International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Twelve-Volume Set: Volume 11 (International Studies in Educational Achievement)

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY EDITORS-IN-CHIEF ROB KITCHIN National Institute of Regional and Spatial ...

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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: 978-0-08-044922-7 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

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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

xi

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

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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

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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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Foreword

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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Foreword

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.

Structural Adjustment G. Mohan, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Balance of Payments The difference between total payments to foreign nations arising from imports of finance, goods, etc. and total receipts from foreign nations from exports of finance, goods, etc. Civil Society Those organizations that form part of the political sphere, but which lie outside the state and market. Cold War The period between the end of World War II and the late 1980s when the world was divided between the two superpowers of the US and USSR. Conditionality The practice by the major international lenders of attaching policy conditions to loans. Governance A way of organizing policy making and rule through networks of actors rather than simply by the institutions of state. Informal Sector The area of economic activity which lies outside of the state-regulated system and is characterized by self-employment and small scale. Keynesian(ism) Economic policy named after the economist John Maynard Keynes, which favors state intervention in correcting market failures and was practiced in the immediate post-World War II period. Neocolonialism The persistence of external control in the formerly colonized world by foreign governments and transnational corporations. Privatization The sale of once state-owned enterprises to capitalist firms.

Introduction Structural adjustment sounds like a highly technical idea, which appears benign, even boring. However, it is a generic term that refers to a set of programs that seek to restructure the economies of countries in the developing world or in transition; literally ‘adjusting’ the ‘structure’ of national economic life. These programs are comprehen sive and affect everything from government economic policy to ownership of firms and the price of essential services. They are based on a set of neoliberal economic principles that were first practiced from the 1970s to 1980s in a number of ‘developed’ economies before being ex ported to the developing world. For these reasons, this apparently unassuming concept affects us all, but has its greatest impact on the poorer sections of society across the world. Structural adjustment programs, or SAPs, are orchestrated by the major international lenders – the

International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank – in which policy conditions are attached to loans to indebted and impoverished countries. In this way the financial power of these institutions is central to policy making in developing countries and continues a long history of external interventions in the developing world, which raises vital questions about sovereignty in a globalizing world. Understanding the dynamics of structural adjustment reveals two important geographical themes. The first concerns long standing interdependencies across space. A persistent feature of the international system has been the way in which capitalist expansion and political intervention have generated uneven development. Within this system, through both formal colonization and less obvious neocolonialism, countries in the global South have been subject to unequal terms of trade and political interference in their affairs of state. While not exonerating these countries’ leaders, they have in effect been ‘hemmed in’ within the global economy, leaving little space for maneuver. Structural adjustment, there fore, reflects the latest phase in this unequal relationship. The second issue concerns the uneven geographical expression of neoliberalism. Although neoliberalism is based on a set of universal principles and is a term bandied around as if the neoliberal condition were uni form, the realization of neoliberalism is shaped by dif ferences within and between states and societies. So, while it is possible to discern general trends, the real world geography of neoliberalization is uneven and deeply political. The key, and crudely stated, difference between the neoliberalization occurring in the global North and that in the South is that in the former it has been driven by domestic political elites within nominally democratic systems, whereas in the latter it has been forced on impoverished populations by the same political elites acting through multilateral organizations alongside their cronies in these developing countries. The article begins by tracing the emergence of structural adjustment before outlining what makes up a typical SAP. From here we disaggregate the major effects of SAPs and then examine how the politics of the policies operate and are contested.

The Neoliberal Turn and the Underlying Principles of SAPs SAPs are based on a neoliberal set of assumptions. In this subsection the genesis of SAPs from the 1970s right up to

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Structural Adjustment

the current period is examined, where, despite changes in name and emphasis, SAPs are still very much in evidence. SAPs are based on a belief that free markets can deliver the best route to prosperity and development. In terms of economic policy the post war period up to the early 1970s was broadly characterized as one of Key nesianism, which saw a role for the state to balance out economic cycles and protect the marginalized. By contrast, neoliberalism believes in a minimalist state and a faith that open and unfettered economies can generate growth, which will eventually trickle down to the poorest. While Keynesian policy was focused on national economies, international economic regulation in the post war period was through a system called the ‘gold stand ard’, which pegged currencies to the value of gold and prevented wild speculation. Additionally, a system of international economic institutions was created to avoid volatility. The architecture of this was laid down at a conference in 1944 at the Bretton Woods ski resort in the USA, so that this complex of regulatory bodies became known as the Bretton Woods Institutions and included the IMF, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (more usually called the World Bank), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which later became the World Trade Organization (WTO). In different ways these institutions sought to regulate international economic flows and were governed by representatives of the countries that contributed finances. By the early 1970s pressures had mounted which saw a gradual dismantling of the Keynesian regulatory system. The gold standard was abandoned and currency move ment became easier, in many developed economies in flation and labor unrest were distressing governments, and an oil crisis forced an international recession. This was set against Cold War polarities, which saw aid and (often covert) military support for regimes that professed support for one of the superpowers. In September 1973, a US backed coup d’etat in Chile ousted the left leaning Salvador Allende and replaced him with General Pinochet. Pinochet and his allies in the US put in place an economic model that removed labor regulations and brutally suppressed dissent. The intellectual support came from a group of economists based in the University of Chicago and led by Milton Friedman. These ‘Chicago Boys’ were the architects of the neoliberal policies in Chile, which acted as a test bed for ideas that would soon come to dominate policy. Internationally the oil crisis of the early 1970s gen erated a recession but also huge profits for oil producers. With vast amounts of money in the banks, but fewer productive outlets in the capitalist core, bankers

looked for other avenues for profitable investment. These so called petrodollars were lent to developing countries at relatively low interest rates. In the late 1970s, as one of the earliest neoliberal attacks on inflation in the core economies, interest rates were raised rapidly. For those developing countries with loans from Northern banks this created a massive and unsustainable debt problem with Mexico famously declaring itself bankrupt and un able to repay in 1982. For the banks this was a huge (and embarrassing) issue that could threaten the legitimacy of the international financial system and the privileges of wealth it secured. Hence, a mechanism was needed to repay the debt, which ensured that these economies did not decline further so that funds were available for debt servicing. It is at this critical point that structural ad justment first appears. Given that state financing was available commercially, the Bretton Woods Institutions had to ‘reinvent’ them selves as development agencies whose main work was in the developing world, and from the late 1980s the former Soviet Bloc as well. Their role became that of ensuring the steady repayment of debt and the inculcation of neoliberal economic ‘openness’, which they did by at taching policy conditions to the concessional loans they granted to developing countries. It was following the neoliberal turns in the USA under President Ronald Reagan, in the UK under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and in Germany under Chancellor Helmut Kohl that the Bretton Woods Institutions formally introduced SAPs in the early 1980s. Although set up in Bretton Woods, these institutions are all based in Washington, DC. The orthodoxy that came to dominate their relationships with the developing world became known as the Washington Consensus and enforced a dogmatic reading of neoliberal policy as part of their conditions. This started in the early 1980s and was in full flow by the middle of that decade. These controversial policies had mixed impacts that are dis cussed below, but in the subsequent quarter of a century they became, and remain, a major feature of international development despite undergoing some changes in emphasis. As a result of limited impacts, theoretical critique, and active resistance, the 1990s saw a softening on the hard neoliberal line. The discourse shifted away from growth at any costs liberalization to poverty eradication by a more diverse set of means, although never displacing the centrality of the market mechanism. This saw structural adjustment programs falling out of circulation as a term to describe neoliberal policies and being replaced by a new, but very similar, initiative called Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRSs). In order to fully appreciate how structural adjustment operates and the difference that geographical context makes, it is necessary to understand what constitutes a typical SAP.

Structural Adjustment

What Is Structural Adjustment? At the heart of SAPs is liberalization of the economy. It is based on the persuasive discourse of freedom and self sufficiency, that human beings are by nature driven by self interest, and that anything which prevents the real ization of this potential is wrong. For the neoliberals the main target was the state, which they believed impeded national and international markets and created depend ency among the poor on state welfare. The 1970s saw the intellectual refinement of this at tack on the state with full blown SAPs emerging in the early 1980s. A typical SAP contains the following elements: Tariff barriers, which had been set high to protect • local production, are removed to promote competition

• • • • • • •

from imports with a view to kick starting local pro ducers into efficient production. Export promotion is also encouraged by pushing for key commodities, especially agricultural goods, to be produced, which diverts efforts away from production for local consumption. Devaluation of the national currency, which is often overvalued, to make exports cheaper on the global market and imports more expensive, which en courages exports over imports to correct the balance of payments deficit. Financial liberalization to allow freer inward and outward flows of international capital, as well as a removal of restrictions on what foreign businesses and banks can own or operate. Subsidies are removed in order to remove market distortions and overcome the dependency of the poor on state welfare. User fees are levied on key services as a way of ‘re covering’ the costs and reducing the burden on tax revenue. On the other side of the fiscal equation ser vices are cut back to reduce government spending. Bureaucracies are trimmed down and other state workers laid off to reduce the government’s wage bill. Bureaucracies are also to be made more efficient and less corrupt under the ‘good governance’ initiatives that followed SAPs. Privatization is introduced as a way of enhancing competitiveness and efficiency, and reducing the burden on the state of sapping and corrupt state owned industries (SOIs). With liberalization, heavily defended national economies are now open to possible inward investment to buy up these SOIs.

Ideally, the upshot of stabilization and liberalization is that the economy opens up and the state reduces spending, which provides a conducive environment for foreign firms and releases finances for debt repayment.

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In terms of implementing a SAP there was a division of labor between the IMF and World Bank, with the former following its historical remit of macroeconomic stabilization and adjustment and the latter focusing more on sectoral problems, such as industrial strategy, and supply side bottlenecks, like poor infrastructure. In practice, the two institutions worked together closely. What is crucial about IMF agreements is that they sig naled to other lenders that a particular country was loan worthy. While total IMF lending to a country may not have been huge, it was necessary in order to access other concessional lending. The high point of SAPs was the mid–late 1980s whereby 64 countries had an SAP in place. Ongoing resistance within recipient governments to SAPs saw the addition of a political dimension to these economic programs in the shape of ‘good governance’ initiatives. As corruption and mismanagement were seen to be im peding SAPs, attention turned in the early 1990s to re forming the bureaucracy and giving greater voice to potentially pro market elements within ‘civil society’. At the same time, changes in government in the UK and USA ushered in a social democratic model, which was still very much pro market but conceded that for those excluded from the benefits of markets so some form of market based support was needed to protect them. A further development was around debt. After over a decade of SAPs it became apparent that most countries were still mired in debt and barely keeping up with repayments. Concerted international lobbying forced a move toward debt reduction and further concessions to indebted countries, which became tied into the adjust ment agenda. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative started in the mid 1990s and was aimed at those countries in severe debt, but who also showed the necessary commitment to neoliberal reforms. Once these countries demonstrated a ‘rational’ plan for im plementing neoliberal policies and made the necessary moves toward ‘good governance’, they passed the HIPC ‘decision point’ when further concessions would be made. In terms of international policy all this produced the ‘post Washington Consensus’ with a shift away from hard line conditionality and an exclusive growth orien tation toward greater ‘participation’ in policy making by both recipient governments and their people. The re sponse was PRSs that were introduced in the late 1990s. According to their initiators in the Bretton Woods Institutions, PRSs are country driven, results oriented, comprehensive, partnership oriented, and long term. They are seen to reverse the draconian conditionality of SAPs, which made a set of policies conditional on taking a loan. By contrast, PRSs favor ‘smart’ conditionality, which assesses each country’s institutional and financial worthiness and then awards a loan accordingly. One important change is that rather than giving funds for

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Structural Adjustment

specific projects, such as the revamping of a port facility, they are given directly to the national treasury to be spent in accordance with the home grown adjustment program set out in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). This so called ‘direct budget support’ appears to give greater control to recipient governments, but despite this rhetoric of ownership all PRSs contain the same elements as SAPs in terms of liberalization and cost recovery.

Impacts and Effects Although neoliberalism is usually talked about in uni versal terms, its elaboration and effects are locally spe cific. In this subsection we review some of the key impacts of SAPs, while trying to capture these complex geographical patterns. Analysis is difficult for various reasons. First is the counterfactual problem, because it can never be known what would have happened to the economy had SAPs never been implemented. The usual approach is simply to take ‘before’ and ‘after’ snapshots of key indicators to try and capture what impacts SAPs have had. Second, SAPs focused on domestic conditions and constraints, whereas economic performance is also af fected by global conditions so it is hard to separate out which effects were produced by what factors. Third, data for many developing countries are poor so calculating impacts is always difficult. However, qualitative data is often used to get behind the aggregate trends. We begin with aggregate trends before disaggregating the impacts of major reform areas. Table 1 shows the performance of countries classified as ‘strong adjustors’ meaning a commitment to SAPs and receiving many loans. It shows that contrary to the objective of ‘adjustment with growth’, the recipients of adjustment loans had the same near zero per capita growth rates as the overall developing country sample. In the worst cases, there were very poor macroeconomic outcomes, although the best cases showed that growth was possible. The best performers tended to stabilize their economies, which could have gone further awry with SAPs, but then failed to kick start growth. However, there were no cases where growth was rea sonable and all macroeconomic imbalances were under control for the adjustment lending period. For example, by 1992 Uganda had shown good growth, but erratic and high inflation, despite having received 14 adjustment loans. This strong adjustment lending group includes some notable disasters. Zambia received 18 adjustment loans but had sharp negative growth, large current account and budget deficits, high inflation, massive overvaluation of the currency, and a negative real interest rate. In other regions, there were also problem cases. After the

Table 1 countries

Performance indicators for a sample of adjusting

Country

Average annual per capita growth rate (%), from first SAP to 1999

Africa Niger Zambia Madagascar Togo Cote d’Ivoire Malawi Mali Mauritania Senegal Kenya Ghana Uganda

2.3 2.1 1.8 1.6 1.4 0.2 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 1.2 2.3

Other developing countries Bolivia Philippines Jamaica Mexico Argentina Morocco Bangladesh Pakistan

0.4 0.0 0.4 0.4 1.0 1.1 2.4 2.7

Minimum in the top 20 Average top 20 Maximum in the top 20 Average all developing countries

2.3 0.1 2.7 0.3

Transition countries Ukraine Russian Federation Kyrgyz Republic Kazakhstan Bulgaria Romania Hungary Poland Albania Georgia

8.4 5.7 4.4 3.1 2.2 1.2 1.0 3.4 4.4 6.4

Minimum Median Maximum

8.4 1.7 6.4

From Easterly, W. (2002). What did structural adjustment adjust? The association of policies and growth with repeated IMF and World Bank adjustment loans, Center for Global Development, Institute for International Economics, August 2002, www.cgdev.org/content/ publicatons/detail/2779.

initiation of adjustment lending, Bolivia had hyper inflation, negative real interest rates, and overvaluation. Even when Bolivia stabilized inflation in 1987, growth was poor, interest rates swung from excessively negative to excessively positive, and overvaluation remained.

Structural Adjustment

The ex communist ‘transition’ countries only received adjustment loans in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the USSR. Their average growth was –1.7% per annum, showing an overall decline, but there were more successes than in Africa. Six of the countries had negative per capita growth and four had positive growth after the initiation of SAP lending. Only Albania, Georgia, Poland, and Hungary are clear success stories. It would be wrong to argue that SAPs have had no benefits, but what is crucial is the distribution of these benefits between and within countries, which brings the logical rider of the distribution of their costs. At one level SAPs have been successful in ensuring debts are repaid. This net transfer of finance from the poor to rich coun tries can be viewed as a form of tribute, not dissimilar to the actions of colonial governments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In development speak adjusting countries service their debt, which when measured against economic activity (GDP) gives a ‘debt–service ratio’. The higher the ratio, the greater percentage of a country’s income goes on paying off loans. An example of the typical impacts of SAPs is Ghana. In 1983, at the start of the first SAP, its debt–service ratio was 0.81% but jumped to 10.82% in 1987 meaning that one dollar in nine went on repayments to the lenders. It was the recognition of this crippling debt servicing that forced HIPC and related moves. Trade liberalization aims to enhance exports and encourage competition from imports to promote do mestic industries. All countries with an SAP put such provisions in place and, in general, their exports did rise. In keeping with theories of comparative advantage countries were encouraged to produce in sectors where they had an advantage, which often meant relying on a narrow range of products, such as one or two commodity crops. As a result, adjusting economies rarely diversified to develop intersectoral linkages or a more robust port folio of different activities. The rise in exports was set against a rise in imports, which meant that the overall balance of payments position did not improve. Many of these imports are finished consumer goods rather than intermediate capital goods that would be used in do mestic manufacturing, which means they usually dis placed comparable local products that may be more expensive or poorer quality. The net effect of this is de industrialization where the number of firms declines, production falls away even more, unemployment rises, and purchasing power in the local economy is reduced. Sectorally there has been a shift away from manu facturing to services, but local firms often lack the ex pertise, which opens the market up to foreign firms. In addition, as larger and more formal firms close, this re leases labor, which cannot be absorbed and is forced to enter the informal sector and rely on a range of risky

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survival strategies. So, those worse affected by trade liberalization are smallholder farmers who cannot pro duce for export, very small manufacturing enterprises, and semiskilled labor. In terms of financial liberalization the SAPs aimed to reform interest rates, ease the flow of funds in and out of countries, and make credit easier to access. These are basically about de regulating the financial sector. A key outcome is that while these regulations have been re laxed, only those people and businesses with a sound financial footing have been able to capitalize on these opportunities, leading to concentration of ownership and the further enrichment of the already rich at the expense of the poorer section of society. Particularly badly hit have been small and medium sized enterprises that lacked sufficient collateral for loans. Many of these are women run, so the effects of financial liberalization were felt worse by them. The wealthiest who could gain credit often used a portion of this on nonproductive con sumption, which raised demand for foreign imports over local goods, thereby exacerbating the effects of trade liberalization. While competition from imports, among other things, undermined local producers, other changes such as pri vatization and labor market reforms have also impacted on the poorest in adjusting countries. In countries with a well established manufacturing base, jobs that were cre ated were often in ‘flexible’ and semiskilled industries, which meant that labor has low pay, few rights, and little job security. Again, this changed labor market was gen dered with women usually taking the jobs in manu facturing and subject to harsh labor conditions. The export drive of SAPs also pushes the economy into specialization, which renders some sectors unviable. For example, where agricultural production is not for export, it becomes obsolete and generates rural unemployment and a concomitant rise in rural–urban migration, which undermines rural communities. And as unemployment rises, households are forced into securing income and resources from wherever they can, which can mean for cing children into informal and risky jobs (Figure 1). Privatization was intended to enhance the com petitiveness of the economy and reduce the liability on the state of inefficient enterprises. SAP countries tended to produce an audit of their SOIs, get them into rea sonable financial shape, and then offer them for sale on international markets. Typically these included hotels, heavy industry and commodity processing plants, and infrastructures like telecommunications, water, and electricity. Privatization has had mixed results, with ef ficiency rising in some and a reduction in the state’s obligations coupled with a rise in taxable income. In general, the best SOIs were cherry picked by foreign investors which meant that profits leave the country. Socially, the move toward efficiency resulted in

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Structural Adjustment

Figure 1 A cartoon showing the limited impacts of SAPs. http://live.newint.org/issue236/curious.htm.

Figure 2 A cartoon showing the social impacts of SAPs. http://live.newint.org/issue269/curious.

streamlining practices and getting rid of unwanted labor, which adds to unemployment levels. Additionally, in most cases, the prices for privatized services like phones rose after privatization pushing them further out of reach of the poor. In this respect, water has been the most difficult and contested as it is obviously vital to life and costing it out of reach of the poor makes humane living near impossible (Figure 2). Cutbacks in social spending and the repricing of government services are designed to balance the gov ernment’s books and free up funds for debt repayment. In practice, this means reduced funding for education and health in particular, which clearly has major knock on

effects for society and economy. The introduction of user fees for these basic services puts them out of reach of the poorest in society, which further deepens their exclusion and poverty. These effects were so visible in the early days of adjustment that a landmark publication called ‘Adjustment with a human face’ was published by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 1987, which highlighted the impacts on the poor and vulnerable and called for the introduction of social safety nets to protect people during the harsh, but supposedly temporary, ad justment process. The social protection schemes were rolled out with much fanfare, but donor funding was quite limited and by making access conditional upon

Structural Adjustment

certain workfare practices they also served to reinforce a pro market logic. Agricultural promotion was also geared to exporting cash crops at the expense of locally consumed food crops. Additionally, to enhance the market competitiveness of the sector subsidies on key inputs such as fertilizer were cut. This has major livelihood and environmental con sequences. Poorer farmers who could no longer afford inputs saw yields decline, which reduced income and food security. It also meant that larger farmers who had the initial capital or could access credit were able to consolidate their position and expand at the expense of smaller farmers. This often meant taking over the best land and forcing the poorest onto even more marginal land, which was more prone to environmental degrada tion, thereby fuelling a vicious cycle of poverty and degradation. The focus on cash crops also encouraged mono cropping, that reduced biodiversity and with it an increase in the susceptibility of crops to disease. Similar trends were seen in mineral extraction as mining enter prises expanded operations at the expense of agricultural land, not to mention the pollution problems associated with under regulated heavy industry. Overall, food pro duction for local consumption was negatively affected by these reforms, which saw a consolidation and spe cialization of production. While it is difficult to generalize about the aggregate impacts of SAPs, compared to their stated aims there was limited or negative economic growth, increased social polarization, and enhanced foreign ownership. However, debt had been serviced. Within these general impacts women and children were the worst affected. So the economic pie did not increase much in size, but the richest peoples’ share of the pie got bigger. As we have seen, the PRSs promise a big change from the SAPs of the 1980s and 1990s. While it is a little early to say with any precision what the effects have been, there is a lack of clarity over how they will contribute to poverty reduction as opposed simply to stabilization and growth. By and large, the strategies still focus on eco nomic growth without really addressing how any growth is to be redistributed to the poor. At their heart are the same macroeconomic prescriptions of the old SAPs with a continued emphasis on privatization, liberalization, and a reduced role for the state.

The Politics of Sovereignty and Accountability The economic effects of SAPs are clearly far reaching, but so too are their political impacts. In this subsection we examine the politics of SAP intervention, which af fects national sovereignty and promotes accountability to

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the donors despite a countervailing rhetoric of de mocratization and self determination. A key paradox of structural adjustment is that the creation of ‘free’ markets unencumbered by state regu lation requires a great deal of state based politicking, encompassing both the use of raw power and the less obvious deployment of theoretical discourses. The Bretton Woods Institutions are bound, in theory, to noninterference in the politics of sovereign countries, yet conditionality shows that they are central to the decision making of many countries. At the national level we see the state heavily involved in the withdrawal of the state from regulation and service delivery. Rather than dis appearing, the state is restructured to form a parallel government run by insulated and unaccountable tech nocrats, most often located in the finance ministries. On the other hand, much is made in the neoliberal armory of devolution to enhance ‘choice’ at the local level which runs counter to the massive centralization of power that the implementation of SAPs requires. This polemic of devolution within SAPs suggests that local governance is to be a key arena for enhancing political choice. This localism has seen a whole host of political experiments centered on ‘civil society’, ‘par ticipation’, and ‘empowerment’. These positive and rad ical sounding concepts promise local self determination, but prove to be about marketizing services such as edu cation, bypassing the central state which has in many cases proven obstructive to liberalization, and as a vehicle for promoting certain civil society organizations that are known to be pro market. As a result, ‘choice’ through devolution is part of the wider move to create markets and weaken opposition to SAPs, while all the time couching it in a language of empowerment. This localism has proven to be one of the mainstays of the ‘good governance’ programs already mentioned. After nearly a decade of SAPs it was realized that the economic impacts were limited, which donors put down to political and bureaucratic bottlenecks. In many cases well placed political elites were able to benefit from the new inflows of money, often through corrupt re routing of funds for personal or party gain, and so needed to be stopped or bypassed. This led to a whole raft of political reforms such as downsizing bureaucracies, removing key indi viduals, insulating decision making, and using external consultants to provide ‘objective’ analysis of what needed to be changed. These programs were always couched in terms of accountability and transparency, and were tied to democratization agendas that also promised account ability. Such attempts to remove blockages to the reforms were not only a donor driven agenda, but were supported by domestic citizens keen to see an end to corruption. Where the tension arose was the sometimes untran sparent and heavy handed way in which good governance reforms were implemented. People noted the irony of

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recently fed into the worldwide ‘antiglobalization’ movements (Figure 3).

Conclusion

Figure 3 A protestor in South Korea in 1997. Mark Henley PANOS.CO.UK.

these moves toward good governance being forced on countries as part of the loan conditionality, which runs against any definition of democratic politics, and can only ever be justified through an assertion of the moral su periority of Western political models and a concomitant demonization of developing countries as unilaterally ir rational and corrupt. This tension around excessive conditionality has been addressed in rhetoric at least with the PRSs, in which this upward accountability to donors is supposedly reversed, as recipient countries now ‘own’ their own adjustment programs. As we have seen, despite the promise of local input to program design, which should produce different policy mixes, all PRSs look stunningly similar. The shift to supposedly smart conditionality and direct budget support has not reversed the accountability to donors who still pull the strings and undermine the domestic democratization they work so hard to champion. Rather than brutal conditionality the language has shifted to compliance, yet a whole system of checks are in place – most notably Country Policy Institutional Assessments – to ensure that recipient countries are trustworthy before loans are approved and that annual approvals are made in order for funds to be released. While this makes much sense and ensures the funds supplied by taxpayers of the North are not misspent, it is still not a process in which free rein is given to countries to determine their own development pathways. However, these harsh economic conditions and pol itical meddling have not gone unopposed. As the neo liberal model creates authoritarian, centralized, and unaccountable politics, ordinary people are often forced into direct action. Dubbed ‘IMF riots’ these protests combine genuine anxiety over austerity driven economic hardships with a frustration at the way in which national sovereignty has been usurped by the Bretton Woods In stitutions and their cabal of donors. These have been occurring since the start of the SAP era, and more

Structural adjustment is a critical issue for the lives of many in the developing world. It is a process linked to older trajectories within the international political economy, which are about uneven interdependencies across space. The developing world is further hemmed in by SAPs and complex multileveled governance sees na tional sovereignty being usurped by international or ganizations acting in the name of the poor. They also espouse localism as a way of enhancing choice and freedom, but this proves to be a smokescreen for de statization. By understanding this complex economic and political geography we get an insight into how neoli beralization operates so that it appears everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Since the so called ‘war on terror’ began, the economic well being of the global poor has taken on a new signifi cance since poverty is believed to breed grievances, as the poor in the South witness with growing envy the lifestyle of the North. Hence, the poverty focus of adjustment programs is now also about maintaining the security of the North by preventing these grievances building up. Under this war footing the neoliberal governance prerequisites become even more important, because they signal a commitment to like minded (read US administration) values. Muddying the waters further is China’s rise in global economics and politics, which potentially provides an alternative to structural adjustment. The Chinese government is ready to lend to developing countries and enter partnerships and joint ventures unencumbered by the same ideological baggage and the burden of debt re payment. All this means that structural adjustment is set to continue, but is likely to change yet further. See also: Africa; Civil Society; Cold War; Communist and Post-Communist Geographies; Debt; De-Industrialization; Dependency; Governance; Governance, Good; Informal Sector; International Organizations; Neocolonialism; Neoliberalism; Neoliberalism and Development; Privatization; Sovereignty; Third World; Transnational Corporations in Developing Countries; Uneven Development.

Further Reading Bracking, S. (1999). Structural adjustment: Why it wasn’t necessary and why it did work. Review of African Political Economy 80, 207 226. Chossudovsky, M. (1997). The globalisation of poverty: Impacts of IMF and World Bank reforms. London: Zed Books.

Structural Adjustment

Cornia, G., Jolly, R. and Stewart, F. (1987). Adjustment with a human face, vol. 1: Protecting the vulnerable and promoting growth. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cornia, G., Jolly, R. and Stewart, F. (1987). Adjustment with a human face, vol. 2: Country case studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Craig, D. and Porter, D. (2003). Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers: a new convergence. World Development 31(1), 53 69. Easterly, W. (2002). What did structural adjustment adjust? The assocaition of policies and growth with repeated IMF and World Bank adjustment loans, Center for Global Development, Institute for International Economics, August 2002. www.cgdev.org/content/ publications/detail/2779. Elson, D. (1995). Male bias in macro economics: The case of structural adjustment. In Elson, D. (ed.) Male bias in the development process (2nd edn.), pp 164 190. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Green, D. (2003). Silent revolution: The rise and crisis of market economics in Latin America. London: Latin American Bureau. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mohan, G., Brown, E., Milward, B. and Zack Williams, A. (2000). Structural adjustment: Theory, practice and impacts. London: Routledge. Schuurman, F. (1997). The decentralisation discourse: Post Fordist paradigm or neo liberal cul de sac? European Journal of Development Research 9(1), 150 166. Stewart, F. and Wang, M. (2003). Do PRSPs empower poor countries and disempower the World Bank, or is it the other way around? Queen Elizabeth House Working Paper Series, WP 108. Williams, G. (1994). Why structural adjustment is necessary and why it doesn’t work? Review of African Political Economy 60, 214 225.

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World Bank (1994). Adjustment in Africa: Reforms, results and the road ahead. New York: Oxford University Press/World Bank.

Relevant Websites http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org Bretton Woods Project. http://www.essentialaction.org Essential Action. http://www.globalissues.org Global Issues, Social, Political, Economic and Environmental Issues That Affect Us All. http://www.imf.org International Monetary Fund. http://www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk Jubilee Debt Campaign UK. http://www.odi.org.uk Overseas Development Institute. http://www.saprin.org Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network. http://www.worldbank.org The World Bank. http://www.tjm.org.uk Trade Justice Movement Right Corporate Wrongs. http://www.wdm.org.uk World Development Movement Justice for the world’s poor. http://www.50years.org 50 Years Is Enough Network.

Structural Equations Models P. L. Mokhtarian, University of California – Davis, Davis, CA, USA D. T. Ory, Federal Transit Administration, Washington, DC, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Confirmatory Factor Analysis An approach to analyzing relationships among variables in which multiple indicators of one or more postulated underlying (latent, or unmeasured) constructs are observed, and the hypothesized relationships of those indicators to the latent constructs are tested. Covariance Structure Analysis A broad class of statistical methods involving the investigation of patterns in how a set of measures vary together. Includes as special cases regression, analysis of (co)variance, canonical correlation, seemingly unrelated regressions, confirmatory factor analysis, structural equations modeling (SEM), and time series analysis. Effect (Direct, Indirect, Total) A factor indicating the magnitude of a change in the target variable arising from a unit change in the source variable. Direct effects occur without any intervening variables (X-Y2) and are simply coefficients in the model, whereas indirect effects are those involving one or more intervening variables (X-Y1-Y2). The total effect of one variable on another is the sum of the direct effect and all distinct indirect effects. Identification The issue of whether a set of parameters in a model can be uniquely determined. Depending on the number of observations, the number of parameters to be estimated, and the structure of the model, a model could be under- (or not-) identified, just identified, or overidentified. Latent Variable An unmeasured variable, generally (in this context) referring to a hypothetical construct for which several observed indicators exist. Maximum Likelihood Estimation A technique for estimating unknown parameters, consisting of finding the values that maximize the joint probability (or density) of obtaining a given set of sample observations. Measurement Model A special case or subcomponent of a full structural equations model that specifies the relationships between latent endogenous or exogenous variables and their observed indicators (contrast ‘structural model’). Multivariate Normality The condition that a set of random variables jointly follow the multivariate normal distribution. Many parameter estimation techniques, such as maximum likelihood and generalized least squares, require that the variables of interest be multivariate normal.

10

Nonrecursive A model containing closed loops or paths of influence, such as A-B-A. Path Analysis An early precursor of modern SEM. Today, the term can be used synonymously with SEM, but generally connotes the use of a graphic portrayal of an SEM to analyze the magnitudes and significances of direct, indirect, and total effects among variables. Recursive A model containing no closed loops or paths of influence. Structural Model A special case or subcomponent of a full structural equations model, in which all variables (aside from disturbance terms) are observed (contrast ‘measurement model’).

Introduction Suppose we are interested in assessing the impact of information and communications technology (ICT) on travel. We plan to model transportation demand (meas ured, say, in vehicle kilometers traveled, or VKT), using cross sectional data (with longitudinal data some con siderations change, but the basic concepts are still ap propriate). Following conventional wisdom, we assume VKT to be a function of socioeconomic and demographic (SED) factors (such as income, auto ownership, and household size), travel costs (TC), and potentially land use (LU) characteristics such as density. We also assume it to be a function of ICT demand (measured, say, in minutes spent communicating electronically). A logical approach would then be to estimate the coefficients of the following equation using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression: VKT ¼ b12 ICT þ g11 SED þ g12 LU þ g13 TC þ B1 ½1

where b12 and the g’s are the unknown coefficients to be estimated, and B1 is a residual error or disturbance term (each variable could be expanded into multiple measures, the individual case subscript is suppressed for simplicity, and the notation and lack of constant term are clarified later). However, considerable evidence suggests that the relationship between ICT and travel demand is not unidirectional as indicated by eqn [1]. Rather, it is con ceptually, theoretically, and empirically plausible that transportation also affects the demand for ICT.

Structural Equations Models

b12: it could be partly reflecting the influence of VKT on ICT, as well as the converse. (To see this even more clearly, imagine that eqn [2] reflected the only correct direction of causality, and that VKT had a significant influence on ICT. If we only estimated eqn [1] instead, we would probably ‘find’ a significant influence of ICT on VKT, but it would be entirely spurious, reflecting instead the opposite direction of causality.) To obtain a trust worthy estimate of b12, we need a way to sort out the influences in multiple directions. Structural equations modeling (SEM) is the most appropriate technique for doing that. Equations [1] and [2] above constitute an SEM, whose parameters can be simultaneously estimated through several different ap proaches described briefly below. A fully general SEM is a system of two or more equations, for which at least one endogenous (left hand side, or LHS) variable is at least once also an explanatory (right hand side, or RHS) variable, and whose disturbance terms are allowed to be correlated. SEMs have regression, analysis of (co)var iance, confirmatory factor analysis, seemingly unrelated regressions, and other general linear models as special cases. Variables in SEMs can be of two types: observed or latent. The latter case arises when we postulate a con ceptual construct, such as travel demand, which is not or cannot be measured directly, but whose essence can be captured through two or more observed indicators. For example, we might envision a latent travel demand construct to be represented by observed variables such as VKT, number of vehicle trips, and total travel time. Similarly, we might model a latent ICT demand con struct as represented by the observed indicators minutes of electronic communication, kilobytes of information exchanged, number of voice calls made/received, and number of email messages sent/received. In behavioral studies, latent variables are often attitudinal constructs (such as pro environment), which are represented by

Specifically, we could also model: ICT ¼ b21 VKT þ g21 SED þ g22 LU þ g24 CC þ B2 ½2

where CC ¼ (tele)communication cost. This pair of simultaneous equations is illustrated in Figure 1, where transportation demand and ICT de mand are called endogenous variables (i.e., influenced by other variables within the system of interest), and the others are called exogenous variables (determined out side the system). The arrows indicate the expected dir ection of influence of one variable on another: any variable with an incoming arrow is endogenous, while variables that only have outgoing arrows are exogenous. The classification of a variable as one or the other partly depends on the time frame of the study (the longer the time frame, the more variables there are that should be considered endogenous), and partly on the judgment of the analyst with respect to the nature of the relationships within a given time frame. Note, however, that an ex planatory variable can be either endogenous or exogenous. If both eqns [1] and [2] are true, but we only model eqn [1], we will violate a key assumption of OLS re gression: the assumption that the observed explanatory variables are independent of the unobserved variables captured in the disturbance term B1. In particular, ICT is a function of B1, because it is a function of VKT (eqn [2]), which is a function of B1 (eqn [1]). This condition is called simultaneity bias (one form of endogeneity bias, referring to any situation in which an explanatory vari able is correlated with the disturbance term in the same equation). The consequences of using OLS to estimate the coefficients of eqn [1] in the presence of endogeneity bias can be severe: in econometric parlance, the resulting estimates will be biased and inconsistent. Conceptually, it can be seen that if both eqns [1] and [2] are true, mod eling only eqn [1] will give an untrustworthy estimate of

Socioeconomic & demographic traits 11

21 21

Transportation demand (vehicle-km traveled)

ICT demand (minutes of telecommunication)

12

13

22

12

Travel cost

Exogenous variable

11

Land use

24 Communication cost

Endogenous variable

Figure 1 A structural model of transportation and ICT demand. Source: Modified from Choo and Mokhtarian (2007).

12

Structural Equations Models

observed responses to several related statements or questions. SEMs in which all explanatory variables are latent are referred to as measurement models, also known as con firmatory factor analysis models. SEMs in which all model variables are observed are called structural mod els. The two types of models can be mixed. In mixed models, when the measurement submodel is relatively simple, it is common to combine structural and meas urement submodels into a single system and estimate all parameters simultaneously. For more complex latent constructs, however, it is also fairly common to conduct an exploratory factor analysis in the first stage, and then use the factor scores obtained from the first stage as observed variables in a structural model. Due to length limitations, this article focuses on structural models such as the one illustrated by Figure 1. SEMs can also be classified as recursive or non recursive. A recursive SEM is one with no closed loops among variables (and no correlated disturbance terms between two directly linked endogenous variables), whereas a nonrecursive SEM has one or more such loops. The model in Figure 1 is nonrecursive, since it has the loop VKT-ICT-VKT. Recursive models are simpler to handle, but the more general case, including non recursive models, is addressed below. In the remainder of this article, we first present a generic structural model and discuss its interpretation. We next describe various estimation approaches, and address the issue of identifiability. We then present the most commonly used measures of goodness of fit (GOF), and finally address the key assumption of multivariate normality.

A Generic Structural Model and Its Interpretation In matrix form, a generic structural model containing nY observed endogenous variables and nX observed ex ogenous variables can be written as follows: Y ¼ BY þ CX þ 1

½3

where Y is the nY dimensional column vector of en dogenous variables, X is the nX dimensional column vector of exogenous variables, B is the nY nY matrix of coefficients showing the direct effects of endogenous variables on other endogenous variables, C is the nY nX matrix of coefficients showing the direct effects of ex ogenous variables on endogenous variables, and 1 is the nY dimensional vector of disturbance terms. In keeping with typical practice, Y and X are assumed to be mean centered (expressed as deviations from the means of the

raw variables), and as such there will be no constant term in each equation. For example, the nY ¼ 2 equation system shown in eqns [1] and [2] can be represented in matrix form as: "

VKT ICT

#

" ¼

b12 0

0 b12 "

þ

z1

#

#"

3 2 SED # 7 g11 g12 g13 0 6 VKT 6 LU 7 þ 7 6 ICT g21 g22 0 g24 4 TC 5 CC #

"

½4

z2

Notice that a variable like SED affects VKT in two different ways: through its direct effect, represented by the coefficient g11, and indirectly through its effect on ICT, which in turn affects VKT. The sum of the direct and all indirect effects is referred to as the total effect of one variable on another. The direct effect can be thought of as the immediate reaction of one variable to a change in another (holding all other variables constant), while the total effect can be viewed as representing the final, longer term overall effect of one variable on another, after intermediate reactions and counterreactions take place and the system settles back into equilibrium. Direct and total effects can be dramatically different from each other in magnitude, and even be of opposite signs. The ability to distinguish and compare direct and total effects is one key feature of SEM that marks it as a major im provement over single equation regression. For example, this capability may identify unintended consequences of a certain policy or trend, in which the direct effects show the desired direction, but are more than counteracted by indirect effects having the opposite impact. Alternatively, an effect which appears to be insignificant in a single equation regression may actually be the outcome of two significant effects of similar magnitude working in op posite directions – quite a different outcome than that of no effect at all. In the matrix notation of eqn [3], the direct, indirect, and total effects are given by the expressions presented in Table 1. In empirical SEM studies, it is generally of interest to ask which explanatory variable has the greatest (direct or total) impact on a given Y variable. However, if the nY þ nX variables of the system are measured on differing scales, the answer cannot be deduced directly from the raw C and B coefficients, because those coefficients are Table 1

Matrix decomposition of effects in an SEM Direct Indirect

Effects of X on Y Effects of Y on Y

C B

(I (I

B) B)

Total 1 1

C

C I B

Source: Based on the data from Mueller (1996).

(I (I

B) B)

1

C

1

I

Structural Equations Models

sensitive to scale (e.g., if the ICT variable were measured in hours, its coefficient would be 60 times larger than that for ICT measured in minutes). To facilitate the com parison of effects, it is common to use so called stand ardized coefficients, that is, the coefficients obtained when all X and Y variables are standardized (subtracting their means and dividing by their standard deviations, so that the transformed variables all have mean 0, variance 1, and are expressed in terms of standard deviations from the mean of the corresponding original variable), similar to so called beta coefficients in a regression equation. The magnitudes of standardized coefficients are directly comparable, and thus can be used to identify the relative importance of each variable in an equation (with the result, however, that the units of measurement have be come standard deviations rather than the more natural original units). Path Analysis The term path analysis can be used synonymously with SEM, but generally connotes the use of a graphic por trayal of an SEM to analyze the magnitudes and sig nificances of direct, indirect, and total effects among variables. Path analysis is best introduced in the context of a recursive model, so we present a new example: a simple formulation illustrating the role of attitudes in residential location and travel behavior. In the conceptual model of Figure 2, attitudes toward travel modes and various types of neighborhoods (AT) affect the choice of residential location (RL, probably operationalized as one or more built environment characteristics representing the density and diversity of the neighborhood) and of travel behavior (TB) given RL. Residential location probably also affects travel behavior directly, and it is still an open research question: is the influence of residential location on travel behavior really due to the prior self selection of individuals into neighborhoods consistent with their attitudes and SED characteristics, or does residential location exert a separate influence of its own? SEM offers one powerful approach to answering that question.

Attitudes d

c b

Socioeconomic & demographic traits e

Residential location

Exogenous variable

a

Travel behavior

Endogenous variable

Figure 2 Paths in a recursive model of travel behavior.

13

The links in Figure 2 have been labeled with the letters a–e, representing the direct effects of each variable on the relevant others. Indirect effects can be computed as the product of the coefficients on each link in the path. For example, the indirect effect of AT on TB through RL is b a, and the total effect of AT on TB is the sum of the direct and indirect effects: c þ ba. Similarly, the total effect of SED on TB is e þ da, and the total effect of RL on TB is equal to its direct effect, a. Just as in a single equation regression, if the direct effect a remains statis tically significant even after AT and SED are included, we would conclude that RL has an autonomous effect of its own on TB. With a single equation model, however, the intertwined nature of the effects of AT and RL on TB would not be made explicit, and either or both of their total effects on TB might be misrepresented by the es timated coefficients. Further, as indicated in the intro duction, a single equation model could not properly capture feedback loops (not shown in the figure), as would occur if one’s travel behavior influences one’s at titudes over time. Path analysis for nonrecursive models is more chal lenging, because the presence of closed loops (such as that between VKT and ICT in Figure 1) means that there is an infinite process of back and forth influence among the variables in the loop. Thus, in a complex nonrecursive model it can be difficult to decompose a total effect into all of the component paths. However, direct and total effects are readily computed using the formulas of Table 1, and the difference between them constitutes the sum of all indirect effects. For some values of coefficients, a nonrecursive model can be unstable – the infinite back and forth process does not ‘damp down’ and converge to a finite total effect, but ‘blows up’. As its name suggests, the stability index is an indicator of the stability of such a model, and should be evaluated for any nonrecursive model. Some SEM soft ware packages will compute and report the stability index; values less than 1 are generally taken to indicate a stable model.

Estimation There are several different methods for finding the ‘best’ set of B and C coefficients in an SEM, all of them based on a general approach called covariance structure an alysis. The idea is that the relationships among the Y and X variables are manifested in how those variables covary: taking other relationships into account, two variables will have a high magnitude covariance if they are strongly (linearly) related, and a low one if they are not. The true population covariance structure is represented by the [(nY þ nX) (nY þ nX)] covariance matrix R, for which the observed sample covariance matrix S is an unbiased

14

Structural Equations Models

estimator. The hypothesized model, on the other hand, implies a certain set of covariances among the Y and X variables, and so a natural goal is to find the set of par ameters that minimizes the discrepancy between the population covariance matrix (as estimated by S), and the covariance matrix implied by the model (which is a function of those unknown parameters). The unknown parameters include the elements of B and C, as well as the true population variances and covariances of the exogenous variables and of the dis turbance terms. Define those covariance matrices as U (nX nX) and W (nY nY), respectively. For expository purposes, it is customary to array all unknown par ameters in a single vector, called h. Then, for a structural model with no latent variables, it can be shown that the model implied covariance matrix for the observed vari ables Y and X, R(h), can be written in the following (nY þ nX) (nY þ nX) block matrix form: " RðhÞ ¼ " ¼

RYY ðhÞ RXY ðhÞ ðI

BÞ

RYX ðhÞ

#

RXX ðhÞ 1

0

ðCUC þ WÞ½ðI 0

UC ½ðI

be the sample size minus the number of estimated par ameters. The calculation of df differs in SEM. Because SEM involves the analysis of the covariance structure of the endogenous and exogenous variables, those cov ariances (including variances) constitute the observations in the dataset. For nY þ nX variables, the number of nonredundant covariances (since covariance matrices are symmetric) is (nY þ nX)(nY þ nX þ 1)/2, and that quantity minus the number of estimated parameters (the length of the h vector defined above) is the df of the model. Note then that df in an SEM are not a function of the sample size, but only of the number of variables. Increasing the sample size does not increase df; only increasing the number of variables, or decreasing the number of esti mated parameters (generally through restricting some to fixed values such as zero), can do so. However, a larger sample is still better in that it increases the precision with which parameters can be estimated.

BÞ

BÞ

1 0

1 0

ðI

BÞ

1

CU

#

U ½5

where X and Y are mean centered (E[X] ¼ E[Y] ¼ 0), and exogenous variables and disturbances are uncorrelated (E(Xf0 ) ¼ 0). Thus, estimating a structural equation model involves finding the parameter estimates that minimize a scalar ˆ where F in discrepancy or fitting function, F½S; RðyÞ, dicates the difference between the sample covariance matrix S, and the model implied variance–covariance ˆ RðyÞ. ˆ The three matrix for the estimated parameters y; most common approaches to estimating SEMs are max imum likelihood (ML), generalized least squares (GLS), and asymptotic distribution free (ADF), a type of weighted least squares (WLS) method. The first two approaches assume the observed variables to be multi variate normally (MVN) distributed, while the ADF method requires no distributional assumption (the same is true of a fourth approach, bootstrapping, which is still experimental). When the model is correctly specified and the data are MVN, all three approaches are asymp totically equivalent, that is, give similar parameter estimates for large samples. The MVN assumption is addressed in more detail in a later section.

Identifiability Degrees of Freedom Users of linear regression are accustomed to under standing the degrees of freedom (df) in an OLS model to

Testing for Identification Identification is the assessment of whether the unknown parameters of an SEM can be estimated or not. This assessment has three possible outcomes: exact (or just) identification, overidentification, and underidentification. If any of the equations in an SEM are underidentified (also called not identified), the model cannot be esti mated. If the model is exactly identified (also referred to as saturated), all parameters can be estimated and the model will fit the data perfectly (there are zero df), but such a model will be hostage to the idiosyncratic nature of that particular sample, and will probably not be very transferable to other samples. Thus, just as in a single regression equation we want far more cases than par ameters, SEM overidentification is preferable to exact identification. If either of those two conditions is true, however, we say the model is identified. Fortunately, recursive models are always identified, assuming the number of parameters to be estimated does not exceed the number of nonredundant covariances. For nonrecursive SEMs, two methods are frequently used to determine their identification status: the order and rank conditions. The order condition, a necessary but not sufficient requirement (for models allowing all possible disturbance correlations), is applied equation by equa tion. It states that the number of variables (endogenous and exogenous) excluded from a given equation must be greater than or equal to the total number of endogenous variables (i.e., equations) in the system, minus 1. The rank condition, which is a sufficient requirement, is more complex, but can be tested by the estimation software. These are tests for structural identifiability; models can also be empirically nonidentifiable due to multi collinearity or other data problems.

Structural Equations Models

If the model is not identified, its specification needs to be modified, generally either by applying some re strictions (e.g., constraining some parameters to equal zero, or to be proportional to others), or by adding some exogenous variables to the system. The quest for iden tifiability often necessitates the imposition of restrictions that are undesirable from a conceptual standpoint (in essence assuming relationships that should in fact be statistically tested). The only way around this is to have an ample supply of relevant exogenous variables, which can be difficult in some applications. However, note that identifiability can and should be ascertained for the conceptual model, before the data collection stage. For example, it can easily be seen that the model of eqn [4] (if each element stood for just one variable) barely meets the order condition, since there are two endogenous variables in the system and each equation excludes one (ex ogenous) variable.

Goodness-of-Fit Measures In OLS regression, the R2 GOF measure represents the proportion of variance in Y that is explained by the model. In SEM, by contrast, model fit refers to how close the model implied covariance matrix R(h) is to the true population matrix R, as estimated by the observed sam ple covariance matrix S. A high overall GOF for an SEM does not necessarily mean that individual endogenous variables are predicted well, nor that exogenous variables are strongly or significantly related to endogenous ones. The foundational measure of GOF in SEM is the model w2 statistic, generally written as (N 1)FML, where N is the sample size and FML is the discrepancy function used in ML estimation. The larger the discrepancy be ˆ the larger the model w2, so we want tween S and RðyÞ, the measure to be as small as possible and should reject the model, as inconsistent with the data, if it is too large. However, the w2 measure increases with sample size, so the same large sample that is required for the theoretical properties of the statistics to apply, makes it virtually impossible to fit a model with a small w2. For this reason among others, the w2 statistic is not exclusively relied upon, but it is always reported, and it is involved in most of the other measures of GOF that have been developed. GOF measures can be classified into various families, based on their underlying concept. Although space does not permit an extensive discussion of each family, let alone each indicator, Table 2 summarizes the most commonly used measures in each category (values of these indicators are generally computed by the esti mation software). Since no single measure fully addresses every aspect of a model, it is customary to review and report measures from multiple families in evaluating a model’s GOF (be aware, however, that in general these

15

measures rely on the assumption that the data are MVN, and that the sample size is reasonably large). Measures that are most commonly reported include w2, w2/df, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), and comparative fit index (CFI). It is also advisable to esti mate and compare the GOF of several equivalent models, representing different hypotheses about directions of causality, in addition to the model embodying the ana lyst’s preconceptions.

The Assumption of Multivariate Normality As mentioned earlier, the use of either the ML or GLS estimation methods requires that the observed variables in the model have the multivariate normal distribution. Evidence indicates that parameter estimates are fairly robust even with serious departures from normality, but in such instances, (1) standard errors will tend to be underestimated, so that parameters will be incorrectly inferred to be significant, yet (2) the model w2 statistic will tend to be overestimated, so that the model may be wrongly rejected. Software packages often check for normality by as sessing the univariate normality (UVN) of variables individually. This is done by calculating the skewness (departure from symmetry) and kurtosis (degree of peakedness) for the distribution of each variable. How ever, UVN is only a necessary, but not sufficient, con dition for MVN: a set of MVN variables are each UVN, but each of a set of variables could be UVN without being jointly MVN. MVN can be tested using the Mardia coefficient of multivariate kurtosis, which is asymptotic ally distributed as standard normal. A set of variables is considered to be MVN with 95% confidence if the critical ratio of Mardia’s coefficient to its standard error is smaller than 1.96. It is quite common to find that the observed variables are not MVN. In this case, several remedies are possible. First, one could transform variables – generally just the variables departing most markedly from UVN. Selective log, square root, or Box–Cox transformations often bring a set of variables much closer to MVN, with a penalty on the straightforwardness of interpretation of the resulting coefficients. The sum or average of a set of conceptually related variables is often more approximately normal than the individual variables (though again, compli cations in interpretation can result). Second, one could remove outliers from the sample, that is, discard cases that conform the least to an MVN distribution. These cases are typically identified as those having the greatest Mahalanobis distance (a measure of how distant, in standard deviation units, a vector of ob served variable values is from the vector of sample means). In practice, however, achieving MVN this way

16

Structural Equations Models

Table 2

Summary of common goodness-of-fit measures

Measure

Description

Recommended values

w2

Discrepancy between observed and modelimplied variance covariance matrices; low values are better Reduces the sensitivity of w2 to sample size Square root of average squared difference between cells in the observed and estimated correlation matrices Amount of error of approximation per model degree of freedom, correcting for sample size and penalizing model complexity

Depends on df want to fail to reject H0 of no difference between S and S(y)

(N 1) FML, where N sample size

w2/df Standardized root mean square residual

Root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA)

Absolute fit indexes (comparison to no model) Goodness-of-fit An absolute fit index that index (GFI) estimates the proportion of variability explained by the model (similar to R2 in regression models) Adjusted goodnessGFI penalized for model of-fit index (AGFI) complexity

Typical values in operations research: mean (range)

Typical values in marketing: mean (range)

1.82 (0.02, 4.80) 0.052 (0.01, 0.14)

1.62 (1.19, 2.26) 0.05 (0.03, 0.06)

o0.08

0.058 (0.00, 0.13)

0.06 (0.03, 0.08)

40.9

0.93 (0.75, 0.99)

0.95 (0.90, 0.98)

40.9

0.89 (0.63, 0.97)

0.91 (0.84, 0.95)

o5 o0.1

Incremental or comparative fit indexes (comparison to baseline independence model) 40.9 Normed fit index Proportion of baseline (NFI) (independence) model w2 explained by the model of interest Relative fit index NFI corrected for degrees 40.95 (RFI) of freedom Incremental fit index Incremental improvement 40.9 (IFI) of the model of interest over the baseline (independence) model 40.9 Comparative fit Assumes a non-central w2 distribution for the index (CFI) baseline model discrepancy Predictive fit indexes Akaike information criterion (AIC) Browne Cudeck criterion (BCC) Expected crossvalidation index (ECVI)

Balances the discrepancy against complexity Penalizes complexity more heavily than the AIC Discrepancy between the estimated model-implied covariance matrix and its expected value

0.91 (0.72, 0.99)

0.94 (0.88, 0.98)

0.85 (0.78, 0.91) 0.95 (0.91, 0.97)

0.96 (0.88, 1.00)

0.95 (0.91, 0.97)

Smaller is better Smaller is better Any value possible; smaller is better when comparing models

Source: Data from Baumgartner Homburg (1996) and Shah and Goldstein (2006).

often requires discarding an uncomfortably high pro portion of the data, with the result that the analyst may have to choose between a theoretically conforming model which is estimated on a sample that is no longer

representative of reality, and one estimated on the full sample but which does not meet a key assumption of the estimation method. These two undesirable outcomes are often balanced through removal of a few of the most

Structural Equations Models

egregious outliers, transformation of some variables, and acceptance of a certain degree of departure from MVN. Some studies suggest that violating the MVN require ment is less consequential the larger the sample size. A third remedy for non normality is to use test stat istics and estimates of standard errors that are corrected for this condition, and hence considered robust. However, these improved estimates require large samples, and are not available or well documented in all software packages. A final remedy for non normality is to use the ADF estimation method. However, this method is most effec tive for relatively simple models and large samples (1000 cases or more), which restricts its usefulness. For small samples or when non normality is not severe, the ADF method can in fact be inferior to the others. See also: Factor Analysis and Principal-Components Analysis; New Urbanism; Regression, Linear and Nonlinear; Selection Bias; Telecommunications; Transportation and Land Use.

Byrne, B. M. (2001). Structural Equation Modeling with Amos: Basic Concepts, Applications, and Programming. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Golob, T. F. (2003). Structural equation modeling for travel behavior research. Transportation Research B 37, 1 25. Hoyle, R. H. (ed.) (1995). Structural Equation Modeling: Concepts, Issues, and Applications. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Kline, R. B. (2005). Principles and Practice of Structural Equation Modeling (2nd edn.). New York: The Guilford Press. Lei, M. and Lomax, R. G. (2005). The effect of varying degrees of nonnormality in structural equation modeling. Structural Equation Modeling 12(1), 1 27. Long, J. S. (1983). Confirmatory Factor Analysis: Preface to LISREL. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. MacCallum, R. C., Browne, M. W. and Sugawara, H. M. (1996). Power analysis and determination of sample size for covariance structure modeling. Physiological Methods 1(2), 130 149. Mueller, R. O. (1996). Basic Principles of Structural Equation Modeling: An Introduction to LISREL and EQS. New York: Springer. Rigdon, E. E. (1995). A necessary and sufficient identification rule for structural models estimated in practice. Multivariate Behavioral Research 30(3), 359 383. Shah, R. and Goldstein, S. M. (2006). Use of structural equation modeling in operations management research: Looking back and forward. Journal of Operations Management 24, 148 169.

Relevant Websites Further Reading Baumgartner, H. and Homburg, C. (1996). Applications of structural equation modeling in marketing and consumer research: A review. International Journal of Research in Marketing 13, 139 161. Bentler, P. M. and Dudgeon, P. (1996). Covariance structure analysis: Statistical practice, theory, and directions. Annual Review of Psychology 47, 563 592. Bollen, K. A. (1989). Structural Equation Models with Latent Variables. New York: Wiley.

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http://www.statmodel.com Mplus. http://www.mvsoft.com Multivariate Software, Inc.: EQS. http://www.eviews.com Quantitative Micro Software: EVIEWS. http://www.ssicentral.com Scientific Software International, Inc.: LISREL. http://www.spss.com SPSS, Data Mining, Statistical Analysis Software, Predictive Analysis, AMOS.

Structural Marxism A. Kent, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Agency The capacities and potentialities human beings possess to re/make history and geography given certain limits and pressures. Contradiction A relational or dialectical ontology (i.e., theory of reality and existence) holds that each body or thing internalizes myriad social relations which not only support but also undermine one another, and thus set in motion change. Determination The process whereby internal relations set limits to and exert pressures on behavior. Economism A school of thought that holds revolution to be inevitable for the contradictions in capitalism will lead to its destruction not because of, but despite people. Essentialism A school of thought that holds that some bodies and things in the world are essentially capitalist (or whatever) through and through. Humanism A school of thought that holds the will, choice, intention, experience, and consciousness of men and women to be central to the re/making of everyday life. Overdetermination A ‘cause without a cause’ in determinist Marxism, the economy is both (over)determined as well as (over)determining vis-a`-vis politics and ideology in overdeterminist Marxism. Relative Autonomy Rather than being reducible to the needs and wants of capitalism, the state, the legal system, the education system, the family, etc., have a historically and geographically specific effectivity in relation to it. Structure The invisibly real and really invisible processes and relations through which social life is constrained and enabled whether we acknowledge it as such or not.

Introduction Everyone knows that Marxism is dead. Dumped on the ash heap of history, Marx and the Marxists are well and truly over, made obsolete by a triumphalist capitalism. ‘‘There is,’’ as Mrs. Thatcher once said, ‘‘no alternative.’’ Capitalism is so interwoven with our lived experiences that cultural critics like Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zˇizˇek have remarked that it is probably easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It relentlessly penetrates ever more bodies and things; it

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inexorably colonizes each and every place, space, and geographical scale. We live, it seems, in a ‘postpolitical’ world, beyond Left and Right, Labour and Conservative, Democrat and Republican. In these apparently neoliberal times, once divergent ideologies and policies are becoming increas ingly convergent. The state rolls back and the market rolls out, touted as the solution to myriad problems – everything from healthcare and education to develop ment and the environment. The discourse of global capitalism saturates societies such as ours so broadly and so deeply that it constitutes a sense of reality for most men and women, most of the time. However, step outside, turn on a television, or open a newspaper; uneven development and poverty are terribly – even painfully – obvious. Furthermore, the aggressive spread of the new imperialism is undeniable, and ex ploitation and alienation are plainly facts of everyday life. To be sure, these world historical matters of concern exist not despite but precisely because of capitalism, and thus it is more than a little troubling that few people are willing and/or able to think within, against, and beyond it. The need for a (re)turn to Marxism, then, is grave and great. Capitalism is all too easily taken for granted; as it becomes ubiquitous, we become blind to its being in the world. Given that capitalism is something we live day after day, we tend to uncritically normalize or naturalize it. In other words, inasmuch as it is everywhere, it is nowhere, and this is the beauty (sic) of capitalism – it is invisibly real and really invisible. Rather than a tangible object to be identified and made accountable, it is something spectral and slippery that we cannot easily lay our hands on or pin down. Karl Marx famously declared that philosophers (and, indeed, social scientists) have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. Structural Marxism, then, is all about under standing the world differently, illuminating the peculi arity and sociality of capitalism, and in so doing taking the first step down the road to revolutionary social change. Rather than an end in itself, it is a ‘way of seeing’ that transforms both how we participate in as well as know the world – a move toward building survivable futures. The Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre famously argued that space was social through and through, that it was not given once and for all, but that it was produced and reproduced day in, day out, in and through our practice, our labor. The question asked by structural

Structural Marxism

Marxists, then, is whether or not we wish to go on re/ producing the places, spaces, and geographical scales of uneven development, poverty, the new imperialism, ex ploitation, alienation, etc., for there is nothing normal or natural about these unjust geographies. This article proceeds in three sections. First, it pre sents an introduction to structural Marxism in general (focusing especially on the work of the Marxist phil osopher Louis Althusser), and Marxist human geography more specifically. Second, it presents an overview of the major critiques of both Althusserian Marxism and the work of human geographers such as David Harvey and Neil Smith. Finally, it presents an analysis of the limited and limiting nature of these critiques. Before moving on, a health warning. Marx once said that there is no royal road to science – its luminous summits demand the fatiguing climb of its steep paths. What follows, in places, operates at a high level of ab straction, and thus may be less than easy reading at times. However, complaints should be addressed neither to the author nor to Marx but, rather, to capitalism. To be sure, if Marxism is all about revolutionary politics, then ab stract theory (as opposed to concrete practice) seems to be a strange point of departure. Turning this common sense upside down, abstract theory is a rare and valuable starting point for it allows us to reconstruct capitalism in thought, to see it from the inside as if from the outside. It is a way of seeing the wood for the trees, a mode of theorizing that makes the opaque transparent. As such, Marxian theory is political through and through.

Structural Marxism and Marxist Human Geography Before all else, Marxism is a materialist philosophy. In the oft quoted 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx argued that it is not that con sciousness determines social existence, but that social existence determines consciousness. In other words, it is an ontological fact that human beings are first and fore most material animals. It is in virtue of the sort of bodies we have that the realm of production and reproduction sets limits to and exerts pressures on the domain of ideas, thoughts, and feelings. Abstracting the particularities of history and the specificities of geography (i.e., actually existing time spaces) out of focus, Marx reminds us that society is determined, in the last instance, by the eco nomic. In the final analysis, or, in the long run, the mode of production of material life represents the universal condition of possibility for any and all other happenings in the world. After all, the dour world of social repro duction (food, clothing, housing, or whatever) is the pri mary matter of concern for most people, most of the time.

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However, the dominant mode of production – namely, capitalism – is making and remaking a world, it seems, that is an unjust time–space of freedom for the few (emancipation from basic needs and wants) and necessity for the many (immiseration in spite of technoscientific advances). Moreover, the few’s emancipation is predi cated upon the many’s immiseration; as the human geographer Doreen Massey argues, we ought to develop a ‘‘global sense of the local,’’ a ‘‘progressive sense of place,’’ for progress for one people in one place all too often means regress for another people in another place. For example, think about the socioecological network of bodies and things, processes and relations, set in motion each and every time you exchange money for some good or service. The myriad unknown (if not, perhaps, un knowable) costs and benefits for different people and places – (great) costs and (small) benefits for which the consumer is, in part, responsible – are masked or veiled by the commodity form itself, and thus our own world making complicity and compliance goes unacknow ledged. To be sure, to interpret the world is not enough, we badly need change. Marx envisioned the present as humanity’s ‘prehistory’, its ‘pre geography’, for another world is not only possible but also essential given the reality of capitalism – wealth, uneven development, consumerism, poverty, and all – at the beginning of the twenty first century. Besides economic determination in the last instance, two concepts are central to structural Marxism. The first is the idea of structure and agency. Marx once said that men and women make their own history (and, of course, geography), but not of their own will or intention; not under conditions of their own choosing, but under the given conditions with which they are confronted. In other words, our individual freedom and liberty to make and remake the world is illusory, and yet by no means are we docile dupes dancing to the tune of a ruling class. On the one hand, agency (the capacity or potential to act) always exists in the presence of the structures that constrain and also enable it. On the other, structure (ontologically real but nonobservable processes and relations) never exists in the absence of the agencies that reproduce and also transform it. The first point is that structures exist outside of and prior to us. Social relations are more or less spa tially and temporally durable, and thus the processes constitutive of society stand before and above us as ‘ready mades’. It follows, then, that structures are, in the last instance, all about coercion rather than consent in that we cannot ‘be in’ and ‘become through’ some or other social relations. To see and to say, to make and to do, and so on we need myriad resources – the very social necessary conditions for life itself. That said, and this is the second point, structures are thoroughly dependent upon the activities and conceptualizations of people. Social relations exist not despite, but precisely because of

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Structural Marxism

what we are and what we do as creative social beings. As Roy Bhaskar (a philosopher true to the spirit if not the letter of Marxism) argues, the form and content of so ciety may be something people like us are not personally responsible for, but it is just so in virtue of our activities and conceptualizations. For example, if we do not go to work each and every day to create the capitalist economy, then neither do most people, most of the time, go con sciously to sustain (nevermind undermine) it. Never theless, the capitalist economy is at once the necessary condition for, and unintended consequence of, work. The second concept central to structural Marxism is the idea of totality. For Marx, capitalism is more than the economy understood as workaday laborers, machines, and natures. It is a complex social whole – a ‘whole way of life’. In social formations such as ours, the economic ‘base’ of so called productive forces and social relations of production determines an extra economic (political, ideological, etc.) ‘superstructure’ of institutions and knowledges, representations, imaginaries, etc., necessary but not sufficient for social reproduction. The economic determines the political (the state, the legal system, etc.) and the ideological (the education system, the family, etc.) in the sense of setting limits to and exerting pressures on their development. The base explains not the genesis but the evolution of the superstructure; the former represents the latter’s historically and geo graphically specific conditions of possibility; it conditions and shapes it in particular (but not total) ways. To sim plify rather, thinking in terms of a totality means thinking in terms of the relationships between the seemingly separate – seeing the economic as inextricably ‘in’ the political, ideological, etc., and, importantly, vice versa. Interactions, connections, and dependencies, rather than discrete, bounded things, are – as the human geographer Erik Swyngedouw argues in this encyclopedia – the bread and butter of Marxism, a dialectical mode of theorizing. Think, for example, of how the leftist slogan ‘‘think global, act local’’ developed out of a growing understanding of the myriad forces, relations, and knowledges both attached to place and reaching out across space that constitute globalization. As localities become more and more interconnected and reciprocally dependent, and ‘time–space compression’ (the term is Harvey’s) and the creative destruction of place based meanings, values, expectations, etc., proceeds apace, a dialectical mode of theorizing becomes more than ever pertinent. Althusser’s Marxism Against immodest economism and overconfident humanism

Outside human geography, structural Marxism is today primarily (but not exclusively) associated with the work

of Althusser. Nothing if not controversial (and more than a little obscure), Althusser burst onto the Anglophone scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the trans lation and publication of two groundbreaking works – namely, For Marx and, with his student Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital. Althusserian Marxism pivots around the ideas of structure and agency and totality, representing an extended critique of two uses of the concepts popular in 1950s and 1960s France. First, before the Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations about and denunciations of Stalinism at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the So viet Union, French Communist Party philosophers like Althusser were expected to walk the party line and swallow vulgar Stalinist dogma hook, line, and sinker. After Khrushchev’s great speech, Althusser sought to distance Marxism from the one sided economism of crude doctrine. Economism represents a misunder standing of Marx’s idea of totality – the reduction of society as a complex social whole to the economy ‘pure and simple’. The political and the ideological, for ex ample, are taken to be mere epiphenomena or simple effects; produced but not productive. The economy is seen as the one social force driving the making of history and geography, and revolution, the transition from cap italism to communism, is seen as inevitable. Economism takes the contradiction between the inherently dynamic productive forces and the inherently static social re lations of production to be the immutable law of motion for capitalist societies, operating behind the backs of people. An insatiable, profit driven mode of production, in capitalism competition between capitalists forces them to continually make and remake laborers, machines, and natures to work harder, faster, and better (and this is the point) no matter what the socioecological consequences. The crisis tendencies of capitalism, so the thesis goes, will invariably extensify and intensify as its internal processes and relations not only support but also undermine one another. Second, Marxism in post war France had been influ enced by Maurice Merleau Ponty’s phenomenological and Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophies. Brush ing orthodox Marxism against the grain, Merleau Ponty and (especially) Sartre insisted that people in capitalist societies are not passive objects, caught in a trap of their own making, but active subjects, able (if not yet willing) to consciously remake the world. Rather than the ‘iron laws’ of capitalism, phenomenology and existentialism emphasized the creative behaviors, lived experiences, and consciousness of human beings – their innate, actually existing capabilities for ‘praxis’ (conceptualization and activity). In the wake of phenomenology and existen tialism, Althusser sought to distance Marxism from the subjectivist humanism of Merleau Ponty and Sartre. This humanism (it is, of course, inaccurate to talk about

Structural Marxism

humanism in the singular rather than humanisms in the plural; there is, as we shall see, much variety both within and beyond Marxism) represents a misunderstanding of Marx’s idea of structure and agency, as an emphasis on the capacities and potentialities of men and women in variably descends into an overemphasis. Focusing on the ephemerality and volatility (agency) of real individuals on the ground, rather than the fixity and permanence (structure) of capitalist processes and relations, these humanists argue that subjective will and intention is more important, in the final analysis, than objective social forces shaping and conditioning each and every choice we do and do not make. Merleau Ponty’s and Sartre’s subjectivist humanism, in sum, takes the movement from the capitalist present to the post capitalist future to be of our human nature, and thus inevitable. Althusser sought to craft a Marxism that rejected both faith in a single social force, an immutable law of motion, and hope in peoples’ innate, actually existing capabilities for praxis. In other words, he sought to craft a Marxism that avoided dangerously optimistic notions of inevitable revolutionary social change. This is not to say that Althusser was a pessimist. Far from it, he held Marxian philosophy to be a guiding thread key to socialist strat egy. Marxian philosophy struggles to not only interpret the world but also to change it in the sense of trans forming both how we participate in as well as know it. For Althusser, economism and humanism were poor ‘cognitive maps’ of what actors in societies such as ours have to cope with and respond to. They are ideological inasmuch as they represent what he calls the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. As conceptual apparatuses, their silences are symptomatic, signifying their absences and exclusions. Economism’s immodesty blinds it to the myriad other (political, ideological, etc.) structures that are constitutive of as well as constituted by the economic in all manner of ways. Humanism’s overconfidence blinds it to the less than obvious objective determinants constraining and enabling action and belief in capitalist societies. Before moving on, it is worth noting that Althusserian Marxism was undoubtedly influenced by, but is not the same as, structuralism in the sense of the work of Ferdi nand de Saussure in linguistics, Claude Levi Strauss in anthropology, and Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis, among others. To simplify rather, Saussure and fellow travelers sought to deconstruct taken for granted surface appearances, and in so doing illuminate underlying real ities. What lies beneath are logics or structures through which apparently discrete, bounded beings in the world are positioned relative to, and situated in relation to, one another. For example, Saussure studied language, Levi Strauss studied culture, and Lacan studied the un conscious as systems in which seemingly separate objects are, in reality, interconnected and reciprocally dependent.

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A cognitive map of where and when to strike back

Althusser sought to make sense of what, exactly, Marx meant by totality, on the one hand, and structure and agency, on the other. First, society as a complex whole is dynamic rather than static – never made, always in the making. Structures ought to be understood dialectically – not as ‘things’, but as processes and relations. In other words, the economic, the political, the ideological, etc., exist neither outside of nor prior to the processes and relations that create, maintain, or destroy them. Seem ingly absolute, structures are, in reality, relative and re lational in nature – open rather than closed, internally heterogeneous rather than homogeneous. Hence, they are essentially contradictory; internal relations simul taneously support and undermine one another, and thus change is very much a part of what structures are. For example, think of yourself as a contradictory social whole of identities – class, gender, ‘race’, and so on – that come together in and through you. You are not a product of your class, gender, or ‘race’ alone, or, to put it another way, you are ‘underdetermined’ by your class, gender, or ‘race’ alone. A single structure does not determine ab solutely who you are; indeed, it cannot for a single structure is but an analytical distinction (i.e., class is not class without gender, ‘race’, and the like). Rather than thinking dualistically in terms of the determining and the determined, the independent and the dependent, or cause and effect, one should think in terms of ‘overdetermination’. Each structure internalizes every other structure in a social formation. That is, each structure is (over)determined and (over)determining vis a` vis every other structure or, each structure is over determined by and plays a part in the overdetermination of every other structure. The whole is ‘in’ the parts and the parts are ‘in’ the whole, and thus society is not simple (an expression or reflection of the dominant contra diction of the forces and relations of production only), but is complex. The political, the ideological, etc., are constitutive of as well as constituted by the economic – they are interconnected and reciprocally dependent. Each structure, then, has a certain kind of effectivity (a specific effectivity) and a certain degree of autonomy (a relative autonomy). Simply put, society as a complex whole is ‘decentered’ (that is, without essence). Marx, for example, referred to it as a unity of the diverse – a concentration of not one but many determinants. Second, Althusser looked to V. I. Lenin’s and Mao Tse tung’s writings on the Russian and Chinese revo lutions respectively for clues on how to put the idea of overdetermination to work, intellectually and politically speaking. He argued that historically and geographically specific analyses of the articulations, dearticulations, and rearticulations of the structures (economic, political, ideological, etc.) that constitute capitalism can identify moments when a contradictory social whole comes

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Structural Marxism

together (‘condenses’, ‘fuses’), forming a so called ‘rup tural unity’. Interconnected and reciprocally dependent, different structures in different places at different times unfold and spin out in particular ways. For example, the plural rather than singular nature of your identity ex plains much of your creative behavior – it is your hy bridity rather than purity that is at the heart of your becoming as a human being. For Althusser, it is at mo ments of ruptural unity, when serious frictional problems associated with the interactions within and between the economic, the political, and the ideological emerge, that the conditions of existence (in other words, opportunity) for revolutionary social change crystallize. The interactions of economic, political, ideological, etc., structures occasionally come together in a moment charged with radical potential; a moment where and when working men and women can and should heed Marx and Engel’s call in The Communist Manifesto of 1848 to unite (the proletarians, so the saying goes, have nothing to lose but their chains). The lesson Althusser learnt from Lenin and Mao was that revolutionary social change is all about not only being prepared to change the world, but also being in the right place at the right time. Revolution, then, is at once a happening irreducible to the agency of a single social group (contra humanism’s faith in the working class) and irreducible to a single independent causal mechanism (contra economism’s hope in the economic). The economy is, perhaps, determinate in the long run, yet it is definitely both overdetermined as well as overdetermining in the here and now. Similarly, class struggle is, perhaps, the motor of historical and geographical change, yet it is definitely causally effi cacious only at certain times in certain places. History and geography, then, are processes with neither a telos (logic or rationality) nor a subject. Marxist Human Geography Inside geography, Althusser’s Marxism has never been big. For example, Harvey’s groundbreaking Social Justice and the City – an early classic in Marxist human geog raphy – largely ignores the contribution of Althusser to Marxism after Marx. The urban theorist Manuel Castells’ pioneering The Urban Question (as well as the work of Massey, among others, in the 1970s), is the exception that proves the rule, putting Althusserian ideas to work sys tematically. That said, and the details of yesterday’s Al thusserian geography notwithstanding (the 1980s saw both Castells and Massey moving on from Althusser), books like Harvey’s germinal The Limits to Capital and Smith’s seminal Uneven Development – books that have been and remain foundational – are arguably true to the spirit if not the letter of Althusser’s Marxism. They are works of structural Marxism broadly defined, or in a strictly improper sense, only.

Without getting lost in the details, Harvey’s and Smith’s Marxism exhibits some important family re semblances with structural Marxism proper. In general, both take Marx’s mature works such as the Grundrisse of 1857 and Capital of 1867 to be suggestive of a way of seeing the signals in the noise, a mode of theorizing that makes the invisible visible. The intellectual labor that is envisioning capitalism theoretically is taken to be es sential for the political labor of dismantling and over throwing it practically. Marxism is, then, to borrow Althusser’s words, a revolutionary weapon – class strug gle in theory. More specifically, like Althusser, Harvey and Smith embody a historical–geographical materialist sensibility. Revolutionary social change is a matter nei ther purely of the agency of a single social group nor simply of a single independent causal mechanism. Pace humanism and economism, human agency must en counter opportunity – the historically and geographically specific economic, political, ideological, etc., crisis ten dencies of and contradictions in capitalism as a totality. It is neither structure nor agency in and of itself that drives historical and geographical change; like Marx, we should think dialectically in terms of ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. This is not to say that Harvey’s Marxism, for example, lacks distinction. Far from it, as the human geographer Noel Castree argues. (1) It is a ‘classical’ Marxism that refines and extends Marx’s original work rather than the work of Marxists such as Luka´cs and Marcuse, or, like Althusser, non Marxists such as Bachelard and Spinoza; (2) it is less philosophical than scientific, more about explaining the historical geography of capital accumu lation than about clarifying, like Althusser, the onto logical and epistemological principles of Marx’s substantive analyses; (3) it is ‘relational’ in ways Althus serian Marxism is not. It tells us, for example, something about the relationships between society and nature, time and space, etc., insofar as it understands these things to be unified by the processes and relations of capitalism; (4) it argues for a ‘geographical imagination’ that, pace Marx, takes seriously the limits and the possibilities that the material geographies of production, distribution, ex change, and consumption represent for the survival of capitalism; (5) it restlessly illuminates capitalism’s being in the world. It was there in the eighteenth and nine teenth centuries, and, lest we forget in these ‘after Marxist’ times, it is here in the twenty first century; (6) books like The Urbanization of Capital and, especially, Consciousness and the Urban Experience ground Harvey’s Marxism somewhat (making it less ‘theoreticist’ than Althusser’s) as he puts abstract concepts and categories to work explaining concrete conjunctures; (7) it is in some ways very much accessible. Recent books on imperialism and neoliberalism comprehend and condemn present geopolitical and geoeconomic realities plainly, speaking

Structural Marxism

to audiences beyond the ‘ivory tower’; (8) it is revo lutionary theory through and through. Pivoting around a notion of dissensus, it is, not unlike Althusser’s, am bitiously within and against a whole way of life; (9) it is most unusually consistent. Whereas an older Althusser proclaimed a crisis not only ‘in’ but also ‘of ’ Marxism, Harvey tirelessly argues that Marxism is more than ever relevant; (10) it is important to note that whereas the language of structural Marxism served Althusser well in the 1960s and 1970s, it is the language of dialectical Marxism that Harvey mobilizes in today’s politico in tellectual environment (on which more anon); and (11) like Althusser, Harvey is a researcher and a teacher in universities. The point is that the movement from theory to practice, from the Marxist intelligentsia to popular agitation and organization, has never been and will never be easy. Readers could be forgiven for thinking at this point that if structural Marxism proper has played only a minor role in the development of Marxist human geography over the last 30 or so years, then why revisit For Marx and Reading Capital ? In the first instance, it is because critics of Althusserian Marxism have significantly shaped the de bate on and around today’s Marxist human geography. Many of the more well known criticisms of Marxist human geography turn on the family resemblances be tween Althusser and geographers like Harvey, Smith, Richard Walker, and Richard Peet, among others. Criti cisms of Althusser penned outside geography have long been imported, warts and all, into the discipline, and used as ammunition against leading figures such as Harvey et al. Hence, a basic understanding of the principles of structural Marxism is needed if one is to make sense of the last three decades of debate inside geography.

Structural Marxism and Its Critics Presented as the gospel of Marx according to Louis, Althusser’s clinical and uncompromising Marxism has, unsurprisingly, been neither universally nor uncritically embraced. Two critiques stand out, the first of which concerns the question of agency and class, and the second of which concerns the question of structure and capit alism. First, it has been argued that Althusser rudely shunted aside human agency in conceptualizing capital ism as a totality of interacting social processes and re lations. This begs the question of whether the working class makes and remakes itself in spite of capital as much as it is made and remade by and for capital. Second, it has been argued that if structures are always already both overdetermined as well as overdetermining, then the economic cannot be determinate in the last instance – after all, there is no such thing as the economy in and of itself. This then begs the question of whether capitalism

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as a mode of production is more invention of the theorist than historical–geographical reality. The problem, for some critics, is that Althusser’s Marxism at once goes too far (from humanism) and not far enough (from econo mism), and in so doing produces, in thought, something that does not exist in reality – capitalism and class. To put it another way, the problem is all about how and with what consequences capitalism and class are represented in and through the academic work of structural Marxists. On the one side, the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson penned an (in)famous polemic against Althusser’s rep resentation of class in 1978 (which has proven to be in fluential among some geographers seeking to bring people’s ‘life worlds’ (their creative behaviors, lived ex periences, and consciousness) back in to the discipline). On the other side, the Marxian political economists Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff penned an important reappraisal of Althusser’s representation of capitalism in 1987 (which has proven to be influential among some geographers seeking to make sense of an actually existing more than capitalist world). These criticisms will be unpacked below. Structural Marxism beyond Human Geography Thompson: O agency, where art thou?

Thompson’s thesis is long and, at times, hard to follow, yet the question of agency continually surfaces; it is the glue that holds the argument together. Thompson the historian is suspicious of Althusser the theorist. For Thompson, categories such as class tend to become rigid in the hands of self styled philosophers and scientists. Unable and/or unwilling to get their hands dirty and ‘mess up’ their theories with historical evidence, writers like Althusser conceal at least as much as they reveal. Thompson argues that class understood as the social relations of capitalist production is never anything more than a generalization that cannot capture the infinite complexity at large in the world. Wonderfully compli cated and superbly obstinate, real individuals always hold out the possibility of surprising the analyst. General izations plunge actually existing capitalism and its con tingencies (i.e., its ceaselessly changing nature) into darkness, while historical evidence of the thoughts, feelings, loyalties, (in)actions, and the like of real indi viduals casts light upon it. Thompson puts flesh on the bones of this thesis by writing off Althusser’s idea of history and geography as a process without a subject as ridiculous. That individual men and women are but ‘bearers’ or ‘supports’ for interacting structures is taken to be self evidently absurd. Drawing on his earlier, now classic, work, The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson argues that the working class (his case study is eighteenth and nineteenth century England) made itself as much as it was made, that class and

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history and geography as process is less about inhuman structures and more about human experience and consciousness. We are, Thompson insists, the voluntary agents of our own involuntary determinations. Rather than a mere bearer or simple support for economic, political, and ideological structures, class is something that happens in particular places, at particular times. In other words, class is not; it becomes. Given a common experience in his torically and geographically specific social relations of production, some people feel and articulate particular identities and interests in relation to others, and thus class consciousness emerges. Historical and geographical change is not driven by the condensation or fusion of contradictory structures into a ruptural unity behind the backs of the ‘pawns’ on the ground, but is a process driven by class struggle – the continuous ascendancy and des cendency of different sociopolitical forces (think, e.g., of the 1984 miners’ strike in the UK and the 1999 battle in Seattle in the USA). Given certain productive relations, people experience exploitation, identify antagonistic interests, struggle (think, value, act) around these issues, and in so doing they achieve consciousness – they be come a class. For Thompson, then, class is consciousness, and consciousness is struggle. In terms of what is to be done, Thomson argues that Marxists should set out to map the islands of worker resistance in a sea of capitalist power. Resnick and Wolff: It’s capitalism, but not as we knew it

Resnick and Wolff ’s thesis is nothing if not bold, yet much more sympathetic than Thompson’s. Rather than reproduce Althusser’s work verbatim, Resnick and Wolff seek to refine and extend it, for an ambiguity, or, better, hesitancy runs like a red line through it. Plainly, the primacy or privilege of capitalism has been and remains a thorn in the side of Marxism after Marx; economic de termination in the last instance sits uneasily alongside the idea of overdetermination. The former implies the clo sedness of an ‘impermeable’, ‘pure’ capitalism, and the latter implies the openness of a ‘porous’, ‘hybrid’ capit alism. Plainly, if, on one level, capitalism is a totality of economic, political, and ideological structures where each is overdetermined by and participates in the over determination of every other, then, on another, it itself must be overdetermined and overdetermining. The logic that there can be no necessary cause, no cause of fun damental significance, precisely because there can be no independent determinant holds both within capitalism and between capitalism and other social wholes. In other words, given that capitalism is always already and everywhere more than economic, it follows logically that social life has never been and will never be ‘essen tially’ capitalist. What we are dealing with here, then, is

not a singular and global cause (namely, Althusser’s capitalism) but plural and local effects – multiple modes of production that are at least as much noncapitalist (think, e.g., both of slavery and feudalism, as well as of the informal sector, cooperatives, etc., in the world today) as capitalist. Simply put, all noncapitalist ‘others’, ‘exteriors’ and ‘outsides’ are implicated in each capitalist ‘self ’, ‘interior’ and ‘inside’, and thus Resnick and Wolff ’s antiessentialist Marxism is all about the ceaseless ex ploration and elaboration of how the former constitute the latter. Hence, rather than something that explains, capitalism is taken as something to be explained. Structural Marxism within Human Geography Duncan and Ley: Docile working class bodies?

Drawing on Thompson’s work, the geographers James Duncan and David Ley published a humanist critique of structural Marxism and human geography in 1982 (see also the work of Marwyn Samuels, Yi Fu Tuan, David Seamon, and J. Nicholas Entrikin, among others). Argu ing that human geographers like Harvey, Smith, Walker, and Peet can be defined broadly as structural Marxists, Duncan and Ley insist that Harvey et al.’s work does not represent a radical ‘epistemological break’ with Althus ser’s apparently Hegelian–Marxist way of seeing the world. There is some debate in Marxist circles regarding the extent to which Marx was influenced by the idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel argued that Geist (‘reason’, ‘the idea’, or ‘world spirit’) is transcendental in that it is ‘in’ everybody and everything – it is actualized through any and all material objects in the world. Hegel insisted that the surface appearance of chaos that is everyday life is merely the cunning of reason, for an underlying reality is causally efficacious in the apparent confusion of bodies and things. Geist, then, is a formal (true, active) cause and human beings are merely an ef ficient (false, passive) cause, and in spite of what appears to be chaos and confusion, it unfolds through contra dictions toward its predetermined goal. For Duncan and Ley, Marxist human geographers represent capital as a formal cause and people as an ef ficient cause. Capital replaces the idea or world spirit as the mysterious force flowing in and through us as it unstoppably spins out toward a given end (namely, communism). People, then, are reduced to means – agents in, but not of, history and geography. Con ceptualizing the whole as more than the sum of its parts, Marxist human geographers attribute power, activity, and, it seems, will and intention to capitalism, and only passivity and little, if any, choice to human beings. This is little more than functionalism – people exist precisely because they fulfill the needs of the system, and they fulfill the needs of the system precisely because they exist. For Duncan and Ley, Marxism amounts to the

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argument that people exist because they are functional and they are functional because they exist. Gibson–Graham: The end of capitalism

Drawing on Resnick and Wolff ’s work, the geographers Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham (writing as J. K. Gibson–Graham) published an antiessentialist critique of Marxist human geography in 1996 (see also the work of Andrew Leyshon, Colin Williams, Roger Lee, and Kevin St. Martin among others). Gibson–Graham seek to en vision capitalism not as a monstrous unity but as a net work of localities – something not only constitutive of but also constituted by myriad others, exteriors, or outsides. Gibson–Graham wish to remap the relationship between capitalism and noncapitalism, not in terms of power on the one side and resistance on the other, but in terms of hybridity; thinking of capitalism as a sort of ‘cyborg’ that is always more than capitalist, never pure. What makes their thesis novel is that it troubles the first rule of structural Marxism: if one is willing to change capitalism, then one must be able to understand it – to see it as something structural, global, and consequential. Such representations, Gibson–Graham argue, are performative in that they construct (in part) the anticapitalist im agination. Social movement activism depends largely on what activists think is and is not possible, and what they think is and is not possible in the current conjuncture depends largely on what they imagine capitalism to be and not to be. If capitalism is always colonizing/pene trating/expanding and never colonized/penetrated/con tracting, then revolutionary social change is largely unimaginable and, as such, is doomed to inertia. Marxist human geographers take concepts like capit alism and class for granted and in so doing represent them in thought as less open and more homogeneous than they are in reality. Hence Gibson–Graham seek to deconstruct the metanarrative of big C Capitalism (a ‘driverless juggernaut’ or ‘Leviathan’) and see in its place the narratives of little c capitalisms (as much constructed by as constructive of their others – slavery, feudalism, the informal sector, cooperatives, etc.). How we think and talk about capitalism (our discourses of it) really matters for it all too often obscures capitalism’s ‘constitutive outsides’. Rather than empowering discourses of both capitalism and noncapitalism (entangled in myriad ways), of diverse economies and economic difference, we have so called ‘capitalocentric’ discourses of either capitalism or noncapitalism where the former stands before and above the latter. The problem with discourses of the capitalist economy and economic sameness is that they are very much disempowering; they appear to verify Mrs. Thatcher’s maxim – ‘‘there is no alternative,’’ capitalism is the end of history and geography. Radical scholarship, surely, is all about falsifying it, and demonstrating that another world is not only possible, but also actual. In

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sum, there is no capitalist core or center that is in dependent of its noncapitalist peripheries or margins. The latter existing conditions are the former’s conditions of existence, and thus capitalism is at once less (homo geneous) and more (open) than Marxist human geog raphers see.

Marxian Counter-Critiques Doing Dialectics: Not Either/or but Both/and The editor of New Left Review, Perry Anderson, responded in a measured fashion to Thompson’s polemic in 1980. Anderson’s argument is as long and, at times, as hard to follow as Thompson’s, yet it is at heart devastatingly simple. Thompson’s insistence on the parity between voluntary agents and involuntary determinations is a hypothesis that is never tested. Thompson sets up something of a dualism, with working class suffering and indignity on the one side and struggle and consciousness on the other. The problem, it seems to Anderson, is that his account of immiseration is in no way equivalent to an account, like Althusser’s, of the objective determinants that set the limits and exert the pressures constraining and enabling working class behavior in particular his torical–geographical contexts. To be sure, Thompson talks about shaping and conditioning in opposition to human agency – necessity in opposition to freedom – and unproblematically judges them to be equal (the working class made itself as much as it was made, etc.). However, the rich Althusserian notion of a totality of determinants nowhere plays a part in his analysis, and thus his judg ment remains, in the final analysis, unqualified. What is to be done, then, is not less but more conceptualization. Thompson’s account of class consciousness and struggle in eighteenth and nineteenth century England may be the exception to the rule – most people, most of the time, neither articulate nor feel class identities and interests, for the crisis tendencies of and contradictions in a social formation condense/fuse in time–space only occasionally. Hence the need for theoretical analyses in which to situate historical evidence of class formation. For Anderson, Thompson’s weaknesses are Althusser’s strengths, and vice versa. The former is weak on how and with what consequences people set their given conditions of existence in stone, and the latter is weak on the messy, indeterminate struggles to make history and geography that people engage in. Thompson’s lucid accounts of the shared sense of strains, grievances, obligations, en titlements, etc., that develop within and between working class communities have proven to be paradigmatic. To be sure, Thompson and others (especially Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall) were central to the movement on the Left to take seriously – following the Marxian theorist Antonio Gramsci – the idea of culture,

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and the attitudes and identities of ordinary men and women, in relation to revolutionary social change. However, without theoretical analyses of interacting structures framing it, a rich cultural materialism (the term is Williams’) becomes a poor ‘culturalist’ voluntar ism as troubling as determinism. In other words, like structural Marxism, cultural studies is a knife edge path with high theory on the one side and the micro politics of everyday life on the other, and it is – as the human geographers Derek Gregory (writing about Thompson in 1981) and Nigel Thrift (writing about Williams in 1983) tell us – all too easy to fall into the abyss now and then. (On the possibilities and the limits of cultural material ism in human geography, see also Peter Jackson’s won derful Maps of meaning and Don Mitchell’s superb Cultural geography.) In sum, then, Althusser’s Marxism is all about opening up not closing down space for class struggle. The Marxist dialectician Bertell Ollman injects some much needed clarity into the debate when he argues that Althusser and detractors such as Thompson work at different levels of abstraction. When Althusser abstracts political–economic structures into focus, he necessarily abstracts the cultural life of people out of focus. Similarly, when Thompson makes visible real individuals, he ne cessarily makes invisible political–economic structures. In other words, both Althusser’s and Thompson’s theses are necessary but not sufficient, and thus something of an ‘academic division of labor’ is set up. In the flux and flow of elegant and forceful writing, though, cooperation all too easily descends into conflict, and productive epi stemological conversations and political solidarity are, sadly, lost. In the late 1980s, Marxist human geographers like Walker and Peet cited Anderson’s counter critique ap provingly, with Smith wisely noting that properly polit ical academic practice is all about taking seriously both the limits as well as the possibilities of human agency. It is, he insists, one thing to investigate the structural and the structured, and another thing altogether to be ‘‘structuralist.’’ As Althusser once said, to be structuralist is to be ideological – to conceal at least as much as one reveals (and this is the point) in non self conscious or unknowing ways. To be sure, far from a so called ‘tota lizing’ discourse that closes down the possibility of peo ple struggling for radical historical–geographical change, Marxism opens up the possibility by enabling people to find their bearings in the topsy turvy universe of capit alism. However, to place center stage what actors in a society such as ours have to cope with and respond to is to place beyond the pale how, exactly, different actors in different places at different times cope and respond in progressive and/or regressive ways. What Althusser called the ‘‘detour of theory’’ and what Harvey calls the ‘‘theoretical imperative’’ is, then, necessary but not suf ficient – the costs (concealing the contingencies that are

the lived experiences of suffering and indignity as well as struggle and consciousness) must be weighed against the benefits (revealing the necessities that are the tendencies of the capitalist mode of production). To be sure, keeping these two viewpoints (not mutually exclusive but com plementary) in creative dialectical tension is no mean feat – it is all too easy to improperly mediate between one way of seeing and the other (as Harvey noted in an exegesis of Marx’s method in 1989). However, Thomp son’s and Duncan and Ley’s intemperate critiques are very much de as opposed to reconstructive. Althusser and Harvey et al., respectively are seen to be simply wrong rather than self consciously or knowingly leaning to one side of the dialectic rather than the other. This is clearly one case of mistaken identity. Envisioning Capitalism, Making Connections Another case of mistaken identity is Gibson–Graham’s antiessentialist critique of Harvey et al. – a critique that in many ways crowns a canon (of considerable weight) of postmodernist, post structuralist, and feminist writing critical of Marxist human geographers’ apparently structuralist ways of seeing the world. For example, true to the spirit (if not, perhaps, the letter) of Resnick and Wolff ’s earlier and Gibson–Graham’s later anti essentialist critiques, the feminist theorist Rosalyn Deutsche’s attack in 1991 on Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity for eschewing noncapitalism as a matter of concern is a case in point. Harvey’s ‘grand theory’ of social life – of the underlying reality of capitalism be neath the surface appearances of lived experiences – is labeled authoritarian, disinterested, and disembodied for he seemingly performs the ‘god trick’ (to appropriate the socialist feminist Donna Haraway’s felicitous phrase) of seeing everybody and everything from nowhere. Harvey is authoritative precisely because he is unattached from the world, seeing society as essentially capitalist from the perspective of a free floating third person (from ‘above’, ‘up there’) rather than the perspective of a real individual on the ground (from ‘below’, ‘down here’). Far from unproblematic, this sanitizing, exclusionary gaze and its exorbitant knowledge claims is diagnosed as symptomatic of a modernist–masculinist ‘will to power’ – a need to tame, and thus master, the intractable world. The world is represented, it seems, as it really is, or, as in a mirror, without reference to the ‘positionality’ of the observer. Feminists and others take it to be self evident that the observer’s location in social space affects what they do and do not see, and thus that knowledges are always already ‘situated’. The known (capitalism) becomes something global – a monstrous unity – only because the knower’s (Harvey’s) partial perspective as a middle class white male is denied. The question, then, for Deutsche, is ‘‘whose reality counts?’’, for social life is seen to be all

Structural Marxism

about capitalism, and thus the lived experience of dif ference (sexism, racism, production and reproduction in the home, etc.) is reduced to something irrelevant (a so called ‘false consciousness’), rather than something as much constitutive of as constituted by capitalism. Arguably, no human geographer has done more to engage with Marxism’s critics than Harvey. Always at the cutting politico intellectual edge, Harvey it seems an ticipated antiessentialist critiques in 1982 when he made clear the unpretentiousness of Marxian theory. It is not about explaining everybody and everything that is and is not, that has ever been and will ever be, but is about crafting a framework for understanding, or, a conceptual apparatus for making sense of, a few significant processes and relations at large in the world. The question of significance is the crux of the matter. Following Har away, Harvey noted in a rejoinder to Deutsche in 1992 that epistemology is about knowing the difference be tween more significant and less significant differences. There are multiple significant differences in the world that bind human beings together, including class, gender and ‘race’, and these articulate in many different ways in many different places. It is, on the one hand, perfectly right and good to argue that significant differences ar ticulate in different ways in different places to produce uniqueness (Manchester is not Mumbai is not Mel bourne is not Minneapolis, etc.). On the other hand, it is more than a little problematic to see uniqueness as ab solute otherness. In other words, we have certain dif ferences in common in the world today, and thus it is not uniqueness in and of itself but the dialectic of commonality and difference that ought to be taken as a matter of concern. Antiessentialists like Gibson–Graham arguably bend the stick too far back from seeing com monality ‘in’ difference (capitalism here, there and everywhere) to seeing irreducibly specific localities only (the end of capitalism (as we knew it)). The insistence on locality’s sensuous specificity is not only intellectually but also politically problematic. In response to an emphasis on how and with what con sequences different people in different places have cer tain differences in common, Gibson–Graham shade toward an emphasis on the radical difference that marks each and every being in the world. To emphasize, so the saying goes, is to overemphasize, and Gibson–Graham’s reply to Marxist human geographers is, to be sure, po lemical in the best sense – self consciously. However, it is one thing to argue that capitalism (and, indeed, class) is more plurality than singularity, and another thing al together to argue this at the expense of all ‘capitalism talk’. The problem is that if we cannot make strong claims about the nature of a few significant processes and relations such as capitalism, then we know more about what it is that divides us than what it is that unites us, and thus alliance formation between localities becomes

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virtually impossible. For example, a struggle for in digenous rights in Mexico, a struggle against dam con struction in India, and a struggle over labor law in France have little in common on the surface – unique places seemingly give rise to unique problems. The underlying reality, though, is that all three struggles are anticapitalist through and through, and thus could be strengthened (rather than weakened) by the ability to see capitalist processes and relations in otherwise unique contexts, as Harvey argues in both The New Imperialism and A Brief History of Neoliberalism. If reality is the unity of the diverse (a concentration of not one but many determinants), then the power of ab straction must be put to work in order to make sense of infinite complexity. In other words, it is precisely be cause, in practice, social life is underdetermined by capitalism (it does not exist in a pure state) that it is intellectually and politically useful to sketch out, in theory, its ‘essential’ characteristics. Abstractions pro duced in and through historical–geographical materialist analyses are deployed to identify commonalities within and between different people in different places, their other differences notwithstanding. Abstractions serve to isolate significant differences constitutive of (and, of course, constituted by) unique places. Hence, rather than thinking about unique places as irreducibly particular localities marked by absolute otherness, Marxist human geographers like Harvey envision them as ‘permanences’ – more or less stable articulations of a few significant processes and relations. To isolate one significant dif ference but not another is, then, a tactical move. To foreground one and background another is but a moment in a scientific exploration, and not a reflection or ex pression of the analyst’s modernist–masculinist will to power, blindness to positionality and situated know ledges, or whatever. Before moving on, it is worth noting that the struc ture agency and commonality difference questions have been troubling not just for Marxists. With great elan, human geographers such as Gregory (in his Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution) and Allan Pred (in his Place, Practice and Structure) looked to social theorists like Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens in the 1970s and 1980s for a way out of the problems, not in terms of levels of abstraction or creative dialectical tension, but in terms of the ‘duality of structure’. Giddens’ structuration theory, as explained in The Constitution of Society and elsewhere, holds that structures are both the medium and the outcome of social practices, while Bourdieu’s theory of practice, as explained in Outline of a Theory of Practice and elsewhere, holds that structures are both structuring of and structured in social practices. In other words, global structures and commonalities are both produced and productive vis a` vis local agencies and differences; the global is ‘in’ the local, and vice versa.

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Structural Marxism

Conclusion This article proceeded in three sections. First, it pre sented an introduction to structural Marxism in general (focusing especially on the work of the Marxist phil osopher Althusser), and Marxist human geography more specifically. Marxism is a materialist philosophy that takes the dominant mode of production of material life to be both unsettled and unsettling. Turning on the con cepts of structure and agency and totality, and rejecting both economism and humanism as poor cognitive maps for finding our bearings in today’s topsy turvy world, structural Marxism represents the intellectual labor necessary but not sufficient for the political labor of dismantling and overthrowing capitalism. While Al thusserian Marxism has played only a minor direct role in the development of Marxist human geography, it has played a major indirect role in that its critics have sig nificantly shaped the debate on and around the work of Harvey et al. Hence second, the article presented a two part over view of the major critiques of both Althusserian Marxism and the work of Marxist human geographers. First, Thompson’s work outside, and Duncan and Ley’s work inside, Anglophone geography concerns the question of agency and class. Thompson argues that the working class has always made itself as much as it was made, and thus that Althusser’s abstract theory is never suitable to capture the infinite complexity that is class consciousness and struggle. In a similar vein, Duncan and Ley criticize Marxist human geographers like Harvey and Smith for reducing the sensuous particularity of real individuals to docile bodies in and through which capital circulates. Second, Resnick and Wolff ’s work outside, and Gibson– Graham’s work inside, Anglophone geography concerns the question of structure and capitalism. Resnick and Wolff argue that capitalism is less impermeable and more porous, hybrid and cyborg than Althusser’s (albeit subtle) thinking allows. It itself is overdetermined by and plays a part in the overdetermination of all other social wholes. Similarly, Gibson–Graham criticize Harvey et al., for representing capitalism as always colonizing/pene trating/expanding and never colonized/penetrated/con tracting by thinking and talking about historical and geographical sameness but not difference. Both critiques, in the last analysis, can be found wanting, and thus third, the article presented an analysis of their limited and limiting nature. Marxists like Anderson argue that Thompson’s weaknesses are Althusser’s strengths, and vice versa; the former is weak on the objective determinants setting limits to and exerting pressures on social life, and the latter is weak on the idea of culture, and the attitudes and identities of ordinary people on the ground. Human geographers such as Smith, Walker, and Peet too see an academic division

of labor as salutary, for when a writer abstracts into focus what people have to cope with and respond to in capit alist societies he or she necessarily abstracts out of focus how, exactly, different people in different places at different times cope and respond in different ways. Furthermore, Harvey insists that Marxist human geo graphers are not unknowingly blind to anything and everything noncapitalist, but are seeking to craft a framework for understanding a few significant processes and relations at large in the world. It makes good intel lectual and political sense to theoretically sketch out capitalism’s ‘essential’ characteristics, even though in practice it does not exist in a pure state. To emphasize how and why different people in different places have certain differences in common is to hold out the possibility for alliance formation, and a stronger politics that is both attached to place and reaching out across space. A politics of this sort (‘‘something geographical,’’ as Smith would say) demands that the power of abstraction be put to work in order to make sense of infinite com plexity, seeing the wood for the trees and the signals in the noise. See also: Determinism/Environmental Determinism; Dialectical Reasoning and Dialectical Materialism; Historical-Geographical Materialism; Marxism/Marxist Geography I; Marxism/Marxist Geography II; Posthumanism/Posthumanistic Geographies; Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies; Structuration Theory; Structurationist Geography.

Further Reading Althusser, L. (1969). For Marx. London: Allen Lane. Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1970). Reading Capital. London: New Left Books. Anderson, P. (1980). Arguments within English Marxism. London: Verso. Benton, T. (1984). The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism: Althusser and His Influence. London: Macmillan. Bhaskar, R. (1989). Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy. London: Verso. Castree, N. (2007). David Harvey: Marxism, capitalism and the geographical imagination. New Political Economy 12, 97 115. Deutsche, R. (1991). Boys town. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9, 5 30. Duncan, J. and Ley, D. (1982). Structural Marxism and human geography: A critical assessment. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 72, 30 59. Elliott, G. (1987). Althusser: The Detour of Theory. London: Verso. Gibson Graham, J. K. (1996). The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Oxford: Blackwell. Gregory, D. (1981). Human agency and human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 6, 1 18. Harvey, D. (1982). The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (1987). Three myths in search of a reality in urban studies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 5, 367 376. Harvey, D. (1989). The Urban Experience. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (1992). Postmodern morality plays. Antipode 24, 300 326.

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Massey, D. (1991). A global sense of place. Marxism Today June, 24 26, 28 29. Ollman, B. (2003). Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Resnick, S. A. and Wolff, R. D. (1987). Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Thompson, E. P. (1978). The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. London: Merlin.

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Thrift, N. (1983). Literature, the production of culture and the politics of place. Antipode 15, 12 24.

Relevant Websites http://www.marxists.org/ Marxists.

Structuralism/Structuralist Geography R. G. Smith, Swansea University, Swansea, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Antihumanism The emphasis in structuralism on explanation through ‘structural causality’ necessarily downplays the role of purposive action from individuals and groups. Structuralism stands in stark contrast to humanism in that its leading proponents – Le´vi-Strauss, Barthes, and Lacan – all call into question the theory of the subject and consequently its central role within social theory. La Langue The whole social linguistic system into which an individual is born. A master system of differences between signs – a higher principle of organization – that regulates all sign production above and beyond linguistics alone. Parole Individual acts of speech, or how language is actually practiced by a linguistic community. Saussurean Semiology/Peircean Semiotics The study of the life of signs within society (linguistics, fashion, rules of conduct, etc.). Semiology is the name given to such study by those following Saussure (primarily in Europe), while the term semiotics is associated with Charles S. Peirce and the American tradition of semiological analysis. Sign In Saussurean linguistics a term to describe a unit of meaning with two components: the signifier and the signified existing in an arbitrary relation. Consequently, the sign has a dyadic (two-sided) structure with both material and immaterial aspects. Signified The mental concept of the sign that is arbitrarily bonded to the signifier to form an internal relation. The signified is engendered by the signifier. Signifier The material aspect of the sign. For example, when our vocal chords vibrate sounds are produced that are material in nature. Structuralism A twentieth-century European (mainly French) school of thought that applied the insights of structural linguistics to social and cultural life. The approach briefly appealed to some human geographers in the 1970s because it was overtly anti-empiricist – being concerned with below-surface logics that have a causal efficacy over surface events – and consequently different to spatial science. Synchronic/Diachronic Structuralism is, broadly speaking, an approach that stresses the synchronic rather than the diachronic; in other words, an approach that is antihistoricist – not seeking historical antecedents or causes – because it is concerned with discovering the

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universal ‘timeless’ structures of human societies and human minds.

Introduction Structuralism is a philosophy and method that developed from insights in the field of linguistics in the mid twen tieth century to study the underlying patterns of social life. In the social sciences the structuralist mode of inquiry sought not simply to identify structures or rela tionships per se, but rather to look behind or beneath the visible and conscious designs (beliefs, ideas, behaviors) of active human subjects (surface manifestations) to expose or unearth how those designs are in fact outputs, effects, consequences, products generated by underlying causes, hidden mechanisms, or a limited number of ‘deep’ structures that are universal to the human mind; struc tures which while not directly visible or knowable – with no grounding in subjectivity – are nevertheless absolute, autonomous, and only accessible theoretically through the techniques of a structuralist analysis. In other words, any explanation of social life, of observed patterns, can only be found in the general mechanisms, structures, schemas, or systems that are assumed to underpin all observable events; these structures cannot be touched and measured and are not directly observable in the events, phenomena, or patterns themselves, but must be deduced from them to reveal deeper logics. Structuralism, the structural, stands in contrast to a reductionism because it holds that all forms of cultural expression – be they the domains of art, architecture, cookery, dress, human self perception, kinship relations, language, literature, music, etc. – cannot be understood in isolation, as somehow separate, but rather must be understood as positions within a structure or system of relations. Indeed, structuralism is holistic (anti indi vidualistic and anti empiricist) because of its insistence that while observable phenomena are present, they are also absent precisely because any object’s being is de termined by its relationships, its relation to the whole structure to which it belongs; a structure that while not apparent is present in each of its observable parts. The structuralist approach (across the human and social sciences) claimed a fundamental importance to the task of identifying and analyzing (implicit and hidden) ‘deep structures’ which – as with Bhaskar’s realist phi losophy – are theorized to underlie and generate (explicit

Structuralism/Structuralist Geography

and obvious) ‘surface’ or observable phenomenon. While structuralism resonates with the philosophy of realism in that it challenges the positions of empiricism and posi tivism, it does not agree – as in realism – that there is a knowable real world ‘out there’; for structuralism what is knowable is structures. In other words, ‘structuralism’ is a term used in general to denote any kind of analysis that is concerned with exposing structures and relations, with finding orders rather than actions. More specifically and ambitiously however, structuralism was promoted as a philosophy with a worldview (a Weltanschauung), a uni versal understanding of reality and knowledge. Indeed, there were high hopes that structuralism could provide a general framework – a solid common structural basis – for ‘rigorous’ and ‘serious’ work across all the human and social sciences. The hold of phenomenology and especially Jean Paul Sartre’s existential Marxism in post war France was the intellectual context from which structuralism emerged as critique in the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s structural ism came to replace existentialism as the dominant intellectual movement and paradigm in France; an ac ceptance that can also be attributed to a broader general optimism as to the universality of science, with struc turalism claiming to be a new science (albeit one that offered a structural analysis rather than the causal an alysis common to the natural sciences). Structuralism represented a challenging critique, a radical break from previous philosophical traditions and theoretical meth ods/models (including those focused around beliefs in human intention, understanding, and consciousness such as phenomenology, humanism, and existentialism), with its rejection of metaphysics, its indifference to the human subject (including individual and collective action), and its interest in discontinuity rather than continuity and flux, or sociohistorical context. In general, structuralism was a method that was applied extensively in the study of language, society, art, and literature. However, whether or not structuralism can be described as a ‘movement’ is a subject of some debate given the differences between the so called ‘first generation structuralists’ (i.e., Le´vi Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault). Indeed structuralism has also been described as an ideology, a debate, a method, a ‘creative activity’, and an intellectual fad precisely because it was never consciously formed to be a specific school of thought. Structuralism became a highly influential strand of post war French philosophy impacting – to varying de grees – a host of disciplines including (but not limited to) anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism and the soci ology of literature, aesthetic theory, Marxism, math ematics, psychology, sociology, history, architecture, and human geography. The works of Le´vi Strauss in an thropology, Roland Barthes in literary theory, Jean Piaget in psychology, Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis, Michel

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Foucault in philosophy, and Louis Althusser in Marxism were particularly influential (and controversial) in their respective fields pioneering the new approach in their respective disciplines and spawning a legion of followers. Indeed, structuralism had a number of independent leaders who – while often addressing common concerns – were also quite different in their specific enquiries. However, it can be said that it was above all the an thropological work of Le´vi Strauss which was most re sponsible for making ‘structuralism’ both an intellectual fashion and almost a household word. The structuralist approach did not, of course, appear in the 1950s/1960s out of a vacuum, somehow spon taneously appearing on the French intellectual scene. Indeed, many of the themes of structuralism had pre cursors, earlier antecedents, in the works of Bachelard, Bakhtin, Canguilhem, Cavaille`s, Freud, Marx, Mauss, Merleau Ponty, etc. In fact, the basic idea of structural ism can be traced back at least as far as 1725, to the writings of Giambattista Vico, and in many ways owes a debt to the core continental tradition of rationalist philosophy that was advanced by Rene´ Descarte, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Immanuel Kant. How ever, the true intellectual source of modern structuralism (even though the term postdates him) was the work of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). For while the works of structuralism differ considerably by author, Saussure provided the core lexicon – the tech nical vocabulary with terms such as semiology, la langue, parole, anti essentialism, signified, signifier, arbitrary sign, synchronic, diachronic, paradigmatic, syntagmatic, etc. – common to many (but not all) structuralists (and post structuralists). Indeed, it was also Saussure who called for the development of a new science of the study of signs (a semiology) that would be applicable not only in the field of linguistics but also directly or indirectly applicable to all aspects of human cultures and social institutions as systems of signs.

Structuralist Thinkers The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is widely credited as the founder or father of modern linguistics. The inventor of structural linguistics Saussure also made significant contributions to comparative and historical studies of linguistics through his work on Sanskrit and Indo European languages. However, it was the post humous publication (in 1916) of his Cours de linguistique ge´ne´rale (Course in General Linguistics) that led to the development of both structuralism and a radical new methodology for the study of linguistics. That text was constructed by his students from a course in general linguistics that he taught at the University of Geneva from 1907–11. Saussure’s development of a structuralist

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theory of language led him to propose both a profound transformation in our conceptualization of language and a new science of the study of signs within society; a science which Saussure was to christen ‘semiology’ from the Greek se¯meıˆon ‘sign’. One of Saussure’s key insights was the structure of the linguistic sign. He noted an arbitrary relation between the ‘signifier’ (signifiant) (word or sound image) and the ‘signified’ (signifie´) (concept). Arbitrary because Saussure demonstrates that there is no natural or obvious con nection between signifier and signified, only a social re lation established by tradition and convention. In other words, the sign does not unite a thing and a name as in the process of nomenclature, but rather a concept and a sound image. Thus, signification (meaning) is a product of relations between signifiers and signifieds, and there fore not the product of an essential linguistic bond be tween word and thing. Saussure’s radical and important discovery was that languages function as sign systems that are relatively autonomous from reality precisely because any sign is radically arbitrary; with any signification only being de termined by the historically constituted systems of con ventions to which any sign belongs. Consequently, this discovery enables Saussure to draw a distinction between la langue (language) and parole (speech). The former de scribes the conventional relations between signs that are in the same system at any given time. In other words, la langue describes language as it exists as a structure without positive terms. In contrast, the latter is individual speech acts, or in other words, parole describes language as a process, how language is actually practiced by a community of speakers. For Saussure, parole (individual speech acts) cannot be understood in isolation from the system of conventions to which such acts belong (la langue). This distinction between la langue and parole is important for structuralists because it suggests a general model for research across a number of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Saussure uses the analogy of the game of chess to illustrate how languages function as differential totalities where what matters is the relationships between the various pieces and not the intrinsic value or essence as such of individual pieces. Because there is no ‘natural’ correspondence between word and thing, then any of the pieces on a chess board can in fact be substituted by any other object without changing the structural basis – the rules – of the game (i.e., a coin could be a bishop, or a matchstick, anything). What is more, the game of chess also helps illustrate how Saussure’s structural linguistics emphasizes a synchronic, rather than a diachronic (the view of historical linguistics), approach to the study of languages and societies. In chess it is the present con figuration of pieces on the board that matters to the players (nothing is to be gained from knowing how the

pieces came to be organized as they are at any moment), and that is precisely how Saussure contends that lan guages should be studied if we are to grasp how language functions. In other words, Saussure downplays the im portance of individual autonomy and the role of practice to focus on the differential value of signs within totalities. It was the generalization of this new way of thinking that came to be so influential in the social sciences and hu manities in the mid twentieth century. In 1967, the French Literary magazine Quinzaine Litte´raire published a cartoon by Maurice Henry that subsequently became extremely famous through its widespread reproduction as a synopsis of the increasingly influential ‘structuralist movement’. The cartoon became known as ‘The Structuralist’s Lunch Party’ and featured the leading figures of French structuralism, namely Claude Le´vi Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, and consequently we will briefly con sider their contributions to that particular strand of social and cultural theory in the remainder of this section. The anthropologist, Claude Le´vi Strauss (born 1908) is perhaps the world’s most famous anthropologist and certainly one of the twentieth century’s master thinkers influencing some of that century’s most famous thinkers, such as Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault. The inventor of structural anthropology, Le´vi Strauss’s innovative approach meant that his doctrine and influence also spread far beyond academia, France, and the Francophone world. His contribution to the devel opment and reputation of anthropology is immense, but perhaps even more so has been his unswerving com mitment to applying the insights of structural linguistics to social science. Indeed, in the wake of Saussure, Le´vi Strauss is widely considered as the founder or ‘high priest’ of modern structuralism for in addition to ad vancing anthropology as a science (ordering masses of ethnological data), rather than merely an activity of de scription, he also developed an approach and model that others – working across the humanities and social sci ences – could follow and develop. Le´vi Strauss directly introduced ideas from Saussure’s structural linguistics into his anthropological studies to invent a structural anthropology that stood in sharp contrast to the functional anthropology developed by Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) with its specific utilitarian empirical fieldwork based studies. Le´vi Strauss applied the principles of Saussure’s structural linguistic analysis to a range of cultural and societal phenomena: kinship, myths, rites, religion, ideology, cooking practices, ceremonies, totemic systems, the ‘savage mind’, etc. Analyzing both his and other anthro pologists’ field data Le´vi Strauss noted how fundamental symbolic structures underpin social and cultural life, structures that are extraordinarily universal and homo geneous across different people, cultures, and ages. In

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other words, Le´vi Strauss was unswerving in his insist ence that the most apposite means to understand human societies is to investigate the fundamental structures of their organization. Le´vi Strauss’s structural anthropology was distinctive because it was antifunctionalist (i.e., not finding explanation in the intrinsic nature or value of phenomenon); antibiologist (i.e., not grounding social life in biology but in symbolic structures and exchange); and, anti empiricist (i.e., ‘facts’ are not deemed to speak for themselves) because its concern was with differential relations and exchange; with how different elements combine together to form universal structures. For Le´vi Strauss the starting point for structural analysis was methodological, to find differences so as to define any social and cultural phenomena of interest as a relation between two or more terms (cf. a causal analysis that would operate on a one by one basis), the possible per mutations of which could be tabulated to eventually re veal a complete system, such as kinship or myth. Le´vi Strauss’s work is rightly famous because of his identification and novel analysis of several fundamental underlying symbolic structures across different human societies (e.g., the incest taboo as a basis for kinship systems that enable the formation of social alliances). However, it is Strauss’s conceptualization of structures as ternary (the product of at least three elements) and consequently internally dynamic (not simply empirical, skeletal, architectural, an observable reality), open to the historical and contingent, which is fundamental to grasping why and how universal symbolic structures self perpetuate. Indeed, Strauss has often been incorrectly critiqued – probably because his work emerged at a time when existential Marxism was the dominant intellectual paradigm in France – for interpreting structures as static systems of differences (as synchronic) and consequently in opposition to diachronic analyses. However, this cri tique is not true as such because in his key works Strauss sees structures as always containing an ‘empty’ third heterogeneous element – a floating signifier (like the phallus in Lacanian psychoanalysis) – that is perpetually open to take on new meaning and consequently intro duces the historical and contingent (parole) into his analyses of such structures as kinship, myth, and face painting. Another key figure of the structuralist movement was the French semiotician, essayist, author, cultural critic, and literary theorist, Roland Barthes (1915–80) who in addition to his wide ranging interests and international influence was particularly famous within literary criti cism, primarily through his development of literary semiology, or a structuralist ‘science of literature’. In his early career Barthes’ interest in culture and language was influenced by the Marxism and existentialism – centered around Sartre – that was popular in France in the mid twentieth century. However, he subsequently moved

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toward an interest in semiology and Saussure’s theory of the sign, making a substantial contribution to ‘structur alism’ by extending Saussure’s semiological analysis of meaning. For example, Barthes developed Saussure’s understanding of language as a system of internal op positions or differences to study fashion as a system or language (langue) where what is crucial is the relations between signifier and signifier (the clothing sign) and not the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified famously identified by Saussure. Overall, Barthes defined structuralism himself as a way of analyzing cultural ar tifacts through methods that were originally developed within the study of linguistics, precisely because Barthes’ concern was with defining a number of nonlinguistic languages – such as fashion – through a series of struc tural analyses. Barthes is perhaps most famous for his proclamation of ‘the death of the author’ and ‘the birth of the reader’, arguing for the disentaglement of texts rather than the deciphering of authors. Barthes’ own texts served to undermine the idea that works of literature or critical thinking have a single ‘message’ or ‘meaning’, a uni vocality as perhaps intended by an original author (cf. the ‘naturalist’ view of language). Instead, Barthes demon strates how any author is not a God over meaning because ‘texts’ are multidimensional spaces where a multitude of writings, none of them original, collide and merge. In other words, Barthes presides over a shift in power from author to reader, so that the reader becomes the central figure in literary criticism precisely because – through the eyes of literary semiology – any author is no longer understood as the source and arbiter of meaning: Barthes shatters the illusions of individualism and originality. Barthes is also famous for his numerous critiques of the – especially French – modern bourgeois social order. Within literary criticism he undertook structural analyses of some of the key texts from the canon of French lit erature – such as Balzac’s novella Sarrasine – to reveal their intertextual construction where no single ‘theolo gical’ meaning is evident. However, while these literary studies were highly provocative, challenging, and con troversial it was Barthes more popular critiques of bourgeois society that made him almost as famous as Sartre with the French public. In his Mythologies (1957) Barthes famously deconstructs a number (28) of appar ently innocent instances of French culture and society to demonstrate their ideological contamination: from wrestling matches and striptease to advertisements for cleaning products and Einstein’s brain. In his analyses Barthes contrasts myth to ideology (moving beyond simple ideological critique) to demonstrate the import ance of analyzing semiotically ‘how’ any myth (message) is communicated – rather than with what is said or hidden by a message as with ideology – and so

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consequently how myth is a product of parole (speech), rather than langue (the structure of language). Perhaps Barthes most famous demystifying essay was his analysis of a cover of the French magazine Paris Match that fea tured a young black soldier looking up to and saluting the French flag. Barthes’ analysis questioned the ‘naturalness’ or presumed ‘innocence’ of this image, the unquestioned relationship between signifier (the image on the front cover) and signified (Frenchness, militarism) to produce the total sign (i.e., loyal black French soldier), reading it instead as a mythical attempt by the French mass media to justify French imperialism and more generally a bourgeois worldview by ignoring historical fact. For Barthes there is in fact a second order semiological system in play where the total sign (the loyal black soldier) is only the signifier, so that the signified is in fact France as a great empire served faithfully by all its subjects whatever their color or creed, and the total sign is the ideology of colonialism and imperialism. Jacques Lacan (1901–81) was a French psychoanalyst who exposed the field of Freudian psychoanalysis to Saussure’s structuralist approach to language. Lacan highlighted the structural aspects of Freud’s thought, and crucially noted how Freud was concerned with expli cating the structures of the unconscious. Lacan trans forms Freud’s approach through reference to the terms and concepts of Saussurian linguistics (and to some ex tent Jakobson) to argue that the unconscious is structured just like a language and consequently can be analyzed as such. In other words, while Freud was concerned with the structural organization of the unconscious mind, Lacan was concerned with linking language and the unconscious to argue that ‘‘the unconscious is structured like a language’’ (a famous Lacanian aphorism). Lacan’s psychoanalysis is concerned with the complex relationship between the subject and the signifying sys tem. Lacan makes explicit the antihumanism of the structuralist approach through his argument that while any human subject is divorced from signification, he or she is nevertheless constituted by that very system of representation (Lacan famously developed the theory of the ‘mirror stage’ in infants). Lacan points out that for a subject to have a place in the social world he or she must also take a place within its language: to become a social subject any human must enter into the preexisting system of signification. Any subject is dominated by the signifier, by the internal differences of langue, precisely because the process of subjectivity is one of being entangled within the infinite web of signification. Thus, for Lacan the task of psychoanalysis is to examine the chain of signification. We have learnt how Saussure was concerned with the arbitrary internal vertical relation between signifier and signified. However, Lacan’s concern was with the division of the sign through an impenetrable bar so that the relations between signifiers are primary. For Lacan, the

subject is the subject of the signifier precisely because of his insistence as to the impenetrability of the Saussurean bar, effectively separating signifiers from signifieds. The autonomy of the signifier is guaranteed precisely because no signifier ever comes to settle on any signified. Thus, for Lacan the Symbolic order is the realm of the signifier, and it is within that order – of signs, symbols, images, representations, and significations – that any individual is produced as a subject. Through the publication of an astonishing series of books the French philosopher and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault (1926–84) transformed the European Anglo American intellectual landscape. Foucault’s ‘structuralism’ was not as inspired by the ideas of Saus sure as that of Le´vi Strauss, Barthes, and Lacan (although the work of Saussure did have a very significant influence upon his earlier studies). Instead, Foucault’s overall ap proach was more a kind of ‘quasi structuralism’ with no specific theoretical or methodological unity as such, but rather a concern with specific problems and methods at different times in his working life (Foucault did not have one all consuming model with which to explain every thing). The approach evident in his early studies of psychiatry (Madness and Civilization, 1962), the social sciences (The Order of Things, 1966), and clinical medicine (Birth of the Clinic, 1963) was that of an antihumanist ‘archaeology of knowledge’ that understood these various systems of thought as ‘discursive formations’ independent of the beliefs and intentions of individual subjects. In other words, the legacy of Saussure is clear to see in early Foucault with different discourses all being understood as both arbitrary and autonomous. However, the ap proach evident in his later writings has far more to do with the ideas of the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche than Saussure. Foucault shifted his approach to analyze different discourses, or models/re´gimes of ‘truth’ (e´piste`mes), not just as languages (following Saussure) but as genealogies (following Nietzsche). This shift to a ‘ge nealogical approach’ – being in the spirit of Nietzsche in that it signaled Foucault’s lack of interest in developing totalizing or comprehensive explanatory schemas – en abled Foucault to explain changes in systems of discourse by linking them to changes in the nondiscursive practices of social power structures. Foucault first deployed his genealogical approach in his study of the discourse of penology (Discipline and Punish, 1975), a study of the psychological and sociological knowledge upon which modern prisons have been founded, and consequently effectively demonstrated the connection between know ledge and power; with how bodies of knowledge become systems of social control. The brief explication, outlined in this section, of some of the key ideas of perhaps the most famous structuralist thinkers was informative because it demonstrates how structuralism is best understood not as a consciously

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formed school, a readymade answer (self enclosed and deployable as a fixed approach), but as a series of loosely connected relatively open interrogations across a number of disciplines which strive to introduce an explanatory order among seemingly incoherent phenomena. We have seen how while some structuralists followed Saussure’s ideas closely, others such as Foucault did not as such, preferring to develop a more idiosyncratic approach. Indeed, to end this section it is perhaps interesting to note just how detached Piaget’s definition of structural ism is from Saussure’s lexicon. Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a Swiss psychologist, philosopher, and biologist who authored numerous arti cles and more than 50 books. He is most famous for his research on cognitive development in children; an ana lytical structuralist investigation into the structures that regulate the development of intelligence in humans. In his book entitled Le Structuralisme (1968), Piaget famously defined structuralism as a method of inquiry common to, not just linguistics and anthropology, but a wide range of disciplines including biology, mathematics, philosophy, physics, and psychology. Piaget noted three ways of identifying a structure: (1) wholeness, (2) transformation, and (3) self regulation. Through the idea of ‘wholeness’ Piaget demonstrates how a structure differs from an aggregate: namely, any part of a structure has no independence outside of the structure in the form that it would otherwise have within the structure. In other words, wholeness for Piaget emphasizes the internal coherence of structures, so that structures are more than simply a sum of their parts precisely because all parts conform to a set of intrinsic laws which determine both their nature and the structure itself. Through the idea of ‘transformation’ Piaget notes how structures are not static, but have the ability to transform through their intrinsic laws: ‘structures are also structuring’. For structuralists structures are not passive, but rather have a transformational capacity to process new things passing through the system. For example, a living language produces new words and expressions without changing its essential structure. Piaget also notes that structures are ‘self regulatory’ in their transforma tional procedures, valid in themselves in that they are closed. A structure such as language is ‘sealed off ’ from any need to reference ‘reality’, or other structures or systems, because the structure of language has its own internal and self sufficient rules. Piaget’s transdisciplinary definition of structuralism is interesting because it outlines an understanding of ‘structuralism’ that is not directly connected to the ‘structuralist project’ initiated by Saussure and developed by researchers such as Le´vi Strauss, Barthes, and Lacan for whom it made no sense to distinguish between structuralism and semiology precisely because their work made such serious recourse to the nomenclature –

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signifier, signified, synchrony, diachrony, etc. – of signi fication. This difference is significant because it is in dicative of a drift away from a strict definition of structuralism where the ideas and lexicon of Saussure are fundamental to a far more general definition of struc turalism as simply any kind of analysis that emphasizes the importance of structures and relations: ‘among the ‘structuralists’ some are more structuralist than others’. And it is this distinction which is undoubtedly funda mentally important for understanding why ‘structuralist geography’ is in fact not strictly structuralist at all, but is instead a Marxist project that was above all concerned with how to couple together description and explanation (something that spatial science was failing to achieve in the 1960s): namely, with demonstrating how an under standing of underlying ‘structures’ allows for an under standing of ‘surface’ geographies.

Structuralist Geography? Structuralism entered Anglophone human geography in the early 1970s in a very limited way – with citations from the humanist geographer, Yi Fu Tuan in 1972 and the Marxist geographer, David Harvey in 1973 – as a part of the humanist and Marxist projects of critiquing the empiricism and positivism of a spatial science that had come to dominate geography in the 1960s. While some human geographers subsequently went further to discuss the work of structuralists – for example, Le´vi Strauss was mentioned and briefly discussed by Derek Gregory in his 1978 book Ideology, Science and Human Geography in which he attempted to relocate geography’s search for spatial order to Le´vi Strauss’ conception of structure – the truth is that the work of structuralists has not been engaged with in any sustained way by human geographers; in stead, their interest has been piecemeal and sometimes rather idiosyncratic. A few of the geographers who have flirted with the work of structuralists include: James Duncan who dis cussed Barthes’ structural and post structural interpre tations of landscapes as texts, systems of communication, object systems, where ultimately – for Barthes – signs come to be emptied of all cognitive meaning; Hugh Matthews who, through his work on children, cognition, and mental mapping, added, among other things, to a critique of the ideas of Piaget and the constructivist ap proach to understanding cognitive development in chil dren; and, perhaps most significantly, Gunnar Olsson who since the publication of his famous book Birds in Egg (and then Birds in Egg/Eggs in Bird) in the mid 1970s has – among other things – worked within the horizon of Saussure, engaging with the work of many structuralists, to explore the limits of language and representation. However, despite these noteworthy individual efforts

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(and an interest by some human geographers in semi otics), a coherent structuralist geography has not been produced in any canonical sense. An examination of some undergraduate level intro ductory texts about the philosophy of human geography is telling. In a selection from the 1990s one finds either no reference at all to Saussure, Le´vi Strauss, Barthes, or Lacan (as in Cloke, Philo, and Sadler’s 1991 Approaching Human Geography); or a discussion of their ideas for no other reason than to note how human geographers have not significantly engaged with their ideas (as in Unwin’s 1992 The Place of Geography, or Peet’s 1998 Modern Geo graphical Thought). Furthermore, this neglect has con tinued into the twenty first century in edited collections. The book Key Thinkers on Space and Place, edited by Hubbard, Kitchen, and Valentine, published in 2004 collects essays by geographers on 52 ‘key thinkers’, ran ging from Benedict Anderson to Iris Marion Young, but contains only one chapter on a so called structuralist, namely Michel Foucault. Similarly, the 2006 Approaches to Human Geography edited by Aitken and Valentine neither contains a dedicated chapter on structuralism, nor is there any mention of Saussure, Le´vi Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Piaget, or even Althusser; again only Foucault is mentioned in the book. Indeed, Foucault is by and large the only ‘structuralist thinker’ whose work a number of geographers have seriously engaged with (perhaps most notably by Felix Driver, Chris Philo, and Stuart Elden who between them introduced ‘Foucault’s geography’, his ‘spatial histories’). The reason for this lack of interest in, and engagement with, Saussurean structuralism is because in the 1970s many human geographers were becoming interested in Marxism. While one of the earliest citations of a struc turalist in human geography was that of Piaget – by Harvey who attempted to demonstrate certain con vergences between the genetic structuralism of Piaget and the historical materialism of Marx – it was the antihumanist ‘structural Marxism’ of Louis Althusser which was to become popular, and widely (mis)under stood as ‘structuralism’, within Anglo American human geography. Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–90), the Algerian born Marxist philosopher and communist, is perhaps most famous for the circumstances of his later life which was ruined by bouts of mental illness (probably a manic de pressive psychosis), and his murder of his wife (Helene Rytman). However, it was Althusser’s work which was of interest to human geographers in the 1970s because it was a variant of Marxism, a philosophy which, after falling out of fashion in France after the events of 1968, became – rather belatedly it must be said – highly popular in 1970s Anglo American human geography. While within some fields of study structuralism was brought into dialog with the works of Marx(ism) – e.g.,

Marx (alongside Freud) had some influence on the de velopment of Le´vi Strauss’ structural anthropology and consequently conveyed a certain Marxist orientation to anthropological studies – it was the work of Louis Althusser which is most significant in this regard because Althusser tried to synthesize his reading of Marx with a broadly structural viewpoint (or perhaps more accurately to read Marx anew as a ‘science’ along structural lines). It was Althusser who most directly (and controversially) introduced a structural perspective onto the central tenets of Marx’s oeuvre, namely the modes and relations of production, the relations between different levels of society (economic, political, and ideological), and the structural contradictions. Althusser’s work gained an international audience in the 1960s with the publication of two key works, For Marx and Reading ‘Capital’ (the later was coauthored with E´ti enne Balibar). Althusser developed a structural Marxism that challenged and stood in stark contrast to the He gelian (historicist) and humanist readings of Marx that were influential at that time. Most famously, Althusser identified an ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s oeuvre between a young Hegelian Marx and a mature scientific Marx. According to Althusser, the later Marx espoused a theoretical antihumanism in that he rejected a universal human essence or nature to conceptualize history as ‘a process without a subject’. Althusser’s so called ‘return to Marx’ was an attempt to counter what he saw as the distortion of Marx’s writings by the official communist movement to reveal the science of Marxism, historical materialism. For the purposes of our discussion here however it is enough to note that Althusser is only a structuralist thematically in that his ‘structural Marxism’ is anti em piricist, antihumanist, anti individualist, and anti historicist, and consequently on a very superficial level ‘structuralist’. However, above all, Althusser is a Marxist precisely because he has little interest in Saussure’s approach to language and its subsequent deployment and development in fields such as psychoanalysis and anthropology. Indeed, ‘Althusser turns structuralism on its head’ because his approach is fundamentally different to that of structuralists such as Le´vi Strauss. Althusser sought to develop theoretical abstractions of underlying ‘structures’ from which to then approach and explain ‘surface’ realities; whereas Le´vi Strauss started with his, and other anthropologists’, empirical field data to then theorize the existence of underlying structures (cf. Derek Gregory’s attempt in the 1970s to link together Le´vi Strauss and Althusser as practitioners of ‘structural explanation’). In fact, it is the post structuralist, Jean Baudrillard who can be truly described as a ‘structural Marxist’ precisely because, unlike Althusser, he does read Marx through Saussure. In his third book, For a Critique of the

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Political Economy of the Sign (1981), he famously goes against Althusserian Marxism to argue that ideology is a form that traverses material production and sign pro duction, in other words, ideology is not just content, the product of an infra superstructural relation. To reach this brilliant insight Baudrillard reinterprets and combines both Marx’s description of the commodity form and Saussure’s description of the linguistic sign to show how ideology is present in both the very internal logic of the commodity form, in the relations between exchange value and use value, and in the sign form in the relation between signifier and signified: the latter terms – use value and signified – are the capitalist system’s ideo logical guarantee. Consequently, through recourse to Saussure Baudrillard places back on the theoretical agenda in France the articulation of culture and economy from the roots of the commodity form (the structural relation between commodity and sign forms). His astute observation is that in late capitalism commodity has fused with sign (the political economy of the sign), and that it is precisely the homologous relation of the com modity sign form which now best describes the field of general political economy. Anyhow, the main reason why Althusser came to prominence in human geography was because of the influence of his ‘structural Marxism’ on the work of the urban sociologist, Manuel Castells who was concerned with developing a Marxist understanding of cities, an approach that had a profound influence on the devel opment of urban geography. However, the structural Marxist geography that subsequently developed after Althusser and Castells – and which through critique by geographers such as Duncan and Ley came to lose its specificity, to be associated far more generally with ‘structures’ per se, anonymous ‘forces’, or ‘logics’ un touched by human agency – has little to do with either structuralism or with approaching what a structuralist geography would be after Saussure. Indeed, it is true to say that ‘structuralism has not taken place in human geography in any integrated, systematic, or paradigmatic sense’. And perhaps one reason for that lack is because of how structuralism came to be associated in a general sense with ‘structures’ to the detriment of ‘agency’, and so human geographers moved away from structuralism to become interested in those approaches (e.g., structuration theory, realism) that promised to reconcile the perceived split between structure and agency. In effect, the possi bility of a fully fledged structuralist geography was strangled at birth, unjustly abandoned due to a supposed (and ungrounded) association with, on the one hand Althusser, and on the other hand, certain clumsy econ omistic versions of Marxism. However, at least from the 1990s onward a number of geographers have come to encounter structuralism retrospectively through their interest in first, postmodernism, and then second,

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post structuralism. Indeed, this is precisely how Foucault (and Baudrillard) came to be received in human geog raphy, not as structuralists, but as postmodernists and post structuralists.

Conclusion: Ex-Structuralists and Post-Structuralists Based on applying the insights of Saussure’s structural linguistics to all social and cultural phenomena struc turalism developed from the 1950s to the 1970s to be come a theory of human reality that is based on the argument that content (appearances) is reducible to form (structures). In addition, the focus of structuralism was upon relationships – the relations between terms, not the terms in themselves – that create their own autonomous spheres precisely because there are no extra linguistic referents or realities (Platonic forms or essences) avail able to human cognition. However, in the 1960s and 1970s (the heyday of structuralism across the human and social sciences), human geography remained largely ab sent from the debate, in part because at that time human geography was not the interdisciplinary subject that it is today. Interest in the ‘structuralist movement’ in France proved to be short lived, as intellectual life moved on in the late 1960s/early 1970s toward a post structuralist approach. And some previously major structuralist figures – such as Barthes and Lacan – became ex struc turalists, proto post structuralists, or simply post struc turalists (much of post structuralism was in fact already present in structuralist writings) dissatisfied with the confines of Sausserian linguistics (the foundation of structuralism) to destabilize it and shift their position (others also moved on, with Foucault rejecting not only Marxism and psychoanalysis, but also eventually his particular version of structuralism). Alongside the shift of ex structuralists there was also the emergence of a new generation of post structuralists whose work began with and subsequently developed from a critique of the structuralist approach (e.g., Jacques Derrida’s famous 1967 critique) to undermine, destabilize, and make undecideable our understandings of – among other things – language, meaning, social institutions, and the self. There is a final point to be made. The writing of this article inevitably reflects the particular demands of this encyclopedia. In other words, while this article has been written in a way that highlights and summarizes certain key structuralist thinkers there are other ways that this article could have been written, and consequently other ways that structuralism and its significance may be understood and gauged within human geography. Indeed, in his essay on ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’

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Structuralism/Structuralist Geography

Gilles Deleuze eschews the method of recognizing cer tain people as structuralist or not, the very method that has been followed here. Instead, Deleuze structures his essay around a question: ‘What do we recognize in those that we call structuralists?’ As an answer Deleuze iden tifies seven criteria for identifying structuralism (e.g., the symbolic; the serial; the empty square), and his essay is undoubtedly particularly useful as a guide for reading human geography today, for revealing how contemporary human geographers are engaging with structuralism retrospectively through post structuralism. In other words, the ‘crisis of representation’ and the ‘cultural turn’ that took place in human geography in the 1990s has served to place much of human geography within the horizon of Saussure’s splitting apart of the sign, and Deleuze’s essay is instructive for helping us in recog nizing that fact. See also: Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies; Semiotics; Structural Marxism; Structuration Theory.

Further Reading Althusser, L. (1969). For Marx. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Barthes, R. (1973). Mythologies. St Albans: Paladin. Baudrillard, J. (1981). For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis: Telos. Caws, P. (1988). Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Culler, J. (1975). Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (2004). How do we recognize structuralism? In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953 1974, pp 170 192. New York: Semiotext(e).

Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Driver, F. (1990). Discipline without frontiers? Representations of the Mettray Reformatory Colony in Britain, 1840 1880. Journal of Historical Sociology 3, 272 293. Duncan, J. and Duncan, N. (1992). Ideology and bliss: Roland Barthes and the secret histories of landscape. Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, pp 18 37. London: Routledge. Duncan, J. and Ley, D. (1982). Structural Marxism and human geography: A critical assessment. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 72(1), 30 59. Elden, S. (2001). Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History. London: Continuum. Foucault, M. (1973). Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage/Random House. Gregory, D. (1978). Ideology, Science and Human Geography. London: Hutchinson. Harris, Z. S. (1951). Structural Linguistics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Harvey, D. (1973). Social Justice and the City. Oxford: Blackwell. Hawkes, T. (1977). Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lacan, J. (1977). Ecrits: A Selection. London: Tavistock. Matthews, M. (1984). Environmental cognition of young children: Images of journey to school and home area. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 9, 89 105. Olsson, G. (1975). Michigan Geographical Publication No. 15: Birds in Egg. Ann Arbor, MI: Department of Geography, University of Michigan. Philo, C. (1992). Foucault’s geography. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 10, 137 162. Piaget, J. (1971). Structuralism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Robey, D. (ed.) (1973). Structuralism: An Introduction. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Saussure, F. de (1983). Course in General Linguistics. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Strauss, L. (1963). Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Sturrock, J. (ed.) (1979). Structuralism and Since: From Le´vi Strauss to Derrida. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tuan, Yi. Fu. (1972). Structuralism, existentialism and environmental perception. Environment and Behaviour 3, 319 331.

Structuration Theory R. Lippuner and B. Werlen, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Jena, Germany & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Agency Conceptualization of human activity emphasizing the capacity of an individual actor to control its own actions instead of being subjected to external forces and conditions. Duality of Structure Core concept of Giddens’ theory of structuration. In opposition to classical social theory, which is characterized by a dichotomy of structure and agency, structuration theory argues that social structures are the medium and the outcome of human agency. All social practices are carried out under specific structural conditions. While at the same time structures are maintained and reproduced only through these social practices. Habitus Schemes of perception, interpretation, and conduct. The habitus of an individual is a product of incorporating the logic of practice in a specific field of social space and is therefore shaped by the structures of a society or group. Then again it is the generative principle of practices and therefore a basis for the production of structures, that is, differences (fields) of social space. Thus habitus can be called a structured and structuring structure. Practical Consciousness/Sense of Practice Tacit knowledge about the circumstances of social actions. In the vast majority of social situations which they encounter in everyday life, human individuals know what has to be done. They routinely draw upon this knowledge without questioning its foundation. Since they are usually not asked to discursively express what they do or why they do certain things, most social situations, respective expectations, and utterances are taken for granted. Praxis The entirety of individual and collective human activities that maintain and transform social life, that is, the manner in which all aspects of social reality are constituted. Praxis encompasses conduct and interaction in face-to-face situations, as well as complicated and extensive types of social collectivities and relations between people in remote places. Reflexivity Circular reproduction of a process (of cognition). In the social sciences reflexivity particularly refers to the ability of an individual to reflect upon (the conditions of) its doing and thinking and to intentionally govern its activities. In structuration theory, reflexivity is also regarded as a characteristic feature of life in late modernity, as well as an indispensable element of social scientific research.

Resources Disposal of the activities of other people (authoritative resources) and availability of material objects or artifacts (allocative resources) to achieve aims or further interests. Resources are involved in the generation of power and as such implied in all social practices. Rules In the philosophical tradition either directives of conduct or regularities of praxis. From a structurationist point of view, rules are techniques or generalized procedures social actors routinely employ to cope with social situations. Rules have a normative aspect – they refer to legitimation and sanction – and a constitutive character – they refer to signification and communication. Social Space In Bourdieu’s theory of practice, a synonym for society or the social. According to the notion of social space, society is a relational space, in which each position is defined only by its relations to all the other positions. Differentiating principles are economic capital (money, property, estate, etc.), social capital (social relations, allegiances, contracts, etc.), and cultural capital (education, skills, taste, etc.). Social space is divided into various subspaces that represent general fields of social practice (politics, economy, science, art, education, etc.). Structure In structuralist tradition of social theory, a set of stable and stabilizing patterns of social life that shape human agency. In structuration theory, structures are seen as rules and resources inherent in social practices.

William James, one of the chief proponents of American pragmatism, held that every theory is easy to understand, once the reader has grasped the core of its perspective. Concerning structuration theory, this core expresses the idea that social reality is being continually (re)produced and structured in space and time by competent actors in their everyday praxis. Society is constituted in and through human agency, which must be regarded as both structured and structuring. Consequently, the basic as sumption of structuration theory is that social sciences must not explore societies or social life in structural categories, but rather in concepts of action and insti tutionalized practices. To put it succinctly, not structure is the main object of social research, but the acts of structuration. With that, structuration theory wants to avoid a dichotomization of agency and structure and bridge the fundamental gap that hitherto stretched in

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Structuration Theory

social theory: the gap between individualistic voluntarism and structuralistic determinism, as well as between micro and macroanalysis. This dichotomy is, as Pierre Bourdieu states in the introduction of his 1980 book, Le sens pratique (The logic of practice), the most funda mental and fatal opposition that artificially splits up so cial sciences. The social theories of the twentieth century find themselves between two paradigms: the individualistic and the structuralistic line of reasoning. The indi vidualistic approach is represented by phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau Ponty, and Schu¨tz), Berger and Luckmann’s theory of the social construction of reality, ethnomethodology (Garfinkel), as well as by Wittgen stein’s philosophy and symbolic interactionism (Mead, Blumer). Despite the remarkable differences among these theories, they all center on thinking, talking, or acting subjects. All individualistic theories focus their attention on the actors’ knowledge and experiences and ask how they make the social world intelligible to themselves and others. The structuralistic paradigm is first of all based on the work of Durkheim and on de Saussure’s strucural lin guistic. Thanks to structural anthropology (Levi Strauss) and Marxist structuralism (Althusser), structuralism is one of most influential social scientific approaches of the twentieth century. In contrast to individualism, structuralism assumes that there are social and cultural structures within society, that is, superindividual distri bution patterns and collective symbol systems, that shape individual acting, thinking, and talking. Hence, the at tention of structuralistic social science does not focus on individual motives and interpretation but on material and symbolic structures that, in Durkheim’s terms, represent the mold of social praxis. In between these two poles, structuration theory holds a mediating position. It does not deny that super individual social circumstances provide the frame for the actors’ individual actions. However, structuration theory also points out that social structures have to be con tinually produced and reproduced, that is, maintained, in actual everyday practices. That is the reason why on the methodological level, structuration theory aims to over come the dichotomy of agency and structure, as well as the opposition of micro and macro level. The chief proponent of structuration theory is doubtlessly the British sociologist, Anthony Giddens. His theory received great attention also in geography. Besides Giddens, the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, is an other important proponent of structuration theory. Since the 1960s authors other than Giddens and Bourdieu, the two outstanding authors of the structuration theoretical approach, tried to solve this dichotomy in steering clear from the determinism of structuralistic–objectivistic explanations, as well as from the voluntarism of

individualistic–subjectivistic descriptions. In the famous article ‘On the determination of social action in space and time’ from 1983, Nigel Thrift even speaks about a structurationist school. Proponents of this school are, among others, the British philosopher, Roy Bhaskar; the historian, Edward Palmer Thompson; the cultural sci entist, Raymond Williams; and the German sociologist, Ulrich Beck. The following remarks are confined to presenting the theories of the two main proponents of structurationist thinking: the first part of the article deals with the core ideas of Giddens’ theory of structuration; in the second part Bourdieu’s theory of practice will be addressed. Structuration theory was and is one of the most in fluential contemporary social theories not only in social and cultural sciences but especially also in human geography. The human geographical interest in struc turation theory stems from Giddens’ and Bourdieu’s concentration on the concept of space and the spatiality of social practices. Adapting structuration theory in the 1980s and 1990s, enhanced the development of a struc turationist approach in human geography. This struc turationist geography is not discussed in this article but addressed in a separate one.

Giddens’ Theory of Structuration Claiming that no classical sociological theory approaches the social in a way that is still valid today, Giddens holds that a new perspective is needed. With his theory of structuration, this new perspective is put into concrete terms in the 1970s and 1980s. The outlines of the theory of structuration are given in Giddens’ main work The Constitution of Society (1984). The theory’s broad appeal allows theoretical and empirical research in all areas of the social sciences, thus promoting interdisciplinarity to a high degree. Giddens’ theory of structuration is important to geography in many ways. Like no other theory of the social, it integrates spatial aspects of social life system atically into its argumentation. Unsurprisingly, struc turation theory found its way into Anglo Saxon human geography, particularly into new regional geography. In German speaking human geography it was conceived as an elaboration of classic action theory or action centered approach toward a ‘social geography of everyday regionalizations’. Duality of Structure Central to the theory of structuration is the idea of the duality of structure. Duality means that social structures are constituted by human agency while, at the same time, being the means of this constitution. Structure and agency are neither the same, nor can they be regarded as

Structuration Theory

dualistic. Rather they must be received as two diverse aspects of one and the same thing, that is, social praxis. Structures are both medium and the outcome of praxis. Agency and structure are therefore characterized by an immanent dialectic relation. Of course, these assumptions do not only affect the relation between agency and structure but also agency and structure itself. Agency in this sense is to be apprehended as both structured and structuring. Structure is regarded as the outcome of ac tions and, at the same time, as a means for generating actions. One of the consequences of this notion is that every social situation can be looked at from two different perspectives – from the viewpoint of agency, as well as structure. The analysis of praxis and the analysis of structural settings can therefore be seen as two compat ible concepts of social research. However, within the theory of structuration, only the acting individual is endowed with a consciousness. Merely the authority generating the action, that is, the human individual, is capable of structuring. Structures have no consciousness and do not act. Consequently, Giddens’ approach attempts to dissolve the duality be tween structure and agency (that has shaped large parts of social theory) by emphasizing the subjective side of this relation. Agency and the Flow of Human Practice One main assumption of structuration theory is that the social world is generated in and through social praxis. Social praxis comprises the conditions and consequences of all historically and spatially localized human actions and interactions. Therefore, praxis can be regarded as synonymous with the constitution of social life, that is, the manner in which all aspects of social life are gener ated in and through the performance of social conduct. In stressing the significance of praxis, Giddens implies a conception of agency contrary to classical sociological action theory, as, for instance, proposed by Max Weber. In contrast to classical action theory and analytical action philosophy, Giddens does not conceive social practices as sequences of distinct activities but rather as a flow or series of activities. Neither is this flow clearly delimited nor is it fixed. Consequently, ‘intention’ cannot be re garded as the essential characteristic of human action. What is of central importance is, according to Giddens, the ability to act in social context, or, put differently, the capability of shaping the flow of activities in a way that makes social life possible at all. The theoretical presumption that human agency must be considered as a continuous flow has diverse impli cations. First, it implies that social praxis might be ana lytically differentiated into reasons, motives, and intentions, etc. However, these analytical categories cannot – contrary to assertions in traditional action

41

theory or analytical action philosophy – be analyzed separately. Since they are inseparable in social praxis, they shall be scientifically analyzed in context, that is, as being related to one another. Second, Giddens’ concept of praxis entails a specific notion of intentionality. The term ‘intentionality’ forms the very core of a definition of action proposed by the philosophy of language and traditional action theory. The philosophy of language, but also the sociological action theory of Max Weber, Alfred Schu¨tz, or Ju¨rgen Habermas, commonly regard intentionality as the guiding sequence of conduct. Since Giddens, however, refuses atomistic descriptions of human agency, he has a different outlook on intentionality. Giddens rejects the view that only those activities must be called action that are considered in tentional. Instead he claims that, first of all, intentionality cannot be conceptualized as a delimited sequence, and that second, all activities bearing unintended con sequences must be regarded as actions as well. Agency therefore refers not to the intentions actors have in doing things but to the capability of changing the trajectory of their doing at any moment in a given sequence of conduct. Intentionality is seen as a process rather than a completed sequence. In this sense, intentionality is always open to change or revision during the course of action. The third crucial implication of Giddens’ conception of practices refers to the reflexivity of action. Reflexivity allows the continuous revision of the direction of social conduct. Describing agency as being reflexive therefore stresses the freedom of human praxis – at least to a certain degree. That is to say, human agency cannot be determined in a causalistic sense. Human individuals can always act differently than they actually do or have done. Nevertheless, this freedom to act is limited. Since agency also involves following rules, it not only comprises a transformative but also a normative dimension. It should not be inferred from what has been said up to this point that the consequences of actions do always coincide with the effects the agent attempted to bring about. The fact that actions are reflexive does not ne cessarily mean that all of our activities bear the con sequences actually intended. Quite the reverse. Actions often have consequences that were not intended by the agent. However, the unintended outcomes are results of human agency and not products of a social system. Sys tems, to put it directly, do not act in any way. They do not have any needs. Only human individuals are capable of acting and bringing about intended and unintended outcomes that in turn become the conditions of suc ceeding actions. Agent and Agency The different levels of consciousness in human agency are described in a three stage model that not only differs

42

Structuration Theory

from the classic action theory but, despite some simi larity, also from Freud’s psychoanalysis. Modifying Freud’s distinctions, Giddens differentiates between the unconscious, practical consciousness, and discursive consciousness. The unconscious is separated from the other two by mechanisms of repression. The border be tween practical consciousness and discursive conscious ness, however, is not clearly definable but a dynamic one. Much of what actors know about the world and the do main of their actions is known to them in an un articulated manner, as a part of practical consciousness. They are able to do things that require this kind of knowledge, even though they are unable to report out right on it. That is to say, actors possess this knowledge without being able to give account on it (see Table 1). The three stages become differently relevant for several aspects and types of agency. Motivating oneself for an action is primarily bound to the unconscious. Hence, motivation is most remote from the actor’s re flexive monitoring. However, the unconscious is not re garded as a hotbed of dark forces. Instead, motives are rather interpreted as needs or desires. They merely refer to the potential of action, not to action itself. From the fact that human beings do actually have needs and de sires, Giddens does not conclude that actions are deter mined by them. Needs and desires solely indicate a general course of action, which is perpetually open to interpretation by the acting individual. Thus, there is no deterministic causality in the social world. Practical consciousness and rationalization of action relate to one another as most of our daily activities are highly routinized and do not require further explanation or justification. Giddens points out that, at all times, actors ‘know’, albeit they cannot directly report on it. This stresses the actors’ ‘knowledgeability’ in contrast to the structuralists’ claim that society and institutions or social structures operate behind the back of the actors. Even though actors are not always able to describe what they actually do, they are not unaware. Social actors ra ther possess a practical consciousness consisting of un questioned, rationally undoubted knowledge, which Table 1

Types of consciousness and agency

Type of consciousness

Reference to action

The unconscious Practical consciousness Discursive consciousness

Motivation of action Rationalization of action Reflexive monitoring of action

Unacknowledged conditions of action

forms the basis for routines and traditions. They hold a great deal of knowledge about the social world, which they apply in the production and reproduction of everyday social encounters. Nonetheless, the vast bulk of such knowledge is practical rather than theoretical in character. Yet, this practical consciousness can be raised to the level of discursive consciousness, if actors ask themselves what they actually do and how they do it: they are, at least potentially, able to discursively account for their actions (see Figure 1). Only discursive consciousness allows reflecting on, describing, consciously controlling, and rationally re porting on actions. Here, the agents’ ‘knowledgeability’ reaches its climax. Actors are permanently able to cor respond to the given and altering situations of action. Although these premises might be given occasionally, they are not necessarily given at all times. Giddens argues that in modernity, those parts of life proliferate that are either expressions of the discursive consciousness or reflexively monitored action. Late modern societies can thus be characterized by the re flexivity of social processes – even though this reflexive constitution is not accompanied by an increased rational control over all areas of life. While, on the one hand, our world is increasingly constituted through reflexively ap plied knowledge, this knowledge is, on the other hand, ever changing. All this results in a highly complex and, for the most part, problematic relationship between re flexivity and ontological security, which, above all, affects the basis of trust. Structure and Structuration Within the strucuralist approach, structures are con sidered to be the crucial part of the social world. They are attributed with generative or causal power. Giddens strictly opposes this view in assigning the main consti tutive power of the social world to the agency of human individuals, who, in turn, relate to structures in their social praxis. Another divergence from structuralism is Giddens’ redefinition of the term ‘structure’, which dif fers fundamentally from its hitherto use in social sciences. Giddens initially approaches the term ‘structure’ in a negative way: structures are neither groups, nor organ izations, nor subjects. This negative definition elucidates two aspects of what structures are not. First, structures do not exist outside agency. They are not external to action,

Reflexive monitoring of action Rationalization of action Motivation of action

Unintended consequences of action

Figure 1 Stratification model of the agent. From Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration, p 5. Cambridge, London: Polity Press.

Structuration Theory

as structural functionalists or structuralist Marxists claim. Therefore, structures cannot be conceived as being deterministic, that is, as externally governed human agency. Second, structures are no patterns or systems of interactions as has been partly stated by Parsons. Struc ture and system must not be equated; it must rather be assumed that systems have structural properties. Structures can be envisaged similar to language. Language represents an abstract ability of a community of speakers. Analogously, structures are the abstract capability of a group of actors. Like language, structures only exist in a virtual sense and neither has a subject nor the ability to act. As language becomes real only in speech, structures are solely realized in action. But where do structures exist, when they are not presently being realized in actions? Giddens’ answer to this question is, at first glance, rather confusing. He claims that structures are present in their absence. That is to say structures cannot be found beyond the capability of acting individuals. Structures are not present as something observable but as something invisible, that is, the capability of agents. They find ex pression only in the realization of these capabilities. Specifying the capabilities in question, Giddens outlines what they consist of. He claims that structures exist as knowledge about how things are to be done, said, or written. Social praxis is based on this knowledge and at the same time the actualization of it. The knowledge in question can be located in the discursive or practical consciousness and in the unconscious of an actor. In this respect, structures can also be seen as parts of con sciousness or traces of memory. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the concept of structure, it seems ne cessary to clarify what this knowledge is made of. Structure comprises two aspects: rules and resources. That is to say, the flow of human action is embedded in certain rules and resources that are, at the same time, produced and reproduced by human action. Or, put more accurately: human agency refers to specific semantic and normative rules, as well as to allocative and authoritative resources (see Table 2). Rules and Processes of Structuration

Actors always interpret social situations in accordance with certain rules of interpretation. The compliance of standards ensures that certain scopes of interpretation are not being transgressed. This can be called the normative Table 2

Rules and resources

Rules

Resources

Interpretative schemes (semantic rules) Norms (rules of sanction)

Allocative resources Authoritative resources

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aspect of structure. Rules of social practice have not only a regulative, but also constitutive character for social practices. This can be illustrated by the offside rule in football. According to this rule, no player of the attacking team must, at the moment the ball is played by his teammate, be nearer to his opponent’s goal line than both the ball and the second last opponent. This offside rule is constitutive for the attacking and defending strategies of the two teams. It is also regulative because violating the rule will be penalized (through a free kick against the attacking team). Since rules are both regulative and constitutive, they cannot be characterized as being ex clusively one of both. Giddens considers rules as procedures of action. In this view, social rules are a kind of technique that is applied in the flow of action. Nonetheless, the applic ability of rules is not restricted to verbally expressed or written rules (laws, bureaucratic rules, rules of a game, etc.). Formulated rules are thus codified interpretations of rules rather than rules as such. Giddens additionally points out that most rules are part of the practical con sciousness. Hence, rules are best conceived as generalized procedures of action that enable the agents to routinely reproduce their actions, to coordinate them with others’ actions, and to change situations. Rules are regarded as techniques in the sense that they play a constitutive role for meaning and forms of social conduct. Furthermore, they are also constitutive in shaping action. They do not, however, generate action as structuralism claims. Resources and the Reproduction of Power

Within structuration theory, the term ‘resource’ does not refer to something material, like natural resources or raw materials. Resources rather refer to power over people and materials. Or in other words: a resource is not understood as a certain state or thing but rather as a capability of transformation. It denotes the range of things an actor is able to do. Obviously, this notion of transformative capacity refers particularly to the cap acities commonly referred to as power. Hence, Giddens defines power as a part of social encounters. That is to say, power is not regarded as external to social practices but as implicit in all interactions and social relations. Giddens distinguishes between two types of transfor mative capacities: the transformative capacity of (1) au thorization and (2) allocation. Authoritative resources refer to the capacity of controlling the humanly created social world, that is, controlling the actors themselves. In con temporary societies, the dominant authoritative resource is the power to organize: the social time–space of human individuals (the temporal–spatial constitution of society), the production and reproduction of the human body, as well as constitution of chances of self development and self expression. Allocative resources refer to the capability of controlling the natural basis of human life, that is,

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steering the appropriation and use of material objects. Therefore, allocation resources involve a transformative capacity generating command over material phenomena. Social Systems and Institutions The organization of access to material goods by means of authoritative resources and the regulation of activities of individuals in the sense of authoritative resources point to established patterns of social practice, that is, to insti tutions and social systems. According to Giddens, the term social system refers to social relations, inter dependencies, and networks between actors and collect ives that are reproduced as regular social practices. Thus, Giddens dissociates himself from newer systems theory that relates the term social system to the autopoietic self production of society or parts of society. He rather regards social systems as systematic social relations that arise from the practical reproduction of structures (rules and re sources) over space and time. That is the reason why social systems contain moments of structure, that is, in stitutionalized aspects of social practice that stretch in space and time. Such moments of structure can refer to sequence of regulated interaction (e.g., a seminar) or to operational mode of organizations (e.g., a university) just as to the organization of societal totalities. According to Giddens, societal totalities, that is, soci eties, are themselves social systems that stand out in bold relief against other systemic relations. In continually re producing specific structural principles, a system of in stitutions is created by means of which societal totalities contrast with other system relations. Thus, the notion of ‘system’ opens up the possibility to study the reproduction of societal reality on the scale of larger and long term relations, that is, by means of practices that are continually reproduced over time and space. In this regard, various structural properties of social systems can be identified: structures of signification (semantic rules), structures of authority (resources), and structures of legitimation (moral rules). Each dimension can be linked to corres ponding social institutions, which are apprehended as expressions of institutionalized praxis. On the one hand, the respective institutions (modes of discourse, political institutions, economic institutions, legal institutions) monitor these domains, and on the other hand they are responsible for the production of rules of interpretation and sanction, as well as the attainment, management, and enforcement of the resources. Accordingly, the different institutional spheres can be related to the specific domains of scientific theory (see Table 3). Space, Time, and Structuration Giddens’ theory of structuration aims to analyze social praxis in both spatial and temporal context. Ignoring

Table 3

Structures, theoretical domains, and institutions

Structures

Theoretical domain

Institutional order

Signification

Theory of coding

Domination

Therory of resource authorization Theory of resource allocation Theory of normative regulation

Symbolic orders/modes of discourse Political institutions

Legitimation

Economic institutions Legal institutions

From Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration, p 31. Cambridge, London: Polity Press.

these contexts is, according to Giddens, one of the fun damental flaws of previous social theory. This is par ticularly true for the spatial aspect, which has hitherto been excluded from sociology fearing a lapse into some kind of geographical or environmental determinism. Giddens develops a concept of regionalization that opens up the door for a lively discussion of structuration theory within geography. Unlike earlier proponents of social theory, Giddens refers positively to the theory of geography. Conceptualizing social actors as bodily beings, Giddens discovers Ha¨gerstrand’s time geography – a concept that catches the essential conditions of spatial existence. In social sciences, the time geographical method is, above all, used to depict the constraints of coordination, which occur in the time–space sequences of everyday life. It shows that social interactions always take place at specific places that form the reference frame of these interactions. However, in trying to grasp the con textuality of social interactions, Ha¨gerstrand’s time geo graphical models turned out to be too mechanistic. For this reason, Giddens develops his own spatial terminol ogy employing Goffman’s insights into human behavior in public space. One core element of this spatial no menclature is the term ‘place’, for which Giddens prefers the expression ‘locale’. In doing so, he wants to point out that places are more than mere arrangements of struc tures or material conditions for interactions. Physical elements of places are loaded with specific (individual or collective) meanings that are incorporated by the actors as part of the interaction. When determining the meaning of locales in more detail, it is crucial to note that locales are regionalized, that is, they are subdivided into different regions. In other words: physical elements of social interaction’s context are loaded with social content through symbolic mark ings and thus become meaningful context elements of social praxis. An important dimension of regionalization is the division of space into front regions and back re gions. This division encompasses all spatial scales and encopasses the positioning of the body in face to face interactions, the division of countries into privileged and disadvantaged areas, or the geopolitical distinction

Structuration Theory

between center and periphery. Even though Giddens attaches high importance to the significance of spatiality in his theory of structuration, he did not enhance the spatial terminology in his later work. Nonetheless, in the 1980s and 1990s, his theory evoked the geographer’s interest and had a significant impact on geographical theory development. Discussion Giddens’ work is criticized mostly for its syncretism and eclecticism. And quite legitimately if you look at the numerous theories that are fused in his structuration theory. The potpourri of theoretical references is espe cially suspicious, if you are used to following one specific line of argumentation and assign every theory to an al ready established tradition of thinking. Giddens, however, rejects this objection. On the contrary, he considers the comfort of established views to be some kind of intel lectual sloth. According to Giddens, it is more important to set up a frame in which vital and enlightening ideas from other contexts can be brought to bear. Although there is a certain point to such a pragmatic view, it surely does not erase all logical and methodological contra dictions that are bound to a theoretical eclecticism. For instance, the objection remains that, in the end, Giddens’ theory offers only a limited insight into the relation of agency and structure as critics do not consider the dualism to be successfully overcome. In this respect, geographers like Thrift criticize that the actors are con ceptualized as being too individualistic rather than social. Moreover, it is said that Giddens underestimated the efficaciousness of structures. These objections are the reason why Thrift, Gregory, and Pred back off from structuration theory, even though in the 1980s they modeled their reformulation of regional geography on it. Another important problem of human geography concerns structuration theory’s conception of space. In using the conception of space outlined by Ha¨gerstrand’s time geography, Giddens conceives space (in the New tonian sense) as given and absolute, sometimes even as a determining factor of human agency. Assuming however, as Giddens does, that every societal reality is a consti tuted reality, this must also be true for spatial realities. The significance spatial conditions have for human agency, are constituted in social praxis and thus depend on human actions. Besides these objections, which have partly been re futed by geography’s adaptation of structuration theory, Giddens’ theory of structuration is one of the most vital theoretical foundations of human geography up to the present. The discussion of the theory in the 1980s con tributed to a social scientific reorientation of human geography while at the same time providing a suitable basis for it.

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Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice Along with Anthony Giddens, the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu is one of the most cited contemporary social theorists. His work reaches back into the 1950s and is exceedingly voluminous. Besides a multitude of studies concerning culture and social life in Northern Africa and France, his work contains an elaborated outline of a theory of praxis. In contrast to the significance Bourdieu gained in sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology, his works received rather minor attention in geography. Unlike Giddens’ theory of structuration, Bourdieu’s theory of praxis has never been used systematically to develop a specifically geographical approach. This is even more surprising as Bourdieu develops an interesting notion of social space and of the social appropriation of physical space. Theoretical Foundations and References The theoretical foundations of Bourdieu’s theory of praxis are mainly the works of Durkheim, Marx, and Weber. From Durkheim, Bourdieu adopts the notion that the social world is a reality for its own and therefore an independent research topic of social sciences. In addition, he follows Durkheim’s maxim that the social can only be explained by social issues. With his theoretical alignment, Bourdieu tries to take hold of what becomes apparent as an independent social reality beyond subjective thinking and beyond the biological nature (of humans). In his line of reasoning, however, he turns away from Durkheim claiming that Durkheim’s arguments and methods are based on a naive realism. This naive realism eventually leads to a social mechanism that reduces social reality to categories (classes and groups) constructed by social theorists. Studying Marx and Weber helped Bourdieu to overcome Durkheim’s ‘rules of sociological method’. Following Marx, Bourdieu argues that the observable order of the social world at a given point in time is not the result of a causal mechanism but the historically contingent product of practical constructions. Social differences (classes, groups, ethnicities, cultures, and gender) resemble the current state in the struggle for distinction – a struggle about and with the help of pic tures, imaginations, and symbolic representations. Con sequently, the analysis of social processes and the formation of current social classifications require a his torical perspective. The production of the social world is conceived by Bourdieu as a meaningful process, that is, a process of producing meaning. He draws this idea from Weber’s famous definition of sociology according to which sociology should analyze the subjective meanings of social actions in order to interpret and explain it. Bourdieu’s theory of praxis is a theory of the meaningful production of the social world, too. It has, however, to be

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distinguished between what seems to be the meaning of actions from a socioscientific perspective and what is in fact the practical meaning of actions and utterances. Bourdieu basically agrees with Weber in maintaining that actors allocate a subjective meaning to their actions. At the same time, it has to be taken into account that actors do not reflect this meaning component at all times but practically master it. That is to say, actors reproduce meaning even though they do not discursively reflect on it. The theoretical foundations of Bourdieu’s theory can be summarized as follows: (1) social reality, the research topic of social sciences, is not to be reduced to either individual states of mind or to natural determinants; (2) the social world is the historically contingent product of an ongoing struggle for representation; it is the result of the symbolic production of differences and distinctions; (3) constructing and implementing principles of dis tinction is an attempt to determine the legitimate view of the social world; and (4) social sciences include them selves as a part of their research object. Basically, Bourdieu holds a rather traditional under standing of science that stands out from postmodernist reactions to the crisis of representation. Of course, he assumes that truth is not found but made. That, however, does not lead him into an uncritical relativism. On the contrary, he concludes that if truths are being made, the means of truth production, that is, the scientific praxis of observation and representation, have to be scrutinized closely. That is the reason why, according to Bourdieu, socioscientific research is fundamentally reflexive. He repeatedly stresses that social sciences have to direct their findings also to themselves. Socioscientific methods of investigation are to be applied to the social praxis of science as well. That is to say, social scientists have to make themselves the object of their research. In doing so, they grant themselves an epistemic privilege: the position of an observer who observes himself while observing and who is capable of questioning and steering his obser vation practice. What makes socioscientific observation special is, thus, not the fact that social scientists observe others but rather that they include themselves in the observation. They constantly question the unquestioned plausibilities of their own descriptions. Social Space, Capital, and Field Bourdieu’s theory of praxis bears certain similarities to Giddens’ theory of structuration. Nonetheless, there is a major difference between the two. Giddens puts his emphasis on social praxis – on what actors do and think in their everyday life – and on the constraints and free doms of individual action. Giddens’ theory of structura tion is an attempt to overcome the opposition of voluntarism (freedom) and determination (constraint) by regarding both aspects as moments of praxis. Bourdieu,

for his part, discusses the opposition of objectivism and subjectivism, which is not exactly the same since ob jectivism and subjectivism are not aspects of social praxis but moments of its analysis. He is less interested in de limiting the scope of individual freedom of acting or finding out how strong agency is restricted by social constraints. What he wants to foreground and eventually overcome is the opposition of two types of socioscientific observation of social praxis. He holds that both modes of social scientific analysis, subjectivism and objectivism, depict social praxis one sidedly and distortedly. It is Bourdieu’s aim to unveil these distorted scientific view points in order to eventually establish a scientific understanding of social practice and of practical under standing. Criticizing objectivistic and subjectivistic modes of insight is, thus, the starting point of Bourdieu’s con ception of a theory of praxis. Social space

Among the concepts that form the core of Bourdieu’s theory, social space is the most vital term. Especially in geographical contexts, it has to be clarified immediately what the term does not mean. Bourdieu does not use it to describe (a part of) geographical space. Social space is neither a territory nor the ‘habitat’ of individuals or groups. Social space cannot be found as a structure on Earth’s surface. The term is used to designate the social world or society in general. However, it does not refer to a container or some kind of box but rather to a relational formation of positions. Social space is a relational space, that is, an arrangement of social positions that are de termined by relations of proximity and distance. The multiple dimensions of social reality are displayed by means of different forms of capital. Besides economical capital Bourdieu also introduces social and cultural capital. These three forms of capital constitute the main coordinate axis of social space, that is, the determinants by means of which positions in social space are defined and allocated. Capital

Bourdieu’s usage of the term ‘capital’ does not corres pond to the meaning of the word in colloquial language or other social theories where it generally denotes monetary or material value. In Bourdieu’s sense, it rather designates structural principles that are brought to bear in interactions between social actors in different fields of social space. Above all, it is used to describe the actors’ abilities deriving from the structural conditions of their situation, especially the means of power at their disposal, that is, the power over products, persons, and meanings. This notion of capital includes also the conventional economic meaning (money, income, property) of the term capital.

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Social capital can be conceived as an authoritative resource in Giddens’ sense. It is, as a form of controlling persons and their actions that rests on established social relations, like employment contract or amicable com mitments. Cultural capital designates knowledge and skills that are acquired through education. However, cultural capital covers more than school and university education. It encompasses all sorts of competences in dealing with signs and semantics. That is to say, it in cludes the ability to participate in specific language games in various contexts and to fulfill the corresponding expectations. Besides these main determinants of social space, Bourdieu occasionally mentions other forms of capital that can become relevant in specific social con texts: for example, symbolic or scientific capital. Ac cording to Bourdieu, the different types of capitals are only partly interchangeable among one another. In add ition, there is a struggle for the value of capital in social space and for the exchange rate of various sorts of capital. This struggle is closely bound to the division of social space into different fields. Fields

According to Bourdieu, the social space is divided into different fields with each field displaying its own social microcosm. Each social field has, as Bourdieu stresses, its own logic. It is characterized by specific principles of differentiation and representation that define how to ascribe positions, interpret events, and deal with prob lems. Each field has a specific mode of labeling positions, that is, a specific logic of distinction. That is the reason why a field appears to be a more or less autonomous social universe. With the conception of social fields, Bourdieu’s theory of praxis takes the differentiation of social systems into account. The social fields correspond to the subsystems of society, that is, economy, politics, science, art, or religion. Each field also represents a specific viewpoint from which social reality is being ob served and constructed. Habitus and Sense of Practice According to Bourdieu, the principles of distinction within a given field are reflected in the minds (and bodies) of the actors within this field. According to the field’s logic of distinction, actors develop schemes of perception and of acting. These schemes of perception, thought, and action are called the actor’s habitus. Bour dieu argues that the habitus is a product of conditionings that are bound to a certain positioning in social space. Consequently, the habitus is as differentiated as the positions whose products they are. Nevertheless, it has to be added that the habitus is also differentiating as it contains those interpretation schemes that help to com prehend the meaning of utterances and objects and

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reproduce social practices. Hence, the habitus has two sides. On the hand, it is a system of structured expect ations and a scheme of interpretation, on the other it is the generative principle of symbolic practices that re produce social structures. It has to be noticed that the habitus is acquired in and through praxis and not through reflected learning. The habitus evolves from processes of incorporation beyond consciousness and discursive thinking. The application of the habitus, its realization, also takes place without re flexive contemplation. The majority of our powers of discernment, our competences in dealing with social situations, our comprehension of the meaning of utter ances and objects is routinely applied. We have a practical mastery of the valid rules and the social habits. This bears a certain similarity to the practical consciousness in Giddens’ sense. That is to say, the habitus is a kind of knowledge or skill that does not have to and often cannot be readily articulated. In this regard, Bourdieu speaks of an almost bodily anticipation of the requirements in so cial situations within certain fields. Thus, social differ entiation does not only show up in the consciousness of the actors as schemes of thought and acting but is also more or less directly transferred to the body as it manifests itself in the posture and gesture. With the concept of habitus, Bourdieu turns against the idealistic conceptions of agency as outlined by certain action theories (e.g., rational choice or ethnomethod ology). These theories conceive actions as products of calculation or conscious planning and decisions. Bourdieu on the contrary holds that there is a practical sense and practical mastery of social praxis that is not connected with this kind of rationality. Bourdieu metaphorically calls this practical sense a sense for the game. Here, game designating the (serious) social life in general. The fields of social space are, in a way, the playing fields with their corresponding rules. The habitus enables actors to intuitively play the game and to reproduce it (mostly rather unquestioned). According to Bourdieu, there is a direct connection between field and habitus. The habitus is adjusted to the principles of distinction that prevail in a field. It represents the social conditions under which it is acquired. Vice versa, structures of social space (the fields and their logics) are produced and re produced by means of symbolic practices that are gen erated by the dispositions of this habitus. It must not be concluded, however, that social conditions are always reproduced uniformly. People who are involved in a so cial field do not perceive its presets and constraints as an outer constraint. The practical meaning is also a kind of a practical belief in the game. It ensures that the majority of what happens within the field is taken for granted. That does not imply that social actors agree with everything that happens in their social surrounding. It just expresses that they are truly involved in what they do.

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Social Space and Geographical Space Bourdieu’s discussions of geographical space and specific geographical issues of the relation between society and space are manifold. He discusses this topic (without re ferring to geographical research) in his early studies about the kabylic society and rural life in Be´arn (France). However, Bourdieu’s notion of geographical space is less elaborated than that of comparable geographical studies. The concept of habitus defined as a structure of the social world that is inscribed in the bodies could provide access to a more detailed discussion of Bourdieu within geog raphy. This view implies that social life is, in a funda mental way, body centered. Thus, it points to the spatial dimension of social praxis. In a short paper entitled ‘Effets de lieu’ (effects of place), Bourdieu explicitly discusses the notion of geo graphical space. In this paper, Bourdieu analyzes the relation of social and geographical space. He notices that social space inscribes itself more or less exactly into physical space. Social space manifests itself in certain positionings of actors and properties in physical space. That is to say that, for example, the societal distribution of economic and cultural capital becomes apparent in the geography of a city, be it in the concentration of rare goods or their possessors at certain places or in the evolvement of regions where the poorest live (suburbs, ghettos). In social praxis, physical space always appears as a socially appropriated space. Besides economic capital, the appropriation of space always requires social and cultural capital. Vice versa, the place occupied or appropriated by a social actor (or a group) can in turn yield a ‘space profit’. Such profits are expressed by, for example, control over space that allows to keep disturbing or unwanted things or persons at a distance. Profits can also arise from the proximity to rare and treasured goods or facilities. Hence, the appropri ation of desired spaces does not only require capital, it also pays it back to all those who gain excess to the space endowing them with additional symbolic capital. Re versely, this ‘club effect’ works as ‘ghetto effect’, for ex ample, discriminating people because of their origin. Another consequence of permanently inscribing social reality into the physical world is the tendency to natur alize social relations. Spatializations of social and cultural differences can mistakenly give the impression that social and cultural differences stem from the very nature of things. That is the reason why spatializating social and cultural issues represent traps for scientific observers. If the rash observer takes them for granted he inevitably gets caught in a substantialistic or realistic line of rea soning that denies the social production of differences and entities. Bourdieu additionally warns against an un noticed inversion of cause and effect, which happens whenever the actor’s position in social space is inferred

from their localization in physical space. The scientific observer who ignores the social construction of the meaning of places becomes entangled in a naturalizing discourse.

Discussion The critical discussion of Bourdieu’s approach is just as extensive as his work itself. The objections raised against single arguments and concepts of his theory derive from different subjects and are thus manifold. The main cri tique, however, aims at the concept of the habitus. For quite some time, it is (repeatedly) argued that the idea of the habitus is founded on a reductionistic view of social praxis. The close connection of structures of social space and schemes of action and thought (habitus) has raised the objection that Bourdieu has a deterministic under standing of praxis. Other critics, however, claim quite the opposite. Especially Marxist scholars object that Bour dieu’s concentration on symbolic practices of distinction (culture) underestimates actual socioeconomic settings and ignores structural conditions. Bourdieu, however, wants to emphasize that structure and agency cannot be separated. Indeed, social space and habitus cannot be thought of without the other. This is well illustrated by the game metaphor. On the one hand, we see the ‘game’, that is, the social world with its rules and conventions, whenever we analyze the social space with its fields. On the other hand, we discover the intentions and the strategies of players, if we focus on the social actors with their knowledge and attitudes. However, the two sides cannot, strictly speaking, be considered independently. Without the game, that is, without rules and institutions, there are no players and without the players applying the rules and playing the game, there are no games. That is the reason why the actual object of social sciences is, according to Bourdieu, neither the social actor (the in dividuals) nor the social world (the collectives and the groups) or its structures but the relation between the habitus and social space. See also: Cultural Capital; Deconstruction; Determinism/ Environmental Determinism; Ethnomethodology/ Ethnomethodological Geography; Evolutionary Algorithms; Functionalism (Including Structural Functionalism); Habitus; Homelessness; Longitudinal Methods (Cohort Analysis, Life Tables); Military Geographies; Nature-Culture; Phenomenology/ Phenomenological Geography; Place; Poststructuralism/ Poststructuralist Geographies; Pragmatism/Pragmatist Geographies; Quantitative Data; Rational Choice Theory (and Rational Choice Marxism); Regionalisations, Everyday; Society-Space; Space II; Structural Marxism; Structuralism/Structuralist Geography; Structurationist

Structuration Theory Geography; Symbolic Interactionism; Time Geography; Transport, Rural; Tuan, Y.-F.

Further Readings Bourdieu, P. (1972). Esquisse d’une the´orie de la pratique: Pre´ce´de´ de trois e´tudes d’ethnologie kabyle. Gene`ve: Librairie Droz. Bourdieu, P. (1980). Le sens pratique. Paris: Les e´ditions minuit. Bourdieu, P. (1993). Effets du lieu. In Bourdieu, P. et al. (eds.) La mise`re du monde. Paris: E´ditions du Seuil. Bourdieu, P. (1994). Raison pratique: Sur la the´orie de l’action. Paris: E´ditions du Seuil. Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. J. D. (1992). Re´ponses Pour une Anthropologie Re´flexive. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Bryant, C. G. A. and Jary, D. (eds.) (1991). Giddens’ Theory of Structuration: A Critical Appreciation. London: Routledge. Bryant, C. G. A. and Jary, D. (eds.) (1997). Anthony Giddens: Critical Assessments, 4 Vols. London: Routledge. Cohen, I. J. (1989). Structuration Theory: Anthony Giddens and the Constitution of Social Life. London: Macmillan. Craib, I. (1992). Anthony Giddens. London: Routledge. Giddens, A. (1976). New Rules of Sociological Method. London: Hutchinson & Co. Giddens, A. (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. London: Macmillan Press. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration. Cambridge, London: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1990). Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Held, D. and Thompson, J. (eds.) (1989). Social Theory of Modern Societies: Anthony Giddens and His Critics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaspersen, L. B. (2000). Anthony Giddens: An Introduction to a Social Theorist. Oxford: Blackwell. Lippuner, R. (2005). Raum Systeme Praktiken: Zum Verha¨ltnis von Alltag, Wissenschaft und Geographie. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Painter, J. (2000). Pierre Bourdieu. In Crang, M. & Thrift, N. (eds.) Thinking space, pp 239 259. London: Routledge. Thrift, N. (1983). On the determination of social action in space and time. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1, 23 56. Werlen, B. (1995). Sozialgeographie allta¨glicher Regionalisierungen. Band 1: Zur Ontologie von Gesellschaft und Raum. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Werlen, B. (1997). Sozialgeographie allta¨glicher Regionalisierungen. Band 2: Globalisierung, Region und Regionalisierung. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

Relevant Websites http://www.theory.org Anthony Giddens, Theory.Org. http://www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/global/stafflordgiddens.htm Centre for the Study of Global Governance Lord Giddens, London School of Economics and Political Science. http://www.hyperbourdieu.jku.at Pierre Bourdieu. http://www.hyperbourdieu.jku.at/ Pierre Bourdieu Sociologue E´nervant, Le Magazine de l’Homme Moderne, Bienvenue.

Structurationist Geography B. Werlen, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Jena, Germany & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Geography-Making The core concept of praxiscentered research addresses all forms of constitutional processes of geographical realities and related geographical imaginations of the world. It encompasses the analysis of all kinds of singnificative/symbolic, normative, and rationale appropriations of spatial facts as well as the transformation of nature and the productions of spatial patterns of material artifacts (infrastructures, settlements, urban networks, etc.) on the basis of this different forms of appropriation and power relations in form of rules (schemes of meaning attribution and interpretation) and (allocative and autoritative) resources. Locale/Setting It denotes a spatial context of action as a setting for action constituted by material elements as well as by sets of social norms and culturally shared values, to be understood as a material, socio-economic and socio-cultural constellation of action with intersubjective shared meaning contents. Therefore, it is an action-related concept that cannot be turned into an objective fact or a generalized as a social category, having the same meaning for members of a society (in a certain region). Place It denotes a position in a spatial continuum with a certain specific meaning, expression of processes of appropriation. These processes can, for instance, be based on economic actions, including value attribution in the sense of the ‘central place theory’, on normative actions related to territorial regulations or to symbolicemotive appropriations, expressed by feelings of belonging. Regionalization It is traditionally understood as an academic practice of spatial delimitation of natural, social, economical, cultural, or political spheres of reality. According to the perspective of structurationist human/social geography, it is understood as an everyday practice, not for delimitating the ’world’ spatially, but rather using spatial references for the economical, political, cultural etc. structuring of social realities. Therefore, the key issue is world-binding for the performance of human or more precisely: social agency as forms of appropriations on the basis of spatial concepts. Spatial Disembedding The ontological pre-condition of globalization, based on agency or action orientations strictly separated from time in the sense that the ‘where’ and ‘when’ of acting is open to negotiations and not anymore tied to each other by tradition. The interrelated

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‘lifting out’ of late-modern institutions and of social relations in general from local contexts and their reformation across indefinite spans of time-space is called time-space distanciation. As major disembedding mechanisms are regarded symbolic tokens (like writing, money, credit cards, etc.) and expert systems (infrastructure of transportation, electronic communication etc.), enabling actions over distance in real time, provoking as well an enormous acceleration of speed of life and social transformation as a crisis of the nation-state. Spatial Embedding The ontological condition primarily of traditional societies and cultures, based on the unity of space and time, enclosing a local and regional anchoring of social institutions and religious practices, very often linked to powerful processes of reification mythification. One of the major characteristics lies in the dominance of face-to-face communication, and the nearly complete absence of space-time distanciation. These two characteristics encompasses a rather narrow spatial clustering of traditional societies and cultures, expressed by quite clear spatial borders of local and regional traditions and cultures, study object of traditional regional geography. Under conditions of globalization ‘spatial embedding’ is the product of reembedding activities of in principal dis-embedded social and cultural relations. World Binding Key concept of action/agencycentered human/social geography, based on the shift from a space-centered geographical imagination to the analysis of the everyday geography-making. It expresses the basic assumption, that the postulation of the study of societies and cultures in space or the study of space includes to a certain extend the acceptance of a (pre-modern) concept of an absolute and material (container) space. An action/agency-centered perspective develops a worldview in which the embodied subjects form the nucleus of geographic research, analyzing how they bring the ‘world’ to themselves under spatially dis-embedded conditions (space-time distanciation/globalization), on the basis of everyday regionalizations, specific forms of appropriations and specific power relations. Zoning It denotes further differentiation of regions for specific activities in spatial as well as temporal respect. Spatial specifications of the region ‘house’, for instance, include the distinction of ‘living room’ (meeting other persons), ‘kitchen’ (cooking, eating), the temporal distinction, for instance, the separation of daytime (living

Structurationist Geography room and kitchen in the basement) and nighttime (sleeping rooms on the first floor). Zoning involves activity-related differentiations at all possible scales, from one single room to global scope and time unites, from seconds to day, seasons, years, etc.

Structuration Theory and the Spatial Contexts of Social Agency In his theory of structuration, Giddens develops a specific vocabulary to overcome one of the most problematic shortcomings of the classic social theories of Marx, Dur kheim, Weber, and others, thereby integrating space and spatiality into the theory of social practice. The three spatial key concepts are: ‘locale/setting’, ‘region’, and ‘zone’. The first term is ‘locale’. Giddens explicitly differen tiates between this and the geographical concept of ‘place’, in order to show that the contextuality of actions, not the physical realm, is central. ‘Locale’ refers to a piece of space used for a specific activity that is already organized by pregiven material interactions. In short, we can understand ‘locale’ as a material context, or the constellations of actions which acquires a specific social meaning intersubjectively as well. Giddens occasionally uses the term ‘setting’ as in ‘setting for interaction’ for this. But setting is by far, not just a spatial parameter or a physical containment of social interaction. ‘Setting’ has rather to be understood as an element that is mobilized as an inherent part of interaction. An example is a house. A locale can only be called a ‘house’ if we observe that this material context has the furnishings for living in and is treated in that way. Ac cording to the context of action, a locale can be a house, a street corner, a city, or the territory of a state. Con sequentially, the determination that a constellation is a ‘locale/setting’ does not depend on the size or spatial dimensions, but rather from the way in which actions are carried out. Every locale is ‘regionalized’ in space and time. A house, for example, has floors, hallways, and rooms. Re gionalization thus means a first specification of the ‘social definition’ of certain spatial slices or locales ‘in relation to certain ways of acting’. This does not foreground the physical, worldly expression or the material character istics of a region in the (traditional) geographic sense. It is, again, a combination of the social and spatial cat egories or characteristics. Seen in this light, a region should be understood within a ‘locale/setting’ as a social part of the situation or the context of action delimited by symbolic marking which can be ascertained by physical and material re lations (walls, lines, rivers, valley, etc.). A region within a locale refers ‘to aspects of the settings which are

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normatively implicated in systems of interaction, such that they are in some way ‘set apart’, for certain types of activities.’ ‘Regionalization’ can be further differentiated according to type, length of time, and character. Deter mining the ‘form’ of the regionalization refers to the type of borders that define the region and can be determined by physical or symbolic markers. Seen physically, this can mean the walls between individual rooms or mountain chains between larger pieces of space. Seen socially, these translate into understandings that one does not sleep in the kitchen, or that the borderlines of regional differen tiation represent significant social characteristics of spa tially positioned persons of a population, such as between the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ of England. This means that regions can differ in their spatial and temporal extents. Consequently, the intersection of ‘spans’ of space and time may be variable. But the social maintenance of re gions of a bigger span (like nation states, international markets, etc.) necessarily depends – and that is a con sequence of the social nature of regions and borders as elements of social action – in general upon a high degree of institutionalization. Only on that basis, a stabilization in the form of social reproduction is possible. By the ‘character’ of regionalization, Giddens refers to ‘the modes’ in which the time–space organization of lo cales is structured within an embracing social system. ‘Modes’ can be understood as the overarching spatial or ganizing principle, which governs a certain encompassing social system. As an example, preindustrial economic systems rarely led to sharp divisions between familial and work life. Already in industrial societies, there is however a clear differentiation between living space and workspaces. The corresponding organizing principle here can be characterized as a ‘functional division’ between and within production and reproduction zones. ‘Zoning’ refers to the further differentiation of regions. This means that, for example, specific rooms are only de fined for specific activities: the living room is for meeting and receiving guests, the kitchen is for cooking and perhaps also for eating, and so on. Within production facilities, this could be zone of production, administration, and rest. Regionalization and zoning are mostly combined with time, such that time–space regionalization and zoning re sult, which can be seen in an English house, is as follows: the upstairs includes the rooms which are used for activ ities at night, the ground floor for daytime activities. Temporal zoning, however, is also central in a more en compassing manner. The clear division into day and night can be held for the fundamental differentiation of social life into zones of exertion and relaxation in all societies, and the needs of the human organism for regular periods of sleep are governed by it. In this way, ‘nighttime’ forms a very clear ‘border’ for social activities as much as any spatial boundary. In other theaters, zoning occurs according to weekly, monthly, or even yearly rhythms.

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The Integration of the Theory of Structuration into New Regional Geography The first attempt to integrate the spatially enlarged social theory of structuration into the geographical worldview has been undertaken by Derek Gregory in his project of a critical new regional geography. The main characteristic of that attempt lies rather in the integration of a social theoretical perspective into regional research than in a critical transposition of a metadisciplinary position into a new disciplinary framework. Unlike traditional geography, Gregory’s regional geography – based initially on Habermas’ writing and later on Giddens’ critical theory – is not founded on physical geographical conditions but on criteria that are derived from social or structuration theory respectively. Starting with the question of how societal realities are regionally formed and articulated, Gregory then wants to pave the way for appropriate regional political or scien tific interventions. The major thesis of the project is that spatial structures are somehow incorporated in social structures and vice versa. The empirical regional study ‘Regional transforma tion and industrial revolution’ is the first to encompass a systematic geographical discussion of Giddens’ struc turation theory (see Figure 1). The transformation comprises three steps of decoding: In the ‘first step’, the central stages of transformation and the transformation power of regional realities are iden tified. The changes in the wool industry are regarded as expressions of structuration processes, that is, as results of transforming social reality by means of rule governed human action. Being differently equipped with authori tative and allocative resources, actions are seen as the basis for the reproduction of social structures.

Power

Sanction

Interpretative scheme

Facility

Norm

Signification

Domination

Legitimation

System of Communication interaction

Modality

Structure

In the ‘second step’, the transformation of labor into capital and the consequences of this structuration process are empirically analyzed. Changes in the labor process encompass, above all, technical innovations and evolving routinization of work steps, gender specific division of labor, chronic unemployment, vanishing of the inviolability of landowners, etc. All together, these processes are to be seen as expressions of the oncoming convertibility of private property, which turns labor into a commodity and thus working hours into objects of exchange. To explore these changes in their regional appearance is the second task of the ‘new regional geography’. The ‘third step’ commences with an analysis of the time–spatial consequences of the latter two aspects. Subsequently, it should be reconstructed how time–spa tial aspects of action help to ‘prevail’ what has been singled out in the first two steps of decoding, that is, the identification of the transformative power and the re gional transformation analysis. Analyzing the changing rhythms of daily and annual activities within the spheres of household and workplace (which are separated under the capitalist regime) is a central aspect of structuration processes and geographical regional research. It is as sumed that this casts a light on the regional transfor mations of societal realities. These three steps together with an analysis of the theoretically inferred link between the three subject areas should allow two things: first, a deeper understanding of uneven regional developments, second, an insight into the ‘mechanisms’ of the spatial differentiation of society, es pecially the varying regional constitution of class relations. Alan Pred’s reference to Giddens’ structuration theory is embedded in his interest in Ha¨gerstrand’s time geog raphy. Above all, Pred wants to reconstruct the historical becoming of places and regions as expressions of struc turation processes. Consequently, a given region has to be

Figure 1 Gregory’s reference to the structuration theory. From Gregory, D. (1982). Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution: A Geography of Yorkshire Woollen Industry, p 17. London: Macmillan.

Structurationist Geography

understood and analyzed as the result of transformation processes. The objective is to examine regions within the analytical frame of a structurationist ‘theory of place’. In this context, the structurationist comprehension of ‘place’ and ‘region’ becomes important. For Pred, the becoming of ‘place/region’ always im plies two social processes: the appropriation of ‘space’ and the transformation of ‘nature’. Every place or region is an expression of these two processes (Figure 2). The historical becoming of a ‘place’ or ‘region’ by means of appropriating ‘space’ and transforming ‘nature’ is, as Pred stresses, inseparably bound to the reproduction and transformation of society in space and time. Accordingly, the process of societal transformation and reproduction is bound to the becoming of ‘place/region’ by means of the appropriation of ‘space’ and the transformation of ‘nature’. Consequently, the distinctiveness or uniqueness of every place and every region is an expression of the agent’s historically variable interpretation of these pro cesses under historically specific, contingent conditions. The ‘theory of place’ comprises three main points: first, the ‘institutional projects’. Their shaping has an influence on daily routines and paths of the participants of these institutions. This shaping of routines and paths has strong implications for the place; additionally, they leave traces in the landscape and they influence power relations. As a consequence, social structures in Giddens’ sense become particularly important. Second, Pred suggests examining the formation of biographies as an expression of structuration processes ‘within’ a place; that is, to say, the influence of the place/region on a person’s life. Thus, place/region is regarded to play a key role in the formation of biog raphies. Regional studies should disclose this constitutive power.

Third, it is assumed that there is a meaning of place that – although it does not exist as an independent entity – is part of the growing consciousness of an individual: according to Pred, the meaning of place is to be treated as an object of regional research just as the constitution of biographies and the consequences of regional institutions are. At this point, it becomes even more obvious than in the two preceding points that what is analyzed as re gionally constituted cannot be the object of regional re search per se. If the meaning of place is said to be a mental issue, it can just not be material at the same time and therefore not be located topographically. It is a mental or social entity that can be extremely relevant for regional processes without having a regional existence. Con sequently, it can be addressed as a crucial element for the process of regionalization, but not as a regional object. This shows that the application of structuration theory and social theory in general to social geography cannot lead to regional geography, but rather to the investigation or processes of regionalization, what in fact is the original intention of Pred, but is not what he suggested. In the early 1980s, Nigel Thrift successfully in corporated structuration theory into an outline of con textual regional research. The key concepts of this reorientation of regional research are ‘locale’ and ‘social action’. With reference to Giddens, locale designates a certain portion of physical space that already displays a specific pattern of material objects and persons. That is, to say, locale is the material context, the given constel lation for action and interaction. This constellation is also labeled ‘setting’. In order to scientifically demarcate a region as a spatial interaction structure, an in depth understanding of interaction is necessary. Interaction is interpreted as an activity linking social and spatial structure by means of institutional interrelations. Con sequently, a ‘region’ cannot be regarded as a pre given

Become one another

Become one another

Intersection of individual paths and institutional projects (practice)

Establishment, reproduction, and transformation of power relations (structure)

53

Genres de vie and social reproduction Spatial and social division of labor (production and distribution) Sedimentation of other cultural and social forms Biography formation and socialization Language acquisition Personality development Development of conciousness

Transformation of nature

Occur simultaneously

Figure 2 Components of ‘place’ and ‘region’. From Pred, A. (1986). Place, Practice and Structure, p 11. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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place or corporeal entity. Instead, demarcating a region should be the objective of scientific research. It is to find out which ‘settings’ of interactions are to be joined in order to form what then can justifiably be called a ‘region’. Every region is, above all, to be understood as en abling and restricting actions. Both options decisively influence the life paths of the individuals living there. Consequently, the structure of the arrangement pattern of ‘locales’ is regarded as an expression of the social structure. In this regard, the varying importance of dif ferent settings is crucial. The organization of production determines which settings become dominant. They are characterized by the fact that time ‘must’ be allocated to them.

Discussion The aim, however, is to outline a conception of geo graphical research that, on the one hand, is not only social theoretically informed but in a consistent way compatible with the basic principles of social research and, on the other hand, aims at a more thorough in corporation of spatial and temporal contexts of social action. This aim is not fully achieved by first attempts to integrate structuration theory in geographical world perspective. The main problems are insufficient theo retical reflections of the geographical concept of Earth space and a misapprehension of modern and late modern social, ontological conditions. These, however, have to be taken into account, if human and social geography wants to adequately represent late modern geographical conditions and consequently be relevant for everyday life. Before the problematic aspects of the adaptation of structuration theory to geography are to be discussed, it should also be mentioned, that some of the identified problems are integral to structuration theory itself. The main problem of this adaptation lies in the fact, that ‘places’ as well as ‘regions’ are considered in the existing shape, or even regarded as historically pregiven and fixed. Human actions are analyzed ‘in’ regions and not as the region building forces. That is to say, action is not considered as a constitutive power for the social formation of place and region. In the course of estab lishing a new regional geography, the core principle in spired by structuration theory: ‘people produce history and places’ moves toward a quite different governing principle: ‘people are produced by history and places’ implying that times, spaces, or places can constitute meanings and have a socializing effect. Consequently, Pred suggests that places/regions do exist as such – but only as a constant flow of human practice. The latter, however, would imply that place/region can only be seen

as an element of social praxis/action, but not existing as such in the form of a spatial reality in itself. Giddens proposes that analyzing the processes of re gionalization could be the specific, most important, or even legitimizing task of contemporary geography. This notion is reformulated in Gregory’s, Pred’s, and Thrift’s adaptations to a research program of the constitution and transformation processes of historically pregiven political regions. In doing so, they miss recognizing the social meaning of regionalization for the reproduction of social realities. Then the program shows clearly that, still, the explanation of a given geographical phenomenon forms the center of scientific interest. All together, the Anglo Saxon reception of structuration theory lacks a com prehensive embeddedness in social theory. Instead, structurationist geography should rather interpret the signification of geography making as a core dimension of the constitution process of social and cultural realities as well as of the reproduction of power. Moreover, it should reflect social theoretical implications of space con ceptions and late modern living conditions. In this regard, it is not sufficient to apply structuration theory to regional analysis. But also for a productive application to the social scientific analysis of everyday geography making, the theory has to be revised radically. Its internal contradictions have to be overcome for ap propriate geographical research. Above all, this excludes regarding ‘space’ and ‘time’ as special powers of the constitution of society. Giddens’ problematic incorpor ation of ‘space’ has to be revised in the sense that, it can be made compatible with the core principles and as sumptions of structuration theory. In short, a more rad ical implementation of the structurationist perspective into human geographical research has, first of all, to clarify the current geographical condition, the current ontology spatial and temporal relations and its relevance for the constitution of sociocultural realities; second, to theorize ‘space’ in the context of social action or agency; third, to put the processes of regionalization in the center of geographical research interest, and finally, to redefine processes of regionalization under globalized conditions of local actions.

Late-Modern Ontology and Structurationist Geography If we start from the premise that all kinds of spatial re lations are constituted historically under certain social and cultural conditions, we have, above all, to spell out the basic principles of that interconnection. For this, the construction of ideal types should allow to identify cer tain characteristic aspects in the interrelation of the sociocultural and spatial. The first question, then, is: what conditions have to be given or have to hold, if the spatial

Structurationist Geography

description of societies and cultures should be possible, as required by geographical methodology? The first hypothetical answer to this question is that traditional life forms come very close. The most important spatio temporal characteristics of traditional life forms and re gional societies can – in ideal typical form – be summarized as shown in Table 1. Stability over time or embeddedness in a temporal respect is based on the domination of local traditions. Traditions connect past and future and are the central frame of reference for action, orientation, and legitim ization in daily praxis. They set narrow bounds for in dividual decisions. Social relations are predominantly ruled by kinship , tribe , or rank relations. Depending on birth, age, or sex, clearly defined social positions are at tributed to persons. Narrow spatial limitations, or ‘embeddedness’ in a spatial sense, lie in the technical standards of transpor tation and communication. The predominance of walking and the limited significance of writing restrict social and cultural expressions to the local and regional level. Face to face interaction is almost the only possible situation for communication. Additionally, production processes have to respect natural conditions because of technolo gical development. Economies are, consequently, highly adapted to the prevailing physical conditions. In addition – as many anthropological studies teach us – temporal, spatial, and sociocultural aspects of everyday praxis are closely bound together. For traditional life forms, it is important not only to carry out certain activities at a certain time, but also in a certain place and sometimes even with a certain spatial orientation. In this way, social regu lations and activity patterns are reproduced and enforced by unreflexive spatiotemporal commitments. The unity of sociocultural and spatiotemporal di mensions of activities becomes the basis for extremely powerful reification processes. In this way, for example, places of worship are identified with the act of worship. Only in this way is it possible to claim that somebody who puts his or her feet on a certain place also desecrates that place. But this can only appear as a meaningful

Table 1 societies

Ideal type of traditional life forms and regional

55

phrase, if there is no distinction made between signifi cance and place. To put it another way: only when the significance is seen as a quality of the place itself and not as a product of the subjects’ constitution process, only then is it possible to talk about desecrating places. Based on this process of reification, ‘space’ and ‘time’ are loaded, are filled up with specific meanings. Signification appears as a quality of things, deeply rooted in them and em bedded in the territory of a given culture. Under such conditions, regional geography consequently appears a meaningful scientific project. Under late modern con ditions, however, the project of traditional as well as ‘new regional geography’ aiming at spatial representations of life conditions and of life forms is confronted with serious limitations. ‘Late modern life forms’ are the basis and expression of the globalization process. Here, traditions are not at the center of daily social praxis. Social orientations and social actions need – as a consequence of modernity – discursive justification and legitimization. The dominant life contexts are spatially and temporally ‘disembedded’. The disembedding mechanisms are grounded in the history of modernization. These mechanisms are at the core of the transformation of the space–society nexus, leading today to the globalization of our life conditions. Temporal stability is replaced by constant social transformation. Late modern everyday actions are not dominated by local traditions. It is rather routines that sustain ontological security. For individual decisions, a wide field of possibilities stays open. Globally observable cultures, life styles, and life forms (Table 2) – very often linked to a specific generation – become much more important. A person’s social position is determined by production and valued work and – following the prin ciples of the enlightenment – not by birth or age, nor by sex or race. The spatial clustering and embeddedness of tradi tional social life forms is replaced by global inter connections and disembedding mechanisms. The actual and potential reach of actors is stretched to a global di mension. The most important disembedding mechanisms

Table 2 societies

Ideal type of late-modern life forms and globalized

Traditions intertwine past, present, and future Kinship organizes and stabilizes social relations over time Birth, age, and sex determine social positions Face-to-face situations dominate communication Small amount of interregional communication The local village constitutes the familiar life context

1. Everyday routines sustain ontological security 2. Globally observable cultures, life forms, and lifestyles 3. Production and valued work determine social positions 4. Abstract systems (money, writing, and expert systems) enable mediated social relations over enormous distances 5. Worldwide communication systems 6. Global village as anonymous context of experience

Traditional life forms are temporally and spatially embedded. From Werlen, B. (1995). Sozialgeographie allta¨glicher Regionalisie rungen. Band 1: Zur Ontologie von Gesellschaft und Raum, p 104. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

Late modern life forms are spatially and temporally disembedded. From Werlen, B. (1995). Sozialgeographie allta¨glicher Regionalisie rungen. Band 1: Zur Ontologie von Gesellschaft und Raum, p 134. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

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are money, writing, and technical artifacts. Means of transportation enable a high level of mobility. Together with individual freedom of movement, this produces a mixing of formerly locally fixed cultures. This multi cultural mixing, combined with global communication systems, enables a diffusion of information and infor mation storing that is not dependent on the corporeal presence of the actors. Of course, face to face interaction still exists as an important situation of communication, but the most substantial part of communication is me diated. Consequently, a spatial characterization of cul tures and life forms is becoming more and more problematic, if not even highly irritating. Spatial and temporal dimensions do not determine the content of social actions. These dimensions are merely the formal aspects of human activities. They are the basis for standardized metrification and calculation of material facts and the succession of events. Both standardized metrification and calculation form, together with the recognition of the difference between concept and object, the nucleus of the rational constitution of late modern worlds and the end of mystical interpretations of nature.

From ‘Space’ to ‘Action’ ‘Space’, just as all other terms, has undergone a manifold reinterpretation in the course of time. Without entering into a discussion of the history of spatial understandings in philosophical and natural scientific terms, it can be claimed that they too have changed from a rather reifi catory objectivist (Aristotle, Newton) to formalistic subjectivist (Leibniz, Kant, Husserl) understandings. This change, however, has not been recognized suf ficiently by the social sciences. Although it would be logical to eliminate the objectified choric spatial concept from theories of modern society, it would be equally fatal to completely eliminate ‘space’ from social theory for it is apparent that numerous aspects of social realities have spatial connotations. With their ambition to take the spatial dimension of human lives seriously, structuration theory as well as time geography were referring at least implicitly to the reificatory objectivist conception of space by Newton. This has a number of problematic impacts. The basic shortcomings of Giddens’ structuration theory is based on the assumption, that ‘space’ is – in Table 3

contradiction to ‘society’ – not a theoretical concept but a pregiven fact, free of any need for theoretical consider ations. This is expressed in Giddens concept of ‘locale’ and ‘region’ and is basically the result of his reference to Ha¨gerstrand’s time geography and its Newtonian con ception of Earth space, standing in total contradiction of structuration postulation of agent’s capability of agency. In order to do away with this ‘blind spot’ and the lack of care in the integration of spatial categories into social theory, one must first assure that the concepts of space are compatible with the categories of social scientific analysis. For the purposes of arriving at a starting point for research in theories of social praxis, in general, and the structurationist geography, in particular, this neces sitates the provision of a concept of space which is compatible with action. What, then, can be understood under the term ‘space’ within the framework of praxis oriented research? To avoid the problematic implication by using ‘space’ for the construction of somehow pregi ven ‘region’ or ‘locale’, it is necessary to redefine it. There are some good reasons to understand ‘space’ as nothing more than a concept. If so, however, it is admittedly a very unique one. If one were to take the arguments, which have been brought together in the philosophy of the last few cen turies seriously, then ‘space’ would consequently appear to be neither an empirical concept nor simply an a priori one, but rather a formal classificatory. It cannot be an empirical concept, because ‘space’ is not an object. It is formal, because it does not refer to any specific, topical aspects of material objects. It is classificatory, because it enables us to describe a certain order of material objects in respect of their specific dimension. ‘Space’ is not simply an a priori concept, because it is actually based on experience. It is not based on the ex perience of a specific, mysterious object known as ‘space’, but rather on the experience of one’s own corporeality, its relation to other realities (including the corporeality of other subjects), and its significance in enabling and re stricting actions. The claim that different theoretical approaches to action correspond to different approaches to everyday reality implies, that we can distinguish three main types of interpretations in formal and in classificatory respects (Table 3) a rational, a normative, and a communicative interpretation. Accepting this, the next step can be pos tulated: The different constitutions of ‘space’ are

Action and space

Action

Formal

Classification

Examples

Rational Normative Communicative

Geo-metric, absolute Geo-metric, Body centered Body centered

Calculation Normative prescription Relational signification

Land market; location theory Nation-state; back-/front-region Regional/national identity; regional symbol

From Werlen, B. (2000). Sozialgeographie. Eine Einfu¨hrung, p 329. Bern: Haupt Verlag.

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expressions of different interpretations of its formal and classificatory dimensions. Therefore it may be assumed that, depending on the type of action, both the formal and the classificatory as pect of the concept of space can have a correspondingly unique connotation. This means that it is to be expected that, depending on one’s motivations, both the orientation and the classificatory order can vary greatly. We must now apply both the distinction between different types of action or agency and the consideration of the relative level of significance of spatial dimensions in each respective field of practice to the examination of everyday ‘geography making’ under various socio onto logical and sociohistorical conditions.

Regionalization as World Binding Paasi has demonstrated how political regions are to be conceptualized from a structuration theoretical per spective: not as container like entities of concentrated power as postulated in traditional political geography but as institutional realities. The institutionalization of a re gion is to be understood as a process over which spatial– temporal dimensions of acting and thinking are estab lished and qua individual and institutional practices constantly culturally, legally, educationally, economically, politically, etc. reproduced. Thus, ‘region’ becomes con ceivable and researchable as an aspect of social action, as an institution, that is, as a part of social reality that is produced and reproduced through regular action, as a facet of the constitution of societal reality. Instead of socially explaining the spatial as the ‘new’ regional geography does, Paasi wants to elucidate the meaning of socially appropriated space for the consti tution of societal realities. Processes of regionalization or transformation processes of regions can occur at the same time in different spatial and temporal dimensions. The territorial shape of an administrative region is the result of localized political–administrative practices. It is through these practices that a region is demarcated. That is to say, the border is defined by institutional arrange ments. Thus, the emergence of (administrative) insti tutions regulates the reproduction of the societal reality ‘region’ qua regulated interrelations of action. With this approach, structuration theory is successfully employed for analyzing processes of territorialization, but not yet for other aspects of social reality under globalized conditions. For outlining the different dimensions of global ization, the implications for regionalization processes should be noted first. In geography, regionalization has traditionally been understood as a scientific practice of spatial classification. On the level of everyday actions, ‘regionalization’ usually refers to a process of political

57

appropriation or demarcation. Both understandings, sci entific and everyday, are centered around the spatial demarcation of a ‘region’. The borders of political regions normally consist of physical or symbolic markers. But ‘physical markers’ are, in a social sense, nothing more than representations of the symbolic demarcation of the reach of normative standards. Accordingly, they can never be social forces, only the normative standards they are. Spatial aspects can consequently never be the causes of or reasons for human actions. They are only socially relevant to the extent that they are utilized in actions: as a means of either social categorization or symbolic representation. All sociocultural aspects of action that are not bound to territory by means of institutions or organizations may nevertheless not be presented as regional realities in a geographical sense. Their significance for local experi ence may best be revealed and clarified by analyzing the forms of action. If we accept this claim then it is also true that, under globalized living conditions, a new under standing of ‘regionalization’ becomes necessary. In terrestrial terms, regionalization on the everyday level is the expression of a (usually political) production of the ordering system of competences. However, this process is also tied to more comprehensive ordering systems of meaning. The political territorial order in the form of nation states, countries, districts, etc. is a sym bolizing expression of the regulation of competences. The symbolic ordering systems of meaning are con nected to specific territorial areas. If one were to generalize this principle, every form of regionalization could then be understood as a sort of ‘world binding.’ It takes the basic principle of the modern worldview into consideration, which assigns the central roles to the perceiving and acting subjects. ‘Regional ization’ as a practice of ‘world binding’ also means a practice of ‘reembedding’ by which the subjects, under globalized conditions, define the connection between themselves and the world. ‘World binding’ in this sense represents the following: the social control of spatial and temporal horizons in order to control one’s own actions and the practices of others. This implies practices of allocative appropriation of material goods; practices of authoritative ‘appropriation,’ or control of subjects over a distance; and the symbolic appropriation of objects and subjects on the basis of the available inventory of knowledge. It is not the ‘formation of space’, but rather the various forms (calculative/economic, normative/social, and sym bolic/cultural) of appropriating the world of corporeal realities, that is, terrestrially classified objects and bodies that are of central interest. Therefore, the specificity of geography making as globalization process may be defined as follows: a process of appropriation over distance or in absence, which may

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proceed differently for differing life forms and in dif fering life worlds.

Summary In this way, an action centered understanding of geo graphical realties aims to reconstruct everyday region alization of the life world. It critically examines the taken for granted geographical representations of the world, which are so often mobilized, region centered representations of the world, and politically mobilized by regionalist and nationalist discourses with a strong ten dency to strengthen fundamentalist attitudes. At the same time, it should become obvious that the analysis of re gionalization processes should not be limited to the re construction of actually existing political regions, as this is the case for the new regional geography. The utiliza tion of structuration theory for geographical investigation of sociocultural universes has rather to focus on processes of regionalizing the world through actions as forms of world binding and the significance of spatial relations for the production and reproduction of sociocultural real ities. In this sense, geographical representations of late modern spatial relations has to focus on the agencies of world binding and to give insights into the ways agents ‘live the world’ and not how they live ‘in’ regions and (living) spaces. This can be considered as one of the challenging duties of structurationist geography and contemporary human geography in general. See also: Cultural Geography; Habitus; New Regionalism; Regional Geography I; Regionalisations, Everyday; Situated Knowledge, Reflexivity; Social Geography; Society-Space; Structuralism/Structuralist Geography; Structuration Theory; Subjectivity.

Further Reading Giddens, A. (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory. Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. London: Macmillan Press. Giddens, A. (1981). A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Vol. 1: Power, Property and the State. London: Macmillan Press. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity press. Gregory, D. (1978). Ideology, Science and Human Geography. London: Harper Collins. Gregory, D. (1981). Human agency and human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 6, 1 18. Gregory, D. (1982). Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution: A Geography of Yorkshire Woollen Industry. London: Macmillan Press.

Gregory, D. (1984). Space, time and politics in social theory. An interview with Anthony Giddens. Environment and Planning D. Society and Space 2(2), 123 132. Gregory, D. (1989). Presences and absences: Time space relations and structuration theory. In Held, D. & Thompson, J. (eds.) Social Theory of Modern Societies. Anthony Giddens and His Critics, pp 185 214. Cambridge: University Press. Gregory, D. and Urry, J. (eds.) (1985). Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London: Macmillan Press. Paasi, A. (1986). The institutionalisation of regions: Framework for understanding the emergence of regions and the constitution of regional identity. Fennia 164(2), 105 146. Paasi, A. (1991). Deconstructing regions: Notes on the scales of spatial life. Society and Space 23, 239 256. Paasi, A. (1992). The construction of socio spatial consciousness. Geographical perspectives on the history and contexts of Finnish nationalism. Nordisk Samha¨llsgeografisk Tidskrift 15, 79 100. Paasi, A. (1996). Inclusion, exclusion and territorial identities the meaning of boundaries in the globalizing geopolitical landscape. Nordisk Samha¨llsgeografisk Tidskrift 23, 3 18. Paasi, A. (2002). Bounded spaces in the mobile world: Deconstructing regional identity. Tijdskrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 93(2), 137 148. Pred, A. (1981). Social reproduction and the time geography of everyday life. Geografiska Annaler 63B, 5 22. Pred, A. (1984). Place as historically contingent process. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 74(3), 279 297. Pred, A. (1984). Structuration, biography formation and knowledge: Observations on port growth during the late mercantile period. Environment and Planning D. Society and Space 2(3), 252 276. Pred, A. (1985). The social becomes the spatial, the spatial becomes the social: Enclosures, social change and the becoming of places in the Swedish province of Ska˚ne. In Gregory, D. & Urry, J. (eds.) Social Relations and Spatial Structures, pp 337 365. London: Macmillan Press. Pred, A. (1986). Place, Practice and Structure. Cambridge: Polity Press. Thrift, N. (1983). On the determination of social action in space and time. Environment and Planning D. Society and Space 1, 23 56. Thrift, N. (1985). Bear and mouse or bear and tree? Anthony Giddens’ reconstruction of social theory. Sociology 19(4), 609 623. Thrift, N. (1985). Flies and germs: A geography of knowledge. In Gregory, D. & Urry, J. (eds.) Social Relations and Spatial Structures, pp 366 403. London: Macmillan press. Werlen, B. (1987). Gesellschaft, Handlung und Raum. Grundlagen handlungstheoretischer Sozialgeographie. Erdkundliches Wissen, Heft 89. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Werlen, B. (1993). Society, Action and Space. An Alternative Human Geography. London: Routledge. Werlen, B. (1995). Sozialgeographie Alltaglicher Regionalisierungen. Band 1: Zur Ontologie von Gesellschaft und Raum. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Werlen, B. (1997). Sozialgeographie alltaglicher Regionalisierungen. Band 2: Globalisierung, Region und Regionalisierung. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Werlen, B. (2000). Sozialgeographie. Eine Einfu¨hrung. Bern: Haupt Verlag. Werlen, B. (2007). Sozialgeographie alltaglicher Regionalisierungen. Bd. 3: Ausgangspunkte und Befunde empirischer Forschung. Erdkundliches Wissen, Heft 121. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

Relevant Websites http://www.cultural geography.net Cultural Geography. http://www.social geography.net Social Geography.

Subaltern C. McEwan, Durham University, Durham, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Alterity Literally meaning ‘otherness’, this refers to the systematized construction of difference, which is also hierarchical, between groups of people on the basis of such factors as race, ethnicity, or culture. Contact Zone Social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and come into contestation with each other; often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. Discourse Social practices through which the world is made meaningful and intelligible, including narratives, concepts, ideologies, and signifying practices. Epistemic Violence Violence exercised through knowledge regimes and the epistemological suppression of the other; the violently appropriative colonizing practices that are deeply ingrained in Western textual production. Hegemony The dominance of one group or class in society, achieved not through force but rather through the consent of other groups. Consent is achieved through the dominant group associating itself with moral and intellectual leadership in a society. Historiography The study of the way that history has been and is written, or the history of historical writing. This is not the study of events of the past directly, but the changing interpretations of those events in the works of historians. Orientalism Western constructions of the East as an opposite, working ideologically through a series of binary oppositions and underpinning imperialism. Othering A way of defining and securing one’s own positive identity through the stigmatization of an other; the self-identity of the colonizer and its culture is defined as superior through the identification of an inferior, opposite, colonized other. Subalternization A term first used by Gayatri Spivak to refer to the systematic denigration of colonized peoples, largely through colonial discourse, which renders not only peoples and cultures subordinate but continues to create a world in which power (political, cultural, economic, and military) is still concentrated in the former colonial powers and the global North. Transculturation One of the key cultural processes that operate between hitherto sharply differentiated cultures and peoples who are forced (usually by the processes of imperialism or globalization, and primarily through migration) to interact. This interaction often

takes place in profoundly asymmetrical ways in terms of relative power between different groups.

Origins and Definitions The meaning and usage of the term subaltern is complex and there are two distinct but related ways in which it has been understood and deployed. First, it originates as a military expression to refer to junior officers derived from its literal meaning – ‘subordinate’. In the British army, for example, subalterns are commissioned officers below the rank of captain. These ranks are subordinate to the superior officers, but serve a particular role in con necting the lowest ranks with the commanding ranks and thus ensuring that the chain of command is maintained. Second, the term is used more broadly to refer to any person of inferior station or rank, again drawing on its literal meaning of ‘subordinate’. Since the 1980s, this meaning of the term has become widely used, primarily within postcolonial theory and also by geographers, his torians, and cultural theorists, to mark the subordinate positions of former colonized peoples who remain mar ginalized primarily on the basis of race and class. This broader usage of subaltern to refer to peoples subordinated by relationships of power is adopted pri marily from the writings of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1881–1937), who examined political and cultural issues from a Marxist perspective. Most of Gramsci’s meditations on the subject were written while he was imprisoned for dissidence and, since he was ob liged to encrypt his writings to get them past prison censors, his original usage is covert and at times opaque. Confusion sometimes arises because both usages of the term appear in his various essays. In The Intellectuals, for example, he uses the term ‘subalterno’ (subordinate) to draw explicit analogies between urban intellectuals and subaltern officers. The intellectuals – the subaltern classes – are the deputies to the dominant group, exer cising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government. They thus give legitimacy to the dominant group and perform a mediating function in the struggle of class forces between the dominant group and the masses. However, in most of Gramsci’s writings, subaltern is used surreptitiously to refer to the ‘prole tarian’, whose voice could not be heard, being structur ally written out of capitalist bourgeois narratives. What is significant about Gramsci’s theorization of the subaltern classes is his analysis of the ways in which they

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are subordinated by hegemony – the dominance of one group or class in society – achieved not through force but through the consent of other groups. Consent is achieved through the dominant group associating itself with moral and intellectual leadership in society, usually through civil society structures. Gramsci argued that the problem for the subordinated working classes is that they are not unified and their inability to unify means that hegemonic relationships of power remain unchallenged. However, he argued that the working classes are capable of developing from within their ranks their own organic intellectuals and developing links with certain sections of the tradi tional intelligentsia, through which they could then move toward hegemony.

The Subaltern in Postcolonial Theory Both meanings of subaltern – the military analogy and the general meaning of subordinate – have been par ticularly significant within postcolonial theory. Drawing on Gramscian notions, Edward Said and other post colonial theorists have examined the processes by which elites in colonized countries internalize Eurocentric ideas of the inferiority of their own cultures and ensure the dominance of the European powers. This dominance was achieved largely through processes of colonialism, whereby imperial power was grafted onto existing mechanisms of power. Westernization in India and the African colonies, for example, was a tactic for forming an administration and military from local elites, whose ac cess to power would be limited to a subaltern role. Rather like the subaltern officers in the British army, these elites were essential to the chain of command and in main taining order amongst the masses; the hegemony of the British colonial power was maintained through the con sent of these subaltern administrative and military ranks. Other, more subordinated groups (for example, prole tarian and peasant groups) were not drawn into these structures but were left to renegotiate their position relative to these local elites. Subaltern, both as a term of reference and as an object of enquiry, was popularized within academic literature by the Subaltern Studies collective. This was a group of South Asian scholars (orginally Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gyan Prakash, Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Shahid Amin, David Arnold, David Hardiman, Gyanendra Pan dey, and Dipesh Chakrabarty) interested in the post colonial and postimperial societies of South Asia in particular. Their use of the term subaltern was somewhat broader than the military analogy, referring to wider processes of subordination, particularly in the writing of histories of independence struggles and postcolonial na tion building. The Subaltern Studies scholars appropri ated Gramsci’s term in order to locate and reestablish a

voice or collective locus of agency in postcolonial India that moved beyond the role of elites. Beginning in the 1980s, they attempted to formulate a new narrative of the history of India and South Asia. Although clearly influ enced in various degrees by Marxist approaches, they were critical of traditional Marxist and elitist narratives of In dian history, both of which focused on the political con sciousness of elites in mobilizing the masses, ending the domination of Britain as the colonial power, and building an independent nation state. Instead, the Subaltern Studies group focused on the role of nonelites – subalterns – as agents of political and social change, concentrating specifically on the role of peasants. In particular, they explored the discourses and rhetoric of emerging political and social movements, in contrast to only highly visible actions like demonstrations and uprisings. The important point in the early writings of the collective was that sub altern groups were also in a position to subvert the au thority of those who had hegemonic power, and they thus played a more significant role in historical change than had previously been acknowledged. Historical narratives thus need to reflect this in contrast to the grand, heroic narratives of independence and nation building that erase the historical agency of subaltern groups. Inspired by the work of the Subaltern Studies col lective, the term subaltern is now more popularly used, particularly within postcolonial theory, to describe groups who are excluded and do not have a position from which to speak, for example, peasants and women in postcolonial societies. Thus in current philosophical and critical usage, subaltern describes specifically a person or groups of people rendered voiceless and without agency by their social status. Gayatri Spivak’s 1985 essay Can the subaltern speak? has been a particular influence on this broader deployment, especially in its deconstruction of gender and representation in India. The idea of the subaltern has been central to postcolonial theory, par ticularly the exploration of the processes that have ren dered the peoples of colonized countries (and continue to render them in postcolonial contexts) as subordinate, inferior, and without agency or voice. These processes are overwhelmingly discursive. For example, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) referred to the rendering of groups of people as subaltern as ‘othering’ and critiqued the con stellation of false assumptions underlying Western atti tudes toward other parts of the world. Subaltern contains within it the notion of alterity, literally meaning ‘other ness’, which refers to the systematized and hierarchical construction of difference between groups of people on the basis of such factors as race, ethnicity, or culture. Said exposed the subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudices against non European peoples and their cultures, which he argued had served as an implicit justification for Europe’s colonial and imperial ambitions. The deni gration of oppressed, colonized peoples and their

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rendering as subaltern subjects was crucial to the self definition and assumed superiority of the colonizers. Thus, postcolonial theory has examined the centrality of alterity to imperialism and colonialism, global geopolitics and development theory and practice, with the con struction of First World/Western/Northern/advanced/ developed/modern ‘self ’ and Third World/Southern/ backward/developing/traditional ‘other’ framing inter ventions in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. Since subaltern can refer to any person or group of inferior rank and/or status, it might thus be employed in discussions of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, re ligion, and so on. However, some care needs to be ex ercised in its usage. Spivak, for example, objects to careless use of the term and its appropriation by other marginalized groups who are not specifically subaltern. She asserts that subaltern is not just another word for the oppressed or marginalized nor a claim to disen franchisement within a system of hegemonic discourse. Rather, it signifies very specifically a group of people whose voices cannot be heard or that are wilfully ignored in dominant modes of narrative production. Thus, as it is used in postcolonial theory, subaltern refers to those who have no access to processes of cultural imperialism, which locates them in a space of difference or alterity. In this sense, then, subaltern is not simply the oppressed. For example, working classes in the West can be said to have been oppressed, but they are not subaltern by the fact that they have historically had access to cultural imperialism and are positioned within hegemonic dis course. The project of Subaltern Studies has been to create intellectual space to allow the subaltern – in this case, Indian women, workers, and peasants – to speak rather than always being spoken for by either elites or colonizing Western representatives. It is this use of sub altern – as an individual or group rendered subordinate by cultural imperialism and without agency and voice – that has come to be used within historical, cultural, political, and development geographies.

Subaltern Historiographies of Geography The critique of elitist histories of Indian independence by the Subaltern Studies group and the emphasis on recovering the role that subaltern groups played has had an influence on the ways in which histories of geography are written, particularly since the early 1990s. Histories of European geography and imperialism are deeply intertwined. However, while histories of imperial ex ploration have been at the core of the historiography of European geography, the role of subalterns in the cre ation of geographical knowledge is often written out of histories of the discipline. In order to counter these hegemonic histories, geographers have begun to unsettle

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notions of the modern geographical enterprise being solely the product of metropolitan energies and initiative and to open up spaces to reveal multiple agents in the production of imperial geographical knowledge. The notion of countering Eurocentrism in histories of geography is obviously inspired by postcolonial critiques, which demand an interrogation of the history of geog raphy as it has been constructed as a putatively ‘Western’ tradition. The narration of the history of European geography tends to suggest that the origins of these knowledges are located solely in the West, and thus ig nores the agency of subaltern knowledges in their for mulation. Not only did European knowledge appropriate extensive local knowledges but Eurocentric geographical knowledge was formed through the effacement of these alternative ways of knowing. Thus, famous explorers such as Burton and Speke constructed their geographies of Africa by appropriating local indigenous knowledges, but in positioning these knowledges as scientific and rational they actively dismissed and erased from their publi cations those subjective, local knowledges upon which they drew. This simultaneous appropriation and erasure of indigenous knowledges is symptomatic of colonial discourse, and is evidence of the epistemic violence that continues to write out the agency of subalterns in the production of geographical knowledge. The writing of histories of geography, therefore, tends to reprivilege Europe as the site of the production of knowledge. In reality, empires were contact zones in which (at least) two cultures came together, each influ encing the other, albeit against a backdrop of inequality. Thus, notions of transculturation are an important de parture from the European expansionist perspective in allowing for the possibility of agency from within the colonies. However, the possibilities of recovering colon ized voices from within these contact zones are still problematic. For example, there are very few written accounts from Africa of interactions with and responses to Europeans during the nineteenth century. It is not always possible to retrieve subordinated voices from imperial archives because they are not present to be emancipated. Instead, inspired by Subaltern Studies scholars, geographers have begun to explore the epi stemic and real violence that suppressed the subaltern voice, the evidence of this in the imperial archives, and the subsequent denial of the role of subalterns in the production of geographical knowledge about the empire. In addition, while the subaltern voice may be ir retrievable from the archives, it is only within these archives that evidence of agency and resistance by col onized peoples in British and European imperialism can be recovered. In Can the subaltern speak? Spivak argues that the absence of subaltern testimonials and written his tories does not preclude the uncovering of the agency of the colonized subject. Rather, the colonial archive is

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shaped not only by the will of the colonizer, but also by the will of the colonized; the texts of counterinsurgency and elite documentation provide evidence of the con sciousness of the subaltern. Therefore, official documents, exploration narratives, diaries, travelogs, missionary re ports, and such like contain evidence of the will of the colonized, and of the extent to which the subaltern may have played a constitutive rather than reflective role in colonial discourse. Deconstructing the colonial archive also allows for a more subtle analysis of the production of geographical knowledge, and the possibility of de cen tering a putatively Western tradition by viewing the production of these knowledges as a complex process of cultural exchange and negotiation, in which the subaltern played an active part. Deconstructing the hegemonic discourses can allow, to some extent and not unproblematically, for the re covery of subaltern agency and resistance in histories of imperialism and geography. Exploration narratives also contain accounts of insubordination on the part of local guides and carriers, suggesting that racialized imperial authority was challenged in subtle ways by subaltern agency. The imperial archive is also revealing of resist ance to European imperialism in a wider sense. Com munique´s between colonial officials illustrate indigenous resistance to colonization and court and military records document small scale as well as large scale insurgencies. Of course, there is also the added problem of silence as an act of resistance, since this raises questions about whether the subaltern voice wishes to be emancipated and who performs this emancipation. The subaltern does not require an advocate to speak for her. With this in mind, recent historical geographies of imperialism have attempted to follow the direction of the Subaltern Studies group as an example of how critical histories of the discipline can be written not to give the subaltern voice but to create space in which the subaltern can speak and be heard.

Subaltern Historical Geographies: History from Below The approach of the Subaltern Studies scholars is often referred to as ‘history from below’, focusing more on what happens among the masses at the base levels of society than among the elite. The critique of elitist his tories and the focus writing subalterns into history and presenting them as on the agents of political and social change has had influence in both history and historical geography. Rather than an emphasis on grand narratives of historical geographical change, the emphasis is now very much on more limited and specific accounts of particular events and incidents. Furthermore, the con cern of Subaltern Studies and other postcolonial scholars

(primarily Edward Said) with not only political acts (such as rallies, demonstrations, and uprisings), but also with political rhetorics and discourses, has also shaped what now constitutes historical geography. Recent years have seen an outpouring of work on colonial discourses, for example, and how these were used to create particular geographical imaginaries. These geographical imagin aries were Orientalist in nature, representing colonized peoples and landscapes as barbaric and inferior, and being deployed as justification for imperialist inter ventions in far off lands. The methodologies of historical geography have also been influenced by the broader interest in subaltern histories. In particular, oral histories provide access to the ‘histories from below’, the informal and the subaltern since they extend beyond official discourses. One of the strengths of oral history, then, is that it provides access to politically and economically marginalized groups. It ex tends beyond the limitations of written documents of fering a voice to the ‘rank and file’. Central here is the problematic nature of knowledge as a social and histor ical construct and an acceptance that written evidence is only one side of a version of history. Thus, historical and cultural geographers are now using the recorded ex periences of subaltern groups in order to write post colonial historical geographies of, for example, the experiences of minority ethnic communities in European cities, or the personal accounts of the perilous journeys made by refugees, or collective and individual memories of colonialism in places as diverse as Ireland, the Caribbean, India, and Australia.

Space, Place, and the Subaltern In addition to helping to shape new approaches to both historiographies of geography and to historical geog raphies, the subaltern has become an increasingly sig nificant presence in geographical analyses at a range of different scales. This has largely been a consequence of a ‘cultural turn’ within the discipline and the focus on subaltern groups. Class and labor in critical geographies have been largely supplanted by identity politics and the impact of postcolonial theory meant increased ques tioning of conventional, Eurocentric forms of theorizing. The result was that culture, rather than being a neglected afterthought, became a central issue for geographers. A renewed and reinvigorated cultural geography has thus incorporated postcolonial and feminist theories in its challenge of the meaning of culture. No longer is culture seen to be constituted by a uniform set of attitudes, be liefs, and material artefacts, since this is seen as the ideology of a dominant group seeking hegemonic power over what it regards as ‘other’ to itself. Rather, the cul tural integrity of those traditionally excluded from

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discourse (women, the formerly colonized, the materially dispossessed, and other subaltern groups) is recognized, and the theory of cultural politics is seen as central to understanding the constant struggle for power. Thus, geographers have explored topics as diverse as the pol itics of place naming in postcolonial Ireland, the lived experiences of diasporic communities around the world, and aboriginal rights claims in both Canada and Aus tralia, topics that place subaltern groups at the center of analysis and retain the hearing of their stories as the key political motivation. At a different scale, political geographers have also been influenced by this cultural turn and are increasingly interested in the role of subalternization in global geo politics. The systematic denigration in colonial discourse of other peoples and cultures as processes of sub alternization has, according to postcolonial scholars such as Spivak, left a legacy that is buried in the psyche and assumed knowledge about the world that continues to have problematic effects today. These include the con tinued power of Western conceptualizations of develop ment and modernization and a continued deference to the authority of Western discourses. Political geographers have drawn on such arguments to explore how this re lationship between power, knowledge, and development continue to shape geopolitical relations throughout the world. Subalternization renders not only peoples and cultures as subordinate but creates a world in which power (political, economic, and military) is still con centrated in the ‘core’ (the advanced economies of the former colonial powers, the USA and, increasingly, China) at the expense of the ‘periphery’ (mainly the former colonies). Some commentators claim that the postcolonial world is still kept in a state of subordination because it is subsumed under capital and integrated in the global order of capital. At a smaller scale, political geographers are also interested in reformulating an understanding of the public sphere that might provide more space for subaltern pol itics. The public sphere is seen as important to democracy and citizenship because it exists outside the institutions of government, providing a space where an active citizenry can offer critique and thus influence formal politics. Feminists, in particular, have drawn on postcolonial the ory to challenge the notion of a public sphere shaped by exclusions based on class, race, and gender and have called for a more plural conceptualization. The idea of multiple, overlapping public spheres is significant in so cieties characterized by systemic inequalities, and sub altern counterpublics are seen as vital spaces from which marginalized groups can formulate public critique and discourse. This is one of many examples where post colonial theories of the subaltern have meshed with feminist theories to provide a politics concerned with creating spaces in which subaltern groups can be heard.

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Concerns such as these were perhaps first voiced within feminist development geographies, where the re quirement to understand the lived experiences of women in the South acquired increased urgency from the 1970s onward, again inspired by both feminist and postcolonial theories. It is now recognized that women, in the South face multiple challenges, including poverty, unemploy ment, limited access to land and credit, legal, social and cultural discrimination, sexual abuse, and other forms of exploitation and violence. While these challenges might be similar to those faced by all women, the specificities of history, political economy, and culture make them dif ferentially oppressive to women in the South. In Spivak’s words they are ‘doubly subaltern’. Development geog raphies have acknowledged both these realities, as well as the fact that women of the South are not victims. Rather, as subaltern counterpublics they meet these challenges and are active in confronting and overcoming them, often in remarkably creative and empowering ways. Develop ment, then, is not something that is ‘done to’ the Third World; rather, people of the South play an active role in contributing to the discourses and practices of develop ment. These notions of subaltern agency and voice have become increasingly significant within critical develop ment geographies. Related to these geographies have been studies that have explored contemporary subaltern resistance. Of interest to geographers has been the resurgence of interest in the concept of place as an important object of struggle in the strategies of subaltern social move ments. Critical geographers have begun to explore the significance of place in subaltern political strategies aimed at resisting the detrimental effects of globalization. The defense of place by subaltern social movements is often constituted as a rallying point for both theory construction and political action. Thus place based struggles by indigenous peoples, around issues such as environmental destruction, resource extraction, water privatization, and destruction of livelihoods might be seen as multiscale, network oriented subaltern strategies of localization. In such cases, subaltern groups are con sciously building translocal solidarities as a means of achieving local aims and ambitions. Of equal significance are struggles over land rights claims and resurgences in localized political identities based around indigeneity, and geographers are increasingly exploring such issues.

Conclusion Despite the embracing of postcolonialism in many as pects of geography and a political impetus to acknow ledge and hear marginalized voices, the spectral presence of the subaltern continues to haunt the discipline. Northern geographies still struggle to move on from

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Eurocentric visions, and there are still important ques tions to be asked about who is heard speaking about economic, political, or cultural geography. The chal lenges raised by the Subaltern Studies scholars have yet to be fully embraced, let alone overcome. In concluding that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ critics have accused Spivak of not recognizing or allowing the subaltern to speak. However, her point was not that the subaltern does not speak in various ways, but that speaking is a trans action between speaker and listener. The question is does anyone hear when the subaltern speaks? In the absence of listeners, subaltern voices cannot achieve a dialogic level of utterance. This lesson is salutary for contemporary human geographies. There are still major challenges in overturning hierarchies of representation by recognizing colonial histories and power relations and the spaces through which colonial practices continue to reproduce themselves in the contemporary world. There remains a need to recognize the position from which people speak and to de center analysis. It is a source of irony, for ex ample, that the influence of Subaltern Studies in coun tries of the South is mediated by the academic filter of the North, pointing to the persistence of unequal global relations of knowledge production that erase or fail to acknowledge subaltern knowledges and voices.

Escobar, A. (2001). Culture sits in places: Reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization. Political Geography 20, 139 174. Featherstone, D. (2005). Atlantic networks, antagonisms and the formation of subaltern political identities. Social & Cultural Geography 6(3), 387 404. Gramsci, A. (1992). Prison Notebooks. Buttigieg, J.A. and Callari, A. (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Gregory, D. (2004). The Colonial Present. Oxford: Blackwell. Guha, R. (ed.) (1982). Subaltern Studies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Jacobs, J. (1996). Edge of Empire. Postcolonialism and the City. London: Routledge. McEwan, C. (1998). Cutting power lines within the palace? Countering paternity and eurocentrism in the ‘geographical tradition’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23(3), 371 385. Mohanty, C. (1991). Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. In Mohanty, C., Russo, A. & Torres, L. (eds.) Third World women and the politics of feminism, pp 51 80. Bloomingdale: Indiana University Press. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. London: Peregrine. Slater, D. (2004). Geopolitics and the Post Colonial: Rethinking North South Relations. Oxford: Blackwell. Spivak, G. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In Nelson, C. & Grossberg, L. (eds.) Marxism and the interpretation of culture, pp 271 313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Spivak, G. (1988). Subaltern studies: Deconstructing historiography. In Guha, R. & Spivak, G. (eds.) Selected subaltern studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yeboah, I. (2006). Subaltern strategies and development practice: Urban water privatization in Ghana. Geographical Journal 172(1), 50 65.

See also: Colonialism I; Colonialism II; Discourse; Eurocentrism; Feminism and Work; Feminism, Maps and GIS; Feminist Geography, Prehistory of; Gender and Rurality; Gender, Historical Geographies of; Geopolitics; Imperialism, Cultural; Marxism/Marxist Geography I; Marxism/Marxist Geography II; Other/Otherness; Postdevelopment; Race; Social Class; Third World.

Relevant Websites

Further Reading Castree, N. (2004). Differential geographies: Place, indigenous rights and ‘local’ resources. Political Geography 23, 133 167. Clayton, D. (2000). Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island. Vancouver: UBC Press.

http://wsf2007.org/info/ About World Social Forum, Nairobi 2007. An example of subaltern counter publics and their anti globalization networking activities. http://www.lib.virginia.edu/area studies/subaltern/ssmap.htm Bibliography of the writings of the Subaltern Studies group, 1988 2000. http://www.heinemann.co.uk Link to Heinemann publishers and their African Writers Series and Caribbean Writers Series. http://www.bamako themovie.com. Website of the movie Bamako (2006) including video clips; a fascinating example of a counter discourse from the perspective of the subaltern.

Subalternity V. Gidwani, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Aporia A rhetorical term for ‘doubt’ or ‘difficulty in choosing’ (from ancient Greek, a ‘without’, poros ‘way’, or ‘passage’); in Jacques Derrida’s usage, ‘a non-road’. Contrapuntal Any music that contains two or more voices heard simultaneously; in the literary context (and closely associated with the work of Edward Said), a narrative relating to or marked by ‘counterpoint’. Catachrestic Paradoxical, forced; within postcolonial criticism, an ‘ab-usive’ strategy of reading that seizes a given discourse to reverse and displace its effects. Hegemony In V.I. Lenin’s formulation, an achieved unity of working class and other social fractions that enables the proletariat to capture the apparatuses of State and civil society. Antonio Gramsci extends Lenin’s description, characterizing hegemony as a dynamic ‘ethico-political’ terrain in which a group becomes ‘directive and dominant’ in society through ‘‘the combination of force and consent variously balancing one another, without force exceeding consent too much.’’ Historical Bloc A term used by Gramsci to designate the dialectical unity of base and superstructure, theory and praxis, and intellectuals and masses. It is more than a mere alliance of social forces. Singular A figure that is unique, as in the proper name, which resists characterization as merely a particular instance of a general phenomenon; in short, an entity that is irreducible. Sublation English translations have struggled with G.W.F. Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung, a process of simultaneously lifting up, conserving, and negating the ‘other’ within the self-movement of the dialectic. ‘Sublation’ captures these contradictory meanings better than the alternative ‘supersession’. Supplement Jacques Derrida plays with slippages in the noun and verb ‘supplement’ (Fr. supple´ment) and ‘to supplement’ (Fr. supple´er) to describe those unseen forces, which ‘add what is missing’ or ‘supply a necessary surplus’ to texts and their narratives, and are viral in that they resist domestication or arrest even as they erupt a text’s desire for self-adequacy. The Derridean seam of postcolonial studies conceives the subaltern as that untamable specter, which haunts and operates all master narratives. Telos An ultimate end, or the end of a goal-oriented process.

Introduction Subalternity is, simply put, the state of being subaltern. But, what does it mean to be subaltern? The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the noun, subaltern, is an appellation for ‘‘an officer in the British army below the rank of captain, especially a second lieutenant.’’ As an adjective, it implies a person ‘of lower status’ or ‘of in ferior rank’. The term appears to have first come into use in thirteenth century France to denote a person who is a ‘subordinate’. Its current coinage and popularity in aca demic writing owes to the influence of Subaltern Studies historiography. Launched in 1982 under the intellectual leadership of Ranajit Guha, the Subaltern Studies col lective of historians sought to write histories from ‘below’ – of the subordinated masses, as it were – that would be contrapuntal to hegemonic Liberal and Marxist narra tives of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity in India. Subaltern Studies crystallized the groundswell of dis content that had been building within a subset of the academic Left in the 1960s and 1970s over the margin alization of peasant and tribal movements by the State and intellectual orthodoxy. Discontent became rupture in the wake of political events in India from the late 1960s onwards. In 1967, the Maoist Naxalbari peasant uprising in West Bengal was brutally crushed by government forces. In a savage twist of history, the cadre of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which had been elected to a majority in the state legislature, was at the forefront of repression. Naxalbari and subsequently the suspension of civil liberties by Indira Gandhi’s regime during the 1975–77 ‘Emergency’ years laid bare the au thoritarian tendencies and fissures within Indian dem ocracy, and the failure of Nehruvian socialism as a nation building program.

Gramsci and Subalternity Given that India in the mid 1970s bore many of the hallmarks of fascism it was logical for Subaltern Studies to turn for theoretical inspiration, initially, to the writings of the Italian revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci, a founding member of the Italian Communist Party, was thrown into prison in 1926 for his opposition to Musso lini’s Fascist government, which feared his organizational and intellectual acumen. His health failed in prison and he died in 1937 at 46. But between 1916 and 1935, based on his experiences as a communist organizer and strat egist, and wide ranging engagement with political and

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philosophical tracts, Gramsci authored a set of remark able commentaries on class, popular culture, folklore, literature, philosophy, ideology, the state, and political strategy (many of these are in the 29 notebooks, some unfinished, that comprise his prison writings). Once described by Eric Hobsbawm as ‘par excellence the philosopher of political praxis’, Gramsci was deeply mindful of the ‘peasant question’ – which was, in Fried rich Engels’ paradigmatic formulation, how to enroll a conservative peasantry for a proletarian revolution led by urban working classes. Like V.I. Lenin before him, Gramsci recognized that a politically effective class al liance centered about working class radicalism and unity could not be taken for granted merely because a certain deterministic Marxist orthodoxy proclaimed it. Neither the class alliance, nor working class radicalism, nor working class unity was preordained. It was the task of political praxis to produce these, which meant that Marxist intellectuals would have to understand and en gage, rather than dismiss or be diffident toward, peasant culture and consciousness. Although the term ‘subaltern’ has become a more elastic descriptor since – a (some times indiscriminate) referent to persons and groups hierarchically positioned as subordinates or inferiors within nation states, capitalist production relations, or relations of patriarchy, race, caste, and so forth – in Gramsci’s usage, which was the proximate inspiration for Subaltern Studies, subaltern classes (It. subalterno) were invariably contrasted to a ‘dominant and directive social group’, that is, a group which had been able to rise to ‘the phase of ethico political hegemony in civil society, and of domination in the state’. It is likely that Gramsci used the word ‘subaltern’ in place of ‘proletarian’ in an effort to evade prison censors: thus, syndicalists and peasants in southern Italy were among the groups whom Gramsci identified as subaltern, contrasting them to the Fascists and the northern bourgeoisie who were at the time dominant in Italy. Writing about the ‘common sense’ of the ‘masses’ – and by masses he meant the subaltern groups who ‘must be made ideologically homogeneous’ through the polit ical work of hegemony – Gramsci asserted that such common sense was a ‘spontaneous philosophy of the multitude’ that was non identical in ‘time and space’ and took ‘countless different forms’. Fragmentary, even in coherent, it was nevertheless a ‘conception of the world’, which possessed a ‘formal solidity’ and a ‘consequent imperative character’ that ‘produced norms of conduct’. While autonomous from the ‘great systems of traditional philosophy’ and ‘high culture’, which in Gramsci’s esti mation had ‘no direct influence’ on the multitude’s ‘way of thinking and acting’, ordinary people’s common sense was not thereby in necessary opposition to ruling class ideologies. Instead, elite conceptions of the world oper ated on ‘the popular masses as an external political force,

an element of cohesive force exercised by the ruling classes and therefore an element of subordination to an external hegemony’. Here Gramsci appears to make a claim about subalternity that is both ontological and methodological: subalternity resides in the crevices of common sense. Or more exactly, popular consciousness as the accreted experience of being underclass, as well as a realm of unsystematic and officially disqualified knowledge, is a living record of subalternity. The telescoped implications of this claim are pro found. Politically, it implies that popular consciousness is the lived ideology of the masses that any group or party must accept as a point of departure if it is to forge a ‘historical bloc’ and achieve ‘ethico political hegemony’ in civil society and state. Intellectually, it prods scholars and activists to recognize spaces of subaltern politics whose forms of mobilization, organization, and operation differ from and are relatively independent of elite modes of politics. Critical to note here is the grammar of geography that saturates terms like ‘subaltern’ and ‘hegemony’ – key words in Gramsci’s political arsenal. Gramsci’s injunction to reconstruct histories of popular initiative and resist ance that were absented in official records (that is, in the archives of the ruling classes) was innovatively seized in the 1960s by scholars of the English New Left, notably Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, and E.P. Thompson. Hobsbawm, Hill, and Thompson, among others, relied on non conventional sources of evidence such as popular protest pamphlets and posters, workers’ diaries, folk songs and lore, and court testi monies to produce contrapuntal narratives of the his torical experiences of workers, peasants, and ‘common people’. Their ‘history from below’ approaches trans formed the study of history the world over. The themes pioneered by Gramsci and extended by English cultural Marxism were repeated with difference in the first volume of Subaltern Studies, in Ranajit Guha’s now canonical essay on subaltern historiography. In staking out as this alternative historiography’s point of departure the ‘structural dichotomy’ that has differen tiated elite politics from subaltern politics, Guha declared that there ‘‘were vast areas in the life and consciousness of the people which were never integrated into [the colonial or nationalist bourgeoisie’s] hegemonyy. Such dichot omy did not, however, mean that these two domains were hermetically sealed off from each and there was no con tact between them. On the contrary, there was a great deal of overlap arising precisely from the effort made from time to time by the more advanced elements among the indigenous elite, especially the bourgeoisie, to integrate them.’’ Guha’s manifesto, subsequently elaborated in his path breaking monograph, The Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (as well as a later book,

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Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India) anticipates many of the theoretical and methodo logical innovations, as well as problems, that mark the Indian strand of Subaltern Studies.

Subaltern Studies and the Geopolitics of Representation Contiguous with Gramsci, the early volumes of Sub altern Studies emphasized the ‘independent initiatives’ of rural subaltern classes, peasants and tribals, whose con tributions as subjects of history were effaced in Liberal (Cambridge School) and Marxist (nationalist) historio graphies of India (see David Arnold’s perceptive essay on Gramsci’s relevance to studies of subalternity in India). Contra Gramsci, in a move that was methodologically convenient but did no favors to the sophistication of Hegel’s dialectical thought, Ranajit Guha and his acolytes theorized subaltern consciousness as, quite simply, a ‘negative consciousness’ whose ‘‘identity was expressed solely through an opposition, namely, its difference from and antagonism to its dominators.’’ While the imprint of the ‘history from below’ approaches of Hobsbawm and Thompson on Indian Subaltern Studies was marked – both wanted to recover the agencies of ‘people without history’ – their battles were ultimately different. Sub altern Studies acknowledged the global reach of capital but challenged Eurocentric accounts that reduced mul tiple pasts and forms of alterity to particular instances of a general scheme (such as the stages of development of capitalism). Not even the best of the English Marxist historiographers was exempt from this reflex, which as sumed Europe’s history to be the universal template: thus Hobsbawm’s acclaimed study, Primitive Rebels, actively participated in the telos of Europe’s Progress in charac terizing rebellious subalterns as ‘primitive’, ‘backward’, ‘prepolitical’, and ‘anachronistic’. Subaltern Studies re jected such evolutionist descriptions of subaltern con sciousness and politics. Ranajit Guha, for example, insisted that when insurgents from the subaltern classes attempted to annex or annihilate symbols and insignias of enemy power during rebellions, their actions had to be read as an avowedly ‘political struggle’ to ‘abolish the marks’ of their subalternity. Inversion, a ‘principal mo dality’ of uprisings, was a deliberate strategy to force a crisis or semiotic rupture in ruling class discourses. The more wide ranging criticism here, subsequently elaborated in the writings of Shahid Amin, Partha Chat terjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sumit Sarkar among others, was that peasants and various ‘Others’ effaced within structures of authority (colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, caste, racism, nationalism, etc.) required nei ther preparation nor liberation to become political sub jects ready for modernity. They were already political and

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coeval. Such arguments were contra Liberal apologists for empire (like John Stuart Mill), who papered over liber alism’s illiberalism in the colonies by claiming that ‘na tives’ in Britain’s dominions had to be raised to political maturity before they could take up ‘self rule’; and contra nationalist elites, both bourgeois and Marxist, who, misled by a parallel developmental conceit, repeatedly failed to recognize and ally themselves with politicized peasantries during anti colonial struggles (Frantz Fanon was par ticularly fierce in his denunciations of such national elites in The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks). Thus, Indian Subaltern Studies historiography saw the task of ‘provincializing Europe’ – critiquing stagist, cap ital centered accounts in which Europe operated as silent empirical referent, site of Reason, and epistemic space of power – as intertwined with the project of dislodging elitist narratives of Indian nationalism, which ‘‘portrayed nationalist leaders as ushering India and its people out of some kind of precapitalist stage into a world historical phase of ‘bourgeois modernity’, properly fitted out with the artifacts of democracy.’’ Contending that the domain of politics of ‘the people’ (a term that Guha used syn onymously with ‘subaltern classes’) functioned differ ently from the domain of elite politics – the latter secular, legalistic, and constitutional in orientation, based upon ‘vertical mobilization’ of constituents; the former, non secular, often violent in its modality, and involving ‘horizontal affiliations’ of ‘kinship and territoriality’ – Subaltern Studies attempted to erupt, both, the unitari ness of ‘the nation’ and its proclaimed trusteeship by a nationalist bourgeoisie. They argued, with justification, that the problem of subalternity operating within the integuments of colonial and nationalist historiographies not only disrupted the possibility of totalizing historical accounts (a claim keenly evidenced in Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments and Shahid Amin’s Event, Memory, Metaphor), but also exposed the relations and geographies of power that sustain disciplines like History (a charge readily extended to Anthropology and Geog raphy). In its critique of imperial and capital centered teleologies, the nation form, and the historical enterprise itself, Subaltern Studies displaced and radically advanced the contrapuntal approach of English Marxist histori ography. These differences became increasingly salient after 1985 as postcolonial studies took up the question of subalternity – an engagement that prompted, both, renewed appreciation of Subaltern Studies and renewed scrutiny of its accumulated contradictions.

From Subaltern Studies to Postcolonial Criticism The most serious complaint issued against Subaltern Studies by critics hostile and sympathetic to the project

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was, briefly stated, its unwitting complicity with Europe’s episteme due to an inconsistent theory of subalternity. (See, for instance, the regional critiques of Subaltern Studies historiography in the 1994 mini forum on Sub altern Studies published in The American Historical Review 99(5). Whereas Gyan Prakash evaluates the operations of subaltern studies as postcolonial criticism, Frederick Cooper and Florencia Mallon take stock of the insights and limitations of Indian subaltern studies for African and Latin American historiography, respectively.) The mid 1980s was a watershed in this respect. Three articles – two by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 1985 and 1988, and another by Rosalind O’Hanlon in 1988 – took Subaltern Studies to task in no uncertain terms for its failure to adequately theorize the ‘subject’. While ac knowledging substantial differences between members of the collective, they observed nevertheless that Subaltern Studies had veered perilously close to objectifying ‘the subaltern’, a set of heterogeneous actors, into an un differentiated, humanist, and implicitly male subject agent. This was doubly ironic, because not only did this subaltern man resemble the bourgeois individual of lib eral political theory, which Subaltern Studies sought to dislocate; but, like that archetypical ‘man’ who was completely legible to theory, ‘the subaltern’ also re mained under the control of the knowledge that claimed to ‘restore versions of causality and self determination to him’. The upshot of O’Hanlon’s as well as Spivak’s cri tique was that Subaltern Studies, with few exceptions, had absented women as subjects and, thanks to the pro cedural dualism and crypto positivism of Guha’s ca nonical formulations, undercut its central mission – namely, to retrieve resistant presence in ways that would ‘preserve the alienness and difference in the figure of the subaltern’ rather than domesticate it to the historian’s ‘transcendent subject position’. Other critics observed that Subaltern Studies’ pen chant for binary schemes was pernicious. Consider, for example, the vexed issue of violence. Taking cue from Guha’s monograph, The Elementary Aspects of Peasant In surgency in Colonial India, the early volumes of Subaltern Studies repeatedly foregrounded acts of insurrection by dominated groups whose modality was ‘violent’ and ‘inversionary’. Whether motivated by methodological convenience (violent protests leave the most visible trace on colonial archives and thus the possibility of recovering the subaltern perspective by ‘reading against the grain’), dialectical expedience (if colonial archives represent the colonizer’s consciousness, then subaltern consciousness must be the inverse of this totality), or a certain theo retical inheritance (Hegel, Bakhtin, Gramsci) there is little denying the dangers of this move given the per sistent antinomies, in Eurocentric scholarship, between the ‘violence’ and ‘irrationality’ of the colonized as against the ‘civilized’ and ‘rational’ conduct of colonizers.

Similarly, Guha’s conspicuous refusal to cede to sub altern insurgents the historical ‘maturity’ of conscious ness and, by extension, the corporate capacity to ‘‘developya fully fledged struggle for national liber ation’’ unintentionally nourished a series of worn colonial and bourgeois nationalist prejudices: namely, that Europe and its modernity were on the side of culture, reason, history and development, while subaltern classes were precisely those who ‘lacked’ these attributes. Furthermore, if subaltern struggles were ultimately prone to ‘political failure’ – not because of the historical immaturity of subaltern classes, but more plausibly be cause of coercion by hegemonic groups, who stood in relations of superordination – it begged a fuller answer to the question: In what experiential and discursive sense were subalterns ‘autonomous agents’? Indeed, by trucking in a more or less transparent figure of the subaltern as the dialectical negative of elite ‘man’, Subaltern Studies voided the more radical possibility of subaltern as that heterogeneous other which, although subordinated, de fies sublation into hegemonic systems of understanding. These were precisely the directions urged by post colonial criticism. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay Can the Subaltern Speak? was, without doubt, the most provocative and widely noticed of various interventions. Her argument enacts a series of displacements. Spivak begins by noting the failure of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, two of the most ardent critics of the ‘sovereign subject’, to decenter this apparition. What initially ap pears as an idiosyncratic move – Spivak hones in on a conversation between Deleuze and Foucault, rather than their formal writings – ends up being emblematic of the undetected and viral workings of ideology. Spivak argues that Deleuze and Foucault’s aversion to a theory of representation that would take account of the intel lectual’s location and of the geopolitical determinations that operate him serves, unpardonably, to ‘‘conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject.’’ The criticisms staged in the opening encounter with Deleuze and Foucault frame the remainder of Spivak’s intervention. Her methodological aim is to advocate a radical practice of textuality and reading that will ac count for the politics of representation in its double sense of proxy (‘speaking for’) and portrait (‘speaking of ’), ra ther than glibly reincarnate the transcendent, paternal subject of authority and knowledge. Spivak disrupts the intellectual’s complicity in an epistemic violence that persistently constitutes ‘‘the Other as the Self ’s shadow.’’ This remark, which is directed as much at Subaltern Studies as at Western radical intellectuals, paves the way for a stark and simple injunction: ‘‘To confront them [subaltern Others] is not to represent them (vertreten) but to learn to represent (darstellen) ourselves.’’ A lengthy discussion of the Hindu practice of sati (widow sacrifice) and the paradoxes that attend its abolition by British

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colonial rulers – Spivak’s point is not that ‘the killing of widows’ is acceptable but rather that women’s subject ivity is repeatedly foreclosed, first by the epistemic vio lence of Hindu law and later by colonial and postcolonial law – culminates in the now notorious answer to her article’s title and provocation. Her terse response: ‘‘The subaltern cannot speak.’’ Several critics, even sympathetic ones, have objected to Spivak’s ‘muting’ of subaltern voices (see, e.g., Fer nando Coronil’s article ‘Listening to the subaltern’). They misconstrue the implications of Spivak’s essay, which has been formative for the articulation of Subaltern Studies with postcolonial criticism. There are at least five over lapping readings of it, all with radical implications for studies of subalternity. First, the essay is tautological. The title is a red herring. The subaltern by definition is that colonized subject who cannot speak. She is always ‘spo ken for’. Second, the subaltern is that subject who cannot speak because her speech is disqualified. Here ‘speech’ carries the political valence of being the property of that person who is properly recognized as citizen of the polis – and hence a ‘political being’. Third, the subaltern is that singular figure who, although exploited and marginalized within hegemonic formations, defies dialectical inte gration. She is the figure of the ‘radically other’ who marks off a cryptic, secret ‘space of withholding’ within the territorialized ambits of modernity, which dreads her precisely because she represents an internal margin that resists coding and, hence, the Enlightenment desire to know in order to control. Fourth, the subaltern names that figure of undecidability whose reality cannot be known (‘spoken of ’): as such, she forces an ethical de cision around how and why to substitute for her (‘speak for’). Subalternity pits the two senses of representation – portrait (darstellen) and proxy (vertreten) – into an aporetic relationship. Fifth, even if the subaltern could speak for herself – or as Spivak puts it, ‘‘invest her own itinerary’’ – she would still be within the domains of ideology and politics, and be operated by them. In other words, she would come to presence via the work of ‘supplements’: the network of signifiers, which precede and constitute her. The rub? There is no escape from the politics and ethics of representation.

Subalternity and Its Futures Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book Provincializing Europe (the first part especially) is one of the most sustained attempts to extend Spivak’s discussion of subalternity. Chakrabarty employs the analytic device of History 1 and History 2s – a strange double geography – to build his arguments. To write within the episteme of History 1, according to Chakrabarty, is to produce the ‘universal and necessary history we associate with capital’, or equivalently, the

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history of ‘the reproduction of the logic of capital’. Here, following Spivak, ‘capital’ stands in for both, ‘the subject of the West’ and ‘the West as Subject’. By contrast, His tory 2s are those ‘multiple possibilities’ or ‘subaltern pasts’ that ‘may be under the institutional domination of the logic of capital and exist in proximate relationship to it’ but do not belong to its ‘life process’. The task of History 2s, then, is both epistemological and ontological: on the one hand, to function as a strategy of writing that constantly interrupts ‘the totalizing thrusts of History 1’ and on the other hand, to write those pasts and presents that reveal the human bearer of labor power as having the capacity to enact ‘ways of being in the world’ other than as the bearer primarily of labor power – that is, use value for capital. Chakrabarty’s argument has profound implications for a text like David Harvey’s Limits to Capital that has achieved canonical status within radical geography for its acute analysis of the historical and geographical dy namics of capitalist development. Provincializing Europe shows how an argument like Limits’ operates firmly within the epistemic space of History 1, with the result that it writes back dispersed geographies of life into the expansionist narrative of capital’s becoming – as vari ations in a singular, relentless process of capitalist de velopment. In so doing it effectively recoups a diversity of struggles and modes of existence into the unifying dialectic of capital. Chakrabarty’s claim is that History 1’s effacements, which amount to a systematic erasure of certain subject effects within intellectual and shop floor production, can be gathered under the name ‘subaltern’. This usage remains faithful to Gramsci to the extent that it designates subordinated elements of society. But since these subordinated elements are heterogeneous and al ways fragmented, the signifier ‘subaltern’ becomes not the container of a presence but the placeholder of an absence – a catachrestic, anti universal signifier that urges an ethic of responsibility to the dominated. Chakrabarty relies heavily on theoretical openings in Marx’s Grundrisse and the displacement of Hegel’s dia lectic in Derrida’s filial notions of ‘diffe´rance’, ‘sup plement’, and ‘trace’ to convey his argument about subalternity. He contends that although capital strives to sublate ‘difference’ (Chakrabarty variously invokes ‘His tory 2s’, ‘concrete labor’, ‘real labor’, ‘subaltern pasts’ as examples) into itself, these continue to ‘inhere in capital’ and ‘interrupt and punctuate the run of capital’s own logic’. Derrida’s concept of ‘trace’ provides an important corrective to the logic of double negation that is both the power and failing of Hegel’s dialectic of identity. For Chakrabarty the ‘trace’ is that ineffable element – the Grundrisse’s ‘unconquered remnants’, Derrida’s ‘radically other within the structure of difference that is the sign’, Spivak’s ‘subaltern’, or his own ‘History 2s’ – that con stantly challenges from within capital its ‘claims to unity

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and universality’. As such, his argument offers an implicit critique of the Hegelian Aufhebung, particularly its com monplace interpretation as a philosophical historicism that negates difference and leaves no room for its af firmation outside the protocols of European modernity. Provincializing Europe ultimately demands an ethics and politics of representation that does not translate varie gated forms of life into the abstract, formalized categories of capital in lockstep with the transactional logic of positivism, but rather stages subalternity in ways that resist the pull of equivalence. Caribbean and Latin American Subaltern Studies have been considerably more attentive than its Indian counterpart in exploring how colonialism and racism have intertwined with capitalism to produce forms of subordination and exclusion that are manifestly ‘sub altern’ (The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader surveys this rich seam of research). It has also gone farther, most vividly in critical scholarship around the Black Atlantic, in spatializing subalternity and revealing how people and places in imperial margins have enabled the (epistemic and economic) center that is ‘Europe’. In the work of scholars like Enrique Dussel, this ingenious displacement of ‘Europe’ and its modernity as effect rather than au tochthonous cause of world history renovates ‘the sub altern’ (a term that Dussel uses interchangeably with ‘the poor’) as the excluded Others of modernity who are owed an insuperable debt by it. Geographers have extended this line of argument, which amounts to a spatial critique of the core’s he gemony, in vital ways. David Slater, for example, endorses the postcolonial turn as a means to ‘challenge the history and geopolitics of metropolitan theory’. Matthew Sparke’s In the Space of Theory embraces this summons. Thinking spatially through Gayatri Spivak’s decon structive Marxism, he advocates a disruptive ‘geo gra phy’: writing the earth in ways that both expose the imperial and territorial underpinnings of metropolitan narratives (such as those around ‘globalization’ or Iraq) as well as make space for ‘other graphings, other geog raphies’ from the margins. David Featherstone, advancing the insurrectionist imaginary in C.L.R. James’s account of the Black Jacobins, shows how the early radical con ception of ‘man’ espoused by the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s was formed within transnational political networks involving ex slave, free black activists. Such networks, he argues, nurtured forms of ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’ and allowed for the circulation of narratives that were often counter hegemonic of estab lishment positions. In these various endorsements of contrapuntal geographies, ‘the subaltern’ is that figure who vitally enables western modernity but is (neces sarily) effaced from its self narratives. Linking the issue of effacement to questions of pol itical economy, Melissa Wright’s ethnographies of the

devaluation of women’s work and femicide in the maquiladora cluster of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, bear stark witness to the gendered violence of this effacement, and how subalternity services capital accumulation. Sharad Chari also examines the dynamics of subalternity and capital accumulation, but in the knitwear cluster of Tiruppur, south India, that is dominated by owners from the Gounder caste, many who rose to that position from the ranks of the working class. These owner entre preneurs of modest peasant and working class origins rely on the exploitation of labor for capital accumulation, but continuously efface this in their self presentations. Calling themselves ‘self made men’, they narrate their class mobility and industrial success as the outcome of a propensity to ‘toil’ rooted in an agrarian past of hardship and labor. The lesson for subaltern representation, Chari says, is to never forget that subalternity is a differentiated condition, and that it is as important to translate sub altern difference as it is to translate the difference be tween elites and subalterns. The question of subalternity receives a fitting (and yet another geographical) twist in Timothy Mitchell’s ‘Can the mosquito speak?’ – a clever send off of Spivak’s ori ginal provocation. Noting that stories of the nation, of modernity, or of capital are always written around the ‘actions and intentions’ of people, he asks how nonhumans enable these stories. Is it not in fact the case that human agency is parasitic on – ‘‘draws its force by attempting to divert or attach itself to’’ – other kinds of energy or logic whose contributions, like those of subalterns, are erased from conventional accounts? If so, what are its impli cations for who we represent and how? In a familiar yet unexpected move, Mitchell stages the nonhuman as that (subaltern) actor who must be continuously effaced in order to conserve modernity’s story of self movement, but whose subject effects keep disrupting this fiction. See also: Difference/Politics of Difference; Eurocentrism; Hegemony; Imperialism, Cultural; Neocolonialism; Orientalism; Postcolonialism/Postcolonial Geographies; Representation, Politics of; Subaltern.

Further Reading Arnold, D. (1984). Gramsci and peasant subalternity in India. Journal of Peasant Studies 11(4), 155 177. Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chakrabarty, D. (2002). A small history of subaltern studies. In Habitations of Modernity, pp 3 19. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Chari, S. (2004). Fraternal Capital: Peasant Workers, Self Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chaturvedi, V. (ed.) (2000). Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. London: Verso. (in association with New Left Review).

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Coronil, F. (1997). Listening to the subaltern: The poetics of neocolonial states. Poetics Today 15(4), 643 658. Dussel, E. (1998). Beyond eurocentrism: The world system and the limits of modernity. In Jameson, F. & Miyoshi, M. (eds.) The Cultures of Globalization, pp 3 30. Durham: Duke University Press. Featherstone, D. (2007). The spatial politics of the past unbound: Transnational networks and the making of political identities. Global Networks 7(4), 430 452. Forgacs, D. (ed.) (2000). The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916 1935. New York: New York University Press. Gidwani, V. (2008). Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Guha, R. (1982). On some aspects of the historiography of colonial India. In Guha, R. (ed.) Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society, pp 1 8. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, T. (2002). Can the mosquito speak? In Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno Politics, Modernity, pp 19 53. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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O’Hanlon, R. (1988). Recovering the subject: Subaltern studies and histories of resistance in colonial south Asia. Modern Asian Studies 22(1), 189 224. Rodrı´guez, I. (ed.) (2001). The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Durham: Duke University Press. Slater, D. (1998). Post colonial questions for global times. Review of International Political Economy 5, 647 678. Sparke, M. (2005). In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation State. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Spivak, G. C. (1985). Subaltern studies: Deconstructing historiography. In Guha, R. (ed.) Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society, pp 330 363 (reprinted in Spivak, G. C. (1988). In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, pp 197 221. London: Routledge). Delhi: Oxford University Press. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In Nelson, C. & Grossberg, L. (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, pp 271 313. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Wright, M. (2004). From protests to politics: Sex work, women’s worth and Ciudad Jua´rez modernity. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94(2), 369 386.

Subjectivity J. P. Sharp, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Agency The ability to act. Discourse A discourse can be thought of as a temporally and spatially specific lens through which the world is interpreted, thus defining the boundaries of what can be known. Epistemology The theory of what can be known. Hermeneutics The theory of understanding. Situated Knowledge The idea that there is no possibility of universalized knowledge, but that knowledge is always produced from a specific vantage point.

Introduction All forms of human geographical thinking presuppose some theory of subjectivity. However, not all approaches have acknowledged this. Positivistic approaches – most closely associated with spatial science – denied that the subjectivity of the researcher had any influence and that the scientific nature of such research produced a purely objective account of the world. Post positivistic geog raphy has focused on the effects of the subject, with debates ranging over the extent to which the individual subject has agency over actions (or whether action is constrained by structures or greater powers of one form or another), the extent to which actions are known (or knowable) to the subject, and the extent to which sub jectivity should be centered purely around humans. Each debate has an impact upon methodology in terms of the epistemological value given to the knowledge created.

The Origin of the Knowing Subject It was with the rise in the eighteenth century of the European Enlightenment that the human subject became the center of knowledge, replacing models which were centered on God as all knowing. The rational En lightenment subject was regarded as bounded and self knowing. The body contained the subject and the mind, separating the knowing subject from external objects in the world. The Enlightenment sought to produce knowledge through the scientific method – visualizing, naming, and classifying (and in geography, also mapping) the world: capturing the world as an array of facts, and ordering these into a knowable taxonomic structure. It

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was the subject – perceived as separate from the natural world of objects through the reason afforded by rational enlightenment – which could extract the order of things in the world. The idea of visualizing and naming the world’s objects reinforced the notion of the subject remaining outside of the world which was being ordered and understood. The feminist theorist Donna Haraway has famously talked of this archetypal enlightenment subject as playing ‘the God trick’ of simultaneously being everywhere (seeing everything) and nowhere (having no limiting perspective on what is being seen). The Cartesian representation of the map is perhaps the best example of this God trick. This highlights the epistemological and ontological be liefs of Enlightenment knowledge: the world existed in a particular order and it was the role of the enlighten ment scholar to uncover that order. This naturalistic epistemology suggested that so long as the rational, sci entific method was adopted, the order would be revealed the same way to any viewer of it. Thus, knowledge of the world was something con sidered to be external to individual subjects. With the development of the European Enlightenment, faith in the progressive nature of science meant that the development of human knowledge was considered to be through a process of the world revealing its secrets to the know ledgeable scholar. The highest achievements of science and philosophy were presented as objective. Any indi cation of subjectivity (emotions, biases, cultural per ceptions, and so on) was banished from this process. However, despite this apparently universalizing lan guage, objective knowledge was not attainable by all. Women, the working classes, racialized others and chil dren were seen as being unable to achieve objectivity as their minds were not seen to have triumphed over their bodies (women were regarded as too closely aligned to natural patterns due to their role as mothers, through the cycles of menstruation, and through ‘womanly’ problems such as hysteria and fainting; the working classes and racialized others were believed to be lacking rational intellect and were driven by bodily passions rather than higher goals; and children were not yet sufficiently de veloped to achieve control and reason). Thus, the knowledge produced by these subjects was invalidated as it was regarded as hopelessly biased, emotional or ir rational. There were even discussions about the useful ness of attempting to educate women and racialized subjects as there were beliefs that they would never be able to attain enlightenment and reason. In geography,

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women were excluded from intellectual societies. Women were not elected as members of the RGS, for instance, until 1913, and their accounts of travel to distant parts of the world were treated as entertainment rather than as scientific knowledge as were the accounts of their male counterparts. In the postwar years, the social sciences sought to emulate the objectivity of Enlightenment science using techniques that minimized the subjectivity of researchers through methodologies such as spatial science, the use of large data sets and statistics, and the adoption of regu larized data collection in questionnaires.

Subjective Knowledge However, in the last 30 or 40 years, the scientific method has faced serious challenge, in geography and elsewhere. The rise of humanistic geography sought to foreground the human experience of place over the analysis of spatial form and thus could not be objective. This put human experience and understanding of the world at the center of geography. Such an approach negated the possibility of objectivity, replacing scientific methods of analysis and prediction with one based around interpretation (her meneutics), empathy, and understanding. In addition to drawing the human as the subject of geography, humanists also turned to examine the sub jectivity of the geographer. Humanistic geography’s em phasis on interpretation and intersubjectivity meant that the researcher could not be seen as standing outside the research process but instead the researcher had to ac knowledge her or his role in the process of interpretation and the production of knowledge. This necessitated the adoption of ethnographic and participatory research methodologies. Rather than trying to erase the influence of the subject in the creation of knowledge, humanistic geography recognized subjectivity as part of the research process, even viewing the subject of the researcher as a tool in the research process. Scholars sought to insert themselves into the outcomes of their work. Rather than using the detached scientific writing of positivism, post positivistic writers abandoned the passive voice and lo cated agency, wrote in the first person, offered extended quotation from research participants, and experimented with literary devices drawn from the arts. The recovery of subjectivity also had more political motivations to restore subaltern knowledges that had been hidden from bourgeois history and geography. Marxist and radical theorists are critical of the implicit support by social science of state capitalism, pointing instead to the need to construct alternative working class histories and geographies. Such approaches still often presented an objective knowledge, but one where ob jectivity was grounded in the class position of the subject.

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Feminists argued that there is more than one subject of knowledge. Women have been excluded because of the masculinism of Enlightenment knowledge privileging objectivity over subjectivity, and dismissing women as incapable of true reason. While some feminists chal lenged this distinction as being based in untenable stereotypes, others accepted the binary distinction but inverted the values, arguing that there exist specifically women’s ways of knowing that were based on distinctive ‘feminine’ characteristics (collaboration, empathy, and intersubjective understanding). This latter position in sisted that women were incapable of objectivity due to their embeddedness within networks of care and de pendence. This challenged the binary division of subject and object and highlighted the necessity of ontological and methodological subjectivity, but was often critiqued for accepting the binary distinction of essentially mas culine and feminine characteristics. This celebration of the duality of knowledge some times suggested that the subaltern view was more ob jective. Dominant views were supported by power structures within society (whether based around class, race or patriarchal power) and so such views would lack critical rigor. On the other hand, subaltern views could see how power worked and their views would be free of the ideological distortions of social power and therefore more objective. Others were wary of romanticizing the subaltern. From views that recognized the entangled and pervasive nature of power relations, there could never be a simple binary of dominant–subaltern. Class, race, gen der, sexuality, and other social identities would be cross cutting. The rise of interest in identity politics based around these aspects of cultural identity offered a model of subjectivity that went against simple binary models, causing some Marxist and feminist theorists to fear a concomitant loss of political efficacy. Various attempts have been made to produce situated knowledges, arguing for the veracity (and, sometimes, even objectivity) of knowledge but only from one per spective (rather than being totalizing). These partial perspectives (including approaches such as feminist standpoint theory and situated knowledge) sought to avoid the relativism that might arise from suggesting that all views were necessarily incomplete by arguing for the situated and partial nature of all knowledge. Postcolonial theory makes attempts to recover sub altern subjectivity more complex still. The notion of hybridity is central to postcolonialism, challenging any attempt to divide up knowledge into discrete categories. Such a viewpoint clearly challenges any notion of a distinct subject and object. However, postcolonial critics are attuned to the power relations involved in how this intersubjectivity operates. Most prominently, Gayatri Spivak has examined the ways in which the voice and knowledge of the subaltern has been heard by those who

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are dominant. Even when apparently expressing their own views however, the subaltern cannot speak, because she/he must use the words, phrases, and cadences of Western thought in order for it to be heard. In order to be taken seriously – to be seen as knowledge and not opinion or folklore – the knowledge of the subaltern is to be translated into the language of science, development, or philosophy, dominated by Western concepts and Western languages. Thus, the subaltern must always be caught in translation, never truly expressing her/himself, but always already interpreted. This recognition of the influence of subjectivity in academic work required the adoption of methods which recognized how the positionality of the author would inevitably effect the research from the initial con ceptualization of the project (and the motivations behind this), through the response of the research participants to the researcher, methods in which information is analyzed, to what is done with the research outputs. Various strategies have been adopted, to varying degrees of suc cess, to foreground this process, including writing the author into the research narrative, collaboration with research participants in terms of formulating, conducting and disseminating the research, and various writing strategies to emphasize the partial nature of the representation.

Structure/Agency Theories of power are central to understandings of subjectivity in terms of considering the agency of the subject, in other words, the ability of the subject to act independently. Agency is not only about intentions to act, but also capabilities to act. Ongoing debates about the existence of social structures enabling or con straining human action are at the heart of theories of subjectivity. In the early twentieth century, geographers paid little attention to individuals’ actions as these were viewed as being the result of structures operating at a level beyond the individual. For instance, both en vironmental determinism and traditional forms of cul tural geography assumed that people’s actions could be explained by recourse to the overwhelming power of the environment or of culture. Marxist approaches also re garded subjectivity to be the product of location within a systemic economic logic that transcended the individual. Other theories allowed for some exercise of individual subjectivity. Possibilism allowed a range of possible ac tions to emerge from any situation. Spatial science rec ognized the agency of the individual subject but only in as far as it followed the logic of neoclassical economic modeling. Behavioral geography sought to provide a more developed understanding of the psychology behind

human agency, to account for what spatial scientists would see as irrational action. Such work included focus on values, aspirations, experiences, and, in some cases, imagination, in their models of decision making (al though much of this work has been characterized by measurable, quantitative methodologies). However, due to focus on conscious motivations, behavioral geography has been criticized for having an underdeveloped understanding of psychoanalysis. Structuration theory and realism sought to explain how social structures were both outcome and medium of the agency that constitutes them. Both avoid the ex tremes of arguing that society is comprised of individual acts or is determined by social forces by holding these two extremes in tension with one another. It is through repetition that the acts of individual agents reproduce social structures such as institutions, moral codes, norms, and conventions. Nevertheless, this approach still relies upon a binary understanding of society – structuration theory seeks to bridge the individual – structure gap, but it still imagines that it exists. As already stated, humanistic geography emerged in the 1970s with the stated goal of reanimating geography, to put people and their thoughts, emotions, and beliefs at the heart of the discipline. Focusing on issues such as dwelling, lifeworld, and rhythms, humanistic geographers believed that social life was constructed through human actions. This approach faced criticism for paying too little attention to structures that might limit human agency, even moving into voluntarism, and making methodologies particularist.

Post-Subjectivity Post structural theory turned preexisting theories of subjectivity on their head. Rather than assuming a subject which has agency to think and act, post structural ac counts see the subject – and its subjectivity – as an epi phenomenon of discourse or performance: the discourse or act creates the sense of a knowing and capable actor. This approach comes from the work of Michel Foucault who has produced a history and geography of the pro duction of subjects and subjectivity. For Foucault, there is no subject prior to knowledge, power, and discourse; instead subjectivity is a product of these. For example, discourses about homosexuality as an identity preexist homosexual subjects, rather than vice versa. As a result, there can be no knowable subject which exists outside of history (and geography): always the subject must be historicized. Foucault proclaimed the ‘death of man’, by which he meant that emerging trends of Western thought at the end of the twentieth century (including post structuralism) have de invested ‘man’ as a stable category. Whereas for theorists such as Hegel and Marx

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subjectivity was a necessary aspect of achieving freedom, for Foucault subjectivity represented enslavement to self identity. Now that it has been so thoroughly decentered, the subject cannot serve as an absolute ground of knowledge, as a transcendental historical figure, or as an ultimate justification for moral theories. Foucault’s ideas have been developed by a number of feminist and queer theorists. Perhaps most significantly, Judith Butler has critiqued stable understandings of subjectivity to argue that gender identity is constituted not in any essentialist characteristics or through a founding act, but through a regulated performance. The performance of identity establishes the fiction of a subject who is performing. Butler argues that heterosexuality is only established as the norm through a performance of heterosexual acts which give this identity the image of authenticity. Dominant sexualities are no more ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ than alternatives, but the impression of nat ural, stable identities (and deviance from this) is estab lished through a set of normalizing performances that have been invested with a great deal of social and eco nomic power. Rather than seeing it consisting of the dramatic mo ments in life, most have understood performance con stituting subjectivity through mundane, day to day improvisations. Micro scale analysis has turned attention to bodily knowledge, the ways of getting by each day, rather than performances which are coherently thought through and reflected upon. Some have pointed to the body as the most immediate space for geographers to examine. Feminist and queer theorists have turned at tention to the body as the site of meaning, where dis courses of power, and of divisions between inside (subject) and outside (object) are inscribed. Theories of the body have considered how dominant power writes particular subjects through microdisciplinary practices such as fashion, diet, and exercise. However, such ap proaches also consider the body as a site of resistance to these dominant powers through performances such as cross dressing, piercings, tattoos, and self harm. This has led to debates upon the extent to which these perform ances are transgressive or actively resistant. This focus on everyday minutia has been critiqued as ignoring important relations of politics as it can result in an understanding of subjectivity devoid of any atten tion to power relations. However, feminist and queer theorists have highlighted the fact that performances are not simply freely chosen. Examples of fashion, clothing, and the display of symbols of family life in the workplace have allowed study of performances of dominant body cultures, compulsory (hetero)sexuality and the mascu linism of work. Importantly for geographers, the concept of per formance requires an understanding of space: it is im portant where subjectivity is performed as this influences

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the outcome and meaning of the performance and so the meaning and effect of subject identity. The psychoanalytic turn in geography similarly sought to decenter the knowing subject of knowledge. Freud and those who followed examined, in different ways, the establishment of the individual as a subject through the break with the mother (from whom the newborn child is initially unable to distinguish itself). This break is seen, for instance, as the result of patri archal power for Freud, the symbolic patriarch for Lacan, or the realization of abjection for Kristeva. Psy choanalytic theory insists that the unconscious is in accessible to the subject but that its dynamics persistently intervene in more conscious states such as dreams, thoughts, speech, and precognitive practice. This therefore insists that subjectivity cannot be com pletely known, the subject cannot be completely map ped. The subject must always be to an extent unknowable and unstable. This presents a critique of feminist research which situates the subject through self reflexive methodologies as such situated knowledge as sumes the knowability of the subject to establish its lo cation. Clearly then the psychoanalytic turn has impacts on methodologies. For many, psychoanalytic approaches are regarded as essentializing. Some geographers have thus tried to situate psychoanalysis into the particularities of context, for instance, considering the social processes of exclusion and abjection. Studies of agoraphobia and other con ditions have linked the interior spatiality of the psyche to the spatiality of everyday life. The rise of nonrepresentational theory similarly at tempts to get at knowledge without an entirely conscious theory of subjectivity, using precognitive or bodily knowledges or responses to mundane situations rather than adopting discursive methods. This has led to further questions about assumptions concerning subjectivity in geography being limited to human subjects. Human subjectivities are supplemented and maintained through IT and communications networks, medical implants, and genetic manipulation, and human social life is also populated by nonhuman animals as companions, com batants, and food. Here agency is liberated from the subject. It is regarded as an external quality, owned by the network or collective rather than being internal to the individual subject. Methodologically, post subjectivity has proved very troubling. The radical challenge to objectivity has led some to consider all knowledge to be no more than language games, concepts that cannot be translated be cause of the dismissing of any claims to transcendental meaning. Science becomes one knowledge alongside so many others with no recourse to explaining its supe riority. Nonrepresentational and psychoanalytic approa ches raise challenging questions about methodological

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approaches to get at the nondiscursive and subconscious and unconscious aspects of subjectivity. There are also profound political and ethical ques tions about the responsibilities of agency and the politics of academic work. Some feminists have reacted more powerfully to postmodern and post structural pro nouncements of the ‘death of the subject’ wondering whether this had occurred just when the male, white, subject might have had to share its status with those formerly excluded from subjectivity. However, there are elements of transgression and re sistance possible in the post structural understandings of subjectivity. The performative theories of subjectivity provide for the possibility of politics and of transforma tion. If there is always a compulsion to repeat then identity is never complete, further performance is always required. As identity is only secure when performed ‘correctly’, this offers a great potential for subversion. See also: Embodied Knowing; Enlightenment Geography; Ethnography; Feminist Methodologies; Foucauldianism; Humanism/Humanistic Geography; Masculinism; NonRepresentational Theory/Non-Representational Geographies; Performativity; Poststructuralism/ Poststructuralist Geographies; Psychoanalysis; Resistance; Situated Knowledge, Reflexivity; Spatial Science; Structuration Theory.

Further Reading Bondi, L., Avis, H., Bankey, R. et al. (2002). Subjectivities, Knowledges, and Feminist Geographies: The Subjects and Ethics of Social Research. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Cupples, J. (2002). The field as a landscape of desire: Sex and sexuality in geographical fieldwork. Area 34, 382 390. Foucault, M. (1979). The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction (first published 1976) Hurley, R. (trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gregson, N. and Rose, G. (2000). Taking butler elsewhere: Performativities, spatialities and subjectivities. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, 433 552. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14, 575 599. Limb, M. and Dwyer, C. (2001). Qualitative Research Methods for Geographers. London: Arnold. Mascia Lees, F., Sharp, P. and Cohen, C. B. (1989). The postmodern turn in anthropology: Cautions from a feminist perspective. Signs 15, 7 33. McDowell, L. and Court, G. (1994). Performing work. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12, 27 50. Nash, C. (2000). Performativity in practice: Some recent work in cultural geography. Progress in Human Geography 24, 653 664. Philo, C. and Parr, H. (2003). Introducing psychoanalytic geographies. Social and Cultural Geography 4, 283 293. Pile, S. and Thrift, N. (eds.) (1995). Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation. London: Routledge. Spivak, G. C. (1994). Can the subaltern speak? In Williams, P. & Chrisman, L. (eds.) Colonial Discourse and Post Colonial theory, pp 66 111. New York: Columbia. Whatmore, S. (2002). Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces. London: Sage.

Suburbanization A. Mace, University of Westminster, London, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Fordism Taken from the Ford motor company’s model of mass production, the term is used to describe an economic system driven by centralized large-scale industrial production for a mass consumer market. This economic model then influences political and social arrangements in order to maintain itself. Micro-Generation The use of solar panels, wind turbines, and other sources of power generation on a small scale sometimes attached to domestic and commercial buildings. Post-Industrial City A term used to describe former industrial cities where the economy is now driven by service industries including financial services, education, leisure, and tourism. Radial Transport Generally used in relation to public transport, these are links that connect the center of a settlement to outlying areas including suburbs. SUV or Sports Utility Vehicle Much criticized for their high petrol consumption and for their marketing as a heavily defended private environment on the public highway – they have been referred to as a gated community on wheels; one range of SUVs is named ‘The Suburban.’ The Chicago School From the University of Chicago and influential for thinking on the nature of the modernday city, especially during the first-half of the twentieth century. The ecological model of the city, associated with the Chicago School, sought to explain social competition for space within the city in terms of a Darwinian struggle for advantage and survival. Tupperware The trade name for a range of products associated primarily with food storage. Culturally, the product is often linked with an idealized version of the consumption-based suburban family life of the 1950s and 1960s. That is, a married couple with dependent children where the woman homemaker, or housewife, did not have paid employment.

The Roots and Spread of Suburbia Edge of city development has been around in one form or another for as long as cities. This development around the fringes of the city has encompassed both exclusiveness and exclusion. Dotted around first century Rome were villae sububanae, more in the nature of the

modern day second home. They provided Rome’s elite with respite from the demands of the city. At the other extreme a quite different type of suburban development had attached itself to cities – the zone of overspill to which the poor and undesirable were exiled. Southwark to the south of the city of London was, in Shakespeare’s day, infamous as the location for various entertainment and business activities which were sometimes disreput able and which were formally excluded from the city proper. In more recent times, Toronto’s early suburbs were often the product of self build by incomers who could not afford to live in the city and who struggled to make ends meet on the suburban fringe. The low density town/country suburban form, that is the focus of this article, was profoundly influenced by the ‘garden city’ movement, attributed to Ebenezer Howard, and which advocated urban dispersal from overcrowded industrial cities. This informed a policy of urban dispersal and low density housing in Britain throughout much of the twentieth century. Both the US and the UK lay claim to being the birthplace of sub urbia. Robert Fishman sets out the case for the UK, arguing that fundamental changes in family form led by London’s and later Manchester’s Georgian merchants gave rise to the classic town/country form of subur banization. This model is closely associated with a new economic division of labor within the family. Women were gradually excluded from their hitherto central role in the family business and cast as full time mothers tending to the children and domestic management. In this reading, suburbia has been implicated from its earliest days with a patriarchal family structure that has oppressed women. Increasingly, the Georgian inner city was viewed as morally corrupting and an inappropriate residential lo cation for women and children. Thus Georgian mer chants gradually separated off the business premises from the family home moving the latter out of the city. The male city was separated off from the female domestic suburb. Robert Fishman argues that, this was first fully realized in Manchester (England), where the complete residential withdrawal from the city center by the mer chant class led to the world’s first central business district. Such examples are more than just historical detail. This configuration of Manchester carried through into the late twentieth century. By the mid 1980s only a few hundred people lived in the city center, so creating a serious challenge for those seeking to regenerate the

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post industrial city by bringing a residential population back from the suburbs to the center. Meanwhile, Kenneth T. Jackson sets out the case for the US being the true home of mass suburbanization. The economic downturn in the UK’s economy toward the end of the nineteenth century limited the growth of suburbia there while it took off in the USA. Further, in the UK with less space and higher land values the typical sub urban form became the semidetached family house; in the US and Australia the detached house on its own plot more fully realizes the rural/urban dream. It seems reasonable to assert that the US led the world in mass suburbanization and has developed it more fully. If sub urbia has reached its zenith in the US then it is also here that it is most closely associated with sprawl. Veronica Strong Boag et al. claim that the suburbs are more de fining of national culture and identity in the US than is the case in either Canada or the UK. Flowing from this, Fishman has argued that the US suburban lifestyle, ser viced by gas guzzling SUVs, is a defining political issue in a world concerned with environmental matters. The idea of a distinct suburban culture is developed further in the next section. First, more objective or scientific ex planations for the growth of suburbia are considered. Suburbanization is inextricably linked with the growth of mass public transit systems, and car use. Clearly there is a relationship between the development of transit technology and the growth of suburbia. Changes in transportation have made it possible to develop housing at ever greater distances from the city center as transport systems have allowed commuters to cover greater dis tances to work in the center more easily and economic ally. Horse drawn buses, trams, and motor buses and then trains and metro systems have all expanded the reach of suburbia. However, there is not always a simple rela tionship between transit systems and suburban develop ment. There are instances where new transport infrastructure did not lead immediately to suburban development and also, of where suburban development preceded transport links to the center. The relationship between the middle class suburb and mass transit has long been an ambivalent one. As Robert Fishman notes, the exclusive suburb needed good trans port links with the city center, so that residents could commute to their work in the center. But to sustain its status, its exclusiveness, it was essential that those transport links should not provide for the in migration of working class households. Suburban transport had to make the center accessible but keep the suburb exclusive. The cost of public transport served to discourage the development of housing for working class households in many cases. In other instances, mass transportation was used to facilitate the movement of the working class out of the center. An example is found in the UK where, toward the end of the nineteenth century, central

government required the private train companies to provide cheap workers’ fares. This allowed for the de velopment of working class suburbs, for example in Tottenham, North London, where former upper middle class estates were broken up and developed with rented workers’ housing. The effect of this cheap fares policy is still imprinted on the social pattern of London’s suburbs today. In addition to transport systems, the location of employment has also influenced the social mix within suburbia. The social and transport models discussed so far tend to assume that suburbia represents, in the first instance, a purely residential expansion of the city. However, this is challenged by Richard Walker and Robert D. Lewis who argue that suburban expansion has typically been ac companied by the outward movement of industry sometimes encouraged by local and national policy. The transport infrastructure developed in suburbia was at tractive to industry – particularly if suburban rail net works were part of a national system or where new road infrastructure was provided. Therefore, not all suburban development has been based on commuting into the center from an exclusively dormitory or residential sub urb. The suburbs have developed complex commuting patterns which reflect the location of employment in the periphery as well as in the center of cities. Beyond these more particular accounts, suburban growth has been explained as the product of both social and economic competition. The Chicago School sought to develop an analogy between the Darwinian com petition in nature and the way in which communities vie for space and favored locations in cities. In their de scription of early twentieth century American cities, migrants move into declining inner city areas which are vacated by upwardly mobile residents moving out to suburban areas. These new suburbanites were seeking competitive advantage; they were responding to the perceived socioeconomic advantages that suburban home ownership could bestow upon them. An overarching economic logic is offered by David Harvey who provides an analysis of suburbanization as being the spatial expression of capital seeking out new investment opportunities. When investment in the inner city appears less attractive (often because of the poor environmental conditions that capital itself has created) new investment opportunities become apparent around the city fringe where cheaper land and development costs combine with a better environmental quality. The un spoilt environment of the city fringe serves as a free good to the investor, further encouraging investment in sub urban development. In this model, the suburbs can be viewed as the product of capital exploiting an investment opportunity; it has an economic inevitability about it. Certainly, detailed studies of London’s explosive sub urban growth during the mid twentieth century indicate

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that a combination of local, regional, and national eco nomic factors fueled the expansion. Cheap land and building materials, a willingness by landowners to sell, the increasing availability of mortgages, and a relative scarcity of accommodation to rent, along with the long term shift of employment and population to the southeast of England, all combined to fuel a suburban housing boom. However, explanations of suburbia which view it as being shaped solely by unavoidable structural forces are rejected by Doreen Massey. She recognizes the need to accommodate the economic imperative but seeks to go beyond this, arguing that there is more to places than the dictates of capital. In short, while the logic of capital accumulation may explain something of suburbanization, we also need to understand the role of human agency if we are to better understand suburbia as a place or more accurately, as a variety of places. Suburbia is often rep resented visually by aerial photographs which contain implicit judgments about the regularity of this built form and its land hungry nature. However, as Lars Lerup observes, in his graceful account of Houston, sprawl looks quite different on the ground. In the next section the focus is on the internal dynamics of suburbia and on the external relationship with the city.

The Relationship with the City Suburbanites have been criticized for their conformity to the prevailing demands of capital and its associated social norms; for blithely accepting the mass consumer society, traditional domestic roles for women, and the promotion of the individualistic and privatized family unit. In his study of comfortable middle class suburbia, Robert Fishman concludes that successful bourgeois suburbia has always been more about what it excludes than what it includes. Concern for the social impact of suburbanization has reflected national concerns. In America the focus has been on race and suburbanization, while in the UK the emphasis has been on class. In both cases though there is a sense of the calculating suburban type. Suburbia has been characterized as containing privileged social groups seeking to entrench their advantage through spatially segregating themselves from those perceived to be of inferior or undesirable status. Once in suburbia the competition continues. Harold J. Dyos describes how aspiring groups would seek to move to where a better class of person lived. However, if the incomers were seen to be lowering the status of the neighborhood, the higher status residents might move to a more exclusive suburb. Through this process it is important to note that suburbs can and do decline in status in the same way as inner city areas.

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Criticism of suburbia as socially exclusive tends to suggest that suburbia has been successfully shaped by a single suburban type. Furthermore, this classic subur banite is often defined as being in opposition to, or apart from, the city resident. The suburbanite is everything that the city resident is not. This approach is encouraged by the existence of a city/suburban binary which sets the two in opposition. Both the detractors and supporters of suburbia have often resorted to a quite crude city/suburb opposition in order to reinforce their point. However, as Cloke and Johnston have argued, the use of geographical binaries such as city/suburb can undermine, first our understanding of the suburbs themselves and second our understanding of the relationship between the city and the suburb. This is because, once established, binaries tend to underestimate differences within each of the categories (differences within the city and within sub urbs) and overestimate the differences between the two. Much writing on mass suburban development of the mid twentieth century, including from the medical pro fessions, associated the suburbs with a form of female neurosis. The bored stay at home housewife with young children found herself isolated in her new home, away from the support of the traditional network of family and friends. To some extent these studies reflected their time, when women were less likely than now to be in em ployment or to have access to a car. Writers in the Feminist tradition such as Robyn Dowling have sought to challenge the one size fits all view of women in suburbia. Rather, the case is made for the need to understand the variety of women’s experience there. Similarly, in the UK, studies of working class suburbanization have sought to demonstrate that the process of urban dispersal has been responsible for the breaking up of traditional working class neighborhoods and their associated bonds and social networks. In these studies the working classes found themselves divided and alienated in neighborhoods dominated by the middle classes and middle class values. Suburbia undoubtedly has excluded, and has contained examples of traditional or conservative values. However, it is probably reasonable to assert that suburbia is still only one place among many where these views are expressed; the suburban experience reflects as much as it propagates social values. Isolated young mothers, a changing working class, and continuing racial division are all found in suburbia, but they are not the product of suburbia nor are they exclusive to it. Suburbia cannot be understood in isolation from the society that it is a part of. Moreover, suburbia is not simply the opposite of the city. This point is developed further through considering the suburbs as a site of consumption. The new technol ogy of the home in the middle of the mid twentieth century meant that mass suburbanization was associated with the spread of domestic appliances such as the fridge, telephone, the radio (or wireless), washing machine, and

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of course, the car. Both the housing and the appliances within reflected the Fordist economic model, standard ized products, centrally produced for a mass market. In the UK, the cognoscenti were quick to criticize the standardized nature of the houses and the crassness of mass consumption which was associated with poor taste and a lack of culture. Famously, in the 1950s the architect Ian Nairn summed up the sneering attitudes of the elite in the term subtopia. Nevertheless, as Jane Jacobs ob served, there are numerous means through which priv ilege is captured within the urban fabric. Changes in housing markets in the inner city and the suburbs may be blurring the traditional differences between the center and periphery; the city may, in some respects, be be coming suburban. The private suburban culture of house parties and Tupperware is traditionally contrasted with the public life and high culture found in the city. Even if this en during binary were ever entirely true, it appears to be progressively more unsustainable. This point is illus trated by changes in the gentrification process. Early gentrification was associated with individual’s self im proving properties in neighborhoods which they valued for the social mix. The growth of supergentrification has seen the influx to the inner city of the hyperwealthy who appear not to value the diversity of their neighborhood in the way that the original gentrifiers did. Rather, as Diane Perrons has observed, the inner city is becoming about diversity only insomuch as it encompasses the superstars and their servants. Gated communities, the urban village movement, and a more general influx of like minded middle classes into areas may all be producing in the inner city the type of socially homogeneous communities (and built form) that suburbia was criticized for perpetuating. This blurring of city and suburb is integral to the urban village movement which seeks to make the urban more inviting as a place to live by invoking the imagery of rural settlement and geographic community within the city. Arguably, urban villages are designed to appeal to someone more clearly identifying with stereotypical traditional suburban val ues. They are not targeted at the demographic that would be attracted by the traditional grittiness of the city, as was the case with early gentrification. While changes in the inner city housing market may be tempering the richness and diversity that led Jane Jacobs to extol the inner city, in suburbia major demo graphic change may be producing a reverse effect. In London, some suburban boroughs are now characterized by an ethnic mixing rivaling some inner London bor oughs; the suburbs are home to mosques, temples, and other ethnic infrastructure as minority ethnic groups migrate out from the inner city. More recently the tra ditional pattern of immigration into city centers followed by dispersal out to suburbia has been challenged. In the

US there is evidence of a direct move into suburbia by, for example, Korean immigrants. The academic literature on the suburbs has long ac cepted that suburbia is not homogeneous. There is rec ognition that there are a wide variety of family forms in suburbia, also that women’s experience of suburbia is multivariate and that, in terms of class and ethnicity, suburbia is diverse. However, suburbia still tends to be subject to the external gaze. Relatively few studies give a voice to those who actually live in suburbia. Suburbia is commonly framed and studied in terms of its deficiencies, what it should be, rather than being better understood for what it is. There is now a focus by policy makers on suburbia as an unsustainable urban form in need of remediation. In the final section, consideration is given to the future of suburbia.

Suburban Futures/Issues Any suburban development which seeks to combine the rural and the urban is, by its very nature, always in danger of becoming entirely urban. London’s Victorian semidetached villas, once apart from the city are now very much a part of it. Later developments, although much farther from the center, have been profoundly in fluenced by increasing car ownership and use and the suburbanization of industry. As cities have sprawled, so have subcenters of commerce and entertainment de veloped in suburban areas. Indeed as Ed Soja argues, based on the experience of LA, it may be that polycentric suburbia is the new city. In an attempt to capture some of the economic and social changes that are occurring in suburbia, terms such as technoburb, exurb, and edge city have been employed. These are united by the concept of the suburb as becoming progressively more separate from its old, core city center and more urban in its own right. With the rise of the polycentric region of multiple networked subcenters, it may be that the traditional model of the dormitory suburb feeding workers into a central business district simply no longer holds. Again, the fortunes of suburbia cannot be understood in isol ation from wider social and economic restructuring. In this context one may question what sort of place suburbia is becoming in an increasingly urban and global world. Lefebvre offers the opportunity to conceptualize sub urbia as part of an urban dynamic rather than in isolation. One of his enduring interests was how cities simul taneously spread out physically while concentrating power at the center. Under these conditions what benefits or disadvantages does a suburban residential location confer? Why do people choose to live there? And how do they shape suburbia? To some extent the answers depend on which country the suburb is located in. Suburban ization may still represent either the rejection of the city

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by those seeking economic or social benefit (as has been the case in the US and UK), or a rejection by the city of those who do not have the financial wherewithal to live in the center (France, Italy). Though, even for the subur banite in the UK and the US, it still depends on which part of suburbia she or he lives in. While some suburbs continue to do well others are struggling. The theoretical concepts of Pierre Bourdieu offer the potential to build on Doreen Massey’s call to understand places as shaped both by broad economic forces and the people who reside there. Through his concept of ‘habi tus,’ Bourdieu offers those studying suburbia the oppor tunity to move beyond the traditional focus of class and race through an alternative focus, culture. In a study of suburban Manchester, Mike Savage et al. developed a study of suburbia that builds on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to develop an account of the way in which sub urbanites construct and influence the suburban experi ence in an increasingly interconnected city, regional, and global context. The term ‘elective belonging’ is employed to capture the dynamic sense of how people come to construct a sense of place in modern suburbia. While parts of suburbia may be becoming more urban, for others it is still not urban enough. In the UK the attempt to rehabilitate city center living through the urban renaissance debate means that suburbia remains out of favor with policy makers. The urban renaissance debate is driven by esthetic judgments that favor the supposed social qualities of city life (inclusion and di versity) as opposed to low density suburbia (exclusivity and homogeneity). However, the urban renaissance de bate also draws much of its power from the environ mental imperative – the need to achieve more sustainable lifestyles. Suburbia now finds itself out of favor with policy makers because of its land hungry, low density form and its dependence on the car. Although the suburbs are more resource hungry than the city center they do also offer some potential in en vironmental terms, including the possibility of increasing biodiversity, micro generation of power, harvesting rainwater, and growing vegetables. Furthermore, as sub urban areas increasingly develop their own subcenters of employment, it is not necessarily the case that com muting times or distances will increase as suburbia spreads. Indeed, Tokyo is an example of a high density city with long commute times and distances. However, polycentric suburbia, with commuting between suburban centers, is not conducive to public transport which favors radial routes into city centers. Therefore, suburbia is

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likely to remain open to criticism for being relatively unsustainable in comparison to the city, not least because of its relative defendence on the car. To conclude, although numerous academic studies have highlighted the difference that exists within suburbia and the change that is taking place there, the perception of suburbia remains static. To be suburban is still frequently employed as a shorthand term for safe, cautious, and small minded. Popular culture in both sides of the Atlantic and in Australia continues to perpetuate a view of suburbia as a place of secure domesticity; of sitcoms, and farce. A common feature of suburban studies and policy inter vention is that they seek to interpret suburbia from without rather than understand it from within. As a consequence, suburbia is typically defined for what it is not rather than for what it is. It may be that there is some catching up to do by the media and policy communities; to paraphrase Ed Soja, ‘‘Suburbia is no longer what it used to be.’’ See also: Culture; Gender in the City; Gentrification; Housing; Industrial Location; Informational City; Polycentricity; Transport, Public; Urban Village.

Further Reading Clapson, M. (2003). Suburban Century: Social Change and Urban Growth in England and the USA. Oxford: Berg. Dyos, H. J. (1961). Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell. London: Leicester University Press. Fishman, R. (1987). Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books. Jackson, K. T. (1985). Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford: University Press. Lerup, L. (2000). After the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Richards, L. (1990). Nobody’s Home: Dreams and Realities in a New Suburb. Oxford: University Press. Savage, M., Bagnall, G. and Longhurst, B. (2005). Globalization and Belonging. London: SAGE. Sunders, W. S. (ed.) (2005). Sprawl and Suburbia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Silverstone, R. (1997). Visions of Suburbia. London: Routledge. Soja, E. W. (2002). Sprawl is no longer what it used to be. In GUST (Ghent Urban Studies Team) (eds.) Post Urban, Ex Fragmentations, Sub and Dis Constructions, pp 76 88. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Strong Boag, V. (1999). What women’s spaces? In Harris, R. & Larkham, P. J. (eds.) Changing Suburbs: Foundation, Form and Function, pp 168 186. London: E & FN Spon. Thompson, F. M. L. (ed.) (1982). The Rise of Suburbia. Leicester: University Press. Tonkiss, F. (2005). Space, the City and Social Theory: Social Relations and Urban Forms. Cambridge: Polity. Walker, R. and Lewis, R. D. (2001). Beyond the crabgrass frontier: Industry and the spread of north American cities, 1850 1950. Journal of Historical Geography 27, 3 19.

Superpower J. O’Loughlin, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The definition of a superpower is like that of an elephant; it is hard to describe but most people have a fairly clear notion of what it entails. At a minimum, a superpower is a state that has a global interest, a worldwide reach, is an economic or military giant (usually both), has an influ ence on world affairs through pursuit of its own interests, and promotes its values. What is frequently debated is the point that a ‘great power’ becomes a ‘superpower’ and when a ‘superpower’ becomes a ‘hegemon’. This defin ition from the historian, Paul Dukes, that ‘‘a ‘superpower’ must be able to conduct a global strategy including the possibility of destroying the world; to command vast economic potential and influence; and to present a uni versal ideology’’ encapsulates the elements of superpower.

Superpower Rivalry The term ‘superpower’ reached public consciousness in the early years of the Cold War as the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union heated up. A search of Google News Archives showed a peaking of the word ‘superpower’ in news stories in the late 1980s to early 1990s as the Soviet Union imploded and the US was left astride the world stage as the only superpower. The concept of superpower has implications not only for the daily relations between states but also for the concept of the stability of the international system itself. While the United Nations (UN) encompasses all states within its ambit, the body was structurally constituted by the winning powers of World War II with a controlling authority in the Security Council for the five super powers of the day (US, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, China, and France). When these five divided into two ideological camps in the late 1940s, and as other great powers (re)appeared on the world stage (Japan, Germany, India, and European Union), the calls for a revision of UN, the key institution that facilitates cooperation in world affairs, and advance international norms, have grown. Like most geopolitical writings, discussion of super power status takes on a strongly ethnocentric character. How does one’s own country measure up to opponents and other states in the world system? As early as 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville spoke of the United States and Russia as ‘two great nations’ on a collision course as if ‘‘called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world’’ (quoted by Paul Dukes). Research by the historians

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Paul Kennedy and George Modelski, political scientists William Thompson and Joshua Goldstein, among others, has documented the cycles of power since the beginning of the modern world system around 1500 using a variety of economic, military, and geographic territorial indicators. Superpowers (at various times, including the Spanish Empire, Portugal, Britain, The Netherlands, France, Prussia/Germany, Japan, Russia/Soviet Union/ Russia, and China) have been through cycles of growth and declines, experienced periods of global competition at times of relative equality in power status, built alliances to promote or protect their positions, and promulgated ideological and cultural values to go along with their foreign activities and settlements. By Jack Levy’s calculations, over 60% of all years between 1600 and 1980 saw wars between the superpowers of the day.

Superpower Rivalries Though they share a cyclical view of superpower rivalry with regular phases of growth and decline for global contenders and accepting that transitions between peri ods of global leadership are times of uncertainty and contention, the world systems models of George Mod elski and Immanuel Wallerstein differ dramatically in the length of the cycles (50 years for Wallerstein, 100 years for Modelski), the forces driving and underlying global power ambitions (economic leadership for Wallerstein and naval–military leadership for Modelski), the process of transition from one superpower leadership to another (global military conflict for Modelski and loss of eco nomic leadership for Wallerstein) and the prospects for continued US superpower leadership in the twenty first century (strong for Modelski and bleak for Wallerstein). Joshua Goldstein in his book Long Cycles goes a long way toward integrating these (apparently) conflicting inter pretations of the last half millennium with his presen tation of detailed annual measures of economic and military status. Though there is widespread acceptance by both camps that economic and political–military leadership are strongly connected (there is only one world system, an integrated economic–political logic as argued by Christopher Chase Dunn and by Colin Flint and Peter Taylor in their textbook), major differences are obvious in the sources of evidence used to document past phases of leadership and to make predictions for the future.

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The experience of Britain and its superpower status from about 1600 to about 1945 is central to under standing the focus on the prospects for further American superpower status. The American nineteenth century geopolitical author, Alfred Thayer Mahan, argued that the best hope for a rise to global prominence for the US was to replicate the British experience. Like Britain, the US was an offshore country with advantageous physical and economic geographic characteristics favorable for the development of a dominant navy. Mahan promoted a naval strategy for the US, including the occupation and development of strategically located islands such as Hawaii, The Philippines, and in the Caribbean. The beginnings of the analysis of seapower–landpower di chotomy in world affairs are visible in Mahan’s key work, the Influence of Seapower upon History, 1660–1783 published in 1890; his legacy is continued by Modelski and Thompson in their arguments about the significance of naval power for global leadership. There are further resonances of Mahan in Halford J. Mackinder’s heartland model and later in George Kennan’s famous containment strategy that was implemented as a US policy toward the Soviet Union’s heartland location. The Cold War In the Cold War, 1948–88, the US and the Soviet Union were the only superpowers, though their contest was always highly unequal. The US bloc had about four times as many allies as the Soviet one, and the cumulative economic disparity was of a similar nature. What evened the competition somewhat was the military element after the mid 1950s when the Soviet Union developed the ability to launch nuclear missiles to all parts of the US alliance and maintained a strong presence in Eastern Europe face to face with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces. The standoff had a final phase in the introduction of middle range nuclear mis siles (up to 2500 km) by both sides into Europe in the early 1980s. In his statistical analysis of the US–Soviet relations during the Cold War, Joshua Goldstein showed that both superpowers reciprocated each other’s actions within a short time frame of up to about 2 months. In the first two decades, the US reacted consistently to Soviet actions, but in the last two Cold War decades, the Soviets responded predictably to US actions. Typical reciprocal actions were increasing support to allies, moving troops to flashpoints, signing or abrogating treaties or arms agreements, initiating a new weapons program or sig nificantly increasing expenditures, or bilateral meetings and negotiations. Measuring and plotting the level of cooperation–conflict between the two superpowers shows a deep freeze in relations in the first decade of the Cold War, a period of quick oscillation from cooperation to conflict between the mid 1950s and late 1960s, just over a

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decade of de´tente to the late 1970s, a ‘second cold war’ during late Carter and early Reagan presidencies, and an improvement after the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to the Soviet Communist leadership in 1985. The US–Soviet superpower contest was also marked by a distinctive political geography. Though the term ‘cold peace’ is sometimes used to describe their bilateral relations (through actions in supporting allies and ac tively engaging in third party wars), the superpowers were also engaged in ‘hot wars’. Jan Nijman has mapped and analyzed the changing geography of these surrogate actions and his maps clearly show a diffusion of the proxy wars from the margins of the heartland (the Soviet Union and its Eurasian neighbors) in the early years to the Third World by the mid 1970s. Early flashpoints in cluded Berlin (1948), Turkey (1950s), Southeast Asia after the withdrawal of France in the mid 1950s, Korea (1950), Iran (mid 1940s to early 1950s), and Greece (1947). By the 1960s, the Soviet Union could project its power beyond the Rimland, bordering its vast territorial extent, and Cuba (1963) became the stereotypical Cold War standoff after Soviet nuclear weapons were delivered to the island. During the long wars in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), the Soviets provided significant aid to the Viet Cong and to the North Vietnamese regime. The Reagan administration accused Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev of using the de´tente with the US to expand Soviet influence beyond the ring of containment and advocated a policy of ‘rollback’ to counter Soviet support for left wing regimes in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These included newly independent Portuguese colonies (Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and Angola), Somalia (but later Ethiopia in a reversal of earlier superpower clientelism), Syria, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and rebels in El Salvador. American support for the ‘contras’ in Nicaragua was designed to overthrow the leftist gov ernment of President Daniel Ortega, justified by argu ments about the geographic proximity of this Central American country to the US, as well as appeals to the long adherence to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, in American policy toward Latin America. The denouement to this geographic contest in the late 1980s was the strong American support to the enemies of the Soviet backed government in Afghanistan. After a decade there, the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989, and within 5 years, the Taliban took control of Kabul from their bases in the south and in Pakistan where they had received indirect US support with Pakistani government assistance. In turn, the Taliban were removed from power in 2001 by the US and a coalition of Afghan regional opposition movements also supported by Russia who feared a radical Islamist state near its southern borders. The events in Afghanistan, repeated elsewhere as rebels gained control of capitals and former government forces

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became rebels often with bases in neighboring countries, provide clear evidence that superpower involvement in local conflicts can backfire when power shifts, or regional alliances collapse. However, any salutary lessons of the dangers of regional entanglements during the Cold War competition are lost on the United States which, ac cording to Chalmers Johnson and James Carroll (in 2004) owned or rented 702 overseas bases in about 130 coun tries and has another 6000 military bases in the United States and its territories.

Hyperpower: The Endgame of Superpower or Empire by Another Name? Of all of the actual and putative superpowers of the past 500 years, none achieved the leadership over rivals or the heights of cumulative and dispensable power that the United States attained after 1945. After a half century of superpower rivalry and tit for tat military and political actions in the Cold War, the past two decades have been an era of adaptation to a ‘new world order’ in which putative American dominance has become undermined by its own actions and those of state and nonstate actors. By the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, Paul Kennedy noted that the American naval supremacy dwarfed all the other navies in the world combined. In 2007, the US was on the verge of equaling the military expenditure of ‘all’ other countries in the world combined. What really distinguished America’s period of super power leadership (or hegemony) was the cultural power that the US brought to the global scene, especially after 1945. Blending a focus on freedom and democracy with free enterprise and open markets, successive American governments differed from previous superpower leader ships in promoting a seductive mix of political, economic, and cultural norms modeled on the American experience. A rapid development in the technology of mass media (print, radio, telecommunications, television, films, and the Internet) over the past half century allowed the ‘American dream’ to be diffused globally through the actions of major corporations (Disney, TV networks, music companies, and movie companies) and brought American life and values to every corner of the globe. The combination of these multiple leads in 1941 pro voked Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, to dub 1900–2000 as the ‘American Century’. Commentators from all across the ideological spec trum have searched for historical analogies to try to ex plain the concentration of power in the US after the end of the Cold War, and to predict its continuance or de cline. Niall Ferguson, the British historian, as well as Joseph Nye, Immanuel Wallerstein, and of course, George Modelski, have all compared the US rise to

hyperpower status to that of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century. But, by almost any measure, the US concentration of power after 1989, consequent to the (temporary) disappearance of the Soviet superpower had no historical comparison. The US was no longer a superpower, one of many on the world stage, and new terms had to be employed to describe such a concen tration. A hegemon in world affairs is usually defined as a state with overwhelming dominance in military and economic power that precludes effective challenge from a state or a combination of states. From the end of the Cold War to the present, American superpower became hegemonic. Hegemony suggests both a hyperconcentra tion of power and no evident contender on the world stage. It also has an association with aggressive or ex pansionist policies that are designed to ensure the con tinued dominance of the hyperpower. For Wallerstein, however, the US hegemony ended by the early 1970s as it was challenged both on the political–military front from the Soviet Union and on the economic front by Japan, the European Union, and later China. Niall Ferguson has recently promoted the idea of the US as a reluctant empire by showing that it shares many characteristics with Britain in the nineteenth century. The key difference between the two states is that while Britain openly proclaimed its imperial status and role, including its ‘civilizing mission’ for territories in Africa and Asia, no American political leader would see im perial power as a worthy aim or imperial control as a political end. In fact, the political rhetoric of American foreign policy is wrapped up with the concepts of liberty, freedom, democracy, entrepreneurship, and enterprise, none of which figured prominently in the kind of im perial control pursued by the great European power before World War I. But Ferguson argues that imperial control did not necessarily mean a complete lack of political expression in the empire, and that US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the installation of puppet regimes bolstered by an American military presence, does not differ much from the British model. Contrast this to the statements quoted by Niall Ferguson; Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s national security adviser, declared in 1999 that the United States is the ‘‘first global power in history that is not an imperial power.’’ In 2000, then candidate George W. Bush echoed his words, ar guing, ‘‘America has never been an empire. yWe may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused.’’ Adding the component of ‘preventive war’ to its vast military reach, Johnson takes the opposing view that ‘‘Like other empires of the past century, the United States has chosen to live not prudently, in peace and prosperity, but as a massive military power athwart an angry, re sistant globe.’’ Current US leadership is still predicated on ‘hard power’ (the ability to command) and measured by

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military indicators, that in turn rely on a large and powerful economy. In a realist perspective on world af fairs, where putative enemies abound and no permanent rules control the depredations of states, only hard power can guarantee the defense of the state and the projection of power abroad. Combined with a judicious alliance strategy, large powerful states can bend smaller, weaker states to their will. In a world of competition and un certainty, only hard power matters in the realist perspective. In contrast to realism is the liberal perspective, de rived from the idealist notions of building world insti tutions to dampen competition and to uphold values and norms that are universal, such as democracy and liberty. For superpowers, and especially hegemonic states in a liberal world order, ‘soft power’ (the ability to persuade) is paramount. Joseph Nye has been advocating a soft power strategy for the US since the end of the Cold War, both as a device to reduce that country’s military spending and as a more effective long term strategy to structure American security. Key to the soft power ideal is the use of American leadership to encourage global agreements on major challenges that threaten the se curity of all – climate change, terrorism, drugs and crime, financial instability, and economic recession. Nye be lieves that traditional American ideological and political values have broad appeal and rather than instituting them via forceful means (removing a dictator and installing a pro American leader), which generates a hostile oppos ition, the US is more successful by working with like minded states to manufacture stable global institutions that enshrine US principles. The UN and its various agencies are paramount in the success of this strategy as is a change in attitude in the Washington, D.C. political establishment (and for part of the American public) that values cooperation and compromise rather than pursuit of purely American selfish interests. But as Gary Wills has noted, the American rhetoric of human idealistic achievements promulgated by the self described ‘leader of the free world’ has all too often degenerated into quite the opposite policies – especially during the Cold War when regional expediencies frequently overtook hyped up claims that supposedly supported human rights and democracy. After about two decades of overwhelming American hyperpower, it is now clear that a belated response is under way among other major powers. Observers are noticing the rise or return to global prominence of Russia, China, and the European Union. In the case of Russia, the second term of President Vladimir Putin has been marked by a reassertion of traditional Russian geopolitical interests in the territories on, and adjoining, the former Soviet Union. With a resource economy of gas and oil exports thriving in a time of high commodity prices, Russia is rebuilding the strength of its armed

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forces on a scale not seen for a quarter century. For a brief period after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, it seemed as if the geopolitical interests of Russia and the United States were coincident on the Eurasian landmass with a joint fear of Islamist radicalism eman ating from its southern rim (Afghanistan, Iran, and Ara bian peninsula). But the US invasion of Iraq showed the long standing differences in strategic goals while the presence of American forces on the territories of the former Soviet Union (Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and up to 2005 in Uzbekistan) and close political re lations with Washington of many former members of the Warsaw Pact has increased Russian worries about its encirclement by a belt of hostile states. The Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCO – founded in 1996 and incorporating Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan) has a broad range of aims from individual state security to regional stability in Central Asia (meaning a check on militant Islam) and economic cooperation. However, joint mili tary exercises in 2005 between Russia and China amid common language about the dangers of ‘hegemonism’ in world affairs have definitely added to the impression that a new ‘Great Game’ between rival superpower alliances (SCO and the US led one) is underway in Central Asia. The 1990s have seen Chinese economic growth rates averaging 10% and continued economic growth points to projections of a gross domestic product larger than America’s by 2020. This huge spurt has generated an enormous demand for energy imports and China is now engaged in signing agreements with energy exporters from Central Asia to central and southern Africa, espe cially Sudan. These agreements with regimes that have traditionally linked their economies to Europe and the United States is setting off a scramble for long term energy security through locking inflows to the huge en ergy consumers, China, Japan, the US, and the EU. Two other potential superpowers, Japan and the European Union, also deserve mention. In the 1980s, Japan’s economic prosperity and foreign area investments through massive trade and savings surpluses worried the US that this former enemy was in a position to replace the US as the world’s economic superpower. But by 1990, this fear had vanished as the Japanese economy imploded after the collapse of the ‘financial bubble’, a situation that is still not completely reversed almost two decades later. By contrast, economic growth in the European states was slow and, at times, stagnant, the so called ‘eurosclerosis’. As the political project advanced with the accession of 21 states over the next half century to the original six members of 1957, Europe’s global political weight has not been commensurate with its cumulative gigantic eco nomic weight, well in excess of the US and China. Much of this lack of presence is due to differences between the larger European states in aligning with the US (the

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United Kingdom is the most reliable ally and most of the new (2004–07) members have also positioned themselves as enthusiastic members of NATO, which they joined shortly before EU membership). Efforts to deepen the European institutional structures to advance a common foreign policy and bring highly varied national domestic policies into line have been rebuffed by the European publics. Until the ‘democratic deficit’ (the gap between elite and public interests) is resolved, the projections for Europe as a superpower are undermined.

Conclusions Any indications that the US is going to allow its super power lead to slip, at least on the military side, are easily dispelled by the latest National Security Strategy of the United States document from 2006. The central premise of this document which lays out the framework for American policy in the immediate future is that Ameri can ‘‘forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.’’ In order to accomplish this, the document states that the US military must: ‘‘a) assure our allies and friends; b) dissuade future military competition; c) deter threats against U.S. interests, allies, and friends; and d) decisively defeat any adversary if deterrence fails.’’ Clearly, this is not a statement of disengagement from world affairs and a retreat to something like ‘‘Fortress America.’’ Instead, the document is firmly focused on the potential for fur ther attacks on US soil and its citizens from international terrorists and argues strenuously for continued American military bases and involvement in all parts of the globe. Such a global vision is part of what Luiza Bialasiewicz and colleagues have called the ‘performance of security’, whereby imaginative geographies and popular geopoli tical representations of the US and its enemies are combined to produce the effects that they name. The end product is an imaginary geography that mirrors and bolsters support for the US led ‘war on terror’. One of the memorable Yogi Berra (a baseball player famous for his mangled colloquialisms) quotes encapsu lates the problem of trying to anticipate the development of superpower rivalries – ‘‘The future ain’t what it used to be’’ – suggests that the era of competition has to end because an all out military confrontation would result in destruction of all sides. The mutual assured destruction (MAD) arrangement of the Cold War lasted four decades and while preventing direct military attacks, it did not dampen proxy wars or competitions in other spheres

(economic, political, alliance building, sports, and sci ence). Thomas Barnett, as advisor to the Pentagon and popularizer of a new American geopolitics, has taken a pessimistic perspective on the global future, a dystopia filled with threats to American interests and values from much of the world’s poor periphery, an area that he calls ‘the gap’. US strategists with this perspective have to ‘mind the gap’ and be especially cognizant of the kinds of social and economic changes in these states that lead to the entrenchment of movements inimical to US interests. If this perspective is adopted wholesale, the seeds for another round of superpower rivalries with local and regional proxies is alreadyin situ. See also: Cold War; Critical Geopolitics; Empire; Geopolitics; War; World-System.

Further Reading Barnett, T. P. (2004). The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty First Century. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Bialasiewicz, L., Campbell, D., Elden, S., Graham, S., Jeffrey, A. and Williams, A. J. (2007). Performing security: The imaginative geographies of current US strategy. Political Geography 26, 405 422. Chase Dunn, C. (1989). Global Formation: Structures of the World Economy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Ferguson, N. (2003). Hegemony or empire. Foreign Affairs 82, September October, 154 161. Flint, C. and Taylor, P. J. (2007). Political Geography: World System, Nation State and Locality (5th edn.). New York: Pearson. Goldstein, J. (1991). Reciprocity in superpower relations. International Studies Quarterly 35, 195 209. Johnson, C. and Carroll, J. (2004). The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Henry Holt. Kennedy, P. (1987). The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House. Keohane, R. O. (1984). After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levy, J. S. (1987). Declining power and the preventive motivation for war. World Politics 40, 82 107. Modelski, G. (1987). Long Cycles in World Politics. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Modelski, G. and Thompson, W. (1988). Seapower in Global Politics, 1494 1993. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. National Security Council (2006). National Security Strategy of the United States 2006. Washington, DC: Office of the President of the United States. Nijman, J. (1993). The Geopolitics of Power and Conflict: Superpowers in the International System, 1945 1992. London: Belhaven Press. Nye, J. S. (2005). The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone. New York: Oxford University Press. Paul, D. (2000). The Superpowers: A Short History. London: Routledge. Wallerstein, I. (2003). The Decline of American Power: The United States in a Chaotic World. New York: New Press. Wills, G. (1999). Bully of the free world. Foreign Affairs 78, March April, 50 59.

Surrealism/Surrealist Geographies D. Pinder, Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Avant-Garde Derived from a military term for a small force sent in advance of an army, it has been used since the nineteenth century to refer to a group of artists at the forefront of developments, opposed to traditional practices and usually seeking to change not only art’s techniques and forms but also – in the case of the, surrealists, among others – its institutions and the wider world. Dreams Of fascination for surrealists for their poetic, fractured, and spontaneously associational qualities, dreams were explored by them in terms influenced by Freud as symbolic of hidden desires and fears, but more for their productive imagination in relation to reality than for their therapeutic meaning. Found Object Exerting a strange attraction or psychic charge for the discoverer, it often takes the form of an old, discarded, or seemingly useless thing chanced across at a flea market or other urban location; for the surrealists, its charge relates to the ways in which it manifests unacknowledged or repressed desires, or in social, historical terms to its outmoded status, as standing for a now superseded mode of production. Marvelous Aspired to by surrealists, it involves the eruption of wonder and revelation within the everyday and ordinary. Objective Chance An understanding of chance as a positive rather than neutral force and as determined by both ‘exterior necessity’, in the form of objective processes in the world, and also by forces of desire in relation to the interior psyche. Uncanny Refers to a feeling of dread, horror, disturbance, or strangeness generated through the copresence or intermingling of the familiar and unfamiliar; a theme central to much surrealist art and activity, it was understood by them in Freudian terms as connected to the return of materials than had been repressed, whereby feelings of the uncanny (unheimlich) may suddenly erupt within even in the most apparently familiar or homely (heimlich).

Introduction Surrealism is a revolutionary movement that emphasizes imagination, desire, dreams, eroticism, and the un conscious in its activities and efforts to change the world. It is an attempt to find new ways of living that are free

from the shackles of capitalism and bourgeois morality, and that subvert what its advocates see as the deadening influence of the Enlightenment rationalism and the dominant intellectual traditions of Western civilization. Originating as an avant garde group of artists, writers, and radicals in 1920s’ Europe, with an epicenter in Paris but with groups emerging in many parts of the world, its multiple forms have had an extensive and widely ac knowledged influence on modern culture. Yet, the term is frequently understood as a style of art or literature, with the focus falling on individuals and their works rather than on collective endeavor and practice. The word ‘surreal’ has meanwhile lost specificity through casual usage for a whole range of activities, including the most banally ‘strange’ or ‘weird’. In the process, surrealism has become a respectable part of the modern art and literary canon, and has lost much of its early shock value. It has been turned into the stuff more of museums, prestigious art collections, and reading lists than of street revolt, and has been recuperated by consumer culture, with its im ages frequently used to sell commodities rather than undermine their fetishism. In this context, it is important to stress the radical political as well as artistic intent behind surrealism. It is also necessary to underline surrealism’s collectivism and its adventurous and experimental approach that brings together practices associated with many different fields of cultural activity, such as literature, essay writing, poetry, painting, photography, film, architecture, sculpture, and performance, while at the same time seeking to go be yond their institutionalization as individualistic modes of art. As an oppositional and collective avant garde, sur realism expresses insubordination to the existing state of things, to the routinization and bureaucratization of everyday life, and to the commodification of more of the social realm. It reaches toward the possibilities that lie within the everyday, seeking to overturn those forces that prevent their realization. Inspiration is taken both from Karl Marx’s injunction to ‘transform the world’ and from Arthur Rimbaud’s call to ‘change life’; as noted by Andre´ Breton, the movement’s leading figure until his death in 1966, for the surrealists those watchwords were one. Geographical issues have been important in much surrealist activity, which has often taken cities and their spaces as a focus for imaginative investigation and ex ploration. Many surrealist texts and artistic practices as well as performances, games, and political actions engage with everyday spaces and streets, with Paris a frequently favored locale. They challenge dominant codes of space

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and time through a variety of strategies, interventions, and poetic and transgressive acts. Surrealists have also addressed spatial issues through a long overlooked yet significant engagement with architectural theory and practice. Further, running through the surrealist move ment are concerns with resisting nationalistic and im perialist geographical imaginations, and with supporting anti imperialist, anticolonial, and antifascist struggles. Despite these interests, surrealism’s influence within the discipline of geography has been largely subterranean and indirect. Influence has come in particular through intermediary and primarily French writers who have become key figures in spatial and social theory, and who were themselves influenced by or in critical dialog with surrealism. Among them are Gaston Bachelard, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, He´le`ne Cixous, Michel de Certeau, Guy Debord, Michel Fou cault, Julia Kristeva, and Henri Lefebvre. Also significant has been the so called ‘dissident surrealism’ of Georges Bataille. The importance of surrealism for these thinkers has typically been downplayed in their incorporation into human geography, however, perhaps due to the ways in which it sits uncomfortably with geography’s more ra tionalist and social scientific traditions. Explicit dis cussions within geography of surrealist ideas and activities remain rare. That said, connections and related concerns are ap parent between surrealism and certain geographical work since the 1970s that has explored a poetics of place and space, and, in so doing, strained at the limits of discip linary frameworks and conventions. Surrealism has also garnered increasing direct attention among geographers in recent years, as both a subject for research and also an inspiration for developing critical perspectives. Dis cussion of surrealist geographies has been opened up as part of a wider interrogation of the historical geographies of modernity and modernism, which has emphasized the multiple and contested nature of the twentieth century modernisms and the different geographical imaginations that inform them, and which has attended to the ways in which artists and writers investigated the modern by exploring its spatialities. As such, it has been accom panied by investigations of the geographical concerns of other modernist and avant garde groups, including the situationists. The radical activities of both historical and contemporary surrealists have further been drawn upon and discussed in relation to utopian visions of cities, to critiques of the spaces of everyday life, and to explor ations of urban lived experience that have given prom inence to issues of emotion, desire, the unconscious, and the uncanny. The next section introduces surrealism and its historical emergence before the following sections outline selected contours of surrealist geographies. They center, first, on surrealist concern with the spaces of everyday life, and with the possibilities of their

transformation; and, second, on architecture and spatial construction. Brief remarks are then offered on surrea lism’s presence or absence within the discipline of geography, and on the potential significance of surrealist geographies.

Threads of Revolt The immediate origins of surrealist movement lay in dada, an international avant garde initially based in Zu¨rich. The dadaists themselves reacted to the carnage and inhuman ities of World War I, and vigorously rejected cultural norms associated with nationalism, patriotism, militarism, capitalism, religion, and the family. Their performances, visual works, manifestoes, and other publications scorned such institutions and values, and favored spontaneity, chance, and a kind of creativity through destruction. They denigrated art in particular for its ideological role in papering over the barbarities at the heart of Western civ ilization, and turned artistic or anti artistic means, such as ‘ready mades’, spatial assemblages, cabaret performances, and linguistic pyrotechnics into weapons to shock and disrupt systems of meaning, and to serve the struggle for individual liberty. While the most overtly politicized of the dada manifestations developed in Berlin, where members eventually joined the German Communist Party, the dada group in Paris around Tristan Tzara contained a number of members who would soon break to establish the sur realist movement, among them Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, and Philippe Soupault. The term surre´alisme was adopted in homage to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and Breton announced the new movement’s presence in his first Manifesto of Sur realism of 1924. That year also saw the opening of the Bureau de recherches surre´alistes and the founding of the journal La Re´volution surre´aliste. Most attention has fo cused on the tightly organized ‘historic’ surrealist group based around Breton in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, about which an extensive literature has developed espe cially in art history and literature. Further commonly identified phases of surrealism in France are 1939–45, when the attention of members increasingly turned to issues of myth and the occult while Breton was in exile in the United States, and a number of members remained in occupied France; and 1946–69, when new members joined, staged exhibitions, and participated in political actions. Historians have often depicted the latter stages as ones of decline or empty repetition, if not dismissing them altogether, before the dissolution of the Paris group by Jean Schuster in 1969. Yet, such accounts have been challenged by those asserting the significance of postwar surrealists for radical art and politics in France, leading up to their participation in the revolts of May 1968, and for surrealism’s global diffusion in the postwar period.

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The contention of surrealism’s ‘end’ has also been dis puted, with numerous groups developing surrealist ac tivity in more recent years not only in Paris but also in other cities worldwide, currently including Chicago, Prague, London, Leeds, Madrid, Athens, San Paulo, and Santiago. Surrealists have indeed often evoked the idea of a surrealist spirit or current that surpasses the formal movement and its periodizations, and that looks not only forward but also backward to celebrated precursors that include Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Fourier, Lautre´amont, Nerval, Rimbaud, and Sade. In his first manifesto, Breton addressed themes cen tral to surrealism. Notable among them were resistance to the ‘realistic attitude’ and to positivism, and the positive embrace of dreams and the imagination. Breton asserted that the latter ‘‘alone offers me some intimation of what ‘can be’,’’ and suggested that it ‘‘is perhaps on the verge of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights’’ (1972: 5, 10). Breton’s interest in psychoanalysis and the writings of Sigmund Freud came through working as a medical orderly with shell shock patients during World War I, although his adoption of Freud’s ideas never gained the approval of the man himself, just as his reading of Marx found little favor with the self pro claimed guardians of Marxist orthodoxy within the French Communist Party. Breton defined surrealism as ‘‘psychic automatism in its pure state’’ (1972: 26), and he and his colleagues sought to approach this state through automatic writing and through dreams, which they col lected and published. They also explored other ways of loosening social and psychological constraints and ha bitual influences through cultivating trance like states, startling juxtapositions, and games of free association as well as the pursuit of convulsive beauty and amour fou or mad love, so that artistic creation became a means of liberating instincts and of challenging reason and re pression through creative play. Everyday life should be transfigured through the realization of the marvelous possibilities it contains here and now, according to the surrealists. Ordinary life pro vides the basis within which the extraordinary must be sought. To this end, surrealists questioned the separation between dream life and waking life, believing not that the first should subsume the second but that, like poetry and the everyday, they should suffuse one another in the manner of ‘communicating vessels’. In his first manifesto, Breton looked toward the potential resolution of ‘‘these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak’’ (1972: 14). The aim was therefore to deepen or plumb the real rather than to transcend it. Importance was given to sexuality and to what Freud referred to as Eros, or life force, although less as some thing that must be controlled for the maintenance of civilization as Freud averred, than in terms influenced by

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the Marquis de Sade as a drive or disruptive force that could be unleashed for radical ends. Surrealism’s commitment to revolution and to the be lief that art could serve revolutionary ends – signaled, for example, by the group changing the title of its review to Surre´alisme au service de la re´volution in 1929 – led to many attempts to forge alliances with left wing political organ izations, in particular, the French Communist Party. The surrealists’ emphasis on the unconscious, on free creativity, and on their own independence made these efforts strained, however, and Breton opposed Stalinists in the party to ally himself with Trotsky. After World War II, the surrealists in Paris severed ties with the Communist Party and denounced the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, while continuing to take positions on numerous political issues, especially those involving re sistance to imperial and colonial powers, for example, in Algeria and in Vietnam. In recent years, surrealists have been drawn to anarchists and Marxists of an unorthodox persuasion in relation to a range of protests and struggles from opposition to capitalism and to the war in Iraq, to defending the rights of migrants and sans papiers (people without legal documents).

Surrealist Urban Dreams Reconsidering the relationship between humans and the environment has long been important to surrealists. They have opposed the destructive and antagonistic stance toward nature they see as characteristic of Western ra tionalism and capitalist social relations, and have stressed the need to ‘re enchant’ the natural world and to learn from different non Western knowledge systems. Such a displacement and recentering of worldviews is suggested by the group’s map of the world, a work published in a special issue of the journal Varie´te´s on surrealism, in Brussels in 1929 (see Figure 1). In a deliberately pro vocative move that mocks norms of geographical repre sentation, the anonymous author of the map expands certain land masses enormously – notably Easter Island, Mexico, Alaska, the west coast of Canada, and Africa – while diminishing or erasing others altogether, such as the United States and much of Europe. Surrealist geog raphy in this way connects with anti imperialist and anti colonial politics, while at the same time valorizing the so called ‘exotic’ and ‘primitive’ in relation to creativity, something that is also evident from many of their own practices of collecting art works and objects. Their interest in analogical methods, metamorphoses, and al chemical transformations as part of a poetic engagement with matter further prefigures aspects of radical eco logical and geographical thinking that opposes a Car tesian separation between the material world and the mind, as well as rigid distinctions between human and

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Figure 1 The world at the time of the surrealists. Source: Varie´te´s (June 1929), pp 26 27.

nonhuman, and attends to the liveliness of material things and nature. Surrealism has also been rooted in and engaged crit ically with urban environments. Walter Benjamin re marked in his essay on the surrealists in 1929 that ‘‘the most dreamed about of their objects’’ was ‘‘the city of Paris itself ’’ (1999: 211). Arcades, cafe´s, hotels, monu ments, parks, and above all, streets played a significant role in the group’s activities, and its explorations of Paris have been influential in shaping understandings of sur realist geography and in inspiring much creative urban exploration since. Breton wrote of his passion for city streets and for wandering, describing the street as his true element. It was in the streets, he believed that one can become open to chance encounters and coincidences, to the flow of events, to signs and messages that speak of hidden desires, and the mysterious qualities of modern urban experience. It is there that the hold of habit and routinized behaviors might be loosened, the boundaries between interior and exterior interrupted, and the pos sible revealed as one enters into charged relationships with other people, places, and objects and learns to perceive reality afresh with renewed vision. Classic prose works of surrealist Paris include Breton’s Nadja and L’Amour fou (Mad Love), and Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant). Based on the author’s experiences in the city especially while walking its streets, often at night, where the practice itself becomes a poetic act comparable with other forms of creativity, the texts document both mundane and extraordinary events as they interweave accounts of places, encounters, and co incidences with inventories of objects and images, photographs, or records of what was there as well as flights of philosophical speculation. In the process they explore experience itself, identity and urban space, the

last being not simply a physical container but the me dium through which adventures and experiences unfold. Spaces are suffused with desire, at times appearing as a series of discrete sites in a personal geography of emotion and subjective experience, at other times in flux, as the city itself becomes dreamlike and fluid. Urban spaces contain a forest of signs to be de ciphered and felt by the surrealist wanderer, for whom they often spark emotional and apparently irrational as sociations or reveries. The trigger might be the juxta position of words on a street or shop sign, or a surprise encounter or a strange coincidence: these serve to release the marvelous from within the mundane, opening win dows onto worlds beyond the brute empirical. Central to the eruption of these moments of revelation and wonder is the operation of what the surrealists termed ‘objective chance’. That last phrase, taken by Breton from Friedrich Engels, emphasizes the materialist dimension of chance as a positive rather than neutral or negative force, by relating it to what Engels termed ‘exterior necessity’. In this view, it is the objective qualities of reality itself that provide the conditions for – or convulse into – what might otherwise appear as an inexplicably coincidental event, encounter, or sign. At the same time, Breton em phasizes how the event, encounter, or sign also seems to arise from the subject’s unconscious desire, to the extent that she or he appears to be impelled toward it or to somehow constitute it. The notion of objective chance thus cuts across simple divisions between an exterior objective world and an interior psychic realm, depending instead on the intersection of forces of determination related to each. Such moments of objective chance run through Breton’s ‘novel’ Nadja, including his encounters with the woman of that name that she apparently and strangely foresees. They are also evident in Breton’s

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discovery of enigmatic objects whose significance is often only discerned later, for example, the wooden slipper spoon that in Mad Love he recounts finding at the Marche´ aux Puces flea market in Paris, and that resonates both on a subjective level, representing his desire for love, and on a sociohistorical level, as an outmoded object created through peasant craft that now stands for a displaced mode of production and social formation. As repositories for objects that were old, discarded, forgotten, and outmoded, flea markets were favored surrealist haunts. So too were other urban sites that were out of the way or marginal in relation to the monu mental and spectacular city. For Breton, these sites included Les Halles, Place Dauphine, and Tour Saint Jacques in addition to less well defined ‘poles of at traction’ to which he found his feet drawn while out on strolls without necessarily knowing the reasons. The at traction was not simply physical but could come from a vague sense of expectation that something would happen there, or from the personal associations of place that, as with the meaning of dreams, might only become manifest later. Such was the case with Breton’s draw to Place Dauphine, which he came to recognize in terms of its erotic connotations. But the charged quality of places also came from their historical associations, in terms of what happened in particular locations and the roles those places played in the revolutionary and bohemian pasts of the city. As discussed by Margaret Cohen, a ghostly topography can thus be mapped of surrealist Paris, fea turing places whose pasts threaten to burst into the present during surrealist strolls. It was Benjamin who, while critical of many surrealist claims, asserted the political significance of what he called the ‘extraordinary discovery’ by Breton of the revolutionary energies that appear in the outmoded, in ‘‘the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be ex tinct.’’ Benjamin wrote that the surrealists ‘‘bring the immense forces of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in these things to the point of explosion’’ (1999: 210). His argu ment has been developed by, among others, the art historian Hal Foster who, from a psychoanalytic per spective, relates the outmoded to notions of the uncanny. The surrealists understood the latter in terms borrowed from Freud as referring to the return of materials that were previously hidden or repressed, and that have been made strange by that repression. It involves the eruption of the unfamiliar within the familiar, such as ordinary urban space or setting. Attending to the operation of the uncanny in this manner demonstrates its potential as a disruptive force as part of surrealism’s efforts ‘‘to win energies of intoxication for the revolution’’ and to spark moments of ‘‘profane illumination,’’ as Benjamin put it (1999: 215). But for Foster it also directs attention to surrealism’s ‘dark side’, which necessitates looking

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beyond the pleasure principle and the emphasis on love and liberation by surrealism’s advocates to consider the role of trauma, the compulsion to repeat, and the death drive.

Architecture, Space, and Fantasy As developed within the historic surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s, surrealist geography thus gave prominence to lived experiences, to encounters on the streets, and to the possibilities of the marvelous as well as the surge of the uncanny within ordinary urban spaces. Its utopianism centered on realizing the potential that lay within present sociospatial conditions rather than on projecting grand plans of ideal futures. The early sur realists nevertheless fantasized about how they might transform the spaces of Paris according to their desires, outlining ‘some possibilities for the irrational em bellishment of a city’ in 1933. This collective inquiry or game contested the symbolic geographies of monuments and statues in the center of the city through proposals that were often driven by feelings of disgust or hate. Breton’s contributions included detonating the Arc de Triomphe after ‘‘burying it in a mountain of manure,’’ razing the Palace of Justice and letting ‘‘the site be cov ered by a magnificent graffiti to be seen from an air plane,’’ and transforming the Ope´ra into ‘‘a fountain of perfumes’’ (1978: 95–6). Surrealism also addressed space through its relation ship with architectural theory and practice. The surrealist movement has contained few practicing architects, and on first brush its involvement with architecture seems limited. Certainly, it has been neglected within histories of modernist architecture as well as in accounts of sur realism itself. Until the recent appearance of a volume edited by Thomas Mical in 2005, the most extensive survey in English remained an issue of Architectural Design edited by Dalibor Vesely in 1978. Given surrealism’s emphasis on the fluidity of fantasy, dream, and the un conscious, this might seem understandable: how could a surrealist room, building, let alone city not prove dis appointing or even a travesty of revolutionary desire once represented and materialized in a spatial form? Much surrealist engagement with architecture has been critical and textual, involving discussions and polemics over architectural styles and traditions, especially in relation to modernism during the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, Breton, Tzara, and others attacked what they saw as the tech nocratic and rationalist approaches of modernists, such as Le Corbusier, with Tzara calling for a sheltering, com forting, and maternal ‘interuterine’ architecture that looked for inspiration toward caves and other nonrecti linear forms. Salvador Dalı´ meanwhile wrote enthusi astically of the delirious qualities of art nouveau

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architecture and its ‘terrifying and edible beauty’, al though interestingly both Tzara and Dalı´ chose to dwell in clean lined modernist interiors rather than in such spaces themselves. The surrealists celebrated a number of ‘found’ struc tures that embodied alternative values and interests. Among the most treasured were buildings by Antoni Gaudı´, praised for their dreamlike and fantastic qualities, and the Palais Ide´al that was built single handedly by the rural postman Ferdinand Cheval in the Droˆme area of southeast France, according to his own untutored vision. Spatial constructions by surrealists are more rare. They include exhibition spaces by the likes of Salvador Dalı´, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray that immersed partici pants in intense sensory experiences as well as stage sets, film sets, and, in Dalı´’s case, commercial designs for de partment store window displays (not for nothing did Breton castigate his commercial interests through the nickname ‘Avida Dollars’). But architecture’s more gen eral significance for the surrealists has been as a site in which the psyche, fantasy, dream, and space intersect and are explored. The often haunting and psychically charged nature of such investigations are apparent in the interiors depicted in texts by Leonora Carrington and collages by Max Ernst, in architectural proposals by Roberto Matta Echaurren and Frederick Keisler, and in the often fan tastical reimagining of architectural and urban spaces in the writings of Aragon, Breton, and other surrealists through to the present. Surrealism was therefore embroiled in a complex critical relationship with modernist architecture and ur banism. Surrealism can certainly be viewed as a significant counterblast to the contemporaneous modernist calls to order promoted by Le Corbusier and other modernist urbanists in early twentieth century Europe. Yet, placing surrealism back alongside those modernist dreams of order also reveals shared concerns, tensions, dialog, and en tanglements, especially around the monstrous, the magical, the outmoded, and the uncanny. As David Pinder argues, these disturb orthodox views of the rationalism and sup posedly pure spaces of modernist urbanism, highlighting desires and anxieties through which those spaces were constituted, and the ways in which they remained haunted by elements that they could never expunge. Of particular interest in this regard are the writings of Bataille, who, as surrealism’s self described ‘old enemy from within’, es tablished the dissident surrealist journal Documents, and who most vigorously assaulted categorical, hierarchical, and regulatory thinking as part of an anti architectural ‘base materialism’. He conceived of the ‘formless’ as an operation that brings things down in the world and that interrupts efforts to impose spatial and social codes. The term has since been influential in identifying subordinate tendencies within esthetic modernism as well as in more recent art practice.

Engaging Surrealist Geographies Surrealist geography continues to be of considerable interest, exerting an influence in numerous fields. As indicated above, however, surrealism has until recently received relatively scant attention within the discipline of geography. Something of its spirit, if not necessarily with accompanying references, may nevertheless be discerned in certain poetic and experimental excursions in geog raphy since the 1970s. The most direct example involves the remarkable writings of Gunnar Olsson, who, since the middle of that decade, has drawn inspiration from modernist and avant garde figures that include Breton, Aragon, and especially Duchamp. Olsson once described himself as being among ‘‘the late surrealists,’’ and his struggles with the prison house of language and his ‘‘critique of cartographic reason’’ reveal a long standing interest in surrealist writings and art works that informs his approach to the study and writing of geography. His references to surrealism in the later essays of his Birds in Egg/Eggs in Bird came as he wrestled with positivist and spatial science approaches, which he portrayed as far from innocent or neutral, arguing that they assault am biguity and imprison meaning, helping to perpetuate a ‘‘descriptive/truth functional/thingified language’’ that serves to bolster the status quo. He contrasted these ap proaches with that of the poet, quoting with approval Octavio Paz on how ‘‘words behave like capricious and autonomous beings’’ (Olsson, 1980: 10e). Noting that the poet’s aim is not to contain that capriciousness but to liberate it, not to eradicate ambiguity but to appreciate and create from it, he gave particular significance to surrealist efforts to transcend the limits of their language and by extension the limits of their world. Dwelling within the prison house of language remains unavoidable, Olsson acknowledged, but he argued that this makes all the more compelling the surrealists’ at tempts to assault that language, to create new modes of poetry and syntax through words and materials at hand, and in the process to reach toward another way of life and a fuller reality. Hence, he advocated the continuing vi tality of surrealism, including for social science, which he suggested ought to become ‘‘as surreal as the reality it pretends to portray’’ (1980: 17e). Much of his work since then has sought to chart new dialectical approaches to social science and a ‘‘heretic cartography’’ that might, if not shatter the ceiling of language, at least raise it higher. An almost continuous intellectual companion on this journey has been Duchamp, whom Olsson describes as a ‘‘kindred spirit’’ who ‘‘devoted his life to the exploration of the unknown territory of the in between, a reconciler of opposites’’ (2007: 368). Through extended readings of Duchamp’s works alongside those of other modernists, Olsson seeks to challenge norms and conventions of social scientific language and to open up other ways of

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writing and conducting geography. His texts have not been uncontroversial, with some criticizing their obscuritanism as well as their gender politics. Yet, as a form of modernist experimentation in the writing and doing of geography, they have carved a highly distinctive and influential path. Surrealism has at times also come into focus as a subject of study within human geography and has been referenced in the context of debates on geography and literature, with Brian Robinson, for example, addressing the challenge it poses to realist–humanist approaches that long held sway in geographical writings in that field. Recently, however, Jill Fenton has argued most explicitly and fully for the continuing relevance of surrealist per spectives for critical geographical studies and activism. In essays based on ethnographic research with con temporary surrealists in Paris, she discusses their ge´o graphie passionnelle and the ways in which they rework ideas and practices in the context of the changing city and associated political struggles. In the process, sur realism is revealed as a significant subject for historical and contemporary geographical research as well as a radical perspective that can inform critical approaches to geographical issues, within and beyond the discipline, for example, among those concerned more widely with spatial politics, utopianism, and imagining alternative urban futures. Any contemporary confrontation with surrealism comes in the wake of the considerable scrutiny that this movement has been subjected to over the years. Sources of critique have included other movements such as the situationists, who during the 1950s and 1960s sought to build on the constructive possibilities of the early sur realist movement, while attacking many of its positions and practices. The situationists opposed in particular the surrealists’ reliance on chance and what they saw as their reactionary slide into mysticism, magic, and the occult after World War II. Feminists have also critically con sidered the position of women and the feminine in both surrealist works and the movement itself. Many have addressed the ways in which male surrealists have ob jectified women and the female body, and have portrayed women as mysterious, intuitive, and enlightening muses, hence as holding a key to renewed perception of space and place. More positively, some have also explored the oft neglected contributions made by female surrealists who, at least in comparison to their counterparts in other twentieth century avant gardes, have been unusually numerous. Others have traced the importance of sur realism for the later experimental writing practices of French feminists during the 1970s. The theoretical and political climate within geog raphy and other social sciences and humanities in recent decades, especially in Britain and North America, has proved more receptive to some aspects of surrealism than

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others. The writings of Bataille, who has been a major influence on much post structuralist theory, and who clashed with Breton whose work was more tied to dia lectical thought and Hegel, have gained ascendancy and have helped to refigure understandings of surrealism it self. The repercussions of Bataille’s challenging work on excess, expenditure, eroticism, and transgression will continue to be felt and reflected upon in much future work in geography and related spatial studies. Yet, also demanding and beginning to receive more attention are the varied surrealist geographies associated with Breton, Aragon, and others from early twentieth century Paris through to present practitioners. Such surrealist geog raphies have significantly influenced critiques of every day life and lived experience that similarly take space seriously as part of a French tradition that includes Lefebvre, Debord, Certeau, and others. They have also informed and helped to inspire urban explorations and imaginative geographies of cities, for example, through interest in practices of walking. There they take their place in a long line of poetic urban wanderers, although their urban strolls differ markedly from the famed esthetic practices of the nineteenth century flaˆneur, being more active, engaged, and convulsive than the latter predominantly male figure; and also from the later de´rives of the situationists, who in turn were more sceptical of chance and the unconscious, and more focused on an alysis and collective political intervention. Returning to surrealism and seeking a fuller appre ciation of the complexities, diversities, and profound in fluences of this revolutionary movement has much to offer human geography. This is not only in relation to understandings of the historical geographies of modern ity, modernism, and the avant gardes, and of the devel opment of social and spatial theory, especially currents of Marxism and anarchism, but also in terms of current creative and critical thought and practice. Surrealist ex plorations of urban spaces and environments may be regarded as of particular interest at a time when some geographers and others are increasingly concerned with space as a realm of multiplicity, openness, and encounter with the unforeseen, and with investigating emotions, dreams, the magical, the uncanny, and the ghostly as intrinsic elements of what Steve Pile refers to as ‘real cities’ and the ‘phantasmagorias of city life’. They may further repay attention from those wishing to reassess the potential of utopian geographical imaginations, both past and present, for relighting the fires of revolt and for seeking paths beyond the crushing weight of the status quo. See also: Anarchism/Anarchist Geography; Avant-Garde/ Avant-Garde Geographies; Cultural Politics; Psychoanalytic Theory/Psychoanalytic Geographies; Situationism/Situationist Geography; Utopian Cities.

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Further Reading Aragon, L. (1980). Paris Peasant, Watson Taylor, S. (trans.). London: Pan Books (originally published in 1926). Benjamin, W. (1999). Surrealism: The last snapshot of the European intelligentsia. In Jennings, M., Eiland, H. and Smith, G. (eds.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927 1934, Livingstone, R. et al. (trans.), pp 207 221. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (originally published in 1929). Bonnett, A. (1992). Art, ideology and everyday space: Subversive tendencies from Dada to postmodernism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10, 69 86. Breton, A. (1960). Nadja, Howard, R. (trans.). New York: Grove Weidenfeld (originally published in 1928). Breton, A. (1972). Manifestoes of Surrealism, Seaver, R. and Lane, H. R. (trans.). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. (originally published in 1962). Breto, A (1978). What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. New York: Pathfinder. Cohen, M. (1993). Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Durozoi, G. (2002). History of the Surrealist Movement, Anderson, A. (trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fenton, J. (2004). ‘A world where action is the sister of dream’: Surrealism and anti capitalism in contemporary Paris. Antipode 36(5), 942 962. Fenton, J. (2005). Space, chance, time: Walking backwards through the hours on the left and right banks of Paris. Cultural Geographies 12, 412 428.

Fenton, J. (2006). Contemporary surrealist imaginary geographies of utopia and dystopia. In Emden, C., Keen, C. & Midgeley, D. (eds.) Imagining the City, vol. 1: The Art of Urban Living, pp 273 293. Oxford: Peter Lang. Foster, H. (1993). Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mical, T. (ed.) (2005). Surrealism and Architecture. London: Routledge. Olsson, G. (1980). Birds in Egg/Eggs in Bird. London: Pion. Olsson, G. (1991). Lines of Power/Limits of Language. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Olsson, G. (2007). Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, Press. Pile, S. (2005). Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life. London: Sage. Pinder, D. (2005). Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth Century Urbanism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pinder, D. (2006). Urban encounters: De´rives from surrealism. In Adamowicz, E. (ed.) Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers, pp 39 64. Oxford: Peter Lang. Robinson, B. (1987). The geography of a crossroads: Modernism, surrealism, and geography. In Malloy, W. E. & Simpson, P. (eds.) Geography and Literature: A Meeting of the Disciplines, pp 185 198. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Vesely, D. (ed.) (1978). Surrealism and architecture. Architectural Design 2 3.

Surveillance M. Henry, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Code Unique strings of numerals and letters generated by software programs. Disciplinary Power Techniques of governance which accustom individuals to the normalizing effects of constant examination and surveillance. Machine-Readable World Application of codes to all objects through the use of media able to be read and acted on by software. Omnioptic Networks of surveillance based on the premise of the many watching the many. Panopticon System of surveillance based on the isolation of individuals and their visibility to a central watcher. Total Institution Institutions within which the lives of individuals are completely regulated and separated from the outside world.

Introduction Our daily spaces seem to have become inexorably populated by surveillance devices which range from the cookies on our computers, closed circuit television (CCTV) in buildings and on our streets, and the pro liferation of bureaucratic forms requiring personal dis closure from our insurance companies and their ilk. These surveillance devices range in technological so phistication from the mind boggling to the banal; and range in interest from the intensively individual to the extensive, aggregate acts of populations. Expressed in metaphors such as ‘Big Brother’, the dense ecology of surveillance seems to threaten cherished notions of privacy and individuality; but equally, such devices seem to provide security and coordination as we interact with our social worlds. In this milieu, geographers have started to explore the historical and contemporary logics and practices of surveillance, and in doing so have contrib uted to understanding surveillance as consisting of con tingent, embedded practices rather than the totalitarian ‘will to power’ which informs much of the cultural im agination of surveillance. However, what is surveillance? Surveillance can be defined as the organized monitoring of the activities of actors in order to produce personal data. As such sur veillance is not practiced in isolation, but rather is linked to efforts to (re)order the conduct of actors. Surveillance

is a feature of all societies, but has been most closely associated in the work of geographers with the rise of state and capitalist, bureaucratic apparatuses. The sys tematic collection of information about births, baptisms, marriage, and deaths has had a long ecclesiastical history, but as nascent nation states coalesced in Europe during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, a synergistic rela tionship developed between states’ needs for more in formation in order to govern and states’ capacity to produce information from their subjects. The increasing collection of individual information was initially tied to more intensive forms of state policing. Indeed the use of surveillance as a tool of intensive state policing has re mained an overt feature of authoritarian and colonial regimes, as well as an implicit tactic in ostensibly liberal democracies. However, in the emergent liberal dem ocracies, states’ interest in their citizens gradually shifted from the maintenance of power implied in state policing to an interest in ensuring ‘national’ improvement and progress. Simultaneously animated by questions of con trol and improvement, contemporary states and com mercial enterprises have become reliant upon the production, collection, storage, and coordination of per sonal data for their decision making. The implications of the gradual embrace of actors within networks of governmental and corporate sur veillance are ambiguous. In seeking to understand the practice of surveillance and its ambiguities, geographers have travelled along two paths: one path which has em phasized an understanding of the technical aspects of surveillance (especially in the intersection of geographic information systems (GIS) and surveillance); and a second path which has sought a critical understanding of the logic and grammar of surveillance practice. A characteristic of the second, critical path of surveillance studies in geog raphy has been the effort to position the practice of sur veillance within the networks of spatial control associated with modernity, and in this effort geographers have tapped into a deep tradition of social science research.

Surveillance and the Social Sciences A common point of reference in understanding the connection between modernity and surveillance has been via the emergence of the new forms of industrial and administrative organization associated with modernity. The specific treatment of surveillance within the social sciences has been framed by the presuppositions of dif ferent intellectual traditions. Within Marxist inspired

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strands of research the creation of surveillance assem blages has been traditionally connected to the impera tives of capital accumulation. Marx, for instance, argued that in the capitalist factory the need to subordinate workers to their machines meant the emergence of a barracks discipline that involved the creation of a system of surveillance that divided workers into operatives and overlookers. It is the character of the conflict between these groups over the control of the workplace that has dominated Marxist inspired considerations of sur veillance. From Comte and Durkheim the practices of bureaucratic surveillance were understood as artefacts of industrial culture. Within this tradition, surveillance practices were seen to be pursued because they repre sented technical solutions to the problems of adminis tering complex, differentiated societies and territories. In extending this strand Weber highlighted the rational ization of social life as an integral feature of modernity, and argued that the spread of bureaucratic forms of ad ministration was an effect of these broader processes of rationalization, and the technical efficiency of bureau cracies vis a` vis other means of administrating large scale societies. It is this second strand which has arguably been the most influential entry point for geography’s specific interest in surveillance. Drawing on Weber, bureaucratic administration assumes a certain stance toward ration ality. It bases decision making on the collection, storage, and distribution of knowledge, and it frames the exercise of decision making within a disciplinary matrix charac terized by hierarchical authority and an adherence to rule governed conduct. The effect of this mixture of knowledge and discipline has been to create an ad ministrative logic (both state and capitalist) which in creasingly seeks to obtain finer grained levels of calculability through the collection of individual infor mation. These themes of rationality, administration, and calculation find deep echoes in Foucault’s work on dis ciplinary power, and it has been this work which has provided the immediate frame for geographers’ critical understanding of surveillance. Foucault’s attraction for geographers (particularly his work in Discipline and Punish) has been the resolutely spatial way in which he framed questions of surveillance.

Panoptic Visions According to Foucault, disciplinary power revolves around the accumulation of information about individuals, the use of that information to govern the conduct of in dividuals, and the acceptance of that personalized governance by individuals. In governing individuals, dis ciplinary power transforms space from a medium of activity into a calculative technology in its own right. To

illustrate the spatiality of disciplinary power Foucault drew on Jeremy Bentham’s (1748–1832) model for a panopticon as the archetypical expression of a surveillance technology. Designed around a ring of cells open to a centralized viewing point, the panopticon simultaneously ensured the total visibility of its inmates and the unknowability of the surveillance enacted over them. In the uncertainty between visibility and unknowability, the panopticon was intended to inculcate a ceaseless self discipline amongst its inmates as they refashioned them selves according to the moral norms transmitted via punishment and reward from the unknown judge. The figure of the panopticon has been deeply in fluential as geographers have sought to uncover and understand the power relations embedded in the archi tecture and operation of institutional spaces such as pris ons, schools, and factories. However, geographers have qualified their understanding of the intersection of sur veillance and panoptic logics. This has involved a shift in the debate away from regarding the panopticon as an actual surveillance technology. One effect of this shift from the literal to the metaphorical panoption has been the development of more nuanced understandings of the spatiality of actually existing surveillance practices. A feature of which has been a movement in attention away from total institutions and their sequestered inhabitants toward an attempt to reveal the pervasive embedding of surveillance into the daily routines of ‘normal’ individuals. While the development of increasingly intensive sur veillance practices has been closely linked to the emer gence of European modernity, it has been persuasively argued that it is in Europe’s colonial regimes (both his torically and in neocolonial regimes) that surveillance practices have been most thoroughly developed and ex tended into the daily lives of colonial subjects. Here geographers have revealed the extensive surveillant assemblages that linked together the minute ordering of individual spaces with the articulation of a colonial power aligned along fundamentally uneven axes of race, class, and gender, and designed to maintain these relationships. In these myriad colonial spaces, geographers have shown that the practice of surveillance differed markedly from the enclosed spaces described by Foucault. In particular the mobility of colonial populations (especially indigenous peoples, but not confined to them) resulted in the devel opment of surveillance techniques centered upon the creation of spaces of temporary immobility within which the rituals of identification were a necessary adjunct to the movement of individuals. In tracing the use of spatial controls embedded in places such as native reserves, the point has been demonstrated that the order created by surveillance and colonial bureaucracies was not simply a technical, neutral abstraction, but rather was intimately shaped by logics of ordering which were irreducibly framed by racism and economic exploitation.

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CCTV has been often cited as an example of the creeping pervasiveness of panoptic logics and disciplin ary power into the spaces of everyday life. Here, urban geographers in particular have traced the explosive rise in the use of these electronic technologies as tools of urban ordering. Notwithstanding the disquiet of geog raphers, CCTV systems are now a ubiquitous, indeed banal, feature of urban public places, private workplaces, shops, and increasingly rural spaces. In understanding the implications of CCTV on public spaces, geographers have argued that CCTV itself is only one manifestation of broader processes of (re)ordering. In particular the deployment of CCTV systems has occurred in contexts marked by concerns over the existence of city spaces (especially inner city spaces) as economic spaces. In promising improved security CCTV has been touted as a necessary adjunct to the economic revitalization of urban spaces. However, questions over the value and fairness of CCTV systems have been subsumed under the as sumption of effectiveness supported by the widespread publicity given to CCTV’s forensic successes. Despite such success, the research increasingly indicates there are significant questions to be asked regarding the uneven ness of CCTV surveillance, and in particular the judg ments made by CCTV controllers as they mobilize agents of ordering such as the police and security guards in response to the images on their TV screens. The surveillance of the spatially mobile, which has been a feature of colonial surveillance regimes and CCTV mediated urban landscapes is continually marked by the slippage between a will to watch and the practical ability to watch. In bridging this gap geographers have pointed to the deployment of surveillance techniques beyond those which rely on the direct visibility of indi viduals. It is not that an intensive concern with indi viduals has been eliminated, but that the means of addressing their visuality has been linked with an ex tensive concern with populations. Cartography and stat istics have provided the paradigmatic technologies in the production of these broader visions. Geographers have become particularly sensitive to cartography’s entangle ment with surveillance and power (especially in colonial contexts), and increasingly more sensitive to the use of statistics as a means of surveillance. In particular, con temporary surveillance practices which draw on stat istical tools have been amplified by the addition of actuarial logics to the classic techniques of survey and census. Actuarial logics draw on the vast databases of information collected by state and nonstate agencies to predict the actions of individuals, where those actions remain opaque to forms of direct surveillance. In the use of actuarial logics we can discern a deeper shift in sur veillance practices from the visuality of certainty in which the immediate role of surveillance is to categor ically link individuals to spaces and actions; toward a

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visuality of risk in which individuals, spaces, and actions are linked together in networks of possibility framed by the management of risk. In tracing surveillance practices geographers have shown that literal accounts of the panopticon have been flawed in their failure to appreciate the limits imposed on surveillance practice by issues such as scale and techno logical capacity. For example, as the scale of the space and population to be surveilled increases so do the difficulties in ensuring the total visibility of panoptic logic. Indeed, even at the architectural scale envisioned in Bentham’s panopticon, and actually practiced in total institutions such as prisons, the logic of total visibility has provided to be an aspiration rather than a reality. Moreover, Foucault’s account of the panopticon was predicated upon the spatial enclosure (and indeed isolation) of individuals. As indi cated in the growing use of CCTV, and in colonial sur veillance regimes, most individuals do not lead lives marked by confinement: rather the lives of these indi viduals are characterized by degrees of mobility which in turn creates moments of anonymity. It is a qualified ano nymity which marks the experience of surveillance for most people, and under these conditions the metaphor of the panopticon as used by geographers has become problematized because of the image it conjures up of a centralized, omniscient gaze. Rather than being central ized in tall watchtowers or vast computer databases the information collected by contemporary surveillance sys tems is generally stored in small, decentralized reposi tories, and used not by a central authority (Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’) but rather by small (relatively), dispersed gov ernmental systems. Thus, in contrast to the simple image of the prisoner subjected to the intensive gaze of the un seen jailer, the experience of ‘normal’ individuals is of an extensive embrace with myriad surveillance systems each of which has its own calculative rationalities and desire to order. The result is both a fragmented visibility as sembled from a wide, and often disparate, number of different surveillance systems, and an equally fragmented landscape of control enacted over individuals. In tracing this fragmentation, geographers’ understandings of the limitations of surveillance practice have provided a prophylactic against some of the dystopian fears associated with the growth of surveillance technologies.

Omnioptic Visions Notwithstanding the recognition of the fragmentation of actuality existing surveillance, panoptic inspired under standings of surveillance still rely at some level on a categorical, hierarchical distinction between watcher and watched. A further strand of surveillance studies in geography has counterpointed a panoptic distinction between watcher and watched with a sense of the

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omnioptic character of much surveillance. Rather than being based on the logic of the one viewing the many, omnioptic surveillance is based on the many viewing the many. Perhaps the paradigmatic articulation of such omnioptic logic comes from Jane Jacobs’ seminal The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Here Jacobs argues that safe city streets are places that are marked by the presence of people and a pervasive surveillance en gendered by the presence of everyday ‘eyes on the street’. Work in this vein has pointed to the enactment of sur veillance through dense webs of demotic sociability, ra ther than through the imposition of technoarchitectural programs. Geographers have recognized that these omnioptic logics are deeply embedded in governmental spaces. In part this recognition has dovetailed with an under standing of the link between power and vision found in institutions of enclosure such as prisons, asylums, and factories. Alongside these institutions of enclosure geographers have paid attention to the emergence of public institutions centered upon ensuring both the visibility of individuals and the world. Exemplified in institutions such as the museum, the library, art gallery, gym, and zoo, a doubled gaze has been argued to operate which positions both objects and individuals in a visual relationship. On the one hand objects are systematically, but selectively, framed for the viewer. In viewing framed objects, the individual patron is placing it under sur veillance. Conversely, on the other hand the act of viewing in such institutions is in itself a public per formance in which the conduct of the viewing patron is simultaneously framed by the gaze of fellow patrons. In this doubled gaze in which individuals are simultaneously the object of surveillance and a surveilling subject there can be seen operating omnioptic logics of dispersed, demotic surveillance. Such omnioptic visions are not confined to public institutions but can be increasingly discerned in the ex plosion of public archives of images, videos, and dis cussion in blogs and on websites such as ‘YouTube’. Such collections have been enabled by the proliferation of the same digital technologies that have become synonymous with contemporary panoptic visions. Traced back to the emblematic images of the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in early 1991, the countersurveillance enacted through such technologies has been argued to provide a check on the abuse of bureaucratic and media power, and increasingly a means of spreading a popular calculative matrix over the mundane services and products which individuals and groups use. It is an irony that notwith standing the dystopian imagery which accompanies sur veillance in the cultural imaginations of many people and the fact that whilst we have all become the targets of surveillance, many of us have also become enthusiastic agents of surveillance.

Automatic Surveillance Whilst surveillance has been characterized by fragmen tation and limitation, the ongoing story is of the increasing connection of different surveillance networks. This has been made possible through the electronic mediation of contemporary life in which individuals’ activities in creasingly require the use of electronic credentials, and the consequent storage of the electronic traces that are generated through transactions and encounters. Geog raphers have recently started to examine the ways in which the intricate spaces of social life have become subject to an automatic surveillance conducted through the intersection of individuals and a machine readable world. Automatic surveillance has been enabled through the creation of a dense ecology of codes – serial numbers, barcodes, id numbers, tracking numbers, and passwords – which are embedded in the objects we use, and which are required for them to be used. These codes do not simply enable a finer grained appreciation of the movement and use of specific objects, but have a profound, but largely hidden ordering role in shaping the spatiality of social life. The embeddedness of codes in the technological in frastructure of daily life is linked to an enduring concern with classification and sorting. Nonetheless the capture and collation of individual information has shifted at tention from the enactment of a direct gaze upon indi viduals towards the construction of evermore elaborate classification schemes in which our informational sha dows perform as our proxies in complex simulations of social relations. Two processes can be seen amplifying the shift toward automatic surveillance. First, following September 11 (2001), and the subsequent (and potentially permanent) ‘war on terror’ there has been a rearmouring of travel spaces such as airports and train stations through the use of surveillance measures such as biometric passports, CCTV with facial recognition, and extended electronic eavesdropping of communications. Second, increasingly intersecting with the securitization of sur veillance has been the commercialization of surveillance. In particular the rise of geodemographics, and the ability to both store and combine the consumption patterns of individuals recorded in myriad electronic transactions has enabled the production of a sheath of commercial opportunities (or risk) around individuals. In both these cases, individuals are increasingly enmeshed in a matrix of calculative possibilities constructed from the re combination of multiple sources of information. The power of such technologies is their ability to be used to sift and sort individuals in increasingly finer ways and to amplify the putative precision of management systems which attempt to expedite the flows of those lives and activities calculated to be riskless (in both a security and a commercial sense), and which aim to simultaneously hinder the flows of the risky.

Surveillance

Geographers have highlighted the sorting effects of the banal technologies which shadow our movements through space. At one level the use of these machine readable codes to monitor and sort objects and individuals ever more finely is simply a quantitative extension of those individualizing processes which have proliferated as a consequence of the state’s interest in taxing individuals, mobilizing armies, and securing populations. At another level the practice of automatic surveillance suggests a qualitative change in the nature of judgment away from humans and toward nonhuman actors. In the codes and the centeres of calculation buried in lines of software, qualitatively different modalities of surveillance emerge in which individuals are only ever partially aware of the extent of their machine generated visuality, and the automatic decision making algorithms which are con stantly adjusting access to services and spaces.

Toward a Surveillance Assemblage Foucault indicated that his understanding of power was productive in the sense that power not only constrained, but that it also enabled new subjects and spaces to be created. Geographers’ accounts of surveillance have ten ded to focus on the former rather than the latter. However, we have increasingly come to view the practice of sur veillance as framed by the tension between control and freedom. Thus, on the one hand surveillance system render us and our actions visible and consequently amenable to the calculative grids of governments and businesses; whilst on the other hand those self same sys tems enable us the convenience of electronic banking or access to social welfare benefits. Yet, in identifying the ambiguity of surveillance practices we need to be con stantly mindful that the balance between control and freedom is both contingent and uneven. Thus, whilst surveillance can be enabling, it is not enabling for all. Whilst omnioptic surveillance can act as a check on the unrestrained power of governmental agents, the automatic, mundane surveillance of everyday life goes on invisibly enabling a subtle grid of possibilities to envelope and shape our life experiences. And unfortunately for some, the experience of surveillance is both direct and brutal. In this world of multiple lines of surveillance, the traditional moments of hierarchical, architectural obser vation have been supplemented, and in many cases supplanted, by extensive networks of both omnioptic and automatic surveillance. Whilst older traditions of sur veillance were enacted upon the suspected object, the exercise of automatic surveillance positions every indi vidual, object, and space as potentially risky. No longer is surveillance enacted solely over society’s outsiders, ra ther we are all suspects, if not for past events, then for present and future events. Surveillance conducted in this

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latter vein disappears into the very rhythm and fabric of life. Its practice, distinctions, and decisions have become both more dispersed and more connected, and both more intimate and more extensive. The importance of space has not lessened in this changing surveillance environ ment, but rather the questions have shifted from those of enclosure to those of control, permeable access, and the calculation of risk. See also: Crime/Fear of Crime; Defensible Space; Foucauldianism; Gated Communities/Privatopias; Law and Law Enforcement; Public Space; Public Spaces, Urban; Regeneration to Renaissance; Visuality.

Further Reading Adey, P. (2004). Surveillance at the airport: Surveilling mobility/mobilising surveillance. Environment and Planning A 36, 1365 1380. Crush, J. (1994). Scripting the compound: Power and space in the South African mining industry. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12, 301 324. Curry, M. (1998). Digital places: Living with geographic information technologies. London: Routledge. Dandeker, C. (1990). Surveillance, power and modernity: Bureaucracy and discipline from 1700 to the present day. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dodge, M. and Kitchin, R. (2005). Codes of life: Identification codes and the machine readable world. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23, 851 881. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Penguin Books. Graham, S. (1998). Spaces of surveillant simulation: New technologies, digital representations, and material geographies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16, 483 504. Graham, S. and Wood, D. (2003). Digitizing surveillance: Categorization, space, inequality. Critical Social Policy 23, 227 248. Haggerty, K. and Ericson, R. (2000). The surveillant assemblage. British Journal of Sociology 51, 605 622. Hannah, M. (1997). Imperfect panopticism: Envisioning the construction of normal lives. In Benko, G. & Strohmayer, U. (eds.) Space and social theory: Interpreting modernity and postmodernity, pp 344 359. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Hannah, M. (1997). Space and the structuring of disciplinary power: An interpretive review. Geografiska Annaler 79B, 171 180. Lyon, D. (1994). The electronic eye: The rise of surveillance society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marx, G. (2002). What’s new about the ‘new surveillance’? Classifying for change and continuity. Surveillance & Society 1, 9 29. Norris, C. and Armstrong, G. (1999). The maximum surveillance society: The rise of CCTV. Oxford: Berg. Staples, W. (2000). Everyday surveillance: Vigilance and visibility in postmodern life. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Relevant Websites http://www.aclu.org American Civil Liberties Union. http://www.liberty human rights.org.uk Liberty Human Rights. http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/ Roger Clarke. http://www.statewatch.org Statewatch. http://www.surveillance and society.org Surveillance and Society.

Surveying U. F. Paleo, University of Extremadura, Caceres, Spain & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Control Network A set of well-spaced and interconnected points with very accurately known horizontal and vertical positions covering a large area. Coordinate Value indicating the spatial position of an object or a point located in the Earth surface in a two- or three-dimensional space. High-Definition Surveying Surveying completed with a laser scanner providing a cloud of points with coordinates of the target area. Theodolite Instrument used to measure accurate horizontal and vertical angles when aiming at a certain distant point, relative to the position of measurement. Triangulation Calculation of coordinates of points in a triangle using angle measurements, distances, and trigonometric functions.

measure the length of an arc of 11 of a meridian and determine the roundness of the Earth. Another major surveying endeavor was the Great Trigonometric Survey of India. The survey began on 10 April 1802 with the measurement of a baseline near Chennai and a second baseline measured near Bangalore in 1804. Colonel William Lambton, in charge of the operations as the superintendent of the survey until his death in 1823, and succeeded by George Everest, proceeded firstly south ward to Cape Comorin and then northward with the triangulation survey across the whole Indian sub continent. The survey was completed in 1866 although its application as a support to large scale surveys was lim ited due to its prolonged duration. The most symbolic achievement was the measurement by Radhanath Sikdar of the elevation of Peak XV in the Himalayas, later re named Mount Everest, and its identification as the world’s highest peak in 1852.

History

Methods

Surveying has been a fundamental technique since the beginning of recorded history for purposes of measure ment and division of the land into plots, to record land ownership, ‘and facilitate taxation, using basic geo metrical calculations’. Maps were important for the re quirements of military operations, with a need for a good topographic coverage. The civilian maps lacked the detail required for moving troops, the construction of road and railroad networks connecting fortifications or planning campaigns, so that military pioneered the works in many geographical areas. The exploration of newly discovered lands by Euro pean countries and emerging states led to an effort of ensuring territorial domination, expansion, and consoli dation of national or continental borders. The search for natural resources and further claim to ensure exploitation was the motive for large scale efforts to survey, describe, and map large territories in Africa, Southern Asia, Aus tralia, Russia, and North America in the nineteenth century, notably impulsing the scientific and technolo gical advance of the discipline. Railroad development, driven by the need to open land trading routes, required the support of route surveying in construction. Several paired scientific efforts were conducted to accurately measure the shape and dimensions of the Earth. In 1735, the French Academie Royal des Sciences commissioned two scientific expeditions to the equator – the Spanish–French Geodesic Mission – and Lapland to

Various approaches may be adopted according to the data type to be collected, the accuracy to be reached, and the consideration of the true spherical shape of the Earth. Geodetic surveys cover large areas of the Earth’s surface with measurements over long distances, where curvature is significant and taken into account to reach a high accuracy. The objective is to locate highly accurate points on the terrain and establish triangulation networks of control points, used to support further plane and photogrammetric surveys. However, the most commonly practiced method is plane survey, a local data collection covering much smaller areas, so that the curvature of the Earth’s surface can be ignored and considered a flat plane, without compromising the accuracy of the positions obtained. Surveys which only measure the horizontal position of points and features, in order to establish its geographical location, are identified as horizontal surveys, obtaining just coordinate pairs. While those determining the ele vation relative to a reference surface, or the difference in heights between vertical positions, are termed ‘vertical surveys’. The most common reference surface used is the mean sea level at certain coastal locations, commonly indicated in topographic maps. However the most com mon occurrence is the combined measurement of both positions. Echo sounding is the method used in hydrography to survey the bottom of water masses and courses. An

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application of active sonar is that it sends acoustic pulses from the surface down to the floor and then records the return signal. The distance to the bottom is calculated as a function of the time for the signal to travel from the instant of transmission to the pulse echo reception. Additionally, the changes in the shape of the reflected wave help to characterize the properties of the material and texture type of the bed.

Instruments A range of instruments have been utilized in surveying history, succeeding each other in the search for a higher accuracy and efficiency. Distances were determined with chains and flat steel tapes of a known length, but they introduced substantial error in measurement until they have given way to the electronic distance measuring (EDM) device. The EDM measures distance by sending an infrared light beam to the target – commonly a reflecting prism – which is re flected back to the instrument and calculating the time invested by the light beam to travel. The basic instrument for measuring horizontal angles is the surveying compass, but commonly both vertical and horizontal angles are measured using the same in strument. The alidade, dumpy level, transit and, finally, the theodolite came to replace all the other telescopic devices. The introduction of the telescope in instru mentation allowed to precisely locate the target points at great distances. The theodolite has been the most used instrument for measuring horizontal and vertical angles since, at least, the sixteenth century when it was first described. It consists of a telescope, mounted on a tripod that rotates 3601 around a vertical axis and vertically around a horizontal axis, which are perpendicular. With level control, the set of graduated circles allows us to read the two rotation angles when aiming at a certain position, relative to a fixed horizontal position and the horizontal plane when pointing to the surveyed target. In the electronic theodolite, readout is done by electronic means assuring a higher accuracy, and data recording brings the capability of digitally storing large volumes of data. The integration of an electronic theodolite, a dis tance measuring device and processing capability in a single instrument led to the total station. Global Positioning System (GPS) surveying has not only introduced a new technology but also specific techniques. ‘GPS is a radio based real time navigation and positioning system with a global coverage which allows to know the exact position of a point on the Earth’s surface in almost any meteorological condition. The geostationary satellites of the system emit a con tinuous signal with information on the exact time it has been sent out, that allows a receiver to calculate the distance to each satellite by estimating the time invested

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to arrive. When at least three satellites of the constel lation are simultaneously visible the receiver calculates, by triangulation, its local position in geodesic coordinates (x, y, and z) in the WGS84 Geodetic datum. The distance to a fourth satellite facilitates to calculate the height or vertical position of the point’. Three dimensional (3D) measurements can be completed at any accessible point without visibility limitations, and a high accuracy can be achieved with differential GPS. The conventional static mode data capture is enhanced with the kinematic measurement using a moving receiver, and when data are transmitted and promptly processed a real time kine matic (RTK) GPS surveying is feasible. The application of light detection and ranging (LIDAR) to terrestrial laser scanning has initiated ‘a new phase’ of the field, high definition surveying (HDS), by using laser scanner technology or HDS scanner. This conflating technology between the fields of photogram metry and surveying facilitates automatic data capturing and the generation of large data sets of 3D position co ordinates in the form of a dense point cloud. The in strument scans the target area with a narrow beam of pulsed laser in a short time producing a detailed physical model of reality, cutting down the need of revisits and making it appropriate for remote or inaccessible areas. The point density allows an accurate and precise de scription of features which, combined with surface characteristics of objects obtained from the strength of the laser return signal, renders a photorealistic image using grayscale or hue based color maps. In hydrographic surveying, the sidescan or side looking, sonar system is used as an underwater imaging system. It emits narrow fan shaped pulses perpendicular to the path of the survey vessel and continuously records the strength of the return signal. The multibeam sonar system adopts the same technology but focuses on measuring the time for the signal to travel, in order to produce data about depths instead of just images.

Techniques Triangulation is a type of survey which starts at a baseline joining two positions with a known distance and grows by adding sides to form a triangle, measuring the angles formed – always exceeding 201 – and shaping a network of connected triangles whose sides have ‘calculated’ dis tances. Triangulation may adopt various patterns in the search for a higher coverage or accuracy: a single chain of triangles, a chain of quadrilaterals, or a central point ar rangement. The mode of operation in ‘trilateration’ is the calculation of angles from the measured lengths of the triangle sides instead of determining them directly. A traverse survey is formed by a series of concaten ated lines between points whose bearing and distances are measured. This configuration is optimal to adapt to

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terrain and obstacles. The traverse may reach the de parture point or remain open. The open traverse starts at a point of known position and ends at a point whose relative position is measured, so that it is functional to survey routes, such as roads or water courses. The closed traverse starts and ends at the same known point, a procedure which is applicable to polygons. Vertical surveys determine the vertical position of points using differential and trigonometric leveling techniques. Through differential leveling elevation is determined as a difference between heights, and in tri gonometric leveling that is estimated as a function of vertical angles and horizontal distances. According to the coordinate system used, there are two modes of positioning – relative and absolute. Relative or differential positioning is a mode of indicating the position of a point with respect to another, taken as the origin of a local coordinate system. In the second mode, the position of a point is referred to a universal coordinate system with a distinctive origin such as the geocenter in the geocentric coordinate system. In GPS surveying, the latter mode is generally common while in terrestrial surveying the for mer is more frequently used, assigning coordinates of new stations to an arbitrarily origin station.

Applications The different applications entail specific methods and techniques. Topographic surveying requires both hori zontal and vertical control to determine the location and elevation of selected features of both the natural and built environment, as well as terrain elevation. The objective is to obtain the data needed for producing detailed and accurate topographic maps showing contour lines, ele vation points, cultural, and natural features, which are true to scale. Control surveying, also known as geodetic or trigo nometrical surveying, deals with the establishment of a series of highly accurate horizontal and vertical control points, or stations, according to specifications and standards, using a defined datum. The points are solidly fixed to the ground and provide a network of permanent positions used to reference further survey measurements. The elaboration of nautical charts is the result of hydrographic surveying, which precisely maps the depths of water bodies in coastal sea areas, lakes, reservoirs, and rivers. It is required for the purposes of safe surface navigation and support of coastal engineering works or monitoring dynamic processes. Cadastral surveying is the set of operations leading to the compilation or updating of a legal cadastre, a register

of the ownership of land parcels. Land and boundary surveys, closely related, are used for property or real state purposes and provide a description of the land parcel, and data to prepare plots detailing the boundary lines and calculate dimensions and area. Surveying applied to construction, engineering, and mining is an application whose goal is the data collection to precisely represent the site to facilitate the structure design. Subsequent phases of the survey include placing the design on the ground, monitor and register the ad justment of the work to the original plans. See also: Landscape.

Further Reading Anderson, J. M. and Mikhail, E. M. (1998). Surveying: Theory and Practice (7th edn.). Boston: McGraw Hill. Bannister, A., Raymond, S. and Baker, R. (1998). Surveying (7th edn.). Harlow: Longman. Danson, E. (2001). Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Edney, M. (1997). Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765 1843. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Irvine, W. H. (1995). Surveying for Construction (4th edn.). London: McGraw Hill. Johnson, A. (2004). Plane and Geodetic Surveying. The Management of Control Networks. London: Spon. Kavanagh, B. F. (2005). Surveying: Principles and Applications (7th edn.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Keay, J. (2000). The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named. New York: Harper and Collins. McCormac, J. C. (2004). Surveying (5th edn.). New York: John Wiley and Sons. Moffit, F. H. and Bossler, J. D. (1998). Surveying (10th edn.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. van Sickle, J. (2001). GPS for Land Surveyors (2nd edn.). New York: Taylor and Francis. Schofield, W. and Breach, M. (2007). Engineering Surveying (6th edn.). Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann. Uren, J. and Price, W. F. (2005). Surveying for Engineers (4th edn.). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Whyte, W. S. and Paul, R. E. (1997). Basic Surveying. Oxford: Laxtons. Wolf, P. R. and Ghilani, C. D. (2005). Elementary Surveying: An Introduction to Geomatics (11th edn.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Relevant Websites http://www.fig.net International Federation of Surveyors. http://www.gmat.unsw.edu.au Principles and Practice of GPS Surveying. http://americanhistory.si.edu Smithsonian National Museum of American History. http://www.surveyreview.org Survey Review Journal. http://www.fig.net The Meridian Arc Measurement in the Equator.

Sustainability T. Marsden, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction: Origins Recent decades have witnessed a significant shift in social and geographical thought as various disciplines in the social sciences have attempted to incorporate eco logical awareness, actions, and vulnerability into their theories and paradigms. The steady recognition in the second half of the twentieth century that the modern industrialization and urbanization process – unleashed first in the North and then in the South – was creating increasing environmental vulnerability; and that it was humans who were both the cause and a significant consequence of this, created a fertile intellectual seed bed on which notions and debates about ‘sustainability’ were to be built. Human geography, with its long tradition of linking the natural and cultural landscape to human settlement and activity, was at the forefront of tracing the growing ‘metabolic rift’, which was being witnessed between seemingly unstoppable economic processes and their environmental problems. This had first been recognized as early as the mid nineteenth century as artificial fer tilizers were introduced to ‘solve’ the problems and needs of increasing agricultural output for a growing industrial and urban population, within the intensive agricultural systems of North America and Europe. It was then re inforced in the post war period of the twentieth century as the state induced ‘intensive food regime’ became more dominant and associated with the ecological effects of pesticides and herbicides on local human and natural ecologies; but it quickly spread to an array of industrial and consumption processes as the effects of pollution, contamination, soil depletion, and water quality were first defined and then measured. From the 1960s onward there were many conferences and debates concerning the impending ‘environmental crisis’. This was not just associated with the ‘limits to growth’ assumptions concerning the gradual burning up of finite fossil fuels. Neither was it simply about society’s avaricious appetite for consuming finite natural re sources, like coal, oil, and a host of other minerals. Ra ther, it began to question whether the now rapid and intensive processes of economic and social development themselves were indeed severely debilitating the ca pacity of natural ecologies and resource structures to renew themselves at all. Hence sustainability, and its more policy related and normative variant – sustainable development – began to focus on the vulnerability and potentially irreversible denudation of both nonrenewable

and formerly renewable (e.g., fish stocks, animal breeds, forests, soils, and biodiversity) resources. At the same time sustainability became a conceptual question – sustainability? – in that it raised both ques tions about the historical development of capitalism as a severe ‘metabolic rift’ between nature and society on the one hand; and more pressingly it raised questions of ‘intergenerational equity’ – that is, the ability or other wise to pass on to future generations the renewable capabilities of ecologies, on the other. Marx, following Liebig, a century before, had recognized the ‘rift’ that was occurring as a result of the onset of capitalist indus trialization, urbanization, and intensive agriculture, with the removal of soil fertility aided by the growing geog raphies of trade and the removal of human labor through technologies. Now, however, for the first time, a wider scientific and civil movement was developing around a broader set of concerns with regard to the maintenance of the socioecological metabolism after a century of pro gress in the capitalist modernization project. At that time the wider macro global concerns about climate change and global heating had yet to be fully recognized. Nevertheless, a growing number of com mentators began to consider the implications that pre sent generations were, indeed, playing a sort of ‘Russian roulette’ with the natural and ecological heritage. Human geographers, having conveniently demarcated a sort of intradisciplinary binary divide between ‘human’ and ‘physical’ geography as the twentieth century had progressed, now, by the 1980s, were recognizing the need to reassemble and to integrate their discipline once more around the growing ‘environmental agenda’. A major problem for geography in the latter stages of the twentieth century was to maintain and reactivate their longstanding interest in Staffwechsel, or the social–eco logical metabolism, and to do so with much more ur gency as the other social sciences, such as ecological economics and environmental sociology began to de velop their interest in this from a much lower intel lectual base.

Finding Sustainability The 1980s and 1990s were a formative time for this in tellectual ferment. They were a period when three key external features to the discipline began to embed themselves in public and policy concern. First, it was a time when the environmental problems of intensive

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agriculture in the advanced world at least began to be measured and assessed. It was clear that there was not simply one ‘metabolic rift’ now occurring but many. Often adopting the more authoritative vocabularies of the economists, it was clear that conventional agricultural production was creating a cocktail of largely un controllable environmental ‘externalities’. These, as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Develop ment (OECD) finally recognized in 1986, included: eu trophication of water courses, landscape and biodiversity loss, water and ground pollution, air pollution, animal and plant diseases, and human health concerns (not least bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)). Second, especially after Chernobyl, Bhopal, and Three Mile Island, as well as a host of smaller oil spills and pollution incidents, it was becoming clear that des pite the growth of tertiary sector industries and new pollution saving ‘clean’ technologies, the global as well as regional environmental risks of pollution of advanced industrial development were significant, and likely to affect the more economically and socially vulnerable in society. Third, and indeed emanating from these, was the growing recognition of carbon emissions and its effects on global climate change. All three of these strands created a major intellectual and research agenda for human geography, and very much continue to do so. They have led to large inter disciplinary research programs in which human geog raphers are playing a central role. Moreover, they have led to the development and reinvigoration of significant subfields, such as political and cultural ecology; rural studies; urban and political ecology; and environmental, economic, and cultural geography. Further, they have led to significant paradigmatic contestation within the dis cipline, for instance, between political ecology and economy and postmodernity, or between structuralism and behaviorism; productionism and consumerism.

Governing Sustainability If the onset of sustainability debates became a ‘call to arms’ for scholars it also, by the late 1980s, became a major element in government and policy debates. The World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987, and especially Bruntlands’ much quoted definition of sustainable development as ‘development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’, immediately broadened, and some may say diluted, the sustainability problematic by ushering in notions of de velopment, intergenerational equity, the precautionary principle, and a host of social and economic (as well as environmental) concerns. For the next two decades we have witnessed a period when the concept of

sustainability has thus simultaneously deepened, broad ened, and become more of a contested discursive site upon which different environmental interests (coming from the private, public, and civil arena) have acted and articulated their strategies. Whereas academics focused their prime energies on discovering what was not sustainable about the late modern world (i.e., finding and measuring unsustain ability), policymakers had another related agenda: to develop societies which were more rather than less sus tainable (i.e., to progress sustainable development), but to do so by retaining the benefits of an advanced capitalist and increasingly globalized economy. There were many assumptions about how advances in technologies could enable capitalism to innovate itself out of its smoke stacked past. Under this definition it was important that sustainability was at least linked, if not made synonymous with sustainable ‘development’; for it was not just to be seen as a strictly environmental or natural problem, or to be left to environmental scientists alone. Rather, it was to have social and political objectives – in short it had to be politicized to be progressed. If academics were now to practice both critical and managerialist perspectives with regard to their ‘sustain ability science’, then government and governance debates began to take a much more technicist and ecologically modernizing approach. With the coincidence of the end of the ‘Cold War’, which created a hegemony of belief with regard to the sustainability of capitalism (if not with its social ecology), the furthest government bodies could go was to embrace an ecologically modernizing approach. Supported by selected European scholars who had been studying advances in the chemical and other high pol luting industries in the 1980s, and by many (softly sus tainable) nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) who were all too pleased that at least governments and cor porate firms were at last prepared to share a table with them, the ‘post Bruntland’ period has been characterized by an ‘ecologically modernizing approach’ by many governments and leading corporate firms. This approach assumed, rightly or wrongly – and it is still an open question – that through a variety of socio technological and market based means it is possible to turn, as one leading environmental modernization (EM) scholar typified it, the lumbering ‘industrial caterpillar’ into an ‘ecological butterfly’. In other words, to attempt a new transition of progressive economic and social mod ernization which recreates in a far more technologically sophisticated way a new Staffwechsel – a new social–eco logical metabolism – which is capable of meeting the grand aims of the wider definitions of sustainable de velopment and becoming legitimate to a far more en vironmentally aware public. Ecological modernization thus poses a key set of questions and challenges to both scholars and

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policymakers alike: ‘To what extent are we seeing the arrival of a more ecologically modernizing process op erating in advanced societies?’ ‘If we are, how is it being progressed and what sorts of relationships and organizing frameworks does it imply between public, private, and civil society sectors?’

Analytical Challenges in Understanding and Creating Sustainability Scholars and policymakers have, in beginning to address these challenges, faced some key conceptual and meth odological obstacles in recent years. First, is the growing ‘recognition of the complexity’ of the problem of sus tainability itself. While earlier scientific work pointed to the multitude of differently sourced environmental ex ternalities emanating from the modernization project of the twentieth century; governance debates have com pounded this complexity by significantly broadening its ambit to cover social, economic, and environmental justice/exclusion concerns. The reaction of most natural scientists to this complexity conundrum has been to in creasingly focus on the specific, and to conduct micro studies of complex biological phenomena, leaving cli mate change modelers to deal with the macro ab stractions and assumptions of predicting climate change. Social scientists and many policymakers have alter natively recognized the need for more ‘holistic’ and publicly deliberative approaches, however difficult or complex these may be to validate. Human geographers have only recently seen it as one of their roles to focus on both the problems of real and analytical scale in sus tainability debates; and to move (between these scales) from the detail of very rich case studies of unsustain ability to broader aspects of theorizing. What is clear is that for the human geographer and the policymaker the ‘problems of scale’ (both as a phys ical, governance, and social phenomenon) are as signifi cant as the problems of temporality and intergenerational change in the study of sustainability. The framing of ‘the sustainability question’ thus becomes not only how can more sustainability be achieved and over what time period, but where, by whom, and at what spatial scale is it most likely to be successful? Is the local the best place to start? How should strategic national and regional sus tainability concerns link with local concerns? A second analytical problem for human geography relates to how it deals with what we might call the critical assessment ‘of the real sustainability question’. This calls into question debates about realist versus constructivist debates. Sustainability, as we have seen, creates a ques tion; indeed a normative question as much as it does a critical question. How might a more sustainable society develop? If we see expressions of this, how far are they

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related to deeper structural shifts in the economy or polity? What might its new human geography look like? These have been difficult questions for many human geographers to address having been trained in a more critically interpretative, as opposed to critical–normative stance and perspective. This raises questions about sus tainability planning, visioning, and building as much as it does about the identification, measurement, and con tinuance of unsustainable practices or their connected sets of power relations. In dealing with this conundrum it is necessary to interrogate the articulation and the practice of sustainability in the context of at least three spatial frames: uneven development, articulation and appropriation, and production and consumption systems. We will deal with these three framings in turn.

Uneven Development Sustainability research in human geography and in the broader social sciences more generally, has raised im portant questions concerning spatial inequality and un even development. Some of the more radical writers see this inequality as both a cause and a consequence of growing environmental vulnerability and unsustainability. This works at different spatial scales. Clearly, late capit alism and its more recent neoliberal and globalizing ten dencies have exposed many countries and regions to new forms of environmental exploitation as part of the race toward more capitalist and globalized ‘development’. Northern advanced countries and their corporate firms may advocate more ecological modernization at home (e.g., the raft of European Union (EU) legislation on pol lution, waste recycling, and agricultural land protection), while basing this upon the importation of ‘cheaper’ goods, services, and commodities produced in more unsustain able conditions. Thus environmental vulnerability and unsustain ability can be conveniently exported in the name of neoliberal trade regulation and privatized supply chain management. This is most clearly seen in the con temporary sense, for instance, in patterns of trade (for such ‘environmental goods’ as ‘fresh’ foods, timber products, biofuels) from (as well as between) the newly industrializing countries of Southeast Asia, including most notably China and Latin America. This multicentric reproduction of dominant and dependent states and spaces as part of the global capitalist logic and the rela tively cheap carbon based transport and patterns of trade on which it relies, is seen by many scholars as a root systemic cause of uneven unsustainability. The creation, recreation, and redistribution of rights and regulations associated with dominant, dependent, and what we might term ‘void spaces’ (areas of the world (e.g., parts of sub Saharan Africa) which have an absence of any resources

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needed by the dominant powers), is a major feature and condition of contemporary sustainability. The current increasing politics and economics of the scarcity of oil reserves on the one hand, and the realization of global climate change on the other, serve to intensify these uneven development tendencies and their geopolitical controversies and manifestations. These have been clearly expressed both inside and outside of the current round of world trade (World Trade Organization (WTO)) talks and world environmental summits. Such global arenas become sites of major contestation, not only between void, dependent, and advanced nations and re gions, but also between politicians, corporate firms, and a variety of globally linked NGOs. Of course, these patterns of uneven resource ex ploitation as part and parcel of the (declining) carbon based economy are also played out at the lower spatial scales, within states, and between cities and regions. There has been a recent and growing literature in many of the new environmental and planning journals about the processes and expressions of territorial environmental deprivation and justice. This was clearly expressed most vividly by the Hurricane Katrina disaster which com bined both the realization and denial of climate change with the uneven processes of human poverty, vulner ability, and its effects. Even at the city level we see more affluent parts enacting a more ecologically modernizing path (through, for instance, locally based recycling and organic food box schemes), while on the other side of the tracks there remain ‘food deserts’, high risk air pollution, and lower levels of life expectancy. Hence, the onset of sustain ability debates has served to rightly reinvigorate and infuse debates about spatial inequalities at the multiple scales of city, region, and nation state. At the same time these spatial inequalities are now partly expressed through deepening disparities in living conditions and consumption patterns.

Contested Articulation and Appropriation Many early critics of the rise of concern about sustain ability point to the fact that its usage and application can be far too widely interpreted and therefore devalued. This lack of precision and thus theoretical power has itself been challenged by many scholars who argue that it is necessary to adopt a more holistic and systemic ap proach to both why sustainability seems to be declining, and how and under what conditions it may be recreated. Clearly however, it has become a major task for scholars to adopt a critically interpretative approach to the usage and articulation of ‘sustainable development’. This has become more urgent in recent years as major state agencies, and corporate firms have developed their own

usage and articulation of sustainability discourses. In short, the term or concept is prone to different types of ‘linguistic appropriation’ which can lead to contested arguments concerning the real effects of state and cor porate actions. These tensions clearly surround the changes in strategies and ‘straplines’ of major corporates (like BP’s ‘Beyond Petroleum’ label, for instance); and they also need to call into question state based commit ments to sustainable development. One consequence of the now widespread insinuation of sustainability into both the boardrooms and corridors of power of both the private sector and the state is that a major intellectual challenge becomes how to decipher ‘real’ forms of progress and action in sustainable devel opment from what might be regarded as ‘greenwash’. In short, does it become just another branch of corporate social responsibility (in corporate firms) and ‘duty of care’ in state agencies, or, more importantly, a real force for ecological modernization and systemic change? For in stance, the UK government and its devolved bodies (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland), have recently adopted a set of shared sustainability priorities which are to be measured and enacted across government depart ments. These include four key areas of action: sustainable consumption and production, climate change and energy, natural resource protection and environmental en hancement, and sustainable communities. The govern ment embraces all three strands of sustainable development – environment, economy, and social inclu sion. The jury is still out, of course, about how these objectives will be achieved and early research suggests, not surprisingly, more progress on some of the softer targets (like more sustainable government buildings and waste recycling) than on the hard nuts of advancing re newable energy and reducing carbon emissions. Inertia and backlash politics are also a critical part of the sus tainability debate, especially during the midst of eco nomic downturns. Nevertheless, it is clear that concepts of sustainable development are now a major dimension of both pol icymaking and monitoring; whether they become com pletely absorbed into a ‘managerialist measurement’ and ‘indicator culture’, or lead to real systemic change is now becoming a key governance question for human geographers.

Practices and Planning: Sustainable Production and Consumption in Communities Taking a more critically normative stance in geo graphical research becomes a necessity we can argue with regard to the question of sustainability. Moreover, despite the avoidance of some scholars to tread along paths

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which may suggest policy implications of their findings, it is clear that this cannot really be avoided in sustainability research. Of course, the development of what some scholars are now calling interdisciplinary ‘sustainability science’ has to be rooted in rigorous, critical, and theo retically and empirically based research. This research, however, also needs to suggest solutions and possible ways of achieving systemic shifts toward more sustain ability. For it is inherently a human and geographical question. A major challenge for us concerns how to link our basic and applied research to the question of sustain ability planning. For instance, a critical area here – as indicated by major EU studies of the life cycle analyses of major commodities, goods, and services – concerns how scholars can track existing production and con sumption supply chains, assess their degree of sustain ability (or otherwise), and then find ways of adjusting or influencing sets of behavioral, regulatory, and market based adjustment factors which could lead to more sus tainable production–consumption systems. For instance, it is now evident that energy, transport, food, and household goods and services are four of the key con tributors to carbon emissions and global heating. How we adjust these key production–consumption systems and in what ways will be a key question for sustainability science. One geographical aspect of these key systems of course is that of their relative spatial embeddedness. Production–consumption chains, while dependent upon increasing levels of mobility and transport, are also rooted in spaces and nodes which increasingly transgress national and regional boundaries. Does it make sustain ability sense to ‘short circuit’ these chains and make them more localized? This relocalization process is now oc curring in some major European cities around food chains. For example, in Copenhagen, Frankfurt, and Malmo the provision of relocalized organic food has now become mainstreamed, representing a real form of eco logical modernization rather then just another middle class ‘niche’ activity. The role of greener forms of city and regional governance have yet to be fully explored yet they will be crucial in shifting production and con sumption chains in a more sustainable and less carbon dependent direction. Sustainability planning needs therefore research which can understand the complexity of city and regional governance and the obstacles con sumers and producers face in achieving more sustainable supply chains. City and city regional planning, indeed, needs to be more multidimensional by not just dealing with the two dimensional frameworks of more sustainable land zoning and the built environment of cities and towns. Rather, it needs to consider both urban and rural spaces, and the eco economic interactions between them as sets of

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complex networks, supply chains, and flows of goods, services, and knowledge. The current emerging policy and academic concern regarding ‘sustainable com munities’ is a vital development in this regard which could serve to link more basic sustainability research to sustainability planning. Clearly the engagement of more vibrant local communities of place, as well as the dis persed communities of interest needs to be incorporated into sustainability planning.

Conclusions: From Recognition and Appropriation toward Experimentation The past three decades have seen the steady, contested, but nevertheless profound rooting of sustainability de bates and concepts into the political and economic fabric of both advanced societies and some developing coun tries. At the same time this has promoted and encouraged human geographers to reconnect with many of their earlier origins, associated with the quest to understand the ‘social–ecological metabolism’. This has also led to sustainability debates becoming a major intellectual magnet for those scholars practicing in the more estab lished subdisciplines of economic, social, cultural, and political geography. Indeed, an important intellectual trend has been to recognize that sustainability theory needs to integrate and be critically interwoven with broader and challenging spatial theories of the economy and polity. However, today, the paradox is that after a century and a half of the application of a carbon based modernization project, the globalized, resource intensive and un sustainable world in which the human geographer em ploys these approaches is far more complex, vulnerable, and potentially irreversible. This requires us to address many of the analytical challenges identified in this article, and its needs to invigorate both a ‘critically interpretative and a critically normative approach’ which links basic research with how to create systemic and transformative shifts in resource allocation and regulation across and through space. To do this it will need to be open to new epistemologies and conceptual vocabularies which can guide a more effective understanding of how real and progressive ecological modernization can be constructed, not least in engaging communities of space and com munities of interest. Sustainability arose initially as a question. And it sparked a fragmented agenda for the recognition and realization of its very antithesis – ‘unsustainablity’. It’s inception in the post war period arose out of the gradual realization that the inherent renewable resource depleting tendencies in capitalism needed to be harnessed and monitored by a more ‘precautionary’ approach to economic and social development. This has, more

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recently, due to a plethora of scientific and NGO effort and evidence, forced this onto the mainstream political, corporate, and social agendas in the guise of (what we might regard as a form of ‘soft’) ecological modernization. However, we need to recognize that this is a con tinuing story. Sustainable development is now by defi nition a constantly moving, dynamic, and increasingly contested intellectual and political location. Toward the end of the first decade of the twenty first century it be comes a much more potentially emancipating and cre ative force. It is one which is beginning to unleash the capabilities of social and actor network based ex perimentation in both spatial communities and com munities of interest by creating new ethical markets, and production and consumption networks around heretofore sectoral concerns: such as transport and mobility, waste, energy, social and ecological enterprise, amenity services, household goods and services, and relocalized food provenance and consumption practices. A growing lacunae of research begins to show that ‘room for maneuver’ can be made to allow these com munities to experiment and innovate with diverse and more contextually dependent combinations of human and ecological resources in ways which could mainstream sustainable living systems both at the city and the re gional levels. The human geographer’s role in providing and comparing the knowledge bases, as well as demon strating the wider value of these experiments will be a critical component in the degree to which the struggle for sustainability can be really embedded in societies; most of which are still inertly organized around sclerotic regulatory structures which continue to deny, hide, and

indeed spatially displace the true costs of unsustainable practices. In these ways the critical question of ‘sustain ability’ is likely to grow in its maturity as a key and challenging concept central to the development of human geography, as well as contribute, more broadly to interdisciplinary ‘sustainability science’. See also: Agriculture, Sustainable.

Further Reading Drummond, I. and Marsden, T. K. (1999). The Condition of Sustainability. London: Routledge. Forsyth, T. (2003). Critical Political Ecology: The Politics of Environmental Science. London: Routledge. Harvey, D. (1974). Population, resources and the ideology of science. Economic Geography 50(3), 256 277. Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, Nature and the Geography of Distance. Oxford: Blackwell. Marsden, T. K. (2004). The quest for ecological modernisation: Re spacing agri food and rural studies. Sociologia Ruralis 44(2), 129 147. Marsden, T. K. (2006). Denial or diversity? Creating new spaces for sustainable development. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning 8(2), 183 198. Marsden, T. K. (ed.) (2008). Sustainable Communities: New Spaces for Planning, Participation and Engagement. London: Elsevier. Mol, A. (2000). The environmental movement in an era of ecological modernisation. Geoforum 31, 45 56. O’ Riordan, T. (2004). Environmental science, sustainability and politics. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29, 234 247. Owens, S. and Cowell, R. (2002). Land and Its Limits: Planning and Sustainable Development. London: Routledge. Redclift, M. (ed.) (2000). Sustainability: Life Chances and Livelihoods. London: Routledge. Sachs, W. (1999). Globalisation and sustainability. In Planet Dialectics: Explorations in Environment and Development, pp 129 155. New York: Zed books.

Sustainability, Urban M. Whitehead, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Collective Consumption An idea developed by urban theorists to describe the role of cities as concentrated centers for the delivery of key public services (including water supply, healthcare, housing, and other key facilities) to large numbers of urban residents. Ecological Footprint A term developed to describe the surface land area and associated ecosystems which are required for and affected by a given city’s resource requirements and pollution outputs. External Relations of the City The various social, economic, and environmental relations which connect metropolitan areas with places which are located beyond the official boundaries of a city. Internal Relations of the City The complex of social, economic, and environmental interconnections which unify the different residential, commercial, and industrial districts of a city. Structured Coherences A framework devised by the Marxist geographer David Harvey to describe the ways in which the social, economic, and environmental infrastructures and ideological belief systems of urban areas are marshaled to create spaces which are compatible with continued capitalist accumulation. Urban Cramming The increasing spatial concentration of people, industrial activities, and services in a limited number of established urban areas.

Introduction – On Darwin, Geography, and Urban Sustainability In a recent article for the Guardian newspaper Jonathan Watts claimed that 2006 would be remembered as the year when human society finally proved the tried and trusted theories of Charles Darwin wrong. This in triguing assertion is based upon figures produced by the United Nations (UN), which indicate that at some point during 2006 (and for the first time in human history) more people will live in UN designated urban areas than in rural districts. According to Watts then, our collective refutation of Darwin stems from the simple fact that rather than adapting to suit our habitat, through the as siduous construction of cities, humanity has altered and irrevocably transformed its habitat to meet our own needs. This profound shift in the geographical consti tution of human society has seen the city becoming an

ever more scrutinized category of, and for, theory building, policymaking, and planning. A key corollary of this process has been the realization that the form and quality of urban social, economic, and environmental relations will increasingly define the form and quality of human life itself. It is in this context that the idea of urban sustainability has become such an intriguing, al luring, and heavily debated concept. As this article shows the notion of a sustainable city is a multifaceted and highly confusing ideal, its appeal, however, derives from what it appears to offer – namely a solution to some of humanity’s most pressing socio environmental problems. This article has two primary goals: first, to explore the impacts that the notion of urban sustainability has had on urban geography; and second, to consider the role urban geographers have played within the ever evolving con struction of what urban sustainability involves. The re mainder of this article unpacks the different theoretical and practical implications associated with urban sus tainability. It begins by considering the origins of sus tainable urbanism. Space is then given to consider the impacts which sustainable thinking has had on urban geography and the role which urban geographers con tinue to play in challenging and transforming the ways in which sustainable cities are understood and pursued. Analysis then moves on to consider the practical appli cations of sustainable urban policies within two very different geographical contexts, the Greenwich Millen nium Village in London and Ibadan city, Nigeria. These case studies are used to reveal the great geographical diversity that exists both within and between cities re garding what sustainable urban development represents and involves.

Metropolitan Utopia and the Origins of Urban Sustainability By far, the clearest and most detailed summation of the principles and practices associated with urban sustain ability was developed in the Turkish city of Istanbul in 1996. It was in this place, and at this time, that the UN held its second international conference on urban issues (the first was convened in 1976 in Vancouver). Repre sentatives of 170 countries attended the Istanbul Conference (which is also referred to as the Cities Conference or Habitat II) and collectively agreed on 100 commitments and 600 recommendations concerning the form and nature of urban sustainability. While there is neither time nor space to discuss all of the principles of

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urban sustainability agreed in Istanbul in this short art icle, it is possible to summarize its recommendation in three points. First, the Istanbul conference made it clear that sustainable urbanism is, at least in part, concerned with ensuring that cities are ecologically sustainable – that is to say that urban areas’ uses of environmental resources and their production of environmental pol lution should not exceed nature’s ability to reproduce and absorb such metropolitan inputs and outputs. Sec ond, the Cities Conference also asserted that urban sustainability is about addressing issues of social sus tainability within cities – ensuring that the living and working conditions found in cities are tolerable (and particularly so for the most vulnerable in urban society). Finally, Habitat II emphasized that urban sustainability draws particular attention to the ways in which social, environmental, and economic processes interact within urban space. Consequently, while being concerned with social and environmental sustainability, sustainable ur banism recognizes the important role of the urban economy in supporting social need and environmental protection. It is in the context of this final consideration that urban sustainability has become synonymous with an integrated vision of urban policies and planning, within which the social, economic, and environmental con ditions and needs of cities are considered together. When trying to define what sustainable urbanism is, it has become an almost axiomatic reaction to search for an appropriate UN quote like the one provided above. This is perhaps because of the fact that the specific goal of sustainable urban development has been pursued most noticeably by two UN agencies: the UN Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS) (established in 1978) and the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) (who in partnership with the UNCHS run the UN’s Sustainable Cities Programme). In 2002, the growing significance of sustainable urbanism was recognized by the UN when it upgraded its settlement agencies into a full program of the UN – known now as UN HABITAT (United Nations Settlement Programme). UN HABITAT acts as the co ordinating organization for the delivery and promotion of UN sponsored programs of sustainable urbanism at a global level. The association between sustainable urbanism and the UN is indicative of the geopolitical origins of the sustainable cities ideal, but, as we will see, it is necessary to go beyond the UN in order to develop a comprehensive account of sustainable urbanism. Inter national nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), geo political organizations (such as the European Union), and different nation states have all actively promoted dif fering visions of urban sustainable development. There are also many examples of more locally inspired visions of urban sustainability, which have either adapted UN ideas about sustainable development to suit particular local circumstances, or instigated their own definitions of

what constitutes sustainability, in particular geographical milieu. Some see the diversity surrounding the notion of sustainable urbanism as a virtue (see following section), but it is also clear that such eclecticism carries with it some intellectual and practical dangers.

Urban Geography and the Sustainable City: Space, Scale, and Posterity Before moving on to consider some examples of urban sustainability in practice, it is important to reflect upon the relationship between the sustainable city and urban geography. Over the last 15 years it is clear that more sustainable ways of thinking about urbanization have challenged established geographical conceptualizations of urban space. At the same time, however, it is also clear that urban geographers’ conceptualizations of scale, lo cality, and politics have contributed to changing under standings of the sustainable city. This section explores this evolving relationship and the impacts, which it has had on geographical approaches to urban questions.

Provisional Dialogues: Spatial Forms and Sustainability The connections between geographical thinking and discussions of urban sustainability are essentially as old as discussions of urban sustainability itself. Drawing in spiration from the work of urban geographers on the capitalist form of the industrial metropolis, early scholars of the sustainable city analyzed the spatial logics of modern cities in order to understand why urban areas had become unsustainable. In this context, analysts claimed that cities were not inherently unsustainable things, but that it was the spatial logics of capitalist ur banization – replete with its mega suburbs, sprawling commuter belts, and heavily congested commercial dis tricts – that made cities so socially, economically, and environmentally unsustainable. The unregulated spatial expansion of cities has destroyed rural landscapes; seen an increasing social dependence on automobiles (with an associated escalation in air pollution levels); and resulted in the neglectful construction of unsafe and unhealthy places for urban citizens to live (particularly in de veloping world cities). While such unregulated (or at least under regulated) forms of urban development have, in part, been justified on the grounds of necessary eco nomic expansion, urban congestion and inadequate af fordable housing have meant that the spatial form of many industrial cities is now increasingly seen as eco nomically, as well as socially and environmentally, unsustainable. Geographical sensitivities to the spatial forms of ur banization informed debates concerning how urban areas

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could be made to be more sustainable. At one end of the spectrum, writers such as Peter Hall have argued that the key to sustainable urban development is to transform the spatial fabric of cities so that they provide more in tensively used and inhabited districts. Peter Hall’s point is that greater urban cramming and the tighter spatial in tegration of people’s home, work, and leisure life is the key to a less energy intensive, and more environmentally sustainable future. On Hall’s terms then, the geographical form of cities, when appropriately planned, offers a spatial fix for the creation of a more sustainable society. Others, however, are far less optimistic about the po tential of cities to offer sustainable spatial contexts for low energy lifestyles. Joan Martinez Alier, for example, argues against Hall’s position, claiming that cities are so hard wired into the logics of capitalist development that they can never provide a sustainable geographical context for life.

Sustainable Challenges for Urban Geography: Space, Time, and Relational Thinking Beyond debates concerning the most appropriate spatial form of the sustainable city, early geographical writings on urban sustainability focused on the practical dif ficulties of implementing sustainable development pol icies in urban areas. Gradually, however, it became clear that thinking about cities on sustainable terms did not only set practical conundrums for urban geographers to solve, but also challenged the intellectual grounds upon which geographers understood and conceived of urban areas. At one level of course, urban sustainability suggests the need to think more carefully about the complex re lations which make up urban space. Visions of urban sustainability (at least those promoted by the UN) em phasize that urban economic, social, and environmental sustainability cannot be secured in isolation, but require integrated strategies of urban development. An appreci ation of the integrated nature of urban space is not new to urban geographers (geographers have written widely, e.g., on theories of collective consumption and the structured coherences of urban areas). What is perhaps unique about visions of urban sustainability is the par ticular emphasis it places on the role of environmental consideration within the operation of urban systems. A concern with the environmental sustainability of cities has transformed geographical thinking about urban space in two main ways. First, it has drawn greater attention to the role of everyday urban environments in contributing to the operations of urban systems as a whole. Con sequently, whether it be in terms of workplaces, homes, sidewalks, or parklands, it is clear that the urban en vironment has a major impact upon the physical and

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psychological health of metropolitan residents and a key role in defining the overall quality of urban life. The increasing awareness of urban environmental consider ations within debates about urban sustainability has consequently been mirrored by a growing concern among urban geographers with questions of urban environ mental justice. Second, discussions of the environmental sustainability of cities have brought attention to the role of cities within broader forms of regional and global sustainability. Cities are vast consumers of environmental resources and enormous producers of pollution. The point is that the resources which cities consume and the pollution they produce are neither sourced, nor wholly contained, within the territorial boundaries of the city. The ecological footprints of cities now reach around the world, from Antarctica to the Sahara, and from coral reefs to the ozone layer. An awareness of the environmental reach of cities challenges closed, territorially bounded visions of the city, and encourages a more open, fluid, and process based account of urban life. This vision of the city is, however, not confined to environmental concerns alone. The desire to create more sustainable cities is con sequently leading many city authorities to consider their extended socioeconomic as well as environmental re lations (this is perhaps evidenced most clearly in the growing proliferation of fair trade cities and urban food networks). The connectivity of cities with global socio economic and environmental processes has been ex plored and developed by a number of geographers who write on the relational dynamics of cities and space. While it would be erroneous to assume that theorists of relational space have been directly influenced by work on urban sustainability, it is clear that both traditions are now facilitating a much richer account of urban space than had previously been thought possible. What perhaps differentiates work on urban sustainability from work on relational space, however, is its insistence on an ‘inte grated’ and ‘relational’ account of cities – an analysis of cities, which recognizes the complex socioeconomic and environmental relations, which come together in urban space. Perhaps the most original challenge, which notions of urban sustainability offer to existing work within urban geography, however, relates not to questions of metro politan space, but to issues of urban time. Time has featured in urban geography in two main ways: first, in relation to studies of the historical emergence of urban centers, and second, in relation to the impact of the urban experience on the social experience of time in the pre sent. Urban sustainability, however, draws immediate attention to issues of intergenerational justice and the impacts of urban development on as yet unborn urban and nonurban residents. The ‘stretching’ of temporal considerations within work on sustainability, to allow for

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a greater appreciation of future time, represents a clear challenge to the often narrow timeframes within which urban geographers situate their work.

Geographical Challenges for Urban Sustainability While notions of urban sustainability have challenged some of the key spatial and temporal assumptions of urban geographers, it is also clear that urban geographers have offered significant and concerted critiques of estab lished visions of urban sustainability. At one level, geog raphers have been at the forefront of work exploring the politics associated with urban sustainability. Analyses of the politics of urban sustainability have challenged the idea that sustainable urban development simply involves the programmatic imposition of an accepted set of tech nological solutions for urban development. In this context, the work of urban geographers has revealed that the ac ceptance of urban sustainability, and the form which sustainable urban development takes, are dependent on local political cultures and the vagaries of geographical context. Related work within urban political geography has also started to question the governmental structures through which sustainable cities are being developed and managed. In their sustained analysis of the relationship between cities and climate change policy, for example, Harriet Bulkeley and Michele Betsill have questioned the often preeminent role given to metropolitan authorities in the delivery of sustainable urban development policies. Given the complex local, regional, national, and global relations that constitute global warming, the ability of urban authorities to address climate change in a com prehensive way is obviously diminished. It is in this context that Bulkeley and Betsill reveal the important role of appropriately networked, but multiply scaled insti tutions, operating at a local, urban, regional, national, and global level, in implementing and managing urban sus tainability. While an appreciation of the multiple scales of political decision making which impact upon urban sus tainability was recognized in the Brundtland Report itself, Bulkeley and Betsill’s intervention has introduced an important critical awareness of geographical scale into the sustainable city debate. The final challenge offered by geography to con ceptualizations of the sustainable city was developed as part of what must count as the largest and most com prehensive engagement of geographers with the prin ciples of urban sustainability. At a workshop convened in 1998, and supported by the National Science Foundation (of the USA), a group of 18 geographers from North America and the UK considered what a geographical perspective on urban sustainability could actually offer. In their final report, ‘Towards a comprehensive

geographical perspective on urban sustainability’, this collection of geographers critically questioned the understanding of the ‘urban’ promoted within dominant visions of urban sustainability. The workshop argued that while addressing certain issues of urban sustainability at a citywide level had clear benefits, implementing a vision of sustainability at a metropolitan scale failed to recog nize the multifarious spaces, communities, and cultures that constitute urban areas. Accordingly, it was argued that to talk about the sustainable city was misleading because it tended to neglect the fact that what is deemed to be sustainable in one part of a city, may be very dif ferent to the sustainability issues that are prioritized in other urban districts. It was in this context that the Workshop on Urban Sustainability claimed that policies for urban sustainability should focus on the issues facing urban localities – or those intermediate geographical scales, which while operating as part of wider urban systems, have their own histories, neighborhood cultures, and socio environmental pressures. In this context, the Workshop on Urban Sustainability sought to bring a heightened sense of geographical difference to work on urban sustainability and to reveal the importance of de veloping visions of urban sustainability which start with the priorities and needs of local communities, not the abstract goals of a technocratic plan for urban sustainable development.

Sustainable Cities in Practice In light of the reflections that have so far been made on urban sustainability, this final section explores the development of different forms of sustainable urban development in two geographical contexts. The first geographical case study is provided by London’s newly formed Millennium Village; the second example focuses on the implementation of a UN Sustainable Cities Programme in Ibadan, Nigeria. These two case studies are used to reveal the complex decision making pro cesses that inform programs for sustainable urban de velopment, and the value of a geographical perspective on sustainable cities.

Case Study I – England’s Urban Renaissance and the Millennium Village Project Since the election to power of Tony Blair’s New Labour Government in the UK in 1997 the principles of sus tainable development have become an increasingly im portant part of British urban policy. On coming to power the New Labour government was confronted with a set of urban problems which are not uncommon in many de veloping world cities. At one level, urban economic

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expansion and growth (especially in and around cities such as Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, London, and Manchester) was having two socio environmental effects: first, urban growth was resulting in cities expanding onto valued rural land (or ‘green field sites’); second, with increasing demand for urban housing, the costs of living within cities were becoming prohibitively expensive for many people, and especially for so called key workers (including teachers, nurses, and various blue collar workers). At a second level, however, the New Labour government was also confronted with a series of urban communities that had serious levels of poverty and social disadvantage, and were finding it hard to attract jobs and investment. It was in the context of such paradoxical urban problems, that New Labour turned to the ideas of sustainable urban development as a strategy for tackling the problems associated with urban Britain. While it is possible to trace the emergence of sus tainable development thinking within some of New La bour’s earliest urban policy initiatives, the idea of creating more sustainable cities in the UK was only ar ticulated fully following the publication of the Urban Task Force Report, ‘Towards an urban renaissance’. The Labour government commissioned the Urban Task Force to develop a futuristic vision of urban Britain. Led by the prominent architect Lord Richard Rogers of Riverside, in its first section the Urban Task Force established a vision of the British sustainable city – an integrated space of social justice, economic development, and environmental care. Although the Urban Task Force report has been heavily criticized for being an elitist vision of urban Britain, it established the foundation for the first urban white paper to be produced in Britain for 23 years. The urban white paper, or ‘Our towns and cities: The future – delivering an urban renaissance’, established the parameters around which more sustainable urban com munities should be developed throughout England. Running parallel to the shift in British urban policy toward the principles of urban sustainability has been the establishment of the Millennium Village on the Green wich Peninsular, London (see Figure 1). The Greenwich Village project was designed to provide a model of urban sustainability for the new millennium. Based upon a 121 ha site in east London, the Millennium Village combines innovative and energy efficient architecture, an ecology park, affordable housing, and a fully integrated set of community services (see Figure 2). In keeping with the government’s desire to encourage brown field de velopments and to foster sustainable urban communities, the Millennium Village has been promoted as a safe and healthy place for people to live in the city. Its sustainable credentials are based at a social level on the affordability of the Village’s housing, the strong sense of community identity promoted in the area, and the availability of a range of urban services (including a healthcare center

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and school). At an environmental level, the sustainability of the Village is based upon its good links to public transport networks (particularly the recently completed Jubilee Extension Line), its eco architecture, and its links to an adjacent riparian nature reserve on the banks of the Thames. The image of the Millennium Village as a safe, ecologically sound urban development has become a central element within its promotion and marketing to potential residents (see Figure 3). There are features of the Greenwich Millennium Village which mirror the classic forms associated with the ideals of the UN’s sustainable city vision. It is, for ex ample, based upon a carefully integrated form of urban development, which has been specifically designed to minimize the environmental impact and associated en ergy demands of the settlement. Despite this, however, it is clear that the Millennium Village is not merely the product of an internationally sanctioned blueprint for sustainable urban development. Its particular focus on promoting sustainable urban communities, in a previ ously deprived and derelict area of a city, reflects an interpretation of sustainability which has been con ditioned by the particular urban pressures being ex perienced in the UK. In this sense, while clearly sensitive to issues of environmental sustainability, the Millennium Village (and for that matter England’s broader urban renaissance program) is based upon an interpretation of urban sustainability which is focused on the ability of urban centers to continue to function as affordable and safe places for people to be able to live and work.

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Figure 2 The Greenwich Millennium Village, London (Photograph by author).

Figure 3 Environmental narratives and the promotion of the Millennium Village as a sustainable community.

Case Study II – Urban Sustainability in the Developing World, Ibadan Nigeria The second case study of urban sustainability in practice addressed in this article is taken from a very different geographical context than that of the Greenwich Millen nium Village, and serves to illustrate the great diversity that exists in programs for urban sustainability. Ibadan city is located in Nigeria’s southwest region and is known for being the most populous indigenous city in Tropical Af rica (see Figure 4). As with many cities in less eco nomically developed countries, the factors preventing

Ibadan from becoming a sustainable place to live take a more pressing and immediate form than they do in cities of the developing world. Its strategic positioning between Lagos and Abuja has seen Ibadan grow in economic im portance (particularly in relation to retail trade and public administration), and become a significant destination for rural migrants seeking work. The 1991 census revealed that Ibadan’s population had swelled to nearly two million people (it is now believed to be in excess of three million). The purported economic success of Ibadan has, however, placed great stress on the city’s fragile and under resourced municipal infrastructure. One of the most

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worrying aspects of this process has been an inability of Ibadan’s municipal waste and water supply networks to meet the needs of the rapidly expanding population. The main issues defining the sustainability of Ibadan are consequently related to human health and the broader environmental implications of waste disposal and clean water supply. The supply of clean water to urban centers is a prerequisite of urban sustainability. Without clean water households cannot function, businesses can not operate, and human health rapidly deteriorates. At the same time the widespread presence of untreated waste can lead to a range of human health problems as well as untold environmental damage. In the context of Ibadan, the need to dispose of untreated urban waste, for example, poses a major threat to the ecological integrity and sustainability of surrounding woodlands and savan nah areas. As is often the case with cities facing basic threats to their social and environmental sustainability, however, the problems of Ibadan are not only the product of an underdeveloped urban infrastructure, but also poor planning and inappropriate municipal management structures. It was in the context of the complex and intractable problems facing Ibadan that in 1994 the UN launched a

Sustainable Cities Programme for the metropolis. While focusing on the provision of key water supply and waste disposal services, what is most interesting about the sustainable Ibadan initiative are the ways in which it has sought to deliver urban sustainability through active forms of local community engagement. The sustainable cities initiative in Ibadan has challenged the top down, bureaucratic orthodoxies of previous urban development plans, and tried to encourage much greater participation of people at a local scale in the decision making sur rounding the nature of future urban development. Community development was initially encouraged through a public consultation program at the beginning of the Sustainable Cities Programme. This consultation process was designed not only to try and uncover local sustainable development priorities, but also to try and promote a greater sense of community ownership over sustainable development projects in Ibadan. Following this community consultation process the citizens of Iba dan have also been encouraged to take an active role in the implementation of new sustainable development initiatives. These initiatives have ranged from spring water and borehole water supply projects, to waste management and local environmental improvement

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schemes. By involving local residents in such schemes, it is hoped that people can acquire both the skills and the requisite motivation to ensure that such projects are sustainable themselves. The case of Ibadan serves to remind us of the great geographical diversity that exists when defining what urban sustainability involves and what should be priori tized within urban sustainable development projects. Ibadan also emphasizes that sustainable urbanism should not only be about sustainable development planning at large urban scales, but also involves the active engage ment of local communities. It appears that only through a policy process which is sensitive to the needs and con straints of particular urban areas, turfs, and neighbor hoods will it be possible to recognize and implement appropriate long term solutions to unsustainable social, economic, and environmental conditions within cities. Reports reflecting on the impacts of Ibadan’s urban sus tainable development programs show that while great progress has been made, resistances still remain to the practices associated with urban sustainable development within the urban authorities and key interests groups of the area. As a threat to existing patterns of urban de velopment and management, however, perhaps the greater concern would be if urban sustainable develop ment projects did not meet with opposition from estab lished urban interest groups and authorities.

Bulkeley, H. (2005). Reconfiguring environmental governance: Towards a politics of scales and networks. Political Geography 24, 875 902. Bulkeley, H. and Betsill, M. (2003). Cities and Climate Change: Urban Sustainability and Global Environmental Governance. London: Routledge. Bulkeley, H. and Betsill, M. (2005). Rethinking sustainable cities: Multilevel governance and the urban politics of climate change. Environmental Politics 14, 42 63. Girardet, H. (1999). Creating Sustainable Cities. Dartington: Green Books. Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, ch. 13. Oxford: Blackwell. Jonas, A. E. G., Gibbs, A. C. and While, A. (2004). State modernization and local strategic selectivity after Local Agenda 21: Evidence from three northern English localities. Policy and Politics 32, 151 168. Lee, K. N. (2006). Urban sustainability and the limits of classical environmentalism. Environment and Urbanization 18, 9 22. Rijkens Klomp, N., van de Lindt, M., van Asselt, M. B. A. and Rotmans, J. (2003). Integrative policy making for the improvement of the quality of urban life. In Girard, L. F., Forte, B., Cerreta, M., De Toro, P. & Forte, F. (eds.) The Human Sustainable City: Challenges and Perspectives from the Habitat Agenda, pp 89 106. Aldershot: Ashgate. Swyngedouw, E. (2004). Social Power and the Urbanization of Water Flows of Power. Oxford: University Press. Watts, J. (2006). Invisible city. The Guardian 15.3.06, 8 13. Wheeler, S. M. and Beatley, T. (2004). The Sustainable Urban Development Reader. London: Routledge. Whitehead, M. (2003). (Re)Analysing the sustainable city: Nature, urbanization and the regulation of socio environmental relations in the UK. Urban Studies 40, 1183 1206. Workshop on Urban Sustainability. (2000). Towards a comprehensive geographical perspective on urban sustainability. Final Report of the National Science Foundation Workshop on Urban Sustainability. New Brunswick, NJ: National Science Foundation.

See also: Ecology; Locality Debates; Mega-Cities; Planning, Urban; Regeneration to Renaissance; Slums; Social Justice, Urban; Sustainability; Sustainable Development; Third World Cities; Urbanization.

Relevant Websites

Further Reading Bulkeley, H. (2001). Governing climate change: The politics of risk society? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 26, 430 447.

http://www.greenwich village.co.uk The Greenwich Millennium Village Project. http://www.unhabitat.org UN Habitat Agenda and its associated declaration. Sustainable Ibadan Program: provides links to a range of other sustainable city programs. It is interesting to compare the different types of sustainable urban development projects that are being pursued in different regions throughout the world. General information about the UN Sustainable Cities Programmes.

Sustainable Development J. A. Elliott, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Environmentalism The ideas, language, and practices which stem from a concern for human– environment relations. International Monetary Fund (IMF) A financial institution created in 1944 to regulate the international monetary exchange system. Lends money to member states to alleviate short-term balance of payment problems. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Set of eight goals for international development with time-bound targets and measurable indicators agreed in 2000 by the United Nations General Assembly. Neoliberalism A set of ideas about political and economic development associated with free-market economics, removal of trade barriers, and withdrawal of the state. Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) An umbrella term encompassing a range of diverse organizations at various scales which are fundamentally outside government and generally not-for-profit. Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSPs) Since 1999, the strategic documents around which decisions regarding loans and debt relief are made. Administered jointly by World Bank and International Monetary Fund. PRSPs are written by national governments, required to set out coherent plans for reform focused on poverty reduction and identify financing needs. The Precautionary Principle An element for policy decisions concerning environmental protection and management. It is applied where there are reasonable grounds for concern that an activity does or could cause harm but where there is uncertainty about the probability of the risk and degree of harm. It was endorsed internationally within Agenda 21, for example, where Principle 15 states: ‘‘In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.’’ Transnational Corporation (TNC) Organizations with investments and operations in many different countries, with no clear ‘home-base’ and with factories, offices, subsidiary companies, etc., integrated at the international scale. World Bank (WB) Common name for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD),

which together with the International Development Association (IDA), the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) comprise the ‘World Bank Group’. Lends money to governments often on concessional terms and its activities are increasingly central to the lending decisions of other public and private institutions.

Introduction The term sustainable development is a well used one and is probably familiar to many within and beyond academia, certainly in the more developed parts of the world. It is a term that we come across in arenas ranging from door step recycling initiatives to media explanations of global security issues. Within human geography, it informs re search extending from social exclusion within cities of the United Kingdom to outcomes of environmental trans formations in rural Africa. Indeed, some consider that there is none so relevant a discipline as geography to contribute to the sustainable development debates given its ability to marry the science of the environment with an understanding of economic, political, and cultural change, that is, development. The pursuit of sustainable devel opment is now stated as a principal policy goal of or ganizations and institutions across all scales of public life and the field of academic and practical enquiry around sustainable development is a diverse and expanding one. It is generally acknowledged that the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (also known as the Brundtland Commission) published in 1987 did much to bring the term ‘sustainable development’ into the popular consciousness and onto public agendas. This commission, established by the United Nations (UN), comprised people drawn from member states of both the more developed and less developed worlds and was charged with identifying the long term environmental strategies for the international community. Its definition of sustainable development, as ‘‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’’ has become the most widely cited expression of the term. The fun damental notion that development today should not be at the expense of that in the future has found widespread allegiance. As the term sustainable development reaches both further into daily lives and becomes bound up with

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ever larger movements of the modern world, academics and practitioners are increasingly aware of the need to reflect critically on the fundamental principles encapsu lated within the term as it evolves. In addition, close examination is needed of what is trying to be achieved and how, in the name of sustainable development, to encompass the multiple and often competing agendas being pursued and to interpret changes within dynamic local and global contexts. To that end, this review accords substantial detail to the origins and development of the notion of sustainable development and how the complex interdependencies of economic, social, and environ mental development processes and their outcomes are being revealed in the pursuit of sustainable development. The concept of sustainable development has gained some degree of notoriety including for its ‘slippery na ture’ (the multiple definitions that it has), its ambiguities (the various interpretations that flow from those defin itions), and its fundamentally oxymoronic character (the suggested opposition between the two encapsulated terms). This review details a number of frameworks that have been forwarded for handling the diversity and dynamism associated with the notion and points to the principal ongoing divisions within the field of enquiry. For some, the way in which the notion of sustainable development has been redefined so many times and in relation to so many aspects of society–environment re lationships undermines its usefulness. For others, it is the contestations over the direction of social and economic development into the future (the discord of modern politics) that are the substance of sustainable develop ment and as such, the utility of the idea lies precisely in the debate and compromise that it challenges researchers and practitioners to engage in. Two particular literatures, those of environmentalism and of development, are considered to be particularly important in understanding the origins of sustainable development. The first use of the term ‘sustainable de velopment’ is acknowledged to have been within the World Conservation Strategy of 1980 that was drawn up by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. For the first time, development was forwarded as a means for achieving conservation bringing the two literatures closer together. However, the 1980s are also understood to have been an era of ‘im passe’ within both the theory and practice of develop ment. Past theories were upturned and seemed to offer little in terms of explaining the current experiences of development and underdevelopment (let alone into the future). It was also a period when the failures of ‘devel opment’ on the ground were increasingly evident in cluding the environmental impacts of the mounting debt crisis and of the solutions implemented to solve it. In the globalized era of the early years of the twenty first century, environmentalism is considered to be

thriving, particularly as it has adapted to changing sci entific evidence and has been informed by the ideas of related social movements such as ecofeminism. Whilst it can be considered that discourses remain dominated by environmental sustainability concerns, the work of geographers is proving important in placing human needs and rights more centrally into these agendas. In turn, development studies (and development geography) is considered to have moved beyond its impasse to be characterized by lively debate within which environ mental, social, and economic sustainability are a central concern. Whilst this review provides evidence of the substantial work of geographers, particularly in uncovering the nexus of poverty–environment relationships, there is continued concern as to how far this work is impacting on the literature and practices of sustainable development. One way in which sustainable development can now be considered a concept that has come of age is through its position as a primary policy goal of many of the major institutions of the world, including the UN and the World Bank (WB). In particular, finding new approaches to poverty alleviation is currently considered to be on a new and superior roll. This review analyses how this consensus has development and considers how the policy prescriptions that flow from it intersect with local and global environmental agendas. Discussions of the idea and practices of sustainable development are centrally concerned with the future of the Earth and its inhabitants’ relationships, and policy challenges that are the long standing traditional concerns of geographers. This review considers the contribution of human geography in exposing the inherently political and conflictual endeavor that is sustainable development, in particular through the work within political ecology.

Framing Sustainable Development Given that almost all disciplines potentially have some thing to say in terms of analysis of the environment, of development, or with regard to policy for sustainable development, it is no surprise that there are a very large number of definitions of the term. Figure 1 lists a small number of definitions that point to the range of different ‘starting points’ that can be identified regarding the capacities and functioning of the Earth and the require ments of society, now and in the future, locally and globally. The notion of sustainable development is often por trayed in terms of three pillars or corners of a triangle as illustrated in Figure 2. Such frameworks encompass the idea that the arenas are interdependent and the objective of sustainable development is to maximize the goals across all three systems. Whilst there is no agreement as to the detail within the pillars/corners, these kinds of

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A better quality of life for everyone now and for future generations to come. The net productivity of biomass maintained over decades to centuries. International resource development that is socially desirable, economically viable, culturally appropriate, and ecologically sustainable. Nondeclining per capita utility. The process of improving the living conditions of the poorer majority of mankind while avoiding the destruction of natural and living resources, so that increases of production and improvements in living conditions can be sustained in the longer term. The amount of consumption that can be sustained indefinitely without degrading capital stocks, including natural capital stocks.

Figure 1 Definitions of sustainable development.

Genetic diversity Resilience Productivity

Growth Equity Efficiency

Empowerment Social cohesion Cultural diversity

Figure 2 The objectives of sustainable development.

models are important for stressing how system goals are socially constructed and how sustainable development in practice requires choices and trade offs to be made (at particular points in time and at particular scales) re garding what is being pursued, how and at what costs to particular groups of people and interests. Diversity and contestation over the meaning of sus tainable development is revealed in the consideration of ‘how’ to conjoin human demands of the Earth without endangering the systems on which survival depends. A predominant way of organizing the varied interpret ations of sustainable development has been to label them along a set of continua (often used interchangeably or in combination) as shown in Figure 3. Such frameworks are useful for exposing at each end, the very different views of human relations with the Earth, and of the nature and sources of change required for sustainable development. For those that articulate a weaker view of sustainability, the focus is on the ways in which nature can be adapted to meet human needs, through enhancing the stock of resources via developing renewables and creating sub stitutes, making more effective use of existing resources

(enhancing efficiency and reuse), and technological so lutions that will reduce problems of depletion and pol lution. In this weaker view, there is no need to fundamentally alter the predominant narrative of a human centered view of nature or the existing discourse on what constitutes economic progress. In contrast, strong sustainability is a discourse that prioritizes the Earth itself, requires radical changes to what constitutes development, and forwards very different ideas in terms of interventions and the roles for the state, markets, leg islation, and for individual citizenship in practice. In reality, these are spectra rather than dualisms such that distinctions are often blurred and individuals themselves may find favor with different elements at different times and in relation to the various roles they play in society at any point. The meaning of sustainable development can also be considered in terms of ‘what’ it is anticipated to achieve. Target setting (and the associated search for appropriate indicators) has become increasingly popular as the interests in sustainable development have widened, as businesses and public authorities are being required to

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Views of nature and human relations with it

Degree of empathy with need to respond to constraints set by natural system within environmental management

Expand stocks of resources

Revise human demands placed on the Earth

Desire to manipulate nature inherent to human condition

Earth nurtures humanity’s existence

Humans as separate from nature

Human society as immersed in totality of Earth’s systems

Reformist

Radical

More responsible institutions Individual self-regulation

New, devolved political structures needed Self-reliant communities

Figure 3 Typologies of sustainable development.

account for their activities and as results based man agement has become a dominant approach to manage ment within all kinds of organizations. Whilst many authors remain sceptical about the utility of such exer cises (that are fundamentally reductionist) for reconciling inherently complex problems of sustainable development in practice, supporters point to the transformative po tential of accessible information that usually means simple and quantifiable measures against which per formance can be measured. In 2000, the UN General Assembly adopted eight MDGs (with time bound targets and measurable indi cators) against which international agencies, donors, and countries would be judged. Whilst international development targets have been set before, the MDGs (Figure 4) are considered unprecedented for their comprehensive nature, for the broad support that they have garnered and their pivotal role in shaping inter national development policy. One MDG goal refers to environmental sustainability and many others are central to sustainable development more widely for the way in which they demand better outcomes in many arenas that affect poorer groups of people. The meaning of sustainable development can also be considered in terms of the practices being implemented to achieve it and it is in this regard that most diversity is revealed. As the range of organizations and interests aligning themselves to the notion has expanded, the practices of sustainable development include the efforts of local groups to define and shape a sustainable future for their communities of scientific academies in developing technologies that enhance sustainability within and across particular sectors, and the actions of social movements that operate transnationally to foster change in complex arenas of debt rescheduling, labor rights, or genetic en gineering. In consequence, there are no blueprints for

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. Achieve universal primary education. Promote gender equality and empower women. Reduce child mortality. Improve maternal health. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases. Ensure environmental sustainability. Develop a global partnership for development.

Figure 4 The millennium development goals.

what sustainable development means in terms of practice, rather it is the outcome of ongoing dialog, conflict, and compromise in specific places and time.

Mainstream Sustainable Development An understanding of the contemporary challenges of sus tainable development and opportunities in practice re quires consideration of the historical antecedents from which the concept has developed. Many of the current conflicts surrounding sustainable development can be considered a product of the substantially separate nature of the literatures surrounding the environment and that of development in the past. The following section illustrates how debates on sustainable development have substantially reshaped understanding in both arenas to bring modern environmentalism and development studies closer together. Modern Environmentalism Whilst it is acknowledged that an intellectual concern for the conservation of nature goes back at least to the late eighteenth century (and indeed that religious ideas about the relationship between people and the environment have much longer standing), most accounts point to

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Rachel Carson’s 1962 book on pesticide pollution, Silent Spring, as a landmark for founding the popular movement known as modern environmentalism. It was through the 1960s that a coherent philosophy and language sur rounding the environment developed and environ mentalism started to influence public policy. As such, modern environmentalism is distinguished from longer standing literary appreciations of nature or the scientific analyses of species, for example. The subsequent history of environmentalism is necessarily complex, wide rang ing, and varied in different countries. The focus here is to consider the ‘mainstream’ or broad consensus identified within major publications and international conferences, for example, concerning the predominant views of nature, the characteristics of prescribed conservation interventions, and the role of political economic change. However, like other social movements, environmentalism embraces substantial diversity from individuals through to ideologies as seen in Figure 3 such that a consider ation for diversity and dynamism has to be retained through any selective review. In the 1960s, environmentalism was largely a movement reflecting European and American, white, middle class concerns. After a period of two centuries of industralization and urbanization, the undesirable effects of such develop ment were beginning to be seen. Environmentalism be came overtly activist and political and received substantial media support. The combination of actual changes in the environment and people’s perceptions, generally, at this time brought widespread public support for the environ mental movement for its focus on environmental problems and as a means for expressing anti establishment views and lobbying for political change more widely. It was not solely local outdoor environments which were perceived to be under threat, but human survival itself, and the environmentalists’ cause was enhanced by a number of influential ‘global future studies’ published in the early 1970s. These included texts such as The Limits to Growth (also known as the Club of Rome Re port) by D. H. Meadows and co workers. In short, these modeled (often in some detail and complexity), the ever expanding human population and the mounting de mands of society on a fundamentally finite resource base. To avoid the catastrophic consequences of crossing the physical limits of the Earth’s resources, urgent conser vation actions (particularly population control in the developing world) and ‘zero growth’ in the world economy were required. These global future predictions gave little attention to the social, technological, or in stitutional factors which affect the relationship between people and resources. They were also ahistorical in the sense that they gave no attention to how or why the world is divided into rich or poor and were apolitical in considering the future of the Earth (rather than people) as the overriding and paramount concern. There was no

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consideration of how the solutions advocated would favor some nations or groups over others. Within such understanding of the environment as the stocks of sub stances found in nature and of pollution and environ mental deterioration as the inevitable consequences of industrial development, development and conservation at this time were portrayed as incompatible such that the environmental movement found little support within nations of the developing world keen to assert sovereign control over resources and to deliver further indus trialization and growth. The UN Conference on the Human Environment held in 1972 in Sweden, is considered a key event for putting environmental issues on the international polit ical agenda. One hundred and thirteen nations partici pated at Stockholm and a new international institution for monitoring global environmental change, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), was a direct outcome of the conference. Whilst the impetus for and central activities of the conference remained centered on northern environmental priorities (i.e., the environmental impacts of industrialization), the term ‘pollution of pov erty’ was used for the first time to refer to the environ mental concerns of the poor, such as lack of clean water or sanitation, which were the development problems that threatened life itself for many in the developing world. Notions of sustainable development were widened to embrace understanding that a lack of development (as well as industrial development) could cause environ mental degradation. However, there were no detailed discussions of the links between poverty and environ mental degradation or the causes of poverty. There was continued mistrust on behalf of the developing nations regarding the extent to which ideas of development and environment were indeed understood as interdependent and of truly ‘shared’ problems of global resource man agement. Whilst proceedings within the conference confirmed that environment and development should be integrated, there was no plan of action as to how that integration should occur or be fostered. In short, whilst the previously separate arenas of environment and de velopment had started to move together and become understood as interconnected concerns, the practical challenges of sustainable development remained ill defined. In 1977, UNEP commissioned the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Re sources (IUCN) to consider and report on the conser vation problems of the world and to identify effective solutions to these. The World Conservation Strategy was published in 1980 and was envisaged as a comprehensive action oriented program for political change. The ob jectives of conservation were expanded from principally those of nature preservation to include aspects of human development through the ways in which human survival

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and future needs in science, medicine, and industry are linked to ecological processes and genetic diversity. In forwarding ‘development’ (in the form of ‘appropriate’ environmental management) as the means to achieving conservation (rather than an obstruction), the strategy can be considered important in the development of ideas around sustainable development. For many, the strategy shared many of the weaknesses of earlier global future publications, where the priority continued to be the problems for the environment raised by economic de velopment and the root of degradation attributed to the escalating numbers of people and short sighted ap proaches to natural resource management. For a global agenda that stressed global responsibility and strategy, the insufficient attention given to the political realities of resource use or for implementing solutions was particu larly problematic for many commentators. In 1987, the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) did much to insert human development concerns and the challenge of overcoming poverty. By showing how environmental problems were inextricably linked to economic and social inequality, the WCED brought development issues into environmental debates and exposed the environmental impacts of core North–South relationships in trade and industrialization as well as aid. The notion of sustainable development was extended through the recognition that the environment did not exist as a sphere separate from human actions and ambitions and the practical challenges of sustainable development were opened up through the Commission’s consideration of the political and social requirements of sustainable development. The report was underpinned by a strong ideology that nature and the Earth could be managed through reviving economic growth, such that there was no specter of economic disaster portrayed by the WCED. Deteriorating en vironments were also seen to be in opposition to con tinued development such that tackling the broader factors underlying world poverty and international in equality was fundamental to overcoming environmental problems. Inequality was seen as a global environmental problem and seeking distributive justice was part of the solution. The combination and interdependence of environ ment and development concerns of the WCED are

evident in the critical objectives of sustainable develop ment identified in Figure 5. Within the substance of the report, the WCED also challenged a number of dominant narratives on development–environment relationships that had pervaded modern environmentalism. For ex ample, whilst ensuring a sustainable level of population was one of the critical objectives, the WCED recognized the differentiated impact on resources of current inter national patterns of consumption and considered that these patterns and processes of consumption were ‘as important as numbers of consumers’ in the conservation of resources. The commission also recognized varied responsibilities of different countries in implementing solutions and finding the less energy intensive forms of economic growth. The WCED has been accused of ‘comfortable reformism’ for the ways in which it suggests that economic growth can be reconciled with environ mental conservation without any significant adjustments to the prevailing capitalist market system and for how it did not challenge patterns of consumption in the North. It is praised for identifying the substantial political and economic changes required in a range of arenas to achieve sustainable development and criticized for not going far enough in terms of identifying the barriers or obstacles to change in these sectors. In 1992, the UN Conference on Environment and Development, the ‘Earth Summit’, was held in Rio de Janeiro, explicitly to consider progress on environment and development since the WCED report. At the time, it was the largest ever international conference held with over 170 governments represented and a further 2500 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) participating in a parallel Global Forum. The central aim of the summit was to identify the principles of and an agenda for action towards sustainable development in the future. The challenge was seen to require consensus at the highest level, such that, for the first time, heads of state gathered to consider the environment. The outputs were the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (27 Principals), the Agenda 21 document (a 40 chapter action plan), the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Convention on Biological Diversity. There have been many and often opposing evalu ations of the Rio conference, but most acknowledge the need to consider it as a process rather than an event. It

Reviving growth. Changing the quality of growth. Meeting essential needs for jobs, food, energy, water, and sanitation. Ensuring a sustainable level of population. Conserving and enhancing the resource base. Reorientating technology and managing risk. Merging environment and economics in decision making.

Figure 5 The critical objectives of sustainable development, WCED, 1987.

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can be considered to have prompted new ways of thinking regarding the links between poverty and the environment and placed politics more centrally into the environmental arena that endures. Agenda 21 continues to carry political authority in framing the actions of local, national, and international development insti tutions and the Framework Convention on Climate Change has been supplemented by the Kyoto Protocol. For others, the agenda remained consistent with that of the earlier UN conference; one dominated by northern priorities focused on issues of the global commons such as climate warming and biodiversity that are more amenable to political and technical solutions rather than environmental concerns associated with poverty or glo bal inequality. Figure 6 summarizes the ways in which Agenda 21 is considered to have reinforced, rather than challenged, mainstream ideas around environment and development. In 2002, the World Summit on Sustainable Develop ment (WSSD) was held in South Africa with the stated aim of reinvigorating at the highest political level, the global commitment to a North–South partnership to achieve sustainable development. It is considered to have been a more inclusive summit than Rio for the way in which more stakeholder groups were brought into formal meetings (including a bigger presence for business), but also for the extensive informal participation of many individuals and groups in parallel civil society events. There is a widespread view that the period between Rio and Johannesburg has been one in which any consensus around sustainable development fell away. There were substantial difficulties within the preparatory meetings (PrepComs) in arriving at the statements intended to provide the framework for subsequent debates. Oppor tunities for constructive dialog were compromised by the US and the UK engagement in war on Iraq (without UN sanction). The absence of an international consensus on the challenges of sustainable development were also evident within the proceedings; illustrated in the failure to establish new targets for proportional increases in

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renewable energy use or for mandatory standards on corporate accountability. The official outcomes of WSSD were the Declaration on Sustainable Development and the Plan of Implemen tation. The Declaration (notably shorter than the Rio Principles) is reproduced in Figure 7. The Declaration confirms again that poverty, inequality, and the environ ment are interdependent concerns within mainstream international thinking. Some evolution of sustainability thinking is also evidenced in the reference to the inter dependent pillars of sustainable development and to col lective responsibility in reinforcing these, suggesting that notions of development had expanded beyond economic development and social concerns (and to include the im plications of globalization for the first time). The Plan of Implementation details the next steps for action for sustainable development identified by the UN. It was poorly received by international nongovernmental organizations, particularly in the way it restated existing commitment and failed to identify funding nor mech anisms for how actions were to be realized. For others, the lack of fresh commitments or vision was not unexpected, given that world leaders had already committed to pursuing sustainability and suggested that the WSSD was essentially about implementing and monitoring progress. Evidently, ideas surrounding sustainable develop ment have influenced modern environmentalism and mainstream understandings of the environment and its relationship to the concerns of development, particularly in less developed regions of the world. In short, under standings of basic opportunities and needs in develop ment, of persistent poverty, and distributive issues have come closer into environmental debates. For some commentators, this has led to a diffusion of ideas within environmentalism and confusion surrounding sustainable development. The suggestion is that environmental concerns have become secondary to issues of power and politics (e.g., as business interests become key actors within policy debates) and sustainable development

Agenda 21 predicated on economic growth as within WCED. Emphasizes the familiar environmental issues and management of earlier reports such as the World Conservation Strategy. Heavily technocentrist including the means through which sustainable development will be achieved, building on science, information, and sound technologies. Assumes change will arise through mutual interests of North and South and of current and future generations. Calls for participation on behalf of rainbow coalition’ of women, children, young people, indigenous people, trade unionists, business, industry farmers, local authorities, and scientists.

Figure 6 Mainstream environmentalism as forwarded within Agenda 21. Compiled from Adams, W. M. (2002). Sustainable development? In Johnston, R. J., Taylor, P. J. & Watts, M. J. (eds.) Geographies of global change: Remapping the world, pp 412 426. New York: Wiley.

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We recognize that poverty eradication, changing consumption and production patterns, and protecting and managing the natural resource base for economic and social development are overarching objectives of, and essential requirements for sustainable development. The deep fault line that divides human society between the rich and the poor and the ever-increasing gap between the developed and developing worlds pose a major threat to global prosperity, security, and stability. The global environment continues to suffer. Loss of biodiversity continues, fish stocks continue to be depleted, desertification claims more and more fertile land, the adverse effects of climate change are already evident, natural disasters are more frequent and more devastating and developing countries more vulnerable, and air, water, and marine pollution continue to rob millions of a decent life. Globalization has added a new dimension to these challenges. The rapid integration of markets, mobility of capital, and significant increases in investment flows around the world have opened new challenges and opportunities for the pursuit of sustainable development. But the benefits and costs of globalization are unevenly distributed, with developing countries facing special difficulties in meeting this challenge. We risk the entrenchment of these global disparities and unless we act in a manner that fundamentally changes their lives, the poor of the world may lose confidence in their representatives and the democratic systems to which we remain committed, seeing their representatives as nothing more than sounding brass or tinkling symbols.

Figure 7 The Johannesburg declaration on sustainable development.

becomes aligned with broader concerns of justice and governance. For others, mainstream environmental ism remains centered on questions of the natural en vironment, of species extinction, and on ways of reducing consumption of natural resources, and therefore, dis engages from sustainable development. Whilst this lit erature describes the issues of environmental degradation and resource futures as affecting everyone, the discourse continues to pursue the rights of the environment rather than human rights and the identified responses continue to differentiate the more developed from the less de veloped countries of the world. Work in the field of environmental justice can be considered to be bringing the concerns of environ mentalists and those with interests in inequality closer together. Whilst a defining feature of this grassroots movement as it originated in the United States has been the way in which issues are brought to public attention by people themselves rather than environmentalists, work in this arena reaffirms how poor people often live in poor environments (a significant step in the development of ideas of sustainable development revealed within the WCED) and how the costs of pollution and the benefits of environmental protection are regularly uneven (a principal case of many Southern governments in inter national environmental agreements). In these ways, the field of ‘just sustainabilities’ is considered to be creating new spaces for both environmentalism and for sustain able development.

Development Thinking Development is often discussed in relation to ‘developing countries’, but is a concept which relates to all parts of the world at every level, from the individual to global transformation. Whilst ideas about the best means to achieve human aspirations are potentially as old as human civilization, the study of development and formal development planning originated after World War II. It has been suggested that development studies ‘barely’ made it to the twenty first century, whilst the object of study made it rather less effortlessly. The following section traces some of the principle changes in thinking regarding the ideologies and strategies of development over this history and identifies some of the ways in which ideas of sustainable development have impacted on these through to the current period. Although these shifts are considered chronologically, existing theories are rarely totally replaced, rather that new ones find relative favor and contestation over the prescriptions are a continuous feature. From the late 1950s, development thinking was firmly centered on the potential of economic growth and the application of modern scientific and technical knowledge as the route to prosperity in the less developed countries. In short, the global development problem was conceived as one in which these nations needed to enter the modern age of capitalism and liberal democracy and to ‘catch up’ with the West. A modernization thesis dominated

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mainstream theories of development to the early 1970s within which development was modeled as a series of stages along an unconstrained linear path. Modernization was equated with the characteristics of westernization (in terms of economic prosperity, but also in terms of aspects of society, culture, and politics). It was an optimistic time in which underdevelopment could be overcome through imitative processes and the transfer of finance, technology, and experience from the West to less developed countries and from urban centers to rural areas. All countries were considered to have an equal chance of development. It was an era in which the contribution of neoclassical economics was to the fore, in which understandings of development were largely confined to the history and experience within Europe, and when an almost unquestioned faith in urban based industrial growth as the driver for development persisted. The discourse of development at this time was largely separate from that of the environment; the con straints of development were seen as internal to those countries in terms of an insufficiently developed industrial and commercial base and insufficient levels of investment and national savings. Strengthening the material basis of society was the key to becoming mature, developed economies and societies. Too little industrialization, rather than too much, was the dominant message coming from development thinking at this time. Into the 1980s, the optimism of a speedy end to underdevelopment faded with rising levels of debt and the problems for oil importing countries in the context of the oil crisis. Rising economic inequalities and rural– urban differences (rather than any understanding of en vironmental impacts of development) led to growing dissatisfaction with ideas of development as modern ization. During the 1970s, a radical critique of main stream development thinking emerged (particularly through scholars from regions strongly linked to the US such as Latin America and the Caribbean) in which politics were to the fore. The ‘dependency school’ for warded explanations of underdevelopment (framed in terms of the socioeconomic structures as well as the economic conditions of these countries) as outcomes of the exploitative/dependent relations with other parts of the world. The root cause of underdevelopment was modeled as the structural disadvantages external to underdeveloped countries and regions and the processes of colonialism in the past and of the capitalist economy generally that linked the periphery with the core. The radical critique found wider support within Europe at this time, where there was a reinvigorated interest in the work of Marx and an emerging ‘New Left’ movement that linked with the struggles of the Third World antic olonial movements. In consequence, rather than seeing the US and Europe as the source of solutions, depend ency theorists saw the role of these regions as actively creating the problems of underdevelopment.

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Despite some core differences between modernization and dependency theories, both encompass a common no tion of linear progress and a shared belief in the role of the state to realize that progress (although they disagreed on the nature of that role). From the late 1970s, however, greater attention started to be given to how development should occur rather than with theorizing social change. Dependency theory moved out of fashion as a broad sweep of changes in thinking regarding the meaning of develop ment and how best to achieve it emerged (commonly captured under the umbrella term of ‘another’ or ‘alter native’ development). Whilst economic growth remained important within development ideas, phrases such as ‘growth with equity’ emerged and encapsulated the rec ognition that it was critical to ensure that the benefits do not fall solely to a minority of the population. Furthermore, development itself became conceived as a multidimen sional concept encapsulating widespread improvements in the social as well as the material well being of all in society. In turn, the strategies forwarded for achieving development became diverse and multiple rather than single and top down and were considered to require investment in all sectors, including agriculture as well as industry. It was asserted that development needed to be closely related to the specific local, historical, sociocultural, and institutional conditions, focused on mobilizing internal natural and human resources, appropriate technologies, and giving priority to basic needs. Rural based strategies for devel opment were particularly important amongst those pro moting ‘development from below’. In clear contrast to development thinking to that time, development was to be more inclusive, with individual and cooperative actions and enterprises becoming the central means for development rather than the state. Strong notions of participatory development emerged in recognition of the shortcomings of top down, externally imposed, and expert oriented research and development practice. It was understood that development needed to be sustainable (in encompassing not only economic and social activities, but also those related to population, the use of natural resources, and the resulting impacts on the environment) and a consensus emerged surrounding the characteristics of interventions that were more likely to be sustainable. These challenged both academics and practitioners to make a number of ‘reversals’ in their work including; putting people’s priorities first, combining the strengths of both indigenous and scientific knowledge, and moving from a blueprint to a learning process approach to planning. The centrality of security of resource rights and tenure were exposed as were the benefits of locally based, smaller scale initiatives and the capacities of NGOs to foster these orientations in development. However, the experience through the 1980s of many developing countries (with the exception of the ‘Asian Tiger’ economies) was of previous gains being lost and in

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many cases being reversed. By the mid 1980s, the sister institutions of the WB and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were concerned about the threat of the se vere balance of payment difficulties being experienced by many developing nations to the international financial system as a whole. Comprehensive, long term solutions were considered to be required to address the debt crisis, based on packages of broad policy reforms known as structural adjustment programs (SAPs). SAPs became the requirement for lending from these institutions and in creasingly became conditions for access to bilateral as sistance and private investment, such that SAPs increasingly defined the entry of many developing na tions into the global economy. Whilst each package in theory was tailored for the particular country, SAPs generally included many common elements as shown in Figure 8 and reflected strongly the ideals of neoliberal ism that emerged as the predominant idea in defining development policy and practice through the 1990s. From the late 1980s, dissatisfaction with the record of state involvement in the economy and social life more broadly had taken root within the governments and policies of the North. Neoliberalism is an approach to development that heralds the free market as the best way to initiate and sustain economic development, such that typical policy responses involve removing the influence of the state in the domestic economy and external mar kets as shown in Figure 8. By the mid 1990s, private capital flows to the de veloping world exceeded official aid and markets appeared triumphant. However, the 1997–98 Asian crisis revealed how rapidly such capital could be removed and progress dismantled. Debt burdens rose rather than fell through the decade and whilst modifications to the adjustment para digm were made in response to the evidence of widening socioeconomic differentiation and environmental degrad ation under reform packages, there was little challenge made to the fundamental, neoliberal rationale. By the end of the decade, rising dissatisfaction with conventional models of development was increasingly being articulated on the ground through popular struggle and the activities

of new social movements. Protest within countries of the South coalesced around the combined issues of the fail ures of the state and the market to deliver prosperity or well being, around prominent environmental problems, and the hardships created by the debt crisis (both its im pacts and those of the solutions designed to resolve it). The legitimacy of the International Financial Institutions was also questioned by mass demonstrations on the streets of Seattle and Davos, for example, around meetings of the World Trade Organization and the G8 Finance Ministers. Questions over the utility of existing models for devel opment were also raised by the collapse of communism that undermined the strength of Marxist analyses and the ‘postmodern’ critique within the social sciences more widely was challenging fundamental notions of modernity. In addition, the rise of globalization was changing the position of the nation state and national governments across economic, social, and political spheres. A number of ‘post’ and ‘anti’ development versions of development thinking emerged in response to these varied concerns; in short, questioning the whole discourse of development for the way in which it served Eurocentric interests. A post development era depended on breaking the ‘holds of westernization’ be it as organized by the aid industry or activities of western private capital and ‘defending the local’ (through ecological, women’s, and peoples organ izations) against the forces of globalization. Heated de bates over policy also emerged, including within the IFIs, where prominent figures conceded that neoliberal reforms were failing. At the turn of the century, the arena of de velopment as a discipline, as an institutional practice, and as a popular struggle was considered to be in substantial and pervasive ferment.

The Poverty Consensus: Current Engagement of Development Policy with Local and Global Environments It is evident through the review above, that ideas con cerning sustainable development have been a significant

Internal policy reforms designed to increase the role of the market in the domestic economy including: Privatization of public enterprises. Reduction and removal of state subsidies. Reducing government workforce and public spending. Improvements to tax system. Removal of wage controls. External policy reforms designed to raise exports and increase foreign investment including: Currency devaluation. Trade liberalization through removal/reduction of tariffs and quotas. Remove state control of exports.

Figure 8 The characteristics of structural adjustment programs.

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factor towards integrating the discourses of modern en vironmentalism and of development studies. By the start of the twenty first century, both arenas had been shaped by the restructuring of global capitalism, by the emer gence of unprecedented environmental changes (in cluding those associated with maturing TNCs and also with collapse of communism), and by the challenges of new social movements and civil society (nationally and globally) looking to impose regulation over governments, business, and international institutions. It is considered to be a time where the costs and ambiguities of any de velopment intervention are now being more readily ac knowledged and a context within which more meaningful and inclusive debates around sustainable development can occur. Whilst poverty has been a familiar word in develop ment since the start of formal development planning in the 1950s, there is an acknowledged consensus currently around poverty reduction spanning multilateral agencies, government, and development NGOs that is un precedented and different. This is attributed in particular to the move of the WB to a Poverty Reduction Agenda in the late 1990s and the centrality of poverty across the MDGs (Figure 4). There is also widespread agreement around how to operationalize poverty reduction strat egies at a country level (via Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, PRSPs) and in relation to new mechanisms for development assistance based on partnerships between donor and host country to improve the management and delivery of aid. Critics question whether the current poverty focus is fundamentally changing the practice of development or constitutes a real shift beyond neoliberalism. Elements for concern include how the macroeconomic pre scriptions remain centered on rolling back the state and engaging with the globalized economy as the solution to poverty. Furthermore, the prescribed solutions are sug gested to remain focused on government and society of the South as responsible for the causes and outcomes of poverty (and view external factors such as trade, inter national finance, or donor activities as fundamental to overcoming poverty rather than part of the dynamics of poverty creation). This arena of new partnerships in development is also under critical review including for the way in which budgets continue to be set by criteria (and audited) by donors and the required consultation between governments and civil society in practice often means with select members of professional groups. Whilst many diverse actors have bought into the MDG consensus of international development as a measurable, monitorable (and moral) goal, critics point to the way MDGs imply rather than direct necessary policy change. The MDGs are noted as stronger on the material aspects of poverty and deprivation than regarding the non material aspects of freedom such as empowerment and

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citizenship that are identified as important ends as well as means within development. The following sections con sider the current poverty consensus explicitly in terms of its engagement with the environment as evidenced within the framework of MDGs and within PRSPs as instruments in development. MDG7 (Figure 4) commits nations to take action to ensure environmental sustainability and the specific tar gets and indicators developed in relation to this goal are shown in Figure 9. It has been suggested that, to date, the MDGs contribute little in enhancing the complex links between poverty reduction and environmental sustain ability or the role of ecosystem integrity in supporting pro poor growth. Target 9 is seen to refer to country policies, but the indicators accompanying this target track largely issues of global concern with only one (no. 29) being directly relevant to the way in which the poor use the environ ment. Whilst other indicators under this target are issues of importance to the poor, they do not assess the ability of the poor to access key ecosystems as a source of liveli hood, to protect those ecosystems from outside interests nor assess those resources in terms of a route out of poverty. Whilst the importance of country policies is accepted widely, there is a concern that such a focus can detract from more challenging questions such as those regarding global and corporate dimensions to resource use currently and in future that are being shown by re cent research to be most important in shaping sustain ability. For example, a ‘new scramble for Africa’ on behalf of transnational corporations is becoming evident as the continent becomes the source of ‘non Islamic oil’ and other strategically important minerals, the current ex ploitation of which is shown to be a primary source of conflict and instability within this region and to be failing to meet the development needs of the majority of people within African countries. There is no recognition of corporate co responsibility in such failings of African governance. Whilst MDG8 concerns global partnerships for development and refers to transnational issues, there is no mention of the environment. Whilst mount ing research exposes the impacts of global climate changes and the processes of northern industrialization and consumption on local environments of the South, there is little evidence that such research is impacting on the policy framework of the MDGs. Targets 10 and 11 can be considered to be more directly relevant to the interests of the poor, but there is still no consideration of the wider issues determining the access to resources by the poor (in the physical sense nor in terms of information or their participation in environmental de cision making). For example, in relation to numbers of people with access to basic water supply and sanitation, there is no consideration of issues such as the reliability of service or pricing in relation to income that are governance

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Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reverse the loss of environmental resources.

25. Proportion of land area covered by forests. 26. Ratio of area protected to maintain biological diversity to surface area. 27. Energy use per 1 GDP. 28. Carbon dioxide emissions (per capita) and consumption of ozonedepleting chloroflurocarbons. 29. Proportion of population using solid fuels.

Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

30. Proportion of population with sustainable access to an improved water source(urban and rural). 31. Proportion of population with access to improved sanitation.

Have achieved, by 2020, a significant improvement in the lives of least 100 million slum dwellers.

32. Proportion of households with access to secure tenure.

Figure 9 MDG 7: Global targets and indicators.

Biodiversity

Encourage by 2010 the application of the ecosystem approach. Establish representative marine protected area networks by 2012. Achieve by 2010 a significant reduction in the current rate of loss of biodiversity.

Fisheries

Maintain or restore fish stocks to a level that can produce a sustainable yield by 2015.

Water

Develop integrated water resources management and water efficiency plans by 2005.

Chemical pollution

By 2020, minimize significant adverse effects on human health and the environment associated with the production and use of toxic chemicals, via use of transparent, science-based risk assessment and risk management procedures, and taking account of the precautionary principle.

Figure 10 Additional targets for environmental sustainability (United Nations, 2002).

issues that directly impact on access of the poor to these resources. Indeed there is no MDG relating to governance. At the World Summit on Sustainable Development, additional targets relating to environmental sustainability were created (Figure 10). In the commitment to apply an ecosystem approach in biodiversity conservation and in restoring fish stocks to levels that can support sustainable yields, these targets are steps towards the incorporation of greater pro poor elements related to sustainable de velopment. Encouragement was also given at WSSD to countries to modify MDG7 to suit local conditions and to establish country specific targets and indicators, which is further source for optimism concerning engagement with local environments. In 1999, the IMF announced that PRSPs would re place SAPs as the strategic documents around which future loans and decisions over debt relief would be made and are administered jointly with the WB. The core

principles of the approach are shown in Figure 11. PRSPs are written by national governments, required to set out coherent plans for reform focused on poverty reduction and identify financing needs. Governments are also ‘encouraged’ to consider environmental factors in their PRSPs. A number of assessments have revealed serious shortcomings in relation to the mainstreaming of en vironmental issues into PRSPs, even suggesting the need for an ‘environmental overhaul’ if the central role of ecosystems in the lives of the poor and their potential to reduce rural poverty is to be secured. To date, environ mental health targets such as safe drinking water and sanitation have been found to receive more attention than issues of natural resource management as shown in Figure 12. A study by the Environment Department of the WB itself found that many of the PRSPs that were

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PRSPs should involve broad-based participation by civil society and the private sector at all stages, including formulation, implementation, and outcome-based monitoring. PRSPs should focus on outcomes that will benefit the poor. : PRSPs should recognize the multidimensional nature of poverty and the scope of actions needed to effectively reduce poverty. PRSPs should involve the coordinated participation of development partners, including bilateral and multilateral agencies and nongovernmental organizations. PRSPs should recognize that sustained poverty reduction will require action over the medium and long terms as well as in the short run.

Figure 11 Core principles of the PRSP approach. Compiled from World Resources Institute, (2005). World Resources Institute 2005: The wealth of the poor. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute.

A study of forest-related issues in 36 PRSPs found treatment of forest issues to be weak, particularly in their analysis of the links between poverty and forest resources and the role of natural resources and ecosystems in shaping well-being. Despite this, many went on to set forest-related policies and programs in their agendas for action. An assessment of biodiversity-related themes within 15 PRSPs revealed that the majority analyzed declines in biodiversity, only one developed a policy prescription that integrated biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction. A study of 10 PRSPs revealed inadequate and inconsistent incorporation of water issues. In particular, the need for close links between strategies for delivering additional water supply and sanitation infrastructures and those for managing water supplies for productive use by the poor were not recognized.

Figure 12 Issues of natural resource management within PRSPs. Compiled from World Resources Institute (2005). World Resources Institute 2005: The wealth of the poor. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute.

particularly weak in their attention to environmental issues in fact came from countries where poverty–en vironment linkages were strongest (in terms of heavy dependence on natural resources for rural livelihoods, dependence on traditional fuels, and low levels of basic sanitation). Few PRSPs made any reference to the indi cators of MDG 7 (other than access to safe water and adequate sanitation). The degree of mainstreaming of the environment generally within PRSPs was found to be influenced by the nature and degree of civil society participation in their preparation that in turn was driven more by donor concerns rather than political priorities. In addition to these weaknesses in terms of main streaming of the environment, analyses of poverty within PRSPs have revealed an emphasis on technical solutions to poverty–environment issues rather than for the more politically challenging issues of access, control, and rights to resources and how these impact on the capacity of the poor to secure sustainable livelihoods. Many PRSPs to date, fail to consider the impact on sustainability of their proposed growth strategies; incentives for high input, export agriculture still dominate, for example, but fail to analyze the impact on natural resource depletion, on waste generation, or on small scale farmers and their

ability to manage local resources. In short, PRSPs cur rently give insufficient attention to the centrality of ecosystems in the lives of poor people, to the need to enhance the ability of the poor to govern these and in deed, to the negative impacts of wider economic growth strategies on the livelihoods of the poor as well as ecosystems. Evidently, whilst there are positives emerging from the current poverty consensus, there are shortcomings in terms of the degree of mainstreaming of the environment within both the framework of MDGs and the strategies that are considered central to delivering poverty re duction. Optimistic signs for the future include the way that the MDG approach gives civil society organizations opportunities to monitor the activities of governments, to force further accountability for inadequacies, and to as sert more effective pressure. Similarly, optimism can be drawn from the evidence that some of the best examples of environmental mainstreaming within PRSPs were found in those where civil society engagement had been most extensive (although concerns remain as to how far such examples were driven by the donor community). To date, however, it is suggested that the conception of the poverty–environment nexus remains the ‘mainstream

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view’, that is, of the poor caught in a vicious cycle with environmental degradation as both victims and continued agents. There remains little nuanced understanding of the possibility of the poor pursuing livelihood options that are sustainable or for the arenas and practices of international aid or trade, for example, in creating and perpetuating poverty. There is a danger that attention has been diverted away from global and macro level policies and practices that influence global poverty trends and are the context within which poor people operate. Whilst the obstacles the poor face in terms of environ ment and development often manifest themselves at the local level, it is in these wider arenas that many suggest the roots of their problems lie. The suggestion is that whilst ‘alternatives’ in development theory may have seemingly been incorporated into the mainstream as identified here within development policy instruments of international organizations and the donor comm unity, they have been distorted in the process of such incorporation.

Geography and the Poverty–Environment Nexus It has been suggested that sustainable development is not only an important concept for the future of the world, but also for developments in geography. Given that many of the issues central to contemporary sustainable develop ment debates have a long standing history of study within the discipline, many point to the substantial knowledge as well as empirical and theoretical tools that exist within the community to ensure that geographers go on making a contribution to a positive future for life on Earth. As scientific understandings of environmental change develop, for example, geographers are engaging in the required detailed field studies and assessments, in highlighting the limitations of science and exposing the social construction of the meanings of resource use and degradation. Geographers are also fostering under standings of the spatial, temporal, and social nature of outcomes on the ground of conservation and develop ment interventions for people, cultures, and ecologies. They are also well placed to expose the ideologies underpinning the moves towards (and interests within) the mounting and multiple ways in which sustainable development is currently being taken up. In having context and place at the heart of their tradition, geog raphers are also considered to have the potential to overcome the suggested formulaic and parochial under standings of how to foster sustainable development and to fill the gaps between theory and practice of sustain ability in the future. The sections above have revealed the nexus of poverty and environment interactions that are now central to

understandings of sustainable development as a notion and in terms of policy and practice. Geographers working in the field of political ecology can be considered to be particularly active in the critical investigation of the complex realities of poverty and environmental degrad ation and the integrated scales and processes of political, economic, and environmental development that under pin the varied outcomes experienced by particular peo ple and places. Political ecology as an area of geography developed rapidly in the 1980s, particularly as a response to the understood apolitical nature of mainstream en vironmental literature at that time. For example, in ex posing the political and economic interests and conflicts that lie beneath ‘proximate’ causes of environmental problems such as poverty or population growth, they have been part of the challenge to mainstream under standings evident in this review. However, whilst early work in political ecology was rooted in a critique of policy failures such as in conservation and in hazard management, it has been suggested that political ecolo gists have subsequently been better at critiquing dom inant narratives than in generating counter narratives. They are also considered to be falling short currently in engaging with and influencing policy. It has been sug gested that work in political ecology has overemphasized the local case study that can be charged as anecdotal and case specific such that further comparative and broad scale study is required. As development geographers more widely have come to emphasize local outcomes and initiatives, there is a need for close consideration of scale in each case to avoid assumptions that the local neces sarily means more sustainable. Most importantly, greater intradisciplinary work, including between geographers who work in the North and in the South can be con sidered essential for understanding and engaging in the challenge of sustainable development. See also: Aid; Development I; Development II; First World; Neoliberalism and Development; Nongovernmental Organizations; Postcolonialism/ Postcolonial Geographies; Postdevelopment; Poverty; Second World; Third World.

Further Reading Adams, W. M. (2001). Green development: Environment and sustainability in the Third World (2nd edn.). Abingdon: Routledge. Adams, W. M. (2002). Sustainable development? In Johnston, R. J., Taylor, P. J. & Watts, M. J. (eds.) Geographies of global change: Remapping the world, pp 412 426. New York: Wiley. Agyeman, J. (2005). Where justice and sustainability meet. Environment 47(6), 10 23. Barbier, E. B. (1987). The concept of sustainable economic development. Environmental Conservation 14(2), 101 110. Black, R. and White, H. (eds.) (2004). Targeting development: Critical perspectives on the millennium development goals. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Chambers, R. (1983). Rural development: Putting the last first. London: Longman. Cornwall, A. and Brock, K. (2005). What do buzzwords do for development policy? A critical look at ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘poverty reduction’. Third World Quarterly 26(7), 1043 1060. Elliott, J. A. (1996). Introduction to sustainable development. Abingdon: Routledge. Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J. and Behrens, W. W., III. (1972). The limits to growth. New York: Universe Books. O’Riordan, T. (1996). Environmentalism on the move. In Douglas, I., Huggett, R. & Perkins, C. (eds.) Companion encyclopedia of geography, pp 449 478. Abingdon: Routledge. Redclift, M. (2005). Sustainable development (1987 2005): An oxymoron comes of age. Sustainable Development 13, 212 227. Schuurman, F. J. (2000). Paradigms lost, paradigms regained? Development studies in the twenty first century. Third World Quarterly 21(1), 7 20. Simon, D. (2003). Dilemmas of development and the environment in a globalising world: Theory, policy and praxis. Progress in Development Studies 3(1), 5 41. United Nations (2002). Johannesburg Plan of Implementation, http:// www.un.org/esa/sustdev/documents/WSSD POI PD/English/ POIToc.htm (accessed on Nov 2007). World Commission on Environment and Development (1987). Our common future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. World Resources Institute (2005). World resources, 2005: The wealth of the poor. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute.

Relevant Websites http://www.un.org/esa Home page of the Division for Sustainable Development within the Department of Economic and Social Affairs at the United Nations.

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The Division is responsible for providing leadership and expertise on sustainable development within the UN. In addition to facilitating coordination within the UN, it supports the work of the Commission on Sustainable Development in facilitating intergovernmental negotiations, for example, and also provides technical assistance and advice to particular countries. http://www.iied.org Website of the International Institute for Environment and Development a research institute and NGO working for more sustainable and equitable processes of global development. Based in London but has partners throughout the world. Rooted in a commitment to partnership working and providing a voice for vulnerable groups. A good source for recent research, project findings, resources to support practice and links to events and networks. http://www.worldbank.org Web site of the World Bank Group that provides access to a range of research publications, policy and project documentation, data sets, country information and recent initiatives. Can access PRSPs for particular countries and can examine data concerning progress towards MDGs, for example, through this site. http://www.wri.org Web site of the World Resources Institute, a Washington based research and development organization committed to sustaining ecosystems for human needs, enabling public access to information regarding decisions over natural resources and to expanding economic opportunity whilst conserving environments. Hosts a major data base ‘EarthTrends’ tracking environmental, social, and economic changes as well as widely cited publications such as the World Resources volumes.

Symbolic Interactionism V. J. Del Casino, Jr. and D. Thien, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Ethnography The study of cultural and social practice in everyday context with particular attention to the broader cultural and social meanings human individuals and social groups develop over time and space. Functionalism This body of theory challenges behavioral-based social theories, arguing that psychologically each individual’s psyche is invested with certain cultural and social traits that are essential to human interaction. Nonrepresentational Theory This much debated philosophical framework seeks to extend ‘beyond’ representation and values knowledges as they are practiced or performed, instead of interpreted or interpretable. Participant Observation This methodological technique suggests that researchers must participate in the mundane, day-to-day interactions among a social group or people to understand the cultural and social processes at work in a particular time and space. Post-Structuralism A theoretical framework that developed out of a critique of structuralism, suggesting that linguistic practices, discourses, and texts have no essential characteristic but are constructed temporarily through the deployment of power. Pragmatism This philosophical framework proposes people act on the basis of the knowledge they have at hand – that which is most useful. The intellectual focus, on practical application of linguistic conventions as opposed to deeply embedded structures. This approach also suggests that theories must be pluralistic and relevant to the particular context in which various ideas are employed and developed. Social Identity A term that is often attached to a number of social categories (e.g., gender, sexuality, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, etc.), which are themselves based in the construction of broader sociocultural and political–economic processes. Social Role This concept, often associated with structuralist thinking, suggests that certain sets of practices and behaviors (i.e., social roles) are regulated in and through particular social situations. Structuralism A theoretical framework that developed in the study of linguistics and cultural anthropology, which suggests that individual linguistic practices (signifiers) represent the deeper, underlying sociocultural and political–economic contexts and processes (signified) in which they are produced.

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Structuration Theory A social theory that proposes the intertwining of behavior and structure, as opposed to the predominance of either structure or individual agency.

Introduction The development of symbolic interactionism in Western social theory is informed by a general interest in the investigation of subjective experience arising, in part, from a critique of structural functionalism. The term was coined by US sociologist, Herbert Blumer who – following the theories of his mentor, George Herbert Meade – argued that common understanding was de veloped through the mundane acts of daily interaction. More specifically, Meade methodologically concentrated on language and talk between individuals. Symbolic interactionism thus entails the study of face to face interactions to investigate how social meanings and a common sense of belonging emerge in and as part of societies. Contrary to macro theoretical approaches to the study of ‘the social’ and ‘society’, which investigate social systems and processes, symbolic interactionism concen trates on the micro scale of interactions among and be tween social actors. In many ways, early interactionist theorists challenged the assumptions of Marxist and other structuralist thinkers, who chose to focus their at tention on how capitalism, for example, mediates all so cial relations. Put simply, through macro theoretical approaches Marxists argue that relations of capitalism structure social interactions; collective meaning is con stituted through the larger system or process at work in society at a given time and place. In turning attention toward subjective experience, symbolic interactionists seek to investigate collective social meaning from the ground up, suggesting that societal meanings are con structed and reconstructed through practice. At the same time, critical to the development of a social interactionist model is the idea that humans do not simply react to other’s prompts. Rather, individuals are pragmatic actors who proactively employ social and cultural symbols in their interactions. Unlike a strict structural Marxist perspective, power is not theorized as domination; rather, symbolic interactionist philosophy is premised on the notion that humans have agency in the construction of their symbolic culture and society.

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Even though symbolic interactionism appears to privilege the individual over society in its logic, the intent is actually to consider the individual and society as mutually constitutive: all social action is interactive between individuals and thus it must be thought of as complexly intertwined with and productive of collective meaning. Within the field of sociology, various scholars engaged with these notions of interactionism to develop methodological frameworks for investigating urban life (i.e., the Chicago School) or social roles (i.e., Erving Goffman). In the case of urban studies, scholars em ployed ethnographic methodological approaches to examine communication in and between various social groups. In the case of role theory, Erving Goffman suggested that through detailed observation it is possible to investigate how social roles are developed inter actively. In constructing these roles, people employ various symbolic meanings that are mutually ‘accepted’, as they perform and present their ‘self ’ in relation to other ‘selves’. In the context of twenty first century social theory, it is less common for scholars to explicitly claim ‘allegiance’ to symbolic interactionism. At the same time, the broader tenets of this philosophical approach can be commonly found at work in a number of fields and disciplines. In geography, questions of how symbolic meanings of place are constructed are increasingly important in critical human geography. Geographers are also very much concerned with the mundane and profane, as well as the daily interactions at work in the constitution of both social space and identity. Moreover, geographers remain interested in how theories of both ‘the symbolic’ and ‘social interaction’ inform understandings of not only human relations but also human–nonhuman relations. In the case of the nonhuman, geographers are theorizing interactions between objects from the so called natural environment, as well as human products and artifacts, such as maps or buildings.

Symbolic Geographies The development of human geography throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries established the discipline’s focus on the material landscape. Cultural and social geographers, for example, traced the diffusion and distribution of the artifacts of social and cultural systems across local and regional spaces. Early on, how ever, some geographers also insisted that the study of cultural and social worlds demanded attention not only to material artifacts but immaterial processes – for ex ample, religious, linguistic, ethnic – as well. These geographers suggested that psychological geographies, how people imagine the world, were critical to how they might understand cultural and social worlds. Although

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these geographers did not necessarily engage with the conceptual or theoretical language that now facilitates geography’s study of the immaterial world, they certainly understood that these processes were important. Thus, as the discipline of geography developed an expanded repertoire of methodological tools to investi gate the spatial organization of the material social world, there also emerged a number of new approaches to cope with the complexity of immaterial geographies of meaning and feeling. The conceptual development of genre de vie (or way of life) in French human geography provided geographers with a conceptual basis to in vestigate not only human landscapes but also human social behavior in place. As part of this move, geog raphers developed a sense of how places produced a unique set of meanings and feelings. Each area or region was (and is) unique because of the ways that social interactions take place in and through them. Other geographers, particularly Marxists, considered broader social processes and ‘structures’ that regulated social life and human behavior. Importantly, these geographers insisted that they needed to study how various systems of power, economic or social, construct spaces of control. It is here that geographers turned their attention, to the power and importance of cultural symbols, and particularly the ‘symbolic landscape’. Central to this study of ‘the symbolic’ in Marxist geog raphy has been an analysis of class relations and the power of the elite to construct spaces that structured how and where people move on a day to day basis. In this rendition of the landscape, the capitalist economy is the conceptual lens through which an understanding of symbolic meaning and space is theorized. Turning at tention to symbolic meaning means that geographers have developed methodological techniques and concepts to examine this new object. The symbolic landscape has thus been conceptualized as a space that can be ‘read’ like other cultural texts for the subjective meanings invested in them. Importantly, humanistic and feminist geographers struggled with the centrality of purely economic models of power. Humanistic geographers, on the one hand, thought of the symbolic not simply as a system of power and authority wielded by elites. Instead, these geog raphers suggested that the symbolic meaning of places are tied to the mundane, everyday feelings that people ascribe to their ‘place in the world’. Symbols – and more broadly representations – are a critical aspect of understanding how we, as humans, understand the rela tionships between our ‘feelings’ and places. As such, cultural symbols help us both represent our ‘sense of place’ and make meaning of it. Feminist geographers, on the other hand, remained concerned with broader issues of social power and authority but argued that purely economic theories failed to explain the symbolic nature

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of that power, a result not only of the economy but also of patriarchal social systems. Feminist geographers are, therefore, also critical of both humanistic and cultural theories because they privilege masculinist ‘ways of see ing’ the symbolic landscape; they argue that geographers have, in the past, failed to examine the importance of the symbolic power of gendered identities and subjectivities. These debates about the symbolic landscape in geography complicated the discipline’s understanding of the relationship between social identities and spaces. This paralleled the entry of ‘critical race’ and ‘queer’ theories into geography, as well as post structur alist theories of the symbolic all of which began to de construct the relationship between class, gender, and space, and other relationships between age, development, ethnicity, nationalism, race, and sexuality. In a post structuralist reading of ‘the symbolic’ spaces are con ceptualized as relational, constructed through a web of intertextual power relations that privilege certain iden tities over others. Spatial representations are thus im portant empirical nodal points in a post struturalist analysis. However, unlike broader structuralist or hu manist theorizations of the symbolic, the notion that a symbolic system is somehow underpinned by an essential character, such as sense of place, or by a deep underlying structure, such as capitalism or patriarchy, is largely suspect. Instead, post structuralist geographers have examined how symbolic spaces and meanings may be temporarily fixed through relations of power and au thority, giving the appearance of a ‘real’ world that structures everyday social interactions. Such symbolic spaces are given meaning and can be ‘sutured’ to par ticular identities in ways that mediate daily social inter actions. In this way, our symbolic geographies become ‘real’ and quite powerful as both a process of control, as well as a site of resistance, both overt and mundane. Over the course of more than 100 years of academic geography, geographers have developed a conceptual language for studying the symbolic, and cultural and social symbols, particularly through their study of various representations of power and authority. The turn toward ‘the symbolic’ has suggested that purely objective studies fail to account for how meanings are ascribed to various places and spaces or to the dynamics of power that might structure the symbolic world, even temporarily. While the ‘vantage point’ of humanists, Marxists, feminists, queer, or post structuralist theorists in geography might be different, all suggest a focus on subjective experience and human interaction.

Interactive Geographies As the interest in symbolic geographies has become more complex so has the theoretical and conceptual language

that geographers have used to understand social inter actions and how humans define and comprehend their ‘place in the world’. Geographers have become particu larly interested in the interrelationship between place and community, space and identity. In the case of the study of identity, geographers investigate how social actors use various symbolic systems and spaces in the construction of their identities, reciprocally investigating how human interactions with particular spaces also help frame social identities and practices. Geographers have thus explicitly turned their attention to human inter action, the mundane acts of engagement social actors ‘go through’ on a day to day basis as they negotiate the city, the country, or their home. To do this, geographers have needed a number of new theoretical and methodological frameworks to examine the geographies of human interactions, which have included Giddens’ structuration theory, Husserl’s phenomenology, and also the inter pretative sociology of Erving Goffman and symbolic interactionism more generally. To understand how people perform socially in the various regions of everyday life, sociologist, Erving Goffman sketched famously detailed observations of face to face encounters, carefully considering the spaces of these interactions. In his dramaturgical approach, people variously assume social roles as performers, audience members, or outsiders in an ongoing drama devoted to projecting and receiving particular infor mation regulated by rules socially determined through practice. The spaces where these activities of daily life take place are critical: the ‘front’, ‘back stage’, or ‘outside’ regions. As with a stage set, the front is where social performances take place. This spatial designation is not determined by space alone. For example, the front is not only the dining room to a back stage of a restaurant kitchen, but may also be determined in symbolic ways, such as by appearance and manner of the occupants, including such fleeting events as facial expressions. Through the performance of social roles, individuals manage the front stage through both the material pro duction of places and through the symbolic organization of cultural meanings. The symbolic nature of social interactions is translated through geography’s sensitivity for the complex relationship between symbolic and ma terial space; it is possible to trace how spaces are con stituted to support certain sets of symbolic practices. More than simply suggesting that space was divided between front and back, however, Goffman also argued that different actors manage different spaces. The dis tance between performer and audience is a managed space that enables people to limit and regulate what is available for perception by others; that is, both performers and audience can control their use of information in particular spaces. These spatial strategies include man aging discrepancies of interaction – appearing out of one’s

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social ‘role’ or showing the wrong ‘face’, for example – to avoid disruption and eliminate uncomfortable emotions such as embarrassment, shame, or the discrediting of an individual’s self conceptions. Goffman’s notion of ‘civil inattention’, the process of acknowledging then avoiding the presence of others as tactic to preserve privacy, is well known. The potential for unintentional disruptions (in correctly performing, or presenting in the wrong space) serves to highlight both the interactive and symbolic as pects involved in the expression of the self within an everyday social milieu. Goffman’s work is rich with in sights into human encounters. Humanistic and posthumanistic geographers, with their attention to the symbolic nature of being ‘in place’ and ‘out of place’, have resonance with this form of symbolic interactionism. In the 1970s, for example, David Ley suggested that geographers pay close attention to the intersubjective nature of place meaning, arguing that they consider the mundane aspects of everyday life as essen tial to their understanding of the place meaning rela tionship. Although his contributions to the discipline do not draw directly from symbolic interactionism, he pushed geographers to consider the theoretical and methodological value associated with the study of social interaction in their studies of place, validating the con cerns of social and cultural geographers more broadly that wanted to engage in the study of subjective experi ence. Even more generally, the ‘arrival’ of symbolic interactionism and other theories of subjective experi ence in the context of human geographic theory and practice paralleled the growing interest in human agency, which has been seen as a corrective to the overly struc turalist geographies that failed to account for the subtlety, nuance, and difference found in everyday social inter action. In the context of rural geography, Sarah Harper has suggested that positivist and structuralist approaches fail to appreciate the subjective relationships that emerge between people and their place in the world. Turning her attention directly to symbolic interactionism, she has argued that through the use of participant observation it is possible to better understand the complexity of everyday life in rural spaces. Within human geography, then, the emphasis on both the everyday and on the centrality of space remains a key interest, as is the notion that identity is a process of social and spatial intertwining. Moreover, Goffman’s symbolic interactionism has pushed some geographers to consider just how people manage ourselves and identities in par ticular kinds of places, as well as in the face of social roles and rules. Phil Crang, for example, developed an ex tended analysis of a restaurant as a ‘workplace geography’ employing Goffman’s body of work to examine the im agined and spatial structures of interaction which con stituted this particular place. Crang’s research highlights the interconnections between forms of interaction and

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identity politics, intersections which are also deeply in fused with relations of power. Feminist geographers have remained interested also in how the everyday practices of managing gendered roles within social spaces remain regulated through the wider symbolic systems of patri archy and sexism, for example.

Symbolic Interactionism and Contemporary Human Geography Thus, despite certain reservations, symbolic interaction ism still figures in human geography, though twenty first century geographers seldom claim a direct relationship with the label ‘symbolic interactionism’. The traces can be identified in the ongoing concern with symbolic meanings of place and how these are produced; the continued emphasis on the everyday; and the search for ways to explain identity as a process of social and spatial intertwining. Methodologically, the qualitative boom of the 1990s necessitated a deeper understanding of the micro scale interactions that take place in interviews and participant observation encounters. Theoretically and empirically, many cultural, feminist, social, and urban geographers, for example, remain preoccupied with de veloping sociospatial accounts of human encounters in social spaces, accounts that reveal the implicit or explicit traces of a symbolic interactionist analysis. Such work investigates the extent to which people attempt to man age ourselves and identities, in particular kinds of places, both ‘in’ the face of or ‘as’ the face of social roles and rules. Erving Goffman’s work, in particular, has provided a basis for both theoretical and methodological investi gations of symbolic meaning as employed in the ‘pre sentation of self ’. Such investigations consider how symbolic orders and meanings are produced and repro duced, examine how bodies are presented, and assess the negotiation of emotions in social encounters. At the same time, some geographers have become dissatisfied with the binary logics of the front and back stages and have tried to expand on Goffman’s notion of ‘self presentation’ through alternative theories of social interaction. Turning their attention to the performative theory of Judith Butler and the deconstructive method ologies of Jacques Derrida, geographers have re considered the relationships that are constructed through social interactions as they occur between mutually con stituted front and back stages. In this framing, social identities, and the roles that people attach to them, are constructed through relational social interactions that rely on an ‘other’ to make them ‘real’. Front stage per formances do not hold any meaning without the per formances that supposedly occur back stage; there is no front and back, then, only performance, which makes it appear as if the world is structured into discreet spaces of

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‘inside’ and ‘outside’, or ‘us’ and ‘them’. Through de construction, geographers may examine how various so cial interactions put in place temporary barriers between front and back, inside and outside; the so called ‘man agement’ of the distance between these two spaces col lapses, however, when researchers understand how social categories and identities are performed relationally. Such deconstructive tactics also allow geographers to examine the notion of identity or the ‘self ’ within a symbolic interactionist tradition. For example, Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose suggest that within the ‘Goffmanesque tra dition’ performance is staged by knowing actors, who craft their ‘play’ with intent. Offering Judith Butler’s theory of performativity as an alternative, they critique some geographic analyzes of presentation or ‘perfor mance’ for too readily taking up Goffman’s concepts of agency, and thus not attending to the multiple ways in which power informs performances, an awareness that informs Butler’s theory. The keen interest in the production of selves in particular spaces, such as in Goffman’s work, also pres ages the more recent interest in embodiment as the basis of relational engagement. In Goffman’s attention to feelings, he also foregrounds a additional preoccupation with emotion and affect as a consequence of self space interactions. The expansion of qualitative research within geography has also inspired additional attention to face to face encounters. However, neither Goffman, nor symbolic interactionism more generally, is taken up wholesale in contemporary human geography very often. This is because symbolic interactionism is premised on the notion of a conscious actor interacting with others in spaces that can be interpreted through an individual’s ability to produce and decode socially symbolic mean ing. Ontologically, this claim presupposes a social world as a product of social interaction between pragmatic actors who interpret the actions of others and behave accordingly. Information can be consciously withheld or controlled by individual social actors; that is, individuals are imbued with agency. People choose, for example, to display feelings to produce, conceal, or reveal infor mation. Thus, symbolic interactionism is much less concerned with questions of broader systems and pro cesses of power and resistance that are central to the current work of many human geographers today. And yet, by working in the arena of symbolic spaces and interactions, human geographers have deepened the social interactionist notion of the social self, extending the work of Goffman and others, to create an explicitly sociospatial concept of identity. This has helped ground some urban geographic studies in the empirical analysis of political claims to space, such as rights to city spaces and the construction of ‘local’ identities. Post positivist geographers have also drawn upon and expanded sym bolic interactionism in a few useful ways. First, they

consider more explicitly the relationships people have ‘with’ the places of their encounters (e.g., in positioning themselves as ‘local’ or not), as opposed to detailing their performances ‘within’ certain places. Second, they acknowledge more explicitly the relationships people hold within and/or of themselves in the psychic life of encounters (e.g., considering self perceptions or experiences of mental health). Finally, they critically reexamine the notion of a conscious actor in light of developed psychoanalytically inspired notions of sub jectivity, and feminist and cultural theorizations about identity including performativity, gender, and the ‘other’. In these ways, Goffman’s theorizations of both self and space have been employed and critically moved forward by human geographers. For example, Joyce Davidson has worked with Goffman’s ideas of management in order to understand and detail agoraphobic experiences of anxiety within social spaces. His explanation of front and back stage spaces has been extended by Deborah Thien to investigate how dominant understandings of intimacy have a particular spatial logic symbolized by the prox imity of face to face encounters. While this logic recruits people to particular roles and rules, people may con sciously or unconsciously resist and redefine their iden tities in relation to the particular mundane spaces of their daily affairs. As such, symbolic distinctions of ‘front’ or ‘back’ are collapsed or rendered unstable. Eric Laurier and Chris Philo also draw from Goffman’s rich resources as inspiration for their ethnomethodological investi gations of gestures between strangers in urban cafes. Extending Goffman’s ideas of impression management, they note that while gestures as part of a ‘body’s work’ can always elude a manager’s control and so thwart concealment of private intent, such bodily moves may also be an expression of shared presence. Such gestures may contribute to constituting places as sites of sharing a more positive reading than Goffman’s self management analysis allows. Geographers also remain interested in how theories of both ‘the symbolic’ and ‘social interaction’ inform understanding of not only human relations but human– nonhuman relations as well. In the case of the nonhuman, geographers are theorizing interactions between objects from the so called natural environment, as human products and artifacts, such as maps or buildings. In much of this work, symbolic interactionism, which itself began as a critique, is subject to critical revisioning by human geographers who have incorporated and extended this work in productive ways. At the same time, the (im) possibilities of symbolic representations have also been much debated, particularly within cultural geography. Nonrepresentational theory has emerged out of a struggle to escape representation, to acknowledge what is unspeakable or unwriteable. Some feminist theorists have

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also argued for the impossibility of representing a femi nine ‘other’ within a masculine symbolic framework. A focus, therefore, on ‘symbols’ and ‘the symbolic’ is being rethought in various ways through human geo graphy’s interest in emotion and affect theory. The enduring attention within human geography to the symbolism of interaction as constitutive of daily, ‘located knowledge’, such as expressed by Angus Laurier, Eric Whyte and Kathy Buckner, and an abiding meth odological concern for assessing social and spatial identities through assessing encounters, can at least in part be traced to the ideas and methods that make up the symbolic interactionist tradition. While symbolic interactionism may now seem little more than an his torical, conceptual artifact, lingering only in traces of contemporary geographers’ conceptual and methodo logical frameworks, these traces register a continued, considered thinking about social interactions in and of space through detailed engagements with the symbolic and material aspects of geography. Such engagements extend human geography’s theoretical and methodo logical conceptualization of what is meant by symbolic space, human social interaction, and human/nonhuman relations. See also: Emotional Geographies; Ethnography; Ethnomethodology/Ethnomethodological Geography; Feminist Methodologies; Humanism/Humanistic Geography; Lamarck(ian)ism; Non-Representational Theory/Non-Representational Geographies; Participant Observation; Phenomenology/Phenomenological Geography; Posthumanism/Posthumanistic Geographies; Regional Development, Endogenous; Structurationist Geography; Subjectivity.

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Further Reading Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspectives and Methods. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Crang, P. (1994). It’s showtime: On the workplace geographies of display in a restaurant in southeast England. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12, 675 704. Davidson, J. (2003). Putting on a face: Sartre, Goffman, and agoraphobic anxiety in social space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, 107 122. Duncan, J. (1978). The social construction of unreality: An interactionist approach to the tourist’s cognition of environment. In Ley, D. & Samuels, M. (eds.) Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems, pp 269 282. Chicago, IL: Maaroufa Press. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Gregson, N. and Rose, G. (2000). Taking Butler elsewhere: Performativities, spatialities and subjectivities. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, 433 452. Harper, S. (1987). A humanistic approach to the study of rural populations. Journal of Rural Studies 3, 309 319. Laurier, E. and Philo, C. (2006). Possible geographies: A passing encounter in a cafe. Area 38, 353 363. Laurier, E. and Philo, C. (2006). Cold shoulders and napkins handed: Gestures of responsibility. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31, 193 207. Laurier, E., Whyte, A. and Buckner, K. (2001). An ethnography of a cafe. Journal of Mundane Behaviour 2, 195 231. Ley, D. (1977). Social geography and the taken for granted world. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2, 498 512. Ley, D. (1978). Social geography and social action. In Ley, D. & Samuels, M. (eds.) Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems, pp 41 57. Chicago, IL: Maaroufa Press. Pile, S. (1993). Human agency and human geography revisited: A critique of ‘new models’ of the self. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18, 122 139. Pile, S. (1991). Practicing interpretive geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16, 458 469. Smith, S. J. (1984). Practicing humanistic geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74, 353 374. Thien, D. (2005). Intimate distances: Considering questions of ‘us’. In Davidson, J., Smith, M. & Bondi, L. (eds.) Emotional Geographies, pp 191 204. Ashgate: Aldershot.

Symbolism, Iconography M. Denil, Washington, DC, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Conventional Signs Something considered able to stand for something other than itself by virtue of its place in a convention of meaning. Depiction A form of mimesis or imitation relying upon visual resemblance of some aspect of an object. Generalization A process wherein more detailed information is made understandable by elimination or modification of aspects of its representation while maintaining the aspects of its character considered significant. Gestalt The resolution of the interaction of the various elements visual field. Gestalt Psychology The study of phenomena concerning the visual field. Graphic (Axis) The axis of a triadic model of map symbol typology tending toward nonlinguistic abstraction in representation of the object in question. Graphic Redundancy A means of ensuring that different map symbols can be received as different by variation in two or more aspects of the symbol. Iconography A set of specified or traditional symbolic forms associated with a subject or theme. Interpretant A code or convention of understanding brought to a potential sign by the reader. Interpretive Community Description of a group sharing one or more conventions of understanding. Linguistic (Axis) The axis of a triadic model of map symbol typology tending toward specific verbal or written names for the objects represented. Mimetic (Axis) The axis of a triadic model of map symbol typology tending toward depiction of some (often visual) aspect of the object represented. Practics Issues concerned with the practice of theory. Qualitative Differences in kind. Quantitative Differences in amount or value. Representamen The physically present trace of the sign. It represents the object through the working of the interpretant. Representation The act of standing in for something else; another object or concept. Semiology The science of the signs (Saussurian school). Semiosis The process of a sign’s acquisition of meaning. Semiotics The science of the signs (Peircian school). Signified The part of the sign which is represented. Signifier The part of the sign which is present.

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Symbolism The use of signs to represent features on a map. Syntagam The composed statement made up of constituent signs; the map as an argument.

Theoretic Overview of Symbolism and Iconography A map is a mediation between some situation, relation ship, or condition and a user who is able to interpret that mediation. A map is a sign, constructed of constituent signs, composed to persuade the map user of its capacity to represent something other than itself. As with any sign, there is nothing inherent in the map itself which holds meaning; meaning is something that can only reside in the perceived relationship of the sign with some external concept accessible through a paradigm or system of understanding. These systems can be thought of as lan guages, as they utilize vocabularies, grammars, and canons of conventional usage. The potential user brings a system of their choice to the potential map and judges the potential map’s fitness for recognition as a map, and, should it qualify, he or she then reads meaning into it. If the user is satisfied with the validity of the reading s/he has made, s/he declares the artifact to be a good map. The map mediates between a territory (a situation, relationship, or condition) and a user by standing in for that territory – by representing it to that user in some limited way. The map is not the territory, but instead it persuasively suggests some aspect of the territory in a useful and usable manner. By reducing the territory to an abstraction, and presenting it as a configuration of cat egorized and conventionalized signs, the map allows and facilitates a broad conceptual grasp of the territory. A map is not a reconstruction of its represented territory in all specific detail, but is instead a selected, generalized, rhetorical presentation of one way of conceptualizing that territory. The map’s argument hides some specificities and submerges others in generalities while preserving or making explicit still others. The abstract map symbols function in much the same way, but, obviously, not to the same extent, that algebraic symbols abstract a math ematical equation from the specific to the general. Our understanding of how map symbols function and acquire meaning derives from the science of signs, which is variously known as semiotics or semiology. The use of two terms for this science arises from the originally

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independent development of the two main schools of thought about sign function. The latter school derives from the teachings of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure while the former refers to the system developed by the American polymath, physicist, philosopher, and geodesist Charles Sanders Peirce. Each school is grounded in a different model of sign relationship, and each model is useful and informative. The Saussurian semiological model views the sign as a two part entity consisting of a signifier and a signified with an essentially arbitrary relationship between the parts (Figure 1). The signifier is the part present: for example, the letters C, U, and P, for instance, written on a paper. The signified is the concept of cup ness which groups together everything which might be thought of as having some cup like quality. It is the structure of the language or code system that permits the linking of the two factors (the combination of letters and the concept). This sign is then available to take part in a further act of semiosis; that is to say, it can itself become the signified of a new signifier–signified pair (a new sign). This mech anism of progressive construction of meaning is clearly displayed by the semiological model. For example, a stylized rendering on a sign board might be recognized as denoting a cup, while a sign of a cup can connote a cafe´, and a cafe´ can connote a restroom facility. Each reading builds on the previous one. The Peircian semiotic model is triadic: it consists of an object (the thing signified), a representamen (that which is present), and the interpretant (the code which provides the link (Figure 2). The utility of this model is that it allows a switching of interpretant; it shows how a sign can take on various meanings dependent upon context, ex pectation, and/or user experience. This is important, because the interpretant or code is brought to the semiotic by the interpretor (the reader, viewer, or hearer), and may or may not bear any resemblance to the

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interpretant expected by the author. Without an inter pretant, the object and representamen have no relation ship and the representamen would not be recognizable as a sign: it would not, in fact, be a sign. With an unexpected interpretant, the representamen may be taken as a sign for some quite unintended object. This model demon strates quite clearly that the representamen (be it a text, a map symbol, or whatever) is not a self contained re pository of meaning; but, rather, that meaning is negoti ated each time the sign is read. Herein lies an issue at the heart of all symbolization and iconography: how can the understanding of a sign be assured, or at least anticipated? If interpretants can be chosen or switched, or if they are, in any event, brought to the sign by the interpreter, how is it that reading or in terpretation is not wholly idiosyncratic and individual? It is not idiosyncratic because readers are not autonomous and unconstrained; rather, a reader is created by the in terpretive community to which the reader belongs. In fact, it is membership in one (or more) communities for which a given representamen exists as a possible sign (with de notations and connotations) which allows someone to exist as a reader. An analogy might be drawn to a global positioning system (GPS) receiver: the device recognizes a particular signal pattern from a satellite, picking it out of the background of electromagnetic noise (most of which is meaningless) because it accepts that signal pat tern as a possible legitimate and meaning bearing pattern. The code Interpretant

On to other signs Triadic sign model

The signifier

The new signified

The signifier

t jec ed Ob gnifi si

the

The new sign

Re

The next signified

pr the esen sig tam nif en ier

The next sign

The sign The signified

The signifier

Figure 1 The Saussurian semiological model views the sign a two-part entity with an arbitrary relationship between the parts. The signifier is the part present, and this is linked to a signified object, concept, or sign. The resulting sign is then available to take part in a further act of semiosis by itself becoming the signified of a new signifier signified pair (a new sign).

Figure 2 The triadic Peircian semiotic model consists of an object (the thing signified), a representamen (that which is present), and the interpretant (the code which provides the link). It is the interpretant which gives meaning to the representamen, and allows one to leap from the representamen to a signified object. The object (and thus the meaning of the sign) is negotiated between the representamen provided by the message composer (map maker) and the interpretant brought by the reader (map user).

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The pattern, recognized as being amongst a vocabulary of legitimate patterns, is read as meaning ‘‘I am this satel lite.’’ A satellite, perhaps one from a different system, which emitted a different pattern, would not be recog nized as bearing a legitimate meaning. Conversely, a le gitimate pattern received from an entirely different source would be assumed to be the satellite. It is (for the purposes of this analogy) membership in the interpretive community of devices that can recognize the signals of legitimate GPS satellites that define the GPS receiver. Conversely, a text like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is considered difficult because it requires a reader with access to a tremendously wide and varied set of interpretants; the reader must be conversant with the usages of a large number of interpretive communities, applying several interpretants and recognizing interplay between the codes, to begin to make sense of the text. Thus it can be seen that a map, as both a sign itself and an assemblage of constituent signs, must either exploit interpretant paradigms accepted as natural and legiti mate to its target interpretive communities, provide in dependent access to interpretant paradigms utilized in its composition, or (usually) both. Normally, it is through a legend, key, or list of con ventional signs that a map makes explicit its symbolization scheme. Often a legend on a map will be incomplete in that it is restricted to signs that are deemed especially significant to the theme of the map, or that outline a specific hierarchy, or both. Generally speaking, the more complete a legend provided on the map itself, the less the map user or reader is required to rely upon their own expectations and assumptions. The legend, therefore, is an important feature affording access to the map. Some map user communities (by definition, a type of interpretive community) have conventionalized forms, formats, symbolization regimes, etc., which serve to both define and to make usable maps for that community. Competitive orienteering maps, geological maps, and marine navigation charts are three instances of highly conventionalized maps. Often the conventions for such

Proximity

maps are so standardized and ubiquitous that under standing is assumed; in these cases, if a legend is pub lished at all it is often as a separate document altogether.

Mechanics of Symbolization As mentioned above, symbolization is one of the mech anisms of generalization, although, in effect, all general ization can also be seen as a process of symbolization. This is because generalization is a process where one representation is made to stand in not only for the configuration of the feature but possibly for another representation; it is the substitution of a sign for some aspect of a feature or of a sign. All maps require some form of generalization/symbolization; it is one of the primary means of directing and focusing attention upon aspects deemed important by the map’s rhetorical argu ment and of rendering transparent or invisible aspects or features deemed to be extraneous. Much of the mechanics of perception and under standing of map symbolization may be understood by application of the tenets of Gestalt psychology, or the psychology of form. Factors such as proximity, similarity, figural stability, good continuation, closure, and others make up the Gestalt laws of organization in perceptual forms, and explain how individual symbols are perceived on the page, and how they are perceived to interact with and among other symbols. While understanding of the mechanics of perception have moved beyond the rela tively basic gestalt laws, it is still useful to conceptualize the visual field as governed by these rules. It is the gestalt of the image that, for instance, allows the individual marks that make up a dashed or dotted line to be understood as a single continuous entity. It is, as well, the gestalt that establishes the figure–ground relationship in the map image and permits multiple visual levels to develop, thus facilitating the reading of multiple inter secting configurations of symbolized features (Figure 3).

Figural stability

Similarity

Figure 3 An illustration of some of the basic Gestalt laws.

Closure

Good continuation

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An important distinction to keep in mind is that be tween representation and depiction. Depiction is simply one dimension or possible means of representation. A photo or sketch may depict a feature more or less realistically, and the depiction can be used to represent the feature, but the two activities are fundamentally different. A drawing depicting the Brandenburg Gate may, depending upon the context, represent an urban space, German Imperialism, postwar politics, or con temporary German reunification or it may represent a landmark or tourist destination. In any event, while it depicts the Brandenburg Gate, context governs what it may or may not represent. It is useful to conceptualize a triadic model of sym bolization. The three axes of such a model would be the mimetic, the linguistic, and the graphic. The extreme of the mimetic axis would be a realistic rendering, while at the linguistic extreme would be a name. The graphic apex would be a geometric shape, pattern, or color tone. As one moves away from the mimetic pole, and toward the linguistic, the graphic, or both, the symbol becomes more abstract. Away from the graphic pole, the symbol becomes more specific. Precision or nuance is lost with distance from the linguistic peak; naming accesses powers of context and allusion not available to the other poles (Figure 4). Taking Washington, DC as an example, the rendering of the US Capitol dome would be a mimetic, a label ‘Washington, DC’ a linguistic, and a circled star a graphic, symbolization. A tinted area (mimicking either the political or urban area of the city) would fall some where between the graphic and mimetic poles, with some edging toward the linguistic. Normally, some combin ation of symbol type is used: a labeled dot, for instance.

Graphic

si tic ng u Li

ic

et im

M

Washington DC

Figure 4 An example of various possible symbols for Washington, DC plotted on a triadic symbolization model.

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This graphic redundancy multiplies the accessibility of the symbols.

Practics of Symbolization A vocabulary of symbols and a grammar for their use is required. A vocabulary establishes the paradigm of meaningful representamen from which a selection can be made, while a grammar governs the acceptable proper usage to help allow orthodox interpretation. At the most basic level, map symbols are used to represent locatable features, and specific attributes of the locatable features. Representation of these features fall generally into three types: points, lines, and areas, and the attributes may be either qualitative or quantitative, or a combination thereof. Point features are those which are locatable on the map (at that map’s scale) as a single location, or as a constellation of individual or representative locations. A series of connected points defines a line feature; usu ally the phenomena, described by the line, are assumed to exist equally at all locations along the line. An area is defined by a closed line: the enclosed zone is the repre sentation of the extent of the phenomena. Volumes can also be shown, but except in three dimensional models, volume depiction relies on perspective and perceptual conventions, the understanding of which may or may not be problematic. The differentiable aspects of the map symbols can be categorized as symbol variables. Location, size, value, texture, color (value, saturation, and hue), orientation, shape, pattern, and the tripartite element of clarity (composed of the three dimensions of crispness, reso lution, and transparency) are the basic dimensions. Some types of symbols are well matched to some types of data but awkward or even wholly unsuitable for others. The accompanying tables may be of assistance: derived from MacEachren, they outline some example symbol vari ables and suggest a grammar of usage (Figures 5 and 6). Selection of the symbol type most appropriate for a particular use is governed by many factors, such as map scale, the availability of graphic variables (such as color), and the representations used for other map information. In some cases, a point symbol may be chosen to stand for an area, or an area may be defined by use of a repre sentation of its boundary (a line feature) alone. Many times, text alone may be used to identify an area, espe cially if that area has no definite or uncontested bound ary. A mountain range comes to mind as an example, or an archipelago, where in fact the actual edge of the area is not significant or decidable in all instances. Identification of the attribute upon which to base the representation is integral to symbol selection. As men tioned above, the attributes selected may be qualitative,

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Symbolism, Iconography Point

Line

Area

Location

Size

Resolution

Clarity

Crispness

Transparancy

Saturation

Color

Value

Hue

Texture

Orientation

Shape

Figure 5 A basic vocabulary of graphic symbol variables.

quantitative, or a combination of both. Similarities be tween features are usually indicated by similarities in the feature symbolization, and vice versa. Qualitative differences are usually represented by qualitative differences in the symbols employed; with quantitative differences between similar features employing differences in quantitative aspects of similar symbols. A symbolized road, for example, has its physical linearity represented by the employment of a line sym bol; but other qualitative attributes may be indicated by the exact specification of the line used. A particular road may be classified, for example, by surface type, traffic type, one or two way traffic, access restrictions, etc., and these various classes symbolized using different color hues, line weights, or complexities. These qualitative differences can be incorporated into a qualitative hier archy of road types and thus indicate information im portant to navigation of the road network. Roads in a network could also, or alternately, be classed by

quantitative attributes, for instance, traffic capacity or demand. Quantitative differences in a line symbol may be expressed by line weight or color value, and are amen able, by their very quantitative nature, to being in corporated into hierarchies of their own. Perhaps most critical in establishing a symbol set for a particular map is the issue of differentiability and asso ciativity: the ease with which the various symbols can be identified unambiguously as different, where differences are important, and as similar, where similarity is of interest. In both cases, it is the identification of significant differences between symbols that is the key. Conversely, it is important to avoid gratuitous variation: that is, dif ferences between symbols that do not carry symbolic significance but can distract from interpretation. Many factors can affect what qualifies a difference as significant or perceivable. Differences between shades of color which may seem obvious in large adjacent patches can become problematically differentiable in small patches

Symbolism, Iconography

Numerical

Ordinal

Nominal

Visual isolation

Visual levels

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Legend

Location Good Size

Clarity

Crispness Fair

Resolution Transparency

Poor

Color

Value Saturation Hue Texture Orientation Arraingment Shape

Figure 6 A basic grammar for use of graphic symbol variables.

widely separated on a map. The same concerns apply to small, iconic point symbols, or other types of related signs. As the symbol size decreases, and as symbols ap pear more widely separated on the map, more signifi cance is required in their differences. The factor of graphic redundancy can be a key in overcoming problems of this sort. By altering two variables, the symbol is more easily seen as different. Without doubt, the most critical practical aspect of symbolization is ensuring that the code system is access ible to the map user. As has been mentioned above, it is possible for a potential user to bring almost any inter pretant to the map, and without guidance the map user’s interpretation cannot necessarily be anticipated, let alone guaranteed. Provision of a key or legend, explicating the conventional signs employed on the map is, therefore, of great importance. Whatever form the legend takes, its function as a bridge to disambiguation remains central. Legends or keys can take a variety of forms. The list type is very often seen: in a list, map symbols are directly paired with definitions and hierarchies are set out in order. This type of legend can be quite efficient and compact, although abstraction of individual symbols from the general map context to the neutral ground of the key may interfere with identification. Sometimes, this prob lem is addressed by the use of a so called natural legend, or sample map. This is a small section of map containing

examples of all the symbols used on the map with each symbolized feature labeled. Although a small section of the actual map itself may be used for this, it is relatively seldom that any conveniently sized section of the map actually contains all the required features. More often, an idealized sample is created for use as a key. It is also possible to create legends intermediate between the neutral list and the natural sample map, which bring a ground mimicking the map context into the list. It is very desirable that all symbols appear in a legend exactly as they appear on the map; including the exact same symbol size, color, and orientation. Occasionally, production or design constraints can make this im possible, but every effort should be made to allow as little difference between the symbols as shown on the map and in the legend. Introduction of random variations into the symbol vocabulary key is counter to the rationale for the existence of the key (Figures 7 and 8).

Maps and Map Language Cartographic symbolism and iconography has been ex plained above as the application by a potential map user of a code system, something commonly understood as a language (either graphic, verbal, or both), to a set of signs in order to imbue them with meaning. It is important to

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keep a clear conceptual distinction between the system(s) of meaning (languages) utilized or leveraged by maps and the body of works (the individual maps) that take on meaning when interpreted through one or another of

RAP site River, open water Préfecture boundary Sub-Préfecture boundary Settlements (by size) Roads: major, other Inundated land Geographic graticule elevation (meters) 200 150 100 75 50 25 10 5 0

Figure 7 A list type map legend. Pre´fecture de Boke´ dans le nord-ouest de la Guine´e. From Wright, H. E., McCullough, J. N. and Diallo, M. S. (eds.) (2006). A rapid biological assessment of the Boke´ Prefecture, Northwestern Guinea. RAP Bulletin of Biological Assessment 41, p13. Conservation International, Washington, DC.

these systems. This distinction has not always been well understood, and has at times contributed to debate in the cartographic literature. Since the 1970s, there has been a good deal written about ‘map language’ or ‘maps as language’, with much of this discussion utilizing an essentially mechanistic flow model of communication first developed in the late 1940s. Although some authors (e.g., Kola´cˇny´) produced very complex diagrammatic elaborations on that basic theme, most working cartographers found the models to be of little utility. Similarly, the occasionally recurring interest of some cartographic writers in the structure and mechanics of the eye is also of marginal utility. The eye is the tool of vision, but the eye has evolved to facilitate vision; vision did not evolve to make use of the eye. Other writers attempted to draw on research in the linguistic, semiotic, and/or psychological fields in order to account for the multifaceted nature of cartographic practice. These borrowings, however, often met with re sistance. In discussing linguistic theory as applied to car tography in 1976, Robinson and Petchenik were so distracted by superficial differences between verbal texts and graphic texts that they were unable to grasp the es sential identicality of all semiotic activity. They were thus forced to reject parallels to language and to instead claim special powers for what they termed ‘mapping com munication’ in order to set it apart from other reading. Head’s 1984 discussion of using the analogy of natural language as a paradigm for understanding map com munication approached the issue rather less doctrinally

curva de nivel (metros) elevation contour (meters) centros poblados settlements sitio de muestreo AquaRAP AquaRAP sample site campamento de RAP RAP camp división entre el alto y bajo Caura division of the upper and lower Caura raudual o salto rapids and waterfalls río river límite de la cuenca watershed limit

Figure 8 A natural-type map legend. AquaRAP Caura River Watershed : State of Bolivar, Venezuela. From Chernoff, B., MachadoAllison, A., Riseng, K. and Montambault, J. R. (eds.) (2003). A Biological Assessment of the Aquatic Ecosystems of the Caura River Basin, Bolı´var State, Venezuela. RAP Bulletin of Biological Assessment 28. Conservation International, Washington, DC.

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and more usefully, although Schlicthtmann’s critique of that work from a semiotic standpoint is quite pertinent. Certainly, as has been mentioned above, the code systems leveraged by maps can be thought of as languages (because they in fact are languages; usually graphic lan guages). We also know that meaning is not resident in the map; the map is made up only of signs, which must be interpreted through a language, because language/code systems are the only systems through which meaning is possible. A code system through which an artifact can be interpreted as a map can be termed a map language. Obviously, there can be no one ‘map language’. Map languages are cultural artifacts, and although various such systems of understanding can inform and influence each other, it is entirely possible that a map recognizable through the aegis of one system may be nonsensical under another. Although a cartographer can provide a legend or key to a map (i.e., to suggest a system for reading and understanding), it is still up to the user to choose and apply a system. The signs (which can potentially be read as a map) are presented to a potential user, and it is up to that potential user to select and apply an interpretant (also called a code system or language) in order to generate meaning: in order, that is, to make the thing a map and make themselves readers.

See also: Color, Mapping; Map Interactivity; Map Types; Mapping, Philosophy; Maps; Qualitative Spatial Reasoning; Quantitative Data; Symbolic Interactionism.

Further Reading Belbin, J. (1996). Gestalt theory applied to cartographic text. In Wood, C. H. & Keller, C. P. (eds.) Cartographic Design: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives, ch. 18, pp 253 269. Chichester: Wiley.

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Bertin, J. (1983). Semiology of Graphics. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Caivano, J. L. (1990). Visual texture as a semiotic system. Semiotica 80(3/4), 239 252. Campbell, J. (1993). Map Use and Analysis (2nd edn.). Dubuque, MS: Wm. C. Brown. Chernoff, B., Machado Allison, A., Riseng, K. and Montambault, J. R. (eds.) (2003). A Biological Assessment of the Aquatic Ecosystems of the Caura River Basin, Bolı´var State, Venezuela. RAP Bulletin of Biological Assessment 28, p 17. Conservation International, Washington, DC. Denil, M. (2003). Cartographic Design: Rhetoric and Persuasion. Cartographic Perspectives 45, 8 67. Foucault, M. (1983). This Is Not a Pipe. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Head, C. G. (1984). The map as natural language: A paradigm for understanding. Cartographica 21(1). Monograph 31. Hoffman, D. D. (1998). Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See. New York: W.W. Norton. Imhof, E. (1975). Positioning names on maps (trans. McCleary, G. F.). The American Cartographer 2, 2. Jacob, C. (2006). The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History (trans. Conley, T.; Dahl, E. (ed.)). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Kola´cˇny´, A. (1977). Cartographic information A fundamental concept and term in modern cartography. Cartographica 14(supplement 1). Monograph 19. MacEachren, A. M. (1995). How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design. New York: Guilford Press. McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Collins. Roninson, A. and Petchenik, B. (1976). The Nature of Maps: Essays toward Understanding Maps and Mapping. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rock, I. and Palmer, S. (1990). The legacy of Gestalt psychology. Scientific American 263(6), 84 90. Schlicthtmann, H. (1984). Discussion of C. Grant Head ‘The map as natural language: A paradigm for understanding’. Cartographica 21(1). Monograph 31. Wood, D. and Fels, J. (1986). Designs on signs: Myth and meaning in maps. Cartographica 23(3). Wright, H. E., McCullough, J. and Diallo, M. S. (eds.) (2006). A rapid biological assessment of the Boke´ Prefecture, Northwestern Guinea. RAP Bulletin of Biological Assessment 41, p 13. Conservation International, Washington, DC.

Systems G. P. Chapman, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Complexity Theory Abroad spectrum of ideas, relating to dynamic nonlinear systems which exhibit unpredictable, nonrepetitive, complex emergent behaviors Degrees of Freedom The degrees to which system components or whole systems are free from constraint on their behavior. Entropy In thermodynamics a measure of the unavailability of energy for work. At maximum entropy, energy is uniformly distributed, there are no gradients (potentials) so no work can be done. In statistics, entropy is a measure of uncertainty, and is maximized when all probabilities are equal. Feedback The measure by which a system detects its behavioral distance from a target state. General Systems Theory The theory that postulates that isomorphisms between systems of different materials and scale may be found at an abstract and behavioral level. Godel’s Theorem This says that a complete formal system cannot demonstrate its own completeness. If an axiomatic system can be proven to be consistent and complete from within itself, then it is inconsistent. This is about the limits of reflexivity in formal systems. Laws of Thermodynamics These are laws about the conservation of energy, and about its availability for work (see the term ‘entropy’) and about the fact that the universal tendency is for things to run down–that is, energy dissipates toward an equilibrial state of unavailability.

Most of us have an appreciation that our environment is composed of distinguishable objects or things. We also learn quite early in our lives that these objects are made of other objects, that they have parts, whether the leaves of a tree or the grains of sand in a sandpit. But these objects do not all have equal ontological status. It is quite evident that a pile of sand is simply an aggregation of sand particles, whereas a tree is not simply and only an aggregation of leaves. The word system is used to de scribe those phenomena where the parts are related to the whole in a manner which suggests that there are some organizing principles involved in the assembly of the whole. At this level the idea is intuitively obvious, and we can appreciate that a wristwatch is a system, and that an

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animal can be viewed as a system. Both of these are contained within a region of three dimensional space, and are, therefore, volumetric wholes. But the idea of a system can very rapidly be extended to assemblages that are not volumetrically whole. We talk glibly about social security systems, broadcasting systems, relief delivery systems, etc., which we thereby identify as holistic in some sense, and as having organization. The basic ques tion to be asked of systems theory is: what is to be gained by saying that all these things are systems? To be useful, we have to know what distinguishes systems, and what we can say about them from basic abstract principles. Then we will know when we are on firm ground with sound conclusions, and be clearer about when we are on shaky ground with more tentative con clusions. If we are not clear about these things then the value of the concepts is undermined. Indeed, uncritical and uninformed (if enthusiastic) ‘applications’ of systems theory have led some critics to observe that the idea of ‘system’ is nothing but common sense.

The Origins of Systems Theory The origins of systems theory are to be found in the application of mathematics to physical problems, such as Newton’s formulation of the laws of gravity and the deepening understanding of the solar system. The de velopment of powered machinery also prompted new thinking at an abstract level about how work could be abstracted from heat, and the limits that governed the performance of ‘thermodynamic systems’. The ma chinery itself employed new principles such as governors, which were ‘negative feedback’ devices governing the speed of rotation of a steam engine. Systems thinking of the classical kind, to be described in this article, was most forcefully articulated in the period 1940s–80s, a period when Ludwig von Bertalanffy pro moted the vision of ‘general systems theory’ (GST). This was founded on the belief that understanding was more to be found in the structure and organization of wholes than in the physical distinctiveness of their parts. Thus, it was the isomorphic structure of materially different systems that was of most general interest. By this reck oning, there is no difference between Newton’s laws of gravity applied to the solar system and the application of the ‘gravity models’ to human migration between towns. Both can be shown to have a base in probability theory and both can be described as ‘entropy’ maximizing – that is the most probable solution within known

Systems

constraints. Another example is that the oscillation of a spring and the oscillation of a pendulum can both be described by the same differential equations character izing sine wave. The coupling of parts within an organized whole can be revealed empirically by statistical techniques such as correlation (crude and linear, or polynomial and more subtle) or modeled in terms of minimum information requirements. One of the reasons why GST accelerated in the post war period was the development of formal ‘information theory’ and its application within ‘cyber netics’. Just as thermodynamic theory had shown what the theoretical limits were to the capture of energy, so information theory could show what the limits were to the ‘degrees of freedom’ of the parts within the whole. Until the advent of computers, the only way to know theoretically how a system would behave was to find an algebraic solution to the equations which summarized the transformation of the variables that represented it. If the system did not go to a stable state, or if there were lots of numerical constants involved, it was practically and sometimes theoretically impossible to find a solution. However, with the arrival of computers, these constraints were broken. GST coincided with these developments. To begin with systems theorists used computers to break through the practical barrier, and to iterate calculations until a stable and terminal state was found for some ar bitrary system. An example in geography is the deriv ation of a ‘Von Thunen’ landscape from any arbitrary starting point when farmers compete with each other. However, the programmers also discovered that some systems never go to equilibrium; that they behave cha otically in an unrepeating trajectory. The theories developed so far had not expected results of this kind – even if the French mathematician Poincare´ had glimpsed the possibility of this behavior in the nineteenth century. The discovery of these new dynamics is the point when systems theory as a comprehensive framework begins to fade into the background. Its ideas are still around, but now subsumed within the exploding field of ‘complexity theory’. The blurring of the terms is well illustrated by the recent foundation of the European Complex Systems Society. The basic understandings of systems theory are nevertheless still relevant, and are the subject of the rest of this article. There is however one extremely important caveat to stress. Systems theory began with physical systems in a physical world, and understands physical limits. There are no perpetual motion machines, and never will be. But much of systems thinking in the social sciences forgets these constraints, and often argues im plicitly by analogy. If the analogy is exposed, the con clusions can sometimes be shown to be very dodgy. For example, in classical systems theory the word ‘equi librium’ has a thermodynamic origin. It is then possible to

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show how an open system may be far from equilibrium, and how if it loses its inputs, it has to subside to its ground state of equilibrium. Some social theorists speak of social systems, without thinking of physical con straints, as being ‘far from equilibrium’. Since they cannot or do not specify what equilibrium is, that is, the ground state that equilibrium is said to be far from, the analogy may be meaningless.

Isolated, Closed, and Open Systems The Earth, viewed from space, and conceptually im agined as a lifeboat, is a single system. But most of the examples given so far in this article are of examples of systems to be found on the Earth. So ‘the’ system is composed of many systems: indeed Brian Berry authored an article entitled ‘Cities as systems within systems of cities’. This begs a large question. The fundamental truths of systems theory can only apply if the systems are ‘not’ arbitrarily defined. How do we define the boundaries of a system, if in the end everything is related to everything? Starting from thermodynamics, theorists define three kinds of systems. The first is an ‘isolated system’, which has a border that is crossed by neither energy nor matter. We know of no such thing in the current universe, though we can hypothesize a perfectly insulating thermos flask. The nearest is a black hole, in the sense that it can send us neither material nor energy (although it takes both from our universe), so there is nothing we can know or say about the conditions within the black hole. A ‘closed system’ is one which is closed to the import and export of material, but open to an exchange of en ergy. Planet Earth is almost a closed system; it isn’t quite, because it receives an input of dust and meteoroids on a daily basis. For conceptual purposes, it is near enough closed. It is open with respect to energy, receiving short wave radiation from the Sun, and transmitting long wave radiation back into space. If the energy were turned off (the Sun stopped shining), the Earth, like a switched off kettle, would cool to the background temperature of space. The trend toward the universal equilibrium tem perature is one of the ways in which we can express the idea of entropy – the end of differentiation. So, the fact that the Earth is not at that background temperature is a statement that it is not at equilibrium, and it maintains its distance from equilibrium by the throughput of energy. The energy throughput creates pathways – for example, wind patterns in the atmosphere – so by dissipating en ergy, structures are created. Closed systems are dissi pative structures – where the structures are recognizable by differentiation. ‘Von Thunen’s isolated state’ was not actually an isolated one. It was a closed one. The material content of his plain was fixed, but the Sun shone to grow

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the crops and the woods, so that people and animals could find the energy to work and the fuel to keep themselves warm in winter and cook their food; and the waste products were presumed to be recycled. The differentiation creates opportunities for other systems to develop, which are also dissipative in their own way. ‘Open systems’ are those which exchange both matter and energy with their environment – usually the one bound up with the other. So, for example, plants use solar energy to convey water from the ground to the atmosphere in transpiration, thereby also conveying the materials out of which they construct themselves, and in those materials energy is locked up. This is sometimes called a local reversal of entropy, or the production of negentropy – order out of disorder. Human beings are open systems. Although humans can absorb heat energy from the Sun to warm themselves, they actually absorb virtually all their useful energy by consuming food, which means they cannot dissociate their exchange of energy with the environment from their exchange of material. The same concepts can be used to describe current industrial civilization. For the moment, leaving aside the small contributions made by nuclear and wind/hydro energy, our industrial systems consume energy by breaking down coal, oil, wood, etc. Our cities are far from a thermodynamic equilibrium, and are therefore dependent on this continual through put. As a thought experiment, the question to be asked is: can our urban concentrations of population, living off food delivered from supermarkets survive long if all in dustrial energy supplies failed? Where is the ‘boundary of the open system’ of modern civilization? What defines the distinction between us and our environment? It is reasonable to think of this human economic–social system as a separate subsystem of planet Earth ‘only so long as’ the essential outputs from the subsystem, like waste heat, waste gases, waste materials, do not change the nature of the inputs we can receive from the environment. When that is no longer the case, and there is feedback, then we are no longer separate from our environment, and had better pay heed to the totality of the Earth as one system.

Degrees of Organization In a system, the degrees of freedom of the whole are less than the sum of the ‘degrees of freedom’ of the parts. Simple mechanical analogies can illustrate the principles. Suppose you buy an Ikea wardrobe flatpack containing 40 parts. When each part comes out of the pack on its own, it has six degrees of freedom. It can be placed anywhere in three dimensions of space, and at whichever location it happens to be in, it can be rotated around three different axes. When the contents of the box are tipped out, there

are 40 6 ¼ 240 degrees of freedom. The task is to as semble the parts in the right connection with each other, and if you are successful, when you have finished you will have a single wardrobe, with only six degrees of freedom (plus a little extra because the two doors can rotate on their hinges). You can place the wardrobe anywhere in the three dimensions of space, and rotate it at any angle. But whatever you do to the whole, you have also done to the all the parts (except for the doors if they are not locked and swing open in your face). By building a wardrobe you have absorbed 234 out of the 240 degrees of freedom. This is such a staggering task that Professor Andrew Ng of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University in 2006 made it his target to get his team of 30 scientists to build a robot that can do this, within the following decade. In any nontrivial system the parts need to have the ability to be in alternative states. The state they actually adopt is dependent at least to some degree on their membership of the system. In a ‘central place landscape’ the idea of the isotropic plain is that any part of the plain has the same potential to be farmland, a small settlement, a town, or a city as any other part of the plain. But once the willingness to travel is fixed and a central city de marcated (this is arbitrary), all other places are selected to be what they are, from farmland to town. The a priori ensemble of possibilities is reduced to an a posteriori en semble with a single member. Now, the degree of or ganization is expressed as the degree to which the entropy of the a posteriori ensemble is less than the en tropy of the a priori ensemble. Before we put the parts together, anything could be anything, and so there was maximum uncertainty. But once they have been put together, there is only one member of the ensemble possible, and entropy (uncertainty) is zero. So the model has absorbed all uncertainty, and has achieved 100% organization. Each part is ‘exactly’ and ‘totally’ what it is by virtue of its membership of the system. The perfectly organized system cannot evolve – not from within itself. This was a lesson learned the hard way by the planners of the former Soviet Union. The basis of their planning was a rational input–output matrix, which specified the quantities that linked any one industry with all others. Such a system could be used for scaling up production across all industries, but it did not allow for innovation, for new industries, for new technologies that changed efficiencies, etc.

Regulation and Variety ‘One’ way of defining a system and its environment is to look for key variables that may be held constant in the face of environmental variability. Warm blooded animals have to keep a constant body temperature in a variable

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environment, and some can do so by sweating and shi vering, others by plumping their feathers, etc. (among other responses.) To physiological responses human beings have added the extra responses of variable cloth ing and shelter, which may have variable heating and cooling. This is regulation – given a formal definition by the cybernetician W. Ross Ashby’s ‘law of requisite var iety’. This says, in linguistic terms, that only variety can destroy variety. If the animal cannot shiver more or less, or sweat more or less, it cannot counter the environ mental fluctuations. Since its formulation, there have been many ‘applications’ of the law in the social sciences which are nonsense – because they have ignored its precise mathematical formulation. If the quantities ‘en vironmental variability’ and ‘variability of response’ are not properly defined, we can end up with the proposition that one witch doctor’s spells can confound another’s spells. If the variety in the environment exceeds the capacity to respond, then change will occur in the subsystem. Temperatures can be reached which human beings can not survive, even by sweating. Thus parts are linked to wholes in ways which show nonlinear responses, some of them even discontinuous, or ‘threshold’ responses. The modeling of nonlinear relationships before the age of the computer was too difficult for more than rather simplistic two variable attempts to be made (e.g., the famous Volterra–Lotka equations, looking at the phase space of shrimps versus sharks). After the advent of computers it proved possible to investigate these – and it is at this point that the deterministic, nonrepeating behavior of chaotic systems is discovered, and out of systems theory chaos and complexity science are spawned.

The Application of Systems Theory in the Social Sciences The idea of ‘systems theory’ has been adopted with en thusiasm by many members of the social sciences, but whether the resulting theories are actually compatible with the ‘original’ systems theory grounded in physical science is sometimes open to doubt. Arguing by analogy, in economic systems money becomes ‘energy’. But money is not energy: energy can be found in power lines and fuel depots and human stomachs. Money is one of many regulators that regulate how energy and materials flow. Some social systems are said to be ‘far from equi librium’, which has an implicit feel of the potential for incipient instability, crisis, and fall from grace. Whereas a thermodynamicist knows the direction of the ground state, the social theorist does not. Is random social an archy the ground state? Is this truly the most probable state – the Hobbesian nightmare imagined in Leviathan? Despite the contemporary fears about failed states, in

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most of the Earth there are some sorts of ordered social states, even if some social orders do not like other social orders. Mankind has, after all, evolved as the most so cialized animal on the planet, and even where there are failed states societies can be found. Is a central place landscape far from equilibrium? Above it was suggested that any urban system is far from equilibrium – in a ‘thermodynamic sense’. In cybernetics there is another sense in which a system can be said to be closed. Such systems can be transformed from any initial state to any output state, but there is no output state which is not included in the input conditions. So the system cannot go to a state from which we cannot predict its future. It is ‘cybernetically closed’. Repeated trans formations of such systems lead to a stable end state or end cycle. An example in economics would be a cobweb diagram that converged on a market equilibrium. The same can be said for the central place system, in that it is the equilibrium result of the postulates. But this sense of ‘most probable’ is the opposite of the thermodynamic ‘most probable’. Just as Von Thunen’s landscape needed sunshine, so the inhabitants of the central place world need energy to shop infrequently in high order cities, and more frequently in local stores. We have come back to the same point: and it does bear reiterating. In an abstract conceptual world ‘most probable’ may mean exactly the opposite of ‘most probable’ in an actual physical world.

Self-Image and Reflexivity If there is a system, there is an environment, and the system behavior is independent of that environment at least in some minimum respects. According to some authors this means that the system must in some sense have some image of itself and its environment, to main tain its independent state. This image may be as simple as a thermometer reading used by a thermostat, controlling a room heating system. The environment then is con stituted simply by the variation of temperature – no other feature of the environment exists so far as the thermostat is concerted. A little more sophistication could be added if there are combined temperature and humidity controls. Then one can hypothesize a very sophisticated system which also included visual assessment of the state of pot plants in the room, and perhaps in the future there will be such systems. In human society a more complex ex ample would be the understanding that a person has of his or her social standing and the reasons for it. But no system can have a perfect understanding of itself and its environment – whatever that would mean – because the information specifying the totality cannot be compressed in a subsidiary part. This is one of the implications of ‘Go¨del’s (incompleteness) theorem’. This can be

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re expressed as the problem of ‘reflexivity’, in that if parts were to have perfect images of other parts, these perfect images would encompass the images that those other parts held of the first part – and this becomes an infinite reiteration. An example of this is the ‘reality’ of the world’s longest running radio drama soap opera series, the BBC’s The Archers. This has now run for several generations, dramatizing the lives and relationships of a fictional village ‘Ambridge’, in rural England. Many fans treat it as a real depiction of a real place, and it enshrines the idea of society reflexively examining itself. However, it cannot be real, because it lacks one essential feature of the lives of people in rural England. At least some of the people of Ambridge should from time to time be heard listening to The Archers. For obvious reasons, this never happens. All of these problems became apparent in the systems models publicized by Jay W. Forrester (Urban Dynamics and World Dynamics). Despite this, the Club of Rome com missioned Forrester’s student Donald Meadows to provide the simulation basis for The Limits to Growth. The variables selected for these models were essentially chosen on the basis of best guesses, and the relationships between the variables were also specified on the same basis. So a part of the world system (D. Meadows) is exhibiting its ignorance of the world system. It uses the computer systems model simply as a way of calculating results it could not previ ously have achieved. That in most scenarios the world ‘collapsed’ was a function of the form of the nonlinear relationships, something at the time that was very poorly understood, and the time frame within which collapse occurred was arbitrary. Despite the specious objectivity of these projects, they had huge popular impact, and can be said to be one of the beginnings of the modern environ mentalist movement. What they achieved can best be summarized by a word coined by Forrester: the behaviors exhibited were often ‘counter intuitive’. However poorly constructed, their systems had shown ‘surprising’ behavior. In that lay the seeds that would flourish with the ‘new’ fields of chaos and complexity. Since Meadows work, there has been little more on this kind of social–environmental world dynamics. However, in the field of atmospheric modeling, the pro ponents of global circulation models believe that they have produced reasonably robust models which can simulate the gross dynamics of the atmosphere over decades. These models do not include the reflexive im pact of the models on the behavior of their human op erators nor the wider society. There are other ontological and epistemological issues too. A critical realist would say that there is a real atmosphere we can detect, but the

aspects we chose to detect and the scales of resolution at which we do so – both of which are critical to model behavior and outputs – are conditioned by our per ceptions. Further, in epistemological terms, since model outputs are predictions of the future, they can never be tested except after the event. Hence the validity of these systems rests not in correspondence, but in coherence. ‘Truth’ is then confirmed when all the experts sing in unison from the same hymn sheet.

Related Fields Systems theory influenced, and has been influenced by many other fields, most notably management science and optimization techniques. This field, otherwise known as ‘operations research’, has its origins in statistical model ing and other optimization techniques, developed during World War II, to minimize Atlantic convoy losses and Royal Air Force (RAF) bomber losses. The modern field includes techniques often employed within industrial and construction projects, such as critical path review (pro gram evaluation and review technique), queuing theory, game theory, probability and risk, linear programming and agent based modeling. The essential key to all of these is that the system is the paramount level of analysis, but usually seen from the perspective of external control responsible for optimization. This is somewhat different from the other perspective that developed out of systems theory, namely the understanding of self organization and complex dynamics, reviewed in ‘chaos and com plexity’. The difference is not absolute, because opti mization could well involve allowing systems to become self organizing. This is a point lost on most hierarchically minded managers. See also: Spatial Science; Systems Theory.

Further Reading Benenson, I. and Torrens, P. (2004). Geosimulation. New York: John Wiley. Chapman, G. P. (1977). Human and Environmental Systems: A Geographer’s Appraisal. London: Academic Press. Chapman, G. P. (2007). Evolutionary psychology, complexity theory, and quantitative social epistemology. Futures 39, 1067 1083. Chisholm, M. (1967). General systems theory and geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42, 42 52. Huggett, R. (1980). Systems Analysis in Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skyttner, L. (2001). General Systems Theory: Ideas and Applications. River Edge, NJ: World Scientific Publishing.

Systems Theory D. Straussfogel, Pennsylvania State University, DuBois, PA, USA C. von Schilling, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, BC, Canada & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Autopoiesis The process by which a system regenerates itself through the self-reproduction of its own elements and network of interactions. Cybernetics The study of feedback and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines, and organizations. Dissipative Structure A dissipative structure is a thermodynamically open system which is operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium in an environment with which it exchanges energy, matter, and/or entropy. Environment The context within which a system exists. It is composed of all things that are external to the system, and it includes everything that may affect the system, and may be affected by it at any given time. Feedback A process by which information concerning the adequacy of the system, its operation, and its outputs are introduced into the system. General Systems Theory The concepts, principles, and models that are common to all kinds of systems and the isomorphisms between and among various types of systems. Holism A nonreductionist descriptive and investigative strategy for generating explanatory principles of whole systems. Attention is focused on the emergent properties of the whole rather than on the reductionist behavior of the isolated parts. Reductionism One kind of scientific orientation that seeks to understand phenomena by breaking them down into their smallest possible parts or to a onedimensional totality. System A group of interacting components that conserves some identifiable set of relations with the sum of their components plus their relationships (i.e., the system itself), conserving some identifiable set of relationships to other entities (including other systems). Wholeness In reference to systems, the condition in which systems are seen to be structurally divisible, but functionally indivisible wholes with emergent properties.

Emergence of Systems Thinking in Contemporary Science Synopsis: Overview of Systems Theory Systems theory, emerging in western science in the middle of the twentieth century, encompasses principles derived

from the defining characteristics of systems regardless of their discipline of origin (i.e., neurology or ecology) or their scale of analysis (i.e., microscopic or macroscopic). Systems theory allows lessons learned about one system to be applied to understand, manage, or construct another. For example, greater understanding of how neural net works work in the brain could provide insights about ef ficiencies in telephone communication systems. Systems theory does not represent just one theory, per se. Rather, it co evolved with a set of related intel lectual streams concerned with the nature and character istics of systems. These include information and game theory, cybernetics and chaos theory, theory of autopoiesis, complexity theory, and dynamic systems theory. Disci plines of application are as diverse as engineering, biology, ecology, geography, sociology, psychiatry, and neurology. The origins, context, and dimensions of systems the ory will be outlined and explained in the following sec tions. Although they are, for the most part, presented in chronological order, it should be understood that these events and theoretical developments have become interwoven in such a way as to define the broad, inter disciplinary, and multidimensional face of systems sci ence as it is known today. What Is Systems Thinking? ‘Systems thinking’ holds to the adage that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This means that the qualities that emerge from a whole are different from the qualities found in any of the individual parts or even the summation of those parts. Stated another way, what characterizes a system is not the nature of its parts alone, but the interrelationships between the parts and between the system and its environment. In this way, systems thinkers are expansionists, who would seek to understand a system by examining its processes and relationships as opposed to the reductionists of classical science, who would seek to understand a system by first examining its elementary parts and then by adding them together. While ‘the study of wholes’ is not mutually exclusive of ‘the study of parts’, systems scholars maintain that sys tems are better comprehended in their entirety. Classical Science and the ‘New’ Science The intellectual heritage of the paradigm shift in science that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century extends to the Age of Reason that took place in Europe from approximately 1500–1700 corresponding with the

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end of the Middle Ages. Engendered by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) in the mid sixteenth century, and Rene´ Descartes (1596–1650) at the turn of the seventeenth century, the Age of Reason launched Europe out of the Middle Ages and marked a decline in the ideas pervasive in medieval thought, which focused on evidence of the divine in mind and matter and marked a rise in the meaning and power of the human intellect. If the Car tesian worldview heralded the power of human reason to ‘know’ the universe through deduction, Isaac Newton’s (1643–1727) work demonstrated it. He posited a model of the universe that could be known by reducing it into ever smaller parts. Even at the cosmological level, planets could be reduced to particles of matter found at the microscopic level, which he conceived as the building blocks of all matter. Moreover, regardless of scale, he argued that all parts, be they atoms or planets, could be described by their location, movement, and the laws of attraction (i.e., grav ity). The mathematics of ‘Newtonian mechanics’ would be developed over time by numerous individual achieve ments and described a linear, causal, and therefore pre dictable universe, rather like a complex mechanism. Early in the twentieth century a team of scientists that included Albert Einstein (1879–1955), Werner Heisenberg (1901–76), and Erwin Schro¨dinger (1887–1961) developed the conceptual framework of quantum theory to explain several important but puzzling findings made in physical science at that time. Subatomic particles were not particles at all; they were probabilities of wave like and particle like behavior. Moreover, the tendency toward one or the other behavior appeared to be linked to the observer. These discoveries challenged the Newtonian worldview that the world was made of matter, was deterministic, and predictable. Moreover, it appeared that ‘energy’ replaced matter at the subatomic level. ‘Probability’ of location replaced spatial reference; ‘uncertainty’ replaced predict ability. Moreover, an observer at the macroscopic level could instantaneously affect qualities observed at the microscopic level. Together, these discoveries pointed to a universe that could not be understood by reducing it to its parts and then by adding up those parts. Rather, it was a universe that seemed to be comprised of relationships between scales (i.e., atoms, molecules, cells, or objects, etc.). This concept pointed to a world that appeared to be better understood as an embodied whole. Thus, some scholars sought a science of holism rather than a science of parts. This marks the emergence of systems thinking in contemporary western science.

From Systems Thinking to Systems Science Origins and Overview of General System Theory The individual most credited with catalyzing systems theory in contemporary western science, is Austrian born

biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–72). He first presented his ideas at the University of Chicago in 1937. In 1968 he published his work in the book General Systems Theory (GST), for which he is perhaps best known. In it he presented two important concepts, a vision of one ‘science of wholeness’ and a detailed description of ‘open systems’. Bertalanffy’s contemporaries included economist Kenneth Boulding (1910–93), physiologist Ralph Gerald (1900–74), and mathematician Anatol Rapoport (1911– 2007), who, in collaboration with psychologist James Grier Miller (1916–2002), would institute the Society of General Systems Research in 1956. They were motivated by a vision of a general theory of all systems that could help scientists share information about commonalities across their disciplines without replacing discipline specific theories. General System Theory and Open Systems General system theory is a doctrine of principles about the commonalities of all systems, regardless of type and scale. The purpose of its genesis was to provide scientists from different disciplines with a theoretical framework from which to conduct research and share findings. As such, a general systems theory would reduce redundant research between disciplines and reduce the risk that scientists in highly specialized fields could overlook seemingly insignificant phenomena. Bertalanffy explicated the ‘isomorphies’ (structural similarities) and ‘correspon dences’ (relationship with the system’s environment) that systems appeared to have in common. As a biologist, Bertalanffy was particularly interested in the paradox of how complex systems, such as living organisms, could manifest complexity (order) against a universal tide of entropy (disorder). This appeared to contradict the second law of thermodynamics (conceived by Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) and reworked by Rudolf Clausius (1822–88)). The second law of thermodynamics states that energy, while it may not be created or des troyed (first law of thermodynamics), will dissipate over time; that is, entropy increases toward its maximum in an isolated system. However, Bertalanffy noted that, con trary to being isolated or closed systems, living organisms were in fact ‘open systems’. Bertalanffy explained that open systems can garner energy resources from their environment to build internal order despite the universal tide of entropy. The ‘steady state’ of a physical system or ‘homeostasis’ in living organisms refers to self regulating mechanisms maintaining system stability despite a con stant flow through of energy in a fluctuating environment. Defining Systems Bertalanffy clarified that, most fundamentally, a system is comprised of at least two or more parts; each part is connected with at least one other part through observable

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relations; the integrity of the whole system depends upon the parts; and the emergent quality of the whole is not found in any of the parts. Bertalanffy emphasized that systems are not comprised merely of a sum of parts de fined by linear, causal relationships and described by Newtonian mechanics. In fact, he argued that a New tonian type, mechanistic system could only exist when the influence of the parts on each other were minimal. The systems Bertalanffy described, on the other hand, are comprised of interrelated parts defined by both linear and nonlinear relationships. Advances in general system theory demonstrated that certain principles and laws governing the function of one system could be applied to others (isomorphism). Growth and competition are examples of isomorphic character istics in systems. Take, for example, a population of badgers and a system of railway lines. The unit – badger or railway line – is ‘immaterial’. The exponential growth of, for example, the population of badgers or the system of railway lines is ‘material’. It is material because the behavior of each system is determined according to a systemic ‘relationship’, which is further defined by its internal organizational structure, energy inputs, and the boundary of the system. Badger populations grow at a certain rate because of food energy input, while railway lines might grow similarly because of other energy inputs (i.e., materials, service needs of growing populations). Systems within systems have also been characterized as ‘hierarchies of systems’. At each level, a set of prin ciples and laws would appear that are unique from those found at lower levels. For instance, subatomic particles comprise atoms, which make up cells, which comprise humans, which live within societies, and so on. Moreover, unique qualities emerge at each level. Atoms obey principles of quantum theory, organisms obey principles of genetics, and societies obey principles of population growth, etc. From Systems Thinking to Systems Theory to Systems Science Together with Kenneth Boulding, Ralph Gerard, James Grier Miller and Anatol Rapoport, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy instituted the Society of General Systems Research in 1956. In keeping with the goal of general system theory, the society set out to further the unifi cation of the sciences and research into the isomorphies and laws governing systems of different types and scales. The society was renamed the International Systems Science Society (ISSS) in 1988 after the dialog about general systems broadened to what is better known today as ‘systems science’. Systems science remains inter disciplinary in scope; however systems research has ar guably become more applied, and therefore, absorbed into individual disciplines and, as such, has lost some of

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its momentum as a single intellectual movement driven by theory, as it was in the 1950s. On the whole, the work regarding general system theory carried the systems thinking movement to a new level. Relatively new theories developed, such as Laszlo’s ‘general evolution system theory’. Especially in the social sciences, developments include ‘critical systems theory’, ‘liberating systems theory’, and ‘unbounded systems thinking’. In the natural, social, and physical sciences, systems theory is successfully applied in areas of ‘systems engineering’, that is, to construct organizational systems in a given environment; ‘system dynamics’, that is, to understand change in natural systems; or ‘human sys tems’, that is, to manage change or realize vision in value laden human systems. Through this development, from theory into practice, methodological approaches evolved, including ‘hard’ systems and ‘soft’ systems approaches. A detailed discussion of specific applications can be found in the section titled ‘Systems analysis’. ‘Hard’ and ‘Soft’ Systems ‘Hard systems’ science is a diverse field concerned pri marily with controlling, managing, or constructing sys tems. Emerging during the World War II, it is probably best known for its application in ‘systems engineering’ and ‘operations research’. ‘Systems engineering’ is con cerned with constructing, manipulating, and controlling physical, organizational, and informational systems for desired outputs in human society. For example, systems engineering has been applied to developments in tele phone systems. Attempts have also been made to apply systems engineering to social systems. As in all systems, the focus of systems engineering is on the relationship between the parts or elements, be they animate, like the integration of physical components, or inanimate, like the flow of information between individuals. Today, systems engineering focuses on systems of processes, products, or services and all their required inputs a situational context in order to accomplish a prescribed task or solve a problem. For example, systems engineering is applied to systems such as military systems, transportation systems, software engineering, and consumer product systems (i.e., automobiles or cameras). The purpose of applying sys tems engineering includes, for example, improving the safety, reliability, or the efficiency of a system, whatever that system is defined to be (i.e., a car or a telephone network). ‘Operations research’, on the other hand, is concerned with attaining an optimal efficiency or solution for any operation or organization. Similar to systems engi neering, operations research dates to World War II when the US and British military personnel engaged re searchers to seek optimal efficiencies and strategies for their military operations. Today, operations research is

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more closely linked to business and its management; yet it appeals to a wide arena of application, including communications, manufacturing, and public services. It is typically used to facilitate decision making, manage risk, and weigh alternatives, but above all, to increase effi ciency. Both systems engineering and operations research focus on closed type systems. By the 1970s, some scholars recognized that the quantitative and analytical approaches applied to closed systems were not adequate for inquiry involving human systems. For example, C. West Churchman (1913–2004) argued against the propensity of analytical systems planning to isolate and solve for perceived problems like inefficiency or productivity as opposed to focusing on human systems as integral, moral, and value laden wholes, wherein lie greater societal concerns (i.e., mal nutrition or environmental degradation). In contrast to ‘hard’ systems, which tend to be evaluated or constructed according to single goals, human systems involve mul tiple and often competing objectives and interests. Responding to this dilemma, Peter Checkland (born 1930) introduced a ‘soft systems approach’ for social systems research. It is an iterative approach to under stand and then react to an identified systemic problem by learning about its facets, deciding on which actions would pose better alternatives, and then evaluating the out comes. Checkland argued that, with the soft systems approach, further learning, deciding, and acting would take place because perceived problems in human systems are never solved for long, since humans systems are dynamic. Moreover, the iterative nature of the soft sys tems approach acknowledges the dynamic human system as fundamentally value laden by seeking meaning and solutions from the system itself, rather than imposing analytical solutions upon it.

Social Systems Sociologists Talcott Parsons (1902–79) and Niklas Luhmann (1927–98) are widely credited with major ad vances in the general theory of social systems. Both sought a theoretical framework to encompass social interaction. Parsons saw social systems interwoven with cultural and personality systems to comprise the ‘social action system’, wherein human behavior exists within an environment comprised of physical and organic com ponents. Like other systems thinkers he viewed social systems as open systems, with internal self regulating mechanisms that would retain the systemic integrity when faced with perturbations or disturbances (i.e., de viant behavior from within, or conflict from without). Luhmann focused on communication as the mechanism binding human systems. He posed that communication within the human system was characteristically simpler

than the total available information. The ‘reduction of complexity’ was made possible through the value laden human construct of ‘meaning’ such that the meaning humans attribute to information in the environment drives the process of its assimilation and further communication. Furthermore, the process of information selection gives the social system its identity.

Cybernetics Origins and Overview of Cybernetics Evolving concurrently with but independently from general systems theory, and motivated by the demand for more sophisticated technology in World War II, ‘cyber netics’ grew out of the desire to understand the role that sensory perception, memory, communication, and cir cular causality (feedback mechanisms) played in the purposeful behavior of living organisms, and to apply these concepts to make better machines. While the use of control systems was not new, the interdisciplinary field of cybernetics would go well beyond the study of artificial systems and their control and into the study of goal oriented living systems, including human knowing, or ‘epistemology’. It would make significant advances in engineering, computer technology, cognition, and infor mation science. In the 1940s and 1950s key scholars of the growing cybernetics movement included neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch (1898–1969), engineer Jay Forrester (born 1918), biologist Humberto Maturana (born 1928), mathematician John von Neumann (1903–57), anthro pologist Gregory Bateson (1904–80), electrical engineer and mathematician Claude Shannon (1916–2001), psych iatrist W. Ross Ashby (1903–72), and physicist Heinz von Foerster (1911–2002). Yet, it was Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), mathematician and philosopher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who first defined and applied the name ‘cybernetics’ to the emerging area of study. Being derived from the Greek word kubernetes, meaning ‘steersman’, the fundamental tenet is that, as a steersman reacts to messages from the environment to stay on a given path, so an organism receives messages from its environment to which it reacts. In this manner, Wiener argues, communication and control are the most important factors that allow organisms to maintain homeostasis (stability) within a greater tide of growing entropy in the universe. The key mechanism of homeostasis is ‘negative feedback’, whereby a system utilizes information from the environment to limit the effects of change. Positive feed back mechanisms, by contrast, are the processing of en vironmental information as a catalyst for change. Initially, cybernetics focused on these self regulatory mechanisms inherent in organisms and the application of this knowledge to exact better control over machines.

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Interest hinged around questions like, ‘how’ does this operate and how can this operate better? This would come to be called, ‘first order cybernetics’. By contrast, second order cyberneticists asked, ‘why’ is it like this and what does it mean? It focuses on aspects of the human experience such as language, communication, purpose, cognition, and epistemology. Advances in second order cybernetics are best known in education, management, cognition, education, and epistemology. Contributions of Cybernetics Today, the first and second orders of cybernetics are less clearly delineated. In total, the accomplishments of cy bernetics include ‘intelligent machines’ such as navi gational equipment, robotics, artificial intelligence, and, more recently, a deeper understanding of feedback mechanisms in economics. In addition, cyberneticists developed theories that have been subsequently applied to problems or issues in many disciplines. Some of these theories include information theory, game theory, and decision theory. Proposed in 1948 by Claude Shannon, ‘information theory’ is concerned with communication – its quantity (how much information is heard) not its quality (the meaning of the message). Information theory holds that the transmittal of data follows the law of entropy, such that a minimum of information is required for the ori ginal message to be understood by the receiver, despite its dissipation during transmittal due to noise. From the work of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944, ‘game theory’ allows the behavior of competing interests in the context of limitations to be modeled mathematically. It is applied today in many disciplines of inquiry including political science, geog raphy, economics, and sociology. ‘Decision theory’ refers to a variety of analytical tools that may be applied to facilitate decision making in business and government. It factors in variables such as accurate information, risk, and alternatives.

Complexity Science Origin and Overview of Complexity ‘Complexity science’ is the study of complexity in open systems. One of the early contributors to complexity theory was Belgian chemist and 1977 Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) who developed the ‘theory of dissipative structures’. A comprehensive explanation of his work was written and published together with Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers (born 1948) in English in 1984 in the book titled, Order out of Chaos. Like Berta lanffy, Prigogine noticed that the biosphere is comprised of a great many systems that build complexity. Prigogine

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demonstrated that chemical systems can change spon taneously when internal fluxes become amplified by positive feedback and reach a critical point which he called the ‘bifurcation point’. Prigogine demonstrated that, under a certain threshold, any perturbation will be absorbed by the system. That is, internal fluctuations occur but will not change the integrity of the system as a whole. Over a certain threshold, the internal fluxes amplify until the system reaches the bifurcation point. At this point, the system spontaneously reorganizes into an unpredictably different system, defined by different in ternal mechanisms. The flow of a stream provides a simple example. A pebble that is tossed into a stream does not change the nature of its flow; however, if the disturbance is great enough or accumulates to a certain threshold, the flow becomes turbulent. In tandem with important developments in nonlinear mathematics, in cluding dynamical systems and chaos theory, the theory of dissipative structures represents an early contribution to complexity science. Complex open systems are self organizing, meaning they may adapt to environmental changes; self regu lating, meaning they remain characteristically stable while exploiting energy from their environment; and they exhibit emergent properties that are unique to the entire system as a whole. Moreover, the parts and pro cesses of which they are comprised are highly inter connected. As such, system complexity is defined by the amount of information that is required to describe the system. The more interdependent its parts and processes, the greater is the system’s complexity. The science of complexity employs the methodological tools of com puter models, mathematics, conceptual frameworks, and theory to study the patterns, networks, and dynamics of systems. Chaos Theory Chaos theory describes the qualities of the point at which stability moves to instability or order moves to disorder. For example, unlike the behavior of a pendulum, which adheres to a predictable pattern a chaotic system does not settle into a predictable pattern due to its nonlinear processes. Examples of chaotic systems include the be havior of a waft of smoke or ocean turbulence. Chaotic systems are characteristically sensitive to initial con ditions. Therefore a slight change in the initial condition could have a vast impact on the outcome, as exemplified by the ‘butterfly effect’ and in the work of meteorologist, Edward Lorenz (born in 1917). Advances in chaos theory and its mathematics are owed to physicist and mathematician Jules Henri Poin care (1854–1912), who used topological techniques to visualize mathematics. Chaos mathematicians in the 1960s would map the trajectories, for example, of a

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simple pendulum. This map or depiction would be called a phase space, corresponding to the coordinates of the movement. A simple pendulum swing would have a two dimensional phase space of velocity and angle. Once the movement is represented or mapped on the coordinates, a pattern appears. This pattern is called an ‘attractor’. The attractors of chaotic systems are called ‘strange attractors’. At the time that Rene´ Thom (1923–2002) was de veloping the related ‘catastrophe theory’, a French mathematician Benoıˆt Mandelbrot (born 1924) de veloped a geometric representation of everything from natural phenomena to the strange attractors of chaos, using ‘fractal geometry’. Some striking features of fractals include their remarkable similarity with patterns found in nature such as the crystal shapes of snowflakes, or the patterns in a fern frond. Another striking characteristic is that the shapes embedded in the fractal patterns can reappear at smaller and smaller scales.

Autopoietic Theory The complexity that Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana (born 1928) and Francisco Varela (1946–2001) studied was different from Prigogine’s. Prigogine’s dissi pative structure theory described stability and spon taneous change in living and nonliving entities. Maturana and Varela’s ‘autopoiesis theory’ described the charac teristic processes that were fundamental to self organ ized, living organisms. Derived from the Greek words auto, meaning ‘self ’ and poiesis, meaning ‘creation’, autopoietic systems are ones that are comprised of self creating processes. In other words, networks or rela tionships between components that are self referential and create the complexity of living organisms. Moreover, these processes serve the same function in the body (i.e., a cell) as in the mind (i.e., cognition). Components are part of self creating circular networks because they cre ate other components in order to maintain themselves and the structure in its entirety. By contrast, systems that utilize energy to create complexity that is unlike the system itself is called ‘allopoiesis’, such as an assembly line whose components make cars, not itself. Maturana and Varela argued that the function of the organism was characterized by the nature of the self referential and self creating processes and networks. Working to better understand neural networks Maturana found that the same process applied. Maturana argued that cognition is a self referencing system whereby understanding is built upon previous understanding. What is understood by the mind through what the eye sees is not the absolute reality of the ‘outside’; rather, it is the expression of the brain’s neural networks that builds the experience of interpret ation and understanding.

Resilience Theory Ecologist C.S. Holling defined resilience as the ability of a system to remain functionally persistent by absorbing externally generated disturbances. His work led him to argue that it is not an inherent quality of stability – the ability to return to the original state following a dis turbance – that defines the health of an ecosystem; rather, it is its ‘resilience’. This is an important distinction be cause, as demonstrated in the theory of dissipative structures, systems, in this case ecosystems, are com prised of interconnected self regulatory feedback mech anisms and fluctuations that occur naturally within them. It is these mechanisms and their inherent fluctuations that absorb change or disturbances. Positive feedback loops may amplify to the point that the integrity of the ecosystem is lost. At this point, the ecosystem is said to have lost its resiliency in the face of change. While ecosystem collapses might be caused by large disturb ances, they are more typically caused by incremental disturbances or perturbations. Beyond its threshold, the ecosystem reorganizes into a state or ‘regime’, which is similarly characterized by internal self regulatory mechanisms. Moreover, the new regime is ‘persistent’, meaning, it is difficult to change back into the ecosystem it once was. A simple example is the regime shift of a savanna ecosystem that, due to the accumulative effects of overgrazing on the natural drought cycles experienced naturally, reorganizes into a desert ecosystem. More recently, resilience theory has been applied to super systems of social, economic, and ecological sys tems. Some research suggests that regime shifts (collapse or irreversible change) in one system can cascade into other systems, affecting their resilience. It is possible for one system to collapse and cause the collapse of several others. Attempting to model human systems with ecological systems is challenging because it is recognized that human systems share some fundamental character istics that natural systems do not: they are purposeful, they can look into the future to decide on an action today, and they imbue their experience with meaning. Re searchers working within this paradigm are seeking new and innovative conceptual frameworks with which to study issues such as ‘sustainability’ in environment– society systems.

Contribution of Systems Theory and Complexity Science to Geography Systems theory, viewing the social and physical worlds as an interconnected hierarchy of parts and processes ex changing matter, information, and energy, provides a set of conceptual and methodological tools for research in human geography. For example, L. Douglas Kiel reviews the contribution of, specifically, the theory of dissipative

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structures to the social sciences. And W.J. Coffey outlines the progression of research methods and the contribution of systems theory in urban systems research from static statistical analyses to more recent analyses of dynamic systems using chaos, complexity, and bifurcation theories. Others have applied the concepts of systems theory directly to specific systems of interest in human geog raphy. For example, the research of Peter M. Allen, Guy Engelen, Michele Sanglier, and Robert Crosby furthers our understanding of spatial and evolutionary aspects of urban environments. Alan Wilson applied systems theo retic constructs to the study of transportation systems. Additionally, systems theoretical approaches have been undertaken by researchers such as Richard N. Adams and Debra Straussfogel, whose work with systems theory in human geography reveal, respectively, the relationship of energy to society and the systemic underpinnings of world system theory as applied to problems of develop ment. (Other noteworthy contributions of systems oriented research to human geography include early work by Robert Bennett, Richard Chorley, Graham Chapman, and R. Huggett.) Yet, the advent of systems theory as a lens through which to examine issues related to human geography has also been criticized. For example, Peter Gould cogently argued that the theory of dissipative structures does not account for the breadth of variability of the human ex perience. And systems theory in the research of human behavior has been criticized for being used analogously without algorithmic substantiation. As Sunny Auyang aptly states, ‘‘The more crudely we look at a system, the more likely we are able to discern patterns’’ (1998: 328). However, this being said, with the advent of increasingly advanced computer modeling techniques, the ability to test pioneering theoretical frameworks continues to ex pand our understanding of the form and function of geographic systems.

Conclusion Systems theory, the theory that open systems are com prised of interconnected elements that, as a whole, demonstrate emergent properties, and that as such, ad here to isomorphic laws and principles, emerged in contemporary science in the middle of the twentieth century. In a time of technological advancement, insti gated by World War II and in concert with discoveries in quantum physics that shook the foundations of New tonian mechanics, systems theory was embraced by many scholars who espoused the advantages of systems think ing rather than reductionism. Systems theory has been applied by scholars from diverse backgrounds – from those seeking efficiencies in their production network or organization to those seeking answers about the human

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condition by exploring value laden human systems. Consequently, over the breadth of systems inquiry in the last seven decades, an array of related theories emerged. Yet, these theories are held collectively by systems thinkers whose worldview is that the parts of a whole cannot be reduced to better understand the whole, making systems science the multifaceted and inter disciplinary science that it is today. See also: Chaos and Complexity; Complexity Theory, Nonlinear Dynamic Spatial Systems; Networks, Urban; Neural Networks; Systems; Urban Modeling.

Further Reading Adams, R. N. (1982). Paradoxical Harvest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alisch, L., Azizighanbari, S. and Bargfeldt, M. (1997). Dynamics of children’s friendships. In Eve, R. A., Horsfall, S. & Lee, M. E. (eds.) Chaos, Complexity, and Sociology, pp 163 181. Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Allen, P. M. (1997). Cities and Regions as Self Organizing Systems. The Netherlands: Gordon and Breach. Ashby, R. (1952). Design for a Brain. New York: Wiley. Auyang, S. (1998). Foundations of Complex System Theories in Economics, Evolutionary Biology, and Statistical Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Banathy, B. H. (1996). Systems inquiry and its application in education. In David, H. J. (ed.) Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology, ch. 3. New York: Macmillian. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine. Boulding, K. (1956). The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Capra, F. (1982). The Turning Point. New York: Simon and Schuster. Checkland, P. B. (1981). Systems Thinking, Systems Practice. New York: Wiley. Churchman, C. W. (1971). The Design of Inquiring Systems. New York: Basic Books. Coffey, W. J. (1998). Urban systems research: Past, present, and future. A panel discussion. ‘Urban Systems Research: An Overview’. Canadian Journal of Regional Science, 21(3), 327 364. Engelen, G. and Allen, P. M. (1986). Modelling the spatial distribution of energy demand for the province of Noord Holland: Towards an integrated approach. Systemi Urbani 8, 241 261. Gleich, J. (1987). Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin Books. Gould, P. (1987). A critique of dissipatives structures in the human realm. European Journal of Operational Research 30(1), 211 221. Hillier, F. and Liebermann, G. (1995). Introduction to Operations Research (6th edn.). New York: McGraw Hill. Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4, 1 23. Kiel, L. D. (1991). Lessons from the non linear paradigm: Applications of the theory of dissipative structures in the social sciences. Social Science Quarterly 72(3), 431 442. Laszlo, E. (1972). Introduction to Systems Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought. New York: Gordon and Breach. Laszlo, E. (1987, 1993). Evolution: The Grand Synthesis. Boston: Shambhala. Luhmann, N. (1995). Social Systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of Chaos. New York: Bantam Books. Sage, A. (1992). Systems Engineering. New York: Wiley.

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Sanglier, M. and Allen, P. M. (1989). Evolutionary models of urban systems: An application to the Belgian provinces. Environment and Planning A 21, 477 498. Straussfogel, D. (1997). Redefining development as humane and sustainable. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87(2), 280 305. Varela, F. G., Maturana, H. R. and Uribe, R. (1974). Autopoiesis: The organization of living systems, its characterization, and a model. Biosystems 5, 187 196. von Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General System Theory. New York: George Braziller. Weiner, N. (1948). Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wiener, N. (1950, 1956). The Human Use of Human Beings. New York: Doubleday and Company Inc.

Relevant Websites http://www.complexsystems.org/ Institute for the Study of Complex Systems. http://www.incose.org/ International Council of Systems Engineering. http://isss.org/world/index.php International Society for the System Sciences. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SERVER.html Principia Cybernetica Web. http://www.resalliance.org/1.php Resilience Alliance. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/INDEXASC.html Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems.

T Taylor, G. J. M. Powell, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Environmental Determinism The idea that the natural environment controls human activities. Physiography In the context of this article, a loose, early term for descriptions of nature or physical geography - occasionally so loose as to permit references to environmental controls on economic development. Possibilism In the context of this article, the notion that the physical environment allows human communities to select from a range of alternative responses. Resource Management Decision-making for the determination and implementation of policies concerning the use and conservation of natural resources, embracing multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. Social Darwinism The application of Darwin’s evolutionary principles to economic, political, and social contexts. Sustainability In the context of this article, concerning the adoption of modes of development capable of meeting current needs without jeopardy to environmental health and the needs of future generations.

David, and was subsequently awarded an 1851 Science Research Scholarship to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Increasingly exposed to the influence of internationally prominent geologists, geomorphologists, and regional geographers, he commenced an ambitious writing tra jectory, including Australia in Its Physiographic and Economic Aspects (1911), and made a distinguished personal con tribution to the scientific work of Captain Scott’s re nowned, ill fated Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica. Robust and wiry, of above average height, staunchly teetotal, already balding, Taylor was recognized as an all round scientist and enterprising team player, who seemed inclined to the occasional rush of blood. Above all, he was highly valued for his courage, endurance, and quirky humor, characteristics that would be repeatedly tested after his return to Australia.

Taylor, Griffith (1880–1963) Taylor was born in Walthamstow, England, but his closest family origins were in the Lancashire’s cotton districts, near Manchester. His name commemorated his maternal grandfather, Thomas Griffiths, using ‘Griffith’ as a fore name. His father, James, was a well traveled chemist and mines manager. In 1883 Griffith Taylor emigrated with his family to Sydney and continued his education at elite private schools and at Sydney University. Following successful studies in science and mining engineering, he undertook postgraduate training in geology with the celebrated Antarctic explorer, Professor Edgeworth

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The Cambridge and Antarctic adventures led directly to his crucial appointment to Australia’s new federal weather service as a major environmental researcher (officially, as a ‘physiographer’). The demanding brief was heavily influenced by wartime exigencies, nationalist– imperial anxieties, and an emerging focus on national development policy, but the energetic, pugnacious Taylor seemed well suited to the challenge. His rapidly ex panding research schedule included the significance of environmental limits on Australia’s ability to accom modate a large increase in total population, the inadvis ability of massive new investment in tropical settlement, and the promotion of a national resources atlas. It would also accelerate Griffith Taylor’s return to academia. In the interim, although his forthright pronouncements were famously caricatured as unpatriotic, pessimistic ‘environmentalism’ in Britain and Australia, they reson ated very well with North American luminaries, such as Isaiah Bowman. The Geographical Review provided a very respectable outlet for Taylor’s work, and in the 1920s published a series of his papers on subjects as diverse as the geography of race, culture, and language. At the age of 40, after applying unsuccessfully for a range of senior university positions in meteorology, geology, and geography, Taylor welcomed (Sir) Edge worth David’s inspired maneuvers to bring him back to Sydney as the founding head of the new department of geography. He took up his appointment in 1921. Inevit ably, given Taylor’s national notoriety, the new Sydney interlude was tempestuous. Taylor was a lively and en thusiastic teacher, whose unflinching commitment to geography’s underestimated potential for civic en gagement collided with powerful campus and political interests. While carefully attending to the presentation of his Antarctic work, he interrogated key intellectual and political positions of the day – on racial origins and dispersals, the potential targeting of northern Australia by reportedly overcrowded Asian communities, and aridity as a primary obstacle to settlement intensification. He never gave quarter to disciplinary purists: certainly not to threatened classicists who branded him a philis tine, or to what he came to regard as naı¨ve ‘possibilism’. Furthermore – and dangerously, as it would prove – he chose to air some aggressive opinions in the popular media, rather than to confine himself to peer scrutiny in academic journals. Taylor tended to exaggerate his status as lone cru sader. His difficulties partly derived from naı¨ve enthusi asm, excess of opportunity, and a late arrival’s anxiety to make a mark in academia. Vaguely acknowledging social Darwinism, he repeatedly sought to clarify ‘Nature’s Plan’ and to define a role for science in public affairs. Antarctic fame and an exceptional employment experi ence had encouraged his appetite for individualistic pi oneering; on the other hand, the deceptively plum

government position had set enormous tasks which were incapable of solution from any specialist viewpoint. He may have felt entitled to make use of other researchers’ work as circumstances demanded, but although he in serted a patina of novelty that seemed for a time in structive, detractors found more art than science. In particular, his excursions into racial origins and distributions reprised Ellsworth Huntington’s determin istic ideas in human geography, the cephalic index work of W.Z. Ripley, and the global dispersal themes intro duced by palaeontologist and zoogeographer, W.D. Matthews. Taylor preferred to extrapolate by means of enterprising adaptations of a series of familiar diagram matic techniques, drawn mainly from meteorology (iso bars), and geology (stratification). This gave rise to a celebrated ‘zone and strata’ (or Migration Zone) theory, introduced in a number of succinct articles before its ultimate elaboration in Environment and Race. It is worth noting, however, that he also exhibited a distinctive, ar guably innate facility for freehand draughtsmanship. It had been honed by his undergraduate courses in geology and mining engineering, during Antarctica’s arduously remote and testing silences, as a facet of his relentless advocacy of field observation, and in coping with a ser iously understaffed and under resourced teaching milieu. Taylor’s opponents attacked his purportedly ‘de terministic’ stance on Australia’s potentials and his (re markably accurate) forecast of a total population of about 20 million by AD 2000. They also undervalued critical, supplementary explications of a rational sequence of regional development, particularly within his 1923 ad dress to the Australasian Association for the Advance ment of Science. Increasingly vilified in the press and by campus enemies, in 1928 he resigned his Sydney ap pointment and left for the University of Chicago. The brief Chicago interlude strengthened his contact with Bowman, Barrows, and many other influential geographers, provided increased opportunities for ex tensive fieldwork in the US, Europe, and Scandinavia, and generally increased his exposure to geography’s emerging presence as a university subject. His major writings maintained broadly familiar emphases on Ant arctica, Australia, and race. In 1935 he was appointed founding professor of geography at the University of Toronto; on his retirement in 1951 he returned to Sydney. More comfortable with Canadian ways and insti tutions, Taylor settled down to build a fine teaching and research department, improved the subject’s standing in Canadian schools, continued his recent Chicago work on environmental influences in cultural and urban geog raphy, and resumed his older studies of climatic controls in regional development. His Toronto inaugural lecture, Geography – The Correlative Science (1935), reflected a few of the philosophical and pedagogical fragments gleaned

Taylor, G.

at Sydney and Cambridge, but also borrowed from an under remarked appreciation of the liaison role fash ioned for geography by Chicago’s sophisticated ad ministrators. On the whole, the late career evidence finds for modulated speculation, more focused, less ana chronistic bibliographical referrals, and gradual relax ation into established academe, especially during wartime and in the early postwar period. Retrospectively, Environment and Nation (1936) has been considered another wild foray into European his tory, but both Urban Geography (1949) and (his edited) Geography in the Twentieth Century (1951) seem compara tively mainstream. Our Evolving Civilization (1946) was generally familiar too, except that it was proffered as a timely introduction to ‘geopacifics’, or peace studies in formed by a human (or humane) geography, a theme to which he would return in his retirement. More indica tively, Australia (1940) had recommended ‘stop and go determinism’, visualizing human intervention as a form of traffic control – altering the rate, rather than the dir ection, of progress. Similarly, Canada (1947), a very marketable text, actually disputed a prevailing mood of pessimism in that country. Until the end of his life, Taylor continued to picture himself as an ‘enfant terrible’, but he had never been as brazenly deterministic as his enemies charged. Somewhat unkindly, it could now be said that his initial adoption of a deterministic stance mainly provided a launching pad for flailing attacks on themes which interested him. Further, his indulgence in controversy contributed to a much wider determinism–possibilism debate which consumed a great deal of expensive attention at all levels of the subject. If his early career exemplified pioneering adaptability, his notoriety ensured that his adopted sub ject contrived simultaneously to struggle against powerful detractors while rejoicing in his achievements. Taylor cast a particularly large shadow in both Australia and Canada, but arguably the Australian legacy is the more problematical. He encountered more sympathetic company in the far larger pool of North America, and as geography itself found secure institutional footings around the world his authorial persona became more conventional. In 1940 he was elected the first non American President of the As sociation of American Geographers. His writings became more patient than provocative, except insofar as they retained a predilection for startlingly idiosyncratic dia grams, including the usual ‘griffograms’, much to the chagrin of conservative readers and editors. Before leaving Toronto in 1951 for his retirement in Australia, he was elected President of the new Canadian Associ ation of Geographers. In 1954 he was made a Fellow of

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the Australian Academy of Science, the first geographer in that fraternity. He was also elected founding president of the Institute of Australian geographers, in 1960; the Institute now awards a major medal named in his honor. Sydney University awarded him an Honorary D.Litt., 30 years after he had left that campus in some despair. Colleagues and graduate students alike generally found ‘Grif ’ (also ‘Griff ’) accessible, interesting, and constructive, with a low tolerance for trivialities that barely changed down the years: apparently, when asked to recommend a good hotel, he would invariably reply – ‘take the first left outside the station, then the first right, and it’s the first one you’ll see’. Throughout his career he championed the role of geographers in public policy, and in Canada, as in Australia, his reinforcement of a tradi tional environmental bias in school geography assisted the retention of British as opposed to American repre sentations of the subject. By the early twenty first cen tury, some of the controversial Australian works of Griffith Taylor were applauded by environmentalists, national planning advocates, and geography teachers as prescient examples of academic geography’s subsequent engagement with resource management, environmental management, and sustainable development. See also: Bowman, I.; Darwinism (and Social Darwinism); Determinism/Environmental Determinism; Environmentalism; Possibilism; Resource Management, Rural; Sustainable Development.

Further Reading Powell, J. M. (1979). Thomas Griffith Taylor 1880 1963. Geographers: Bibliographical Studies 3, 141 153. Powell, J. M. (1993). Griffith Taylor and ‘Australia Unlimited’, The John Macrossan Memorial Lecture, 1992. St Lucia, QLD: Queensland University Press. Powell, J. M. (1991). A Historical Geography of Modern Australia. The Restive Fringe, pp 121 149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sanderson, M. (1988). Griffith Taylor. Antarctic Scientist and Pioneer Geographer. Ottawa, ON: Carleton University Press. Strange, C. and Bashford, A. (2008). Griffith Taylor: Visionary, Environmentalist, Explorer. Canberra: National Library of Australia Press. Taylor, G. (1922). The distribution of future white settlement. Geographical Review 12, 375 402. Taylor, G. (1935). Geography The correlative science. Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 1, 535 550. Taylor, G. (1936). The zones and strata theory A biological classification of races. Human Biology 8, 348 367. Tomkins, G. S. (1967). Griffith Taylor and Canadian Geography. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. Winlow, H. (2006). Mapping moral geographies: WZ Ripley’s races of Europe and the United States. Annals of Association of American Geographers 96, 119 141.

Taylor, P. J. Glassman, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Hegemony In general, a form of domination; after the Italian social theorist Antonio Gramsci, a form of leadership in which a particular social group exercises power as much by gaining consent from subordinate groups as by exercising repressive force. Modernization Theory An approach to development that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, especially within fields such as economic history, political science, and sociology, which suggested that every society can and should go through a more or less teleological process of change from largely rural, agrarian, and premodern to urban, industrial, and modern. Neoliberalism A doctrine, based loosely on an updating of classic nineteenth-century liberalism and emerging in the 1970s and 1980s, according to which the best political and economic outcomes can be procured through minimizing the role of states and allowing market activities considerable scope, including through encouragement of global free trade. World Cities A notion developed in the 1980s, suggesting that particular cities, such as New York, London, and Tokyo, play crucial roles in articulating the global economy, thus serving as far more than national economic centers. World Systems Analysis A form of analysis developed by historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein in the 1970s, built around the claim that contemporary societies can only be understood if they are analyzed as part of a global capitalist system, one that has developed through very long-term historical processes, and is inherently hierarchical.

Taylor, Peter (1944–) Peter James Taylor is an influential political geographer and world systems theorist whose work has been read widely in geography and other disciplines, both in his home country of England and internationally. Taylor was born in 1944 and grew up in Calverton, near Nottingham, England, receiving a BA in Geography from Liverpool University in 1966 and a PhD in Geography from Liv erpool in 1970. He taught at Newcastle University from 1968 to 1995, and since then he has taught at Lough borough University, where he co founded the Global ization and World Cities research network (GaWC) in 1999 and served as editor of the prestigious journal

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Political Geography. During 1990 Taylor was a research associate for a MacArthur Foundation project on com parative hegemonies at the Fernand Braudel Center of the State University of New York, Binghamton, a project headed by Immanuel Wallerstein, founder of world sys tems analysis. In recognition of his scholarship, Taylor was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004. He has also served as a local councilor for Labour in the Northeast of England, and he has always displayed a strong interest in the political implications of his scholarly work.

Taylor’s academic work can be seen as both contrib uting a world systems perspective to geography and as bringing a more explicit geographical perspective to world systems analysis. Where the latter is concerned, Taylor has developed arguments about states and terri toriality – including their changing forms over time – that have helped elaborate the framework developed by Wallerstein. The notion that the world system is com posed of two types of entities – global commodity chains that are nonterritorial but transnational in scale, and territorial states that are national in scale – owes much to Taylor’s writings. Where Taylor’s development of a world systems perspective within geography is concerned, three major areas of influence can be mentioned. Taylor’s early work was in fields such as electoral geography, and as he

Taylor, P.

became interested in world systems approaches, Taylor applied insights from this analysis to politics and elec tions. As one example, he developed an argument that in order to understand differences in the ways electoral processes and political party structures work in different parts of the world, it is necessary to understand the positions of various national polities within global pro cesses of capital accumulation. Political elites within countries of the Global South, down the global hierarchy of capitalist accumulation from the wealthiest capitalist countries, lack the resources necessary to effectively buy off political opposition groups such as labor parties – at least to the same extent as elites in the Global North. As such, political systems of the Global South are much less likely to have liberal democratic structures and will in stead tend toward authoritarianism and/or corruption, not because of the failures of leaders or polities but be cause of the differing structural position of countries in the global hierarchy. Such a view is very much at odds with the arguments characteristic of modernization the ory and neoliberalism, which see political structures as formed largely by forces internal to the state and society in question. A second area in which Taylor’s work has strongly influenced geography is in his use of world systems ap proaches to reconfigure arguments regarding the struc tures of states and their roles in international relations and the international political economy. Taylor insists that states are formed not only by the internal processes at work within them but by the external relations in which they are embedded – what can be called their ‘interstateness’. This, again, makes it necessary to exam ine the structure and functioning of states, including their varying forms of territoriality, within the context of the world system. Taylor has taken this project forward by examining the rise and decline of states that in different periods have exercised global ‘hegemony’, a concept he adapts and develops from the Italian social theorist An tonio Gramsci, as well as from contemporary neo Gramscian scholarship. The third area in which Taylor’s work has strongly influenced geography is in his arguments regarding ‘world cities’ – cities that play crucial roles in global commodity chains and transnational flows of capital. Taylor has linked the analysis of world cities directly to a world systems framework, and has also worked to over come what he and others have characterized as the lack of adequate empirical evidence regarding the structure of the world cities network. Taylor has carried this last project forward through the formation of the GaWC, an international, collaborative scholarly venture based at Loughborough. Taylor and other GaWC contributors – notably Jon Beaverstock – have developed large data sets documenting various types of connections between branches of firms across the world city network, as well as

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global urban connections for organizations such as non governmental organizations. Taylor has used these data to support his argument that the recent phase of ‘glob alization’ has tended to undermine the territorial integ rity and governability of nation states, without however making national states irrelevant to processes of global capital accumulation. Along with these contributions to scholarly work in geography, Taylor has been an active participant in projects for transforming approaches to higher education. Taylor was a member of the Gulbenkian Commission, headed by Wallerstein and given the mandate of exam ining historical changes and current needs in the social sciences. The Gulbenkian Commission’s 1996 report, Open the Social Sciences, argued that the conventional, historically developed distinctions between social science disciplines are becoming increasingly obsolete and need to be replaced by approaches that are more transdisci plinary – and indeed geographical, including transcend ing the traditional nation state centrism of the social sciences. The report also suggested that any hard and fast distinction between the physical and the social sciences is becoming problematic and should be reconsidered in light of recent advances in the physical sciences. This, too, seems to highlight the potential of a geographical perspective, with its strong emphasis on human–en vironment interactions. Though Taylor and the other authors of the report note that geography became a poor cousin to other social science disciplines in the twentieth century, the implications here seem to be that a revived geographical perspective has much to contribute to a more robust transdisciplinary approach for the twenty first century. See also: Electoral Geography; Hegemony; Political Geography; World/Global Cities.

Further Reading Taylor, P. J. (1981). Political geography and the world economy. In Burnett, A. D. & Taylor, P. J. (eds.) Political Studies from Spatial Perspectives, pp 157 172. New York: Wiley. Taylor, P. J. (1982). A materialist framework for political geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 7(1), 15 34. Taylor, P. J. (1986). An exploration into world systems analysis of political parties. Political Geography Quarterly 5(4) (supplement), 5 20. Taylor, P. J. (1991). Political geography within world systems analysis. Review 14(3), 387 402. Taylor, P. J. (1994). The state as container: Territoriality in the modern world system. Progress in Human Geography 18(2), 151 162. Taylor, P. J. (1995). Beyond containers: Internationality, interstateness, interterritoriality. Progress in Human Geography 19(1), 1 15. Taylor, P. J. (1996). The Way the Modern World Works: World Hegemony to World Impasse. London: Wiley. Taylor, P. J. (1999). Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation. Cambridge: Polity and University of Minnesota Press.

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Taylor, P. J. (2000). Havens and cages: Reinventing states and households in the modern world system. Journal of World Systems Research 6(2), 544 562. Taylor, P. J. (2000). World cities and territorial states under conditions of contemporary globalization. Political Geography 19(1), 5 32. Taylor, P. J. and Flint, C. (2000). Political Geography: World Economy, Nation State and Locality (4th edn.). Harlow: Prentice Hall. Taylor, P. J. (2004). World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis. London: Routledge. Wallerstein, I., Juma, C. and Keller et al. (1996). Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the

Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Relevant Websites http://www.lboro.ac.uk Peter J. Taylor’s Website at Loughborough University, Department of Geography.

Technological Change G. Norcliffe, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Invention The act of ‘invention’, which is often portrayed in film and fiction to consist of the lone experimenter having eureka moments in a macabre laboratory, is today an increasingly commercialized and instrumental process as corporations and research institutions search for specific solutions to prioritized problems. There still are some serendipitous discoveries, but for the most part invention is the result of a structured and commercialized process. Innovation It occurs when inventions are commercially applied. This, too, has become a progressively more rational process as an innovator tries to assess the costs of deploying new technology versus the increase in the revenue stream that it is expected to generate. Imitation and Diffusion Processes whereby successful technologies are copied – sometimes quite legally through franchises, and various technology-sharing arrangements, or because they are public knowledge not protected by patents – and sometimes illegally in clandestine operations which pirate other patented technologies. Imitation and diffusion are more important, economically, than invention and innovation. Learning This is essential to technical change. For instance, learning how to write machine code is important to developing new software, as much as understanding gene maps is to bioengineering. Codified Knowledge Technical information compiled in written or recorded form as text, equations, and tables, which make it easy to transfer, if necessary, over long distances. Tacit Knowledge Knowledge, accumulated by people through experience, is difficult to codify. Sometimes called ’know-how’, people who possess tacit knowledge may be only vaguely aware of it. For instance, the author has been stuck on page 1 of a juggling manual (i.e., codified knowledge) for many years, patiently waiting for an expert to pass on to him the tacit knowledge needed to master the art. The transfer of tacit knowledge normally requires trust and close personal connections. Neighbourhood Effect This effect appears to influence technical change in a traditional closely knit rural society, and also (perhaps more surprisingly) in modern networked society, so that persons located

close to an innovator are more likely to adopt a new technology than those located further away. Trust established by face-to-face contact may be important for this process; indeed science and technology parks are partly based on this premise. Networks In modern industrial society, technology – which may be privately owned and protected by patents – diffuses via social and corporate networks of suppliers, branch plants, project teams, joint-ventures, venture capital initiatives, trade shows, trade magazines and the media. Important technical information may be exchanged face-to-face (especially if trust is an issue), and also via the web, phone networks, and printed media. University and public research institutions also connect with these networks, which have both global and local dimensions. The global dimension is illustrated by China, which is eagerly entering into international joint ventures that bring the latest foreign technologies into its many new science parks. Locally, many technopoles and metropolitan areas have become hotbeds of technological innovation due to (1) new technical knowledge moving through dense contact networks; (2) skilled labour moving locally from firm to firm; (3) the fission and fusion of small firms located within the technopole (Silicon Valley is the archetype of this model); and (4) complex networks of suppliers and sub-contractors.

Technological change is crucial to economic develop ment, with innovation occurring in clusters that generate long waves of growth concentrated in specific regions where invention, innovation, imitation, and learning – four distinct stages of technological change – are pro moted by access to codified and tacit knowledge. Pro tecting intellectual property has allowed industrialized nations to generate large technology rents. Technology is both socially and geographically constructed in favoured ‘spaces of science’ where users and creators of technology interact intensively. Technological change occurs in spaces with good infrastructure, intellectual capacity, and possibilities for networking aided by proximity and neighborhood effects. Extensive recent privatization of technology allows capital to reap substantial benefits. In a neoliberal age, the state needs to play an active role to narrow technology gaps between poor and rich regions, and manage powerful new technologies that allow humans to alter nature in a profound way.

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Introduction and Overview Although other living creatures have developed simple tools, homo sapiens is the only species to have developed sophisticated technologies that in recent years have be come increasingly hierarchical and interconnected as one technology builds on, and interrelates with another. It is the development of technology, including both the ‘tools’ used to produce goods and services, and the ‘crafts’ or processes applied to the production process that most profoundly distinguishes humans from all other species. The increasing speed of innovation and the sophistication of contemporary technology provide humans with the power extensively to reconstruct nature; indeed – and paradoxically – we now have the capacity to engineer the demise of the human species. In the premodern era, technology was developed lo cally and in a somewhat haphazard way, such that, in the absence of means to codify knowledge, a number of important breakthroughs were lost, only to be re in vented centuries later. The development of written script permitted the (rather laborious) storing of knowledge, but it was the invention of moveable type by Johannes Gutenburg in 1438 that initiated the printing, codifying, and dissemination of technical knowledge. From that point on, technological innovation has progressed at an accelerating rate, particularly during the Modern Era.

Technological Change and Economic Growth In the 1930s and 1940s, Joseph Schumpeter stressed the importance of technological innovation to economic growth, coining the famous phrase ‘creative destruction’ to describe how economic growth results from entre preneurs and corporations being willing to discard old technologies and innovate. Robert Solow’s neoclassical growth model, which attributed about 80% of US eco nomic growth to technical change, and the remainder to increases in inputs of labor and capital, broadly con firmed Schumpeter’s ideas. It is now widely accepted that technical change is central to economic growth and the production of wealth in the modern world, although Solow’s model assumed that new technology was ex ogenous to the system and available to producers, whereas – as will be stressed later – much new tech nology today is an endogenous good, held privately by firms who seek to extract large technology rents from their proprietary knowledge. Technological changes do not, however, appear to arrive evenly, but rather (in some economic historians view) to be clustered around interconnected sets of in novations, known as long waves or Kondratieff waves lasting from 45 to 60 years. The nature of long waves is

Table 1 First Wave Second Wave Third Wave Fourth Wave Fifth Wave

Long waves: Dates and key industries 1780 1840 1840 1890 tools 1890 1940 chemicals 1940 1990

iron; steam engines; cotton steel; railways; steamships; machine electrical engineering; automobiles; petrochemicals; aviation; computers

1990 ? information technology; biotechnology; nanotechnology

considered to vary with time and place as laggard regions catch up, and each region plays to its comparative ad vantages, but they are all marked in the first half of the wave by a rising economic boom based on new tech nologies which eventually results in overinvestment and overcapacity, coupled with market saturation, leading to a major recession. The pattern seen to describe western economic development since the 1780s recognizes five waves (Table 1 and Figure 1). The concept of a ‘carrier wave’, as propounded by Hall and Preston, relates closely to the theory of long waves. They see key technologies leading economic booms and carrying economic development forward for two or more decades, until the market is saturated and the boom runs out of steam. Such carrier waves are geographically con centrated; good examples including the technology led cotton boom of the late eighteenth century in Manchester, UK, the railroad boom of the nineteenth century centered on Pittsburgh, and the space technology boom of the late twentieth century concentrated in Orange County, Cali fornia. One of a number of criticisms leveled at the long wave model is that it tends to compartmentalize techno logical change, whereas Norcliffe stresses continuity be tween waves, as bridging innovations link one wave with the next. The bicycle, for instance, was launched in the age of machine technology, but in turn – as stamping and pressing technologies were developed – laid some of the groundwork for the mass production of automobiles in the following long wave. Similarly, microprocessors, de veloped late in the fourth long wave, have had their main impact during the current fifth wave.

Intellectual Property In the premodern world, technology was a public good generally shared in a haphazard way among those who happened to become familiar with the new tools and methods. The first recorded patent, granted by Henry VI to John of Utynam in 1449 for stained glass windows, set a precedent: the state could create a monopoly protecting an entire industry, or protecting an inventor’s technique. From these beginnings, the system of patents spread through the Western world. The first US patent act dates

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A = Recovery B = Boom – inflationary growth C = Stagnation D = Recession

Rate of economic growth

• Iron • Steam engines • Cotton

1

A 1780

B 1800

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• Steel • Railways • Steamships • Machine tools

• Electrical engineering • Automobiles • Chemicals

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• Aviation • Petrochemicals • Computers • Consumer durables

• Information technology • Biotechnology

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5?

D 1840

1860

1880

1900

1920

1940

1960

1980

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Long waves: 1780 2020

Figure 1 Long waves of economic development 1780 2020.

to 1790. As patent legislation evolved, it ceased to protect whole industries, and was restricted to specific written descriptions of processes or products, protected for the inventor during a statutory time period. The earlier re quirement that a patented good be broadly beneficial to society was also dropped – wisely so since the best ap plication of many technical innovations is not always immediately obvious. In the modern industrial age, holding patents gives the patent owner a monopoly for a specified time period. Fortunes have been created by those who hold key pa tents, with family names like Nobel (inventors of dyna mite and detonators) achieving wide recognition, partly through applying their wealth to philanthropic purposes. It follows that owning key technologies through patents and copyright, or simply through secrecy, may yield huge economic rents because the owners may set the price of technological change. Bill Gates, for instance, who is reported to be the world’s richest person, has a major interest in Microsoft, which currently holds the key pa tents for the world’s most popular computer operating systems. In the current industrial era, the origins of patents are not randomly distributed, but are concentrated in in dustrial regions. This in turn reflects on the geography of technical innovation, which also tends to be concentrated in innovative industrial regions. In a country such as Canada, far fewer patents have originated in agricultural and resource regions than in major urban areas in the industrial heartland. This geographical concentration of patent activity has evolved in the twentieth century, with the research laboratories of major firms and universities, and smaller enterprises located in technopoles and sci ence parks, creating an increasingly large share of intel lectual property.

In recent decades, the ownership of intellectual property has been an immense advantage for the indus trialized nations, which have been able to protect a vast array of technological innovations that are exported to the Global South and Newly Industrialized Countries at high prices, including (controversially) AIDS retroviral drugs. The recent stubbornness of the income gap be tween rich and poor countries appears to have been materially affected by the substantial economic rents that the rich industrialized countries derive from the intel lectual property they own, and the high prices that the poorer nations often have had to pay to use the newest technologies. Of relevance here is the Marrakesh Agreement concluding the Uruguay Round (1986–94) of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the GATT), which included language on the protection of intellectual property, and penalties for countries that break these copyright protections.

The Social and Geographical Construction of Technology To simplify a rather complex debate, it was widely as sumed until the middle of the twentieth century that new technologies were created in the minds of great inventors who were almost exclusively male, and possessed re markable powers of insight. Over a long period, many countries have been boosting this version of history by placing statues of their own famous inventors in visible places, by naming streets, schools, and universities for them, and placing their images on stamps and bank notes. In effect this is a version of Whig history that envisages great inventors creating a better modern world by their own efforts. This position was espoused by a group of

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historians whom Wiebe Bijker calls ‘internalists’, which is to say, those who focus on technological details internal to an innovation. On the other hand stand the rival camp whose followers argue for the social construction of technology (SCOT), focusing their attention on the so cial settings in which specific technologies have been developed and the ways users have often adapted in novations for their own purposes. Bijker refers to this group of social historians as ‘contextualists’ because they are interested in the many nontechnical elements that surround technology. A recent contribution to this ap proach by Oudshoorn and Pinch, entitled How Users Matter, moves the focus quite explicitly from the in ventors to the users of technology. Key aspects of the social construction of technology include: (1) the prioritizing of social needs – for instance, the current search for technologies that minimize vehicle CO2 emissions to meet the mandatory limits that signa tories to the Kyoto Protocol must achieve and (2) the adaptation of technologies to uses that the original in ventors had not anticipated – such as ceramic glass which was originally developed for the mirrors of astronomical telescopes because its thermal expansion coefficient was close to zero as temperatures soared up or down, but was subsequently recognized to make excellent cook tops that minimize domestic clean up chores. In addition, a common setting for the actual act of invention is a social one, with a team of researchers and assistants, networking and sharing knowledge with related research groups, collectively working toward their research objectives. The Geographical Construction of Technology (G COT) suggested by Norcliffe seeks to reconcile the internalist and contextualist camps by adopting an anti essentialist position where the development and use of technology are viewed as geographically contingent. In any given geographical space at a certain moment in history, there may come together creative persons en gaged in the development of new technology, and others with the ability to find utility or symbolic value in that technology. These creators and users may then interact creatively with each other, as happened, for instance, in the case of Silicon Valley and in many other technopoles during the latter part of the twentieth century. This is also a part of Bijker’s (1995: 4) understanding of the process since he writes ‘‘values, skills and goals are formed in local cultures.’’

Spaces of Science and Technological Change In recent years a number of historians of science have explored the ‘places’ of innovation, countering the earlier idea that ‘‘scientific ideas floated free in the air, as his torians gazed upon them in wonder and admiration’’

(Ophir and Shapin 1991: 3). To suggest that science has a geography challenges the notions of universality attached to science; it ‘‘goes against the grain’’, as Livingstone notes, because knowledge has no bounds and is certainly not local. For this reason, many scientists have seen technological research as essentially a placeless activity; yet progress in the development and application of sci ence and technology evidently takes place in the minds of creative researchers who work in specific contexts of time and place so, as Gieryn (1998: 248) notes, ‘‘all knowledge begins as local knowledge.’’ Constructivists take this argument further by insisting that all knowledge is socially constructed so that technical knowledge is ‘‘a human product, made with locally situated cultural and material resources, rather than as simply the revelation of a pre given order of nature’’ (Golinski 1998, ix). Local contexts may not always be conducive to research, but the existence of innovation hearths subsequently desig nated as World Heritage Sites (e.g., Coalbrookdale in the UK), of ‘shock cities’, of technopoles, science parks, learning regions and science laboratory complexes all suggest that various forms of clustering promote tech nological innovation, which in turn contributes to re gional growth. David Livingstone also addresses this geographical dimension of science and technology in his recent book Putting Science in Its Place. He points to three important geographical components of science. First, science and technology are produced in recognized spaces – the la boratory, the museum, the workshop, the incubator, the science park, each with a microgeography, an internal spatial organization with defined boundaries, and internal and external spatial relations. Second, scientific know ledge is unevenly distributed as a result of the clustering of knowledge creation, and a diffusion process that favors certain well connected hubs that produce and exchange technical and scientific knowledge, while other remoter places remain largely out of the loop. Scientific know ledge is often exchanged during face to face encounters such as lectures, laboratories, seminars, and conferences or, as Shapin stresses, by the acts of seeing and observing, which create a strong neighborhood effect. Even in this age of unparalleled global communication, proximity is important to technological change, as is demonstrated by the growth of urban and regional clusters of science and technology. Third, what is accepted as science depends upon place and time so that, for instance, ‘intelligent design’ has officially been set beside evolutionary biology in schools and university curricula in parts of the southern United States. Livingstone’s approach to the development of science emphasizes three geographical aspects – the site, the region, and circulation (movement), all of which are important to the present argument because the impact of place on technology is inescapable; this is precisely the

Technological Change

point of the argument for the ‘geographical construction of technology’. In the past quarter century many geog raphers have recognized this line of thinking by con tributing to a growing literature on technologically innovative spaces, on an evolutionary ‘path dependency’ as regions accumulate intellectual capital in a particular technological field, and in some cases become ‘locked in’ a particular suite of technologies that eventually con tribute to regional decline as other technologies super sede them. A new vocabulary has been developed that is captured in many of the contributions to this encyclopaedia. These innovative activities are often found in ‘new industrial spaces’, as Allen Scott has noted, although rejuvenated metropolitan regions have also often become techno poles. Within these new technology intensive spaces, there develop ‘associational economies’, as Cooke and Morgan phrase the idea, or ‘transactional economies’ in Storper’s version of territorial development. Such spaces are occupied by interconnected ‘knowledge intensive industries’ where the creative class plays a key role. Economists likewise stress the role of ‘knowledge spill overs’ or ‘regional spillovers’ where new technologies developed endogenously within the firm through in vestment in R&D often lead to external (exogenous) developments as new ventures are created to oper ationalize the technologies at nearby locations. In the same vein, Michael Storper identifies ‘relational assets’, which he envisages becoming embedded in regional culture and fostering a ‘learning economy’, although Yeung cautions that relational economic geography is under theorized, with insufficient attention being paid to power relations, and to the role of key actors. Storper and Venables use the term ‘buzz’ to capture this notion of excitement about new technologies that persons close to the action experience. The upshot, from a geographical perspective, is that many geographers see proximity as a key factor in technological change.

Technology and Capital The preceding discussion of new industrial spaces may give the impression that technology is the key driver of regional economic growth, and that capital will follow promising new technologies. But technology needs capital invested in research and development, in state of the art plants, and in infrastructure if it is to promote economic growth. Doreen Massey uses the metaphor of sediments to describe the accumulation of capital in particular re gional settings. What this model suggests is that at dif ferent times, different towns and regions have seen major investment in new technologies, triggering rounds of re gional economic growth. Today, for instance, massive private investment in new oil sand technologies is leading

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to rapid growth in Canada’s Fort McMurray region, while a mix of public and private investment has created – in less than a decade – the 13 Science Parks located in Zhongguancun in the northwest suburbs of Beijing. The point to these examples is to suggest that capital is taking an increasingly active role in technological change. This is not to suggest that the link between capital and tech nology did not previously exist – it did, but some of the technological research both in universities and in the private sector was centered on pure rather than applied matters, and the commercialization of technology was not always a priority. In the neoliberal era, capital has become strongly focused on technological innovation, with ven ture capital actively searching for new technologies with commercial promise, and with capital markets developing a category of funds invested in technology intensive in dustries. Thus, capital is searching out technology, rather than technology securing capital. Public capital directed by the state is also an important element in creating technology led regional growth, al though now given less mention than in the Keynesian era. Yet Harrison’s critique of the discourse on Silicon Valley, long held up as an example of private entrepreneurship, stresses the key contribution of the state (i.e., federal defense expenditures and the NASA aerospace program) to the rapid growth of the technopole. Likewise China’s current explosive rate of economic growth and techno logical progress has been helped by the active role of the national and local state in promoting business partner ships, and providing infrastructure. As capital aggressively pursues technological change, so nature is increasingly being put at risk. The impact of technology on nature has become so pervasive that we no longer talk of nature as an original condition, but as a condition produced by humans consciously and un consciously as a by product of our industrial activities. Technological change has not only transformed both industry and domestic production, it has transformed nature to such an extent that all landscapes need to be viewed as human modified. In consequence, the man agement of nature has increasingly become a political issue, resulting in the rise of the new field in human geography called political ecology.

Futures of Technology: A Concluding Comment There is no shortage of gurus predicting the future impact of technologies, some preaching gloom, and others proclaiming a brave new world. From a geo grapher’s perspective, in the short run it seems likely that four principal current trends will continue: 1. New labor saving technologies plus resource de pletion (which often results from using powerful

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‘nature changing’ technologies) are leading to de population of the resource peripheries of the indus trialized world (e.g., interior of Australia, mid north of Canada). 2. New technology intensive industries and services (this includes cultural production and financial ser vices) show increasing concentration in the world’s major metropolitan centres, some of which are growing at a remarkably rapid rate. 3. By aggressively buying best technologies, or copying or importing them via supply/subcontractor ar rangements, and by increasing their own capacity to develop technology, newly industrialized countries (especially in East Asia) have narrowed the economic gap with rich countries. 4. The global south remains highly dependent on im ported technologies, many of which are embedded in high value added goods and services including med ical supplies, luxury goods, military equipment, the media, and financial services. Lack of technological capacity in these and related fields make it difficult for these underdeveloped states to make rapid economic progress. In the longer run, future geographies of technological change will depend largely upon shifts in world politics. The unfettered application of new technology to indus try, to military adventurism, and to resource exploitation raises concerns about the wholesale destruction of nature, and human survival itself. If current neoliberal policies prevail, then it seems certain that new technologies will remain largely in the private sphere, and the associated polarization of incomes and economic development be tween North and South, core and periphery, and rich and poor will continue. Newly industrialized states – now including China – have demonstrated that a technolo gical catch up is feasible, but that depends upon an active ‘dirigiste’ role for the state. See also: Growth Poles, Growth Centers; High-Tech Industry; Industrial Restructuring; Innovation; Learning Regions; Neoliberal Economic Strategies; Neoliberalism and Development; Regional Development and Technology; Regional Innovation Systems; Technology and Regional Development; Technology Industries; Transnationalism and Technological Transfer; Venture Capital.

Cooke, P. and Morgan, K. (1998). The Associational Economy: Firms, Regions and Innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cooke, P. and Piccaluga, A. (2006). Regional Development in the Knowledge Economy. London: Routledge. Florida, R. (2005). Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge. Freeman, C. and Louca, F. (2001). As Time Goes By. From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Golinski, J. (1998). Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Hall, P. and Preston, P. (1988). The Carrier Wave: New Information Technology and the Geography of Innovation, 1846 2003. London: Hyman Unwin. Harrison, B. (1994). Lean and Mean: The Changing Landscape of Corporate Power in the Age of Flexibility. New York: Basic Books. Heertje, A. (1977). Economics and Technical Change. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hsu, J. Y. and Saxenian, A. (2001). The Silicon Valley Hsinchu connection: Technical communities and industrial upgrading. Industrial and Corporate Change 10, 893 920. Livingstone, D. N. (2003). Putting Science in Its Place. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Massey, D. (1995). Spatial Divisions of Labor: Social Structures and the Geography of Production. New York: Routledge. Norcliffe, G. (2001). The Ride to Modernity: The Bicycle in Canada, 1869 1900. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Norcliffe, G. (2005). The rise of the Coventry bicycle industry, and the geographical construction of technology. In Van der Plas, R. (ed.) Cycle History 15: Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Cycle History Conference, pp 41 58. San Francisco, CA: Cycle Publishing. Norcliffe, G. (in press). G COT: The geographical construction of technology. Science, Technology and Human Values. Ophir, A. and Shapin, S. (1991). The place of knowledge: A methodological survey. Science in Context 4, 3 21. Oudshoorn, N. and Pinch, T. (2003). How Users Matter: The Co Construction of Users and Technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rigby, D. (2000). Geography and technological change. In Sheppard, E. & Barnes, T. J. (eds.) A Companion to Economic Geography, pp 202 223. Oxford: Blackwell. Saxenian, A. (1996). Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schumpeter, J. (1942). Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper. Scott, A. J. (1988). New Industrial Spaces. London: Pion. Solow, R. (1956). A contribution to the theory of economic Growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics 70, 65 94. Shapin, S. (1994). A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth England. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Storper, M. (1997). The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. New York: Guilford. Storper, M. (1997). Regional economies as relational assets. In Lee, R. & Willis, J. (eds.) Society, Place, Economy: States of the Art in Economic Geography, pp 248 259. London: Arnold. Storper, M. and Venables, A. J. (2004). Buzz: Face to face contact and the urban economy. Journal of Economic Geography 4, 351 370. Yeung, H. W. C. (2005). Rethinking relational economic geography. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 30, 37 51.

Relevant Websites Further Reading Acs, Z. J. and Varga, A. (2005). Entrepreneurship, agglomeration and technological change. Small Business Economics 24, 323 334. Bijker, W. (1995). Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Towards a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castells, M. and Hall, P. (1994). Technopoles of the World: The Making of Twenty First Century Industrial Complexes. London: Routledge.

http://inventors.about.com/od/timelines/Timelines of Invention and Technology.htm http://www.scimaps.org/ Places & Spaces: Mapping Science. An exhibition created to demonstrate the power of maps to understand, navigate and manage not only physical places, but also abstract information spaces.

Technology and Regional Development J. Zhang, University of Minnesota, Tacoma, WA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Absorptive Capacity The ability of a firm or an individual to scan and monitor relevant technological and economic information, to identify technical and market opportunities, and to acquire knowledge, information, and skills needed to develop technologies. Collective Learning The cumulative creation of common knowledge that takes place among a community of actors in a locality by interactive mechanisms based on shared rules, norms, organizations, and procedures. Knowledge Base The set of information inputs, knowledge, and capabilities that inventors draw on when looking for innovative solutions. Innovation The first attempt to introduce a new product or process into the economy. Invention The first occurrence of an idea for a new product or process. Social Technologies Structures and forces mold the way individuals and organizations interact to get things done, which are commonly referred as institutions.

Introduction The central challenge to economic geographers is to search the determinant of economic development, thus to explain the ‘forging ahead’, ‘catching up’, and ‘falling behind’ of regions and nations. The level of a region’s economic development can be measured by the average performance of its profit seeking firms, without con sidering its procedural justice and distributional effects. Clearly, technology has been identified as the primary determinant of firm productivity and competitiveness. Technological change, or the ‘creative destruction’ of older ways of doing things, is largely understood as the driving force of economic development after Schump eter. However, it is important to differentiate between ‘immediate’ sources of economic development and causation at a deeper level. It is reasonable to identify technology as the immediate source of economic devel opment. The more fundamental question is what deeper causes lie behind it. At the most general level, ‘insti tutions’ presently is the name many geographers and economists give to these deeper causes. For geographers, the key question is why firms in some regions have re peatedly been the site of path forming innovations or

new industrial sectors, but many others have never spawned any major new technology or industrial sector. Moreover, to what extent can successful practices be replicated in other less fortunate locations? In order to answer these questions, we need to first develop our conceptualization of technology. Production involves a set of actions or procedures that need to be done, for example, as specified in a recipe for making a cake. In this view, technology can be defined as a recipe describing a detailed program by which inputs can be transformed into outputs. A recipe is anonymous re garding any division of labor, but most economic activities involve a division of labor plus a mode of coordination among multiple actors. Nelson and Sampat propose to call the recipe aspect of an activity its ‘physical’ tech nology, and the way work is divided and coordinated its ‘social’ technology. ‘Social technologies’ here are defined as structures and forces mold the way individuals and organizations interact to get things done, commonly re ferred as institutions. In this view, technology is in separable from institutions, and technological change often coevolves with institutional change. When technology is concerned, an important dis tinction is normally made between invention and in novation. Invention is the first occurrence of an idea for a new product or process, while innovation is the first at tempt to introduce it into the economy. A time lag of several decades or more between invention and innov ation is not uncommon, because many inventions require complementary inventions and innovations to succeed at the innovation stage. While inventions may be carried out anywhere, for example, in universities, innovations occur mostly through entrepreneurs in business firms. Technological knowledge is embodied in machinery and equipment, but technology cannot be reduced to machinery, a set of well defined blueprints, or operating manuals. The fundamental knowledge, often tacit, is em bodied in individuals and organizational procedures, en tailing the formation of an ‘epistemic community’ with a shared cognitive frame, or codebook, among practitioners. Technology is also ‘knowledge in action’, because inven tion and innovation proceed through sequences of prob lem solving activities. Beyond inventive discovery and patenting, technological learning often involves imitation, reverse engineering, adoption of capital embodied innov ations, learning by doing, and learning by using. Con sequently, technological learning is continuous and cumulative; current technological development often

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relies on the ‘absorptive capacity’ developed through past experiences of production and innovation. Whatever the primary source of scientific invention, it is the successful introduction of product, process, and organizational innovations that allows firms to override the preexisting conditions of markets and industries, and to grow and gain market shares at the expense of non innovating firms. Hence, innovation is at the core of Schumpeter’s theory of economic development. Innov ation allows firms to build up monopolistic rents which tend to be progressively eroded alongside the imitative diffusion of new products and processes. Regions, as repositories of knowledge and facilitators of learning, are becoming focal points for innovation in the new, global, knowledge intensive, capitalism. Region specific enablers and constraints for knowledge pro duction and diffusion can feature prominently in explaining the systematic differential innovative capability of firms between regions. Successful regions often have a well functioning ‘regional innovation sys tem’ in place, with co located firms and supportive technological infrastructure such as public and private research laboratories, universities and colleges, technol ogy transfer agencies, and vocational training organiza tions. In order to understand the relationship between technology and regional development, we need to ex plore the geographic sources and mechanisms of tech nological innovation.

Geographic Sources of Technological Innovation In the nineteenth century, the greatest invention – the method of invention, or the process of transforming in tellectual and physical capital into new knowledge and new technology – became institutionalized through the establishment of research laboratories and universities in the West. The linkages between science and technology have been tight ever since; and the emergence of major new technologies has frequently been directly linked with major scientific breakthroughs. As a result, the conventional wisdom regarding the source of innovation is embodied by the science led ‘linear model’. The innovation process is described as a ‘linear’ process in the sense that increased investment in research and development (R&D) leads to greater in novative output which results in increased economic growth. The main focus of this model is inventions that are largely exogenous to existing firms and the creative entrepreneurs who take the risks involved in turning the inventions into commercial innovations. Based on such a topdown model of innovation, high flows or stocks of both public and private R&D and academic research, measured by patents or innovation counts, are believed as

the major source of firm innovation. Hence, the regional distribution of R&D institutions becomes the major ex planation for regional economic performance. The policy implication of this linear model is also clear. Due to ‘market failure’ in basic research, govern ment must engage in or subsidize basic research and protect intellectual property rights (IPRs) through pa tents and other means, so that the ‘appropriability’ of knowledge producers can be ensured. Accordingly, local innovation can be advanced if the state improves its public R&D system. The linear model of innovation fails to embrace the continuity of innovation and the variety of means by which individual firms and groups of interlinked firms and related institutions generate new technologies. The rele vance of scientific knowledge and the mechanisms through which such knowledge is transmitted vary greatly across scientific disciplines, technologies, and industries. It has been shown that science is directly relevant to in dustrial R&D only in a limited number of industries – typically agriculture, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, electronics, and precision instruments. In most con temporary developed economies, one typically observes quite a few institutions, together with a multitude of firms, sharing in different combinations the tasks of scientific explorations and search for would be technological applications. Firms, especially large ones, do undertake a significant amount of R&D activities. Back in 1940s, Schumpeter argued that the increasingly scientific base of economic activities had caused innovation to become more and more costly, due to indivisibilities and significant econ omies of scale and scope. In the presence of barriers to entry and weak appropriability conditions, large firms and ex ante monopolistic power might be more conducive to innovation than fully competitive markets populated by small firms. In this case, the strong positive feedback loop between successful innovation and increased R&D activities can lead to increased market concentration through vertical integration and to the establishment and persistence of R&D activities in particular cities. Since the late 1980s, some geographers have come to argue that increasing market uncertainty has led to flexible specialization, characterized by vertical disinte gration of large firms. As a result, spatial agglomeration of smaller firms and localized division of labor replaced organizational division of labor of large firms to achieve economies of scale and scope. However, increasing un certainty could lead to either rising or declining internal economies of scale. While it is true that many firms continue to restructure themselves to reap the benefits of specialization in their core business, the resulting struc tures do not always exhibit the characteristics of flexible specialization. Some industries such as oil and gas in the early 1980s, pharmaceuticals in the late 1980s, and

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telecoms and banking in the 1990s have been charac terized by large scale merger and acquisition. The large scale R&D programs of the multinational companies (MNCs) and their key role in knowledge creation and transmission have provided evidence to the continuing significance of large firms in technological innovation. The spatial pattern of these large companies is ul timately determined by organizational decision making. The locations of their headquarters and R&D activities, often in the same region, strongly influence the location of innovation. They also create possibilities for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) located in the same areas to benefit from knowledge spillovers and to exploit new ideas and niche markets for innovation. To the extent that such endogenous knowledge creation and transmission within large firms matter, opening up the technological blackbox entails opening up the organizational blackbox and its geography. In the recent geographic literature, it is neither public research, nor large firms, but industrial communities that is considered as the all important site of knowledge formation. The key members of such communities are defined differently by different authors. Commonly they may consist of engineers, managers, and entre preneurs when inter firm networks are stressed (e.g., in the literature of industrial districts), but can be extended to also include scientists and financiers when linkages with knowledge generating organizations (i.e., R&D in stitutes and universities) and investors (e.g., venture capitalists) are treated seriously. Here the emphasis is placed on social relationships within autonomous com munities and rules of behavior embedded in those rela tionships. It is argued that informal communities can solve knowledge problems that escape governmental and market solutions. Acknowledging the key role of com munities in the production of knowledge means that the mere presence of isolated firms and/or research insti tutions is insufficient for knowledge creation. It also in dicates the need for institutional norms that can support communities. Consequently, public policy must em phasize collective cooperation rather than just individual appropriation. In sum, there is not yet a definite answer to the sources of technological innovation. A moderate con clusion is that governmental research institutes, R&D laboratories of large firms, networked SMEs, as well as their interconnections can all be important sources of innovation. The concrete pattern is an empirical ques tion, depending on the unique ‘knowledge base’ of the industry in question and the stage of its life cycle. A more demanding question, for which we do not yet have a good answer, is that where do these sources come from in the first instance. Moreover, we have to explain the mech anisms, in addition to the sources, leading to geo graphically uneven technological innovation.

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Geographic Mechanisms of Technological Innovation Geographers usually explain regional unevenness of technological innovation by invoking a set of localized structural externalities. This tradition goes back to Alfred Marshall who identified three sets of localization econ omies: (1) economies of specialization due to local access to specialized suppliers, (2) labor market economies due to local access to a pool of specialized workforce, and (3) knowledge spillover due to the advantage of localized informal communications. Economies of specialization and labor market economies are generally referred as pecuniary externalities, and knowledge spillover tech nological externalities. Pecuniary externalities allow co located firms to reduce costs and uncertainties through market interactions. Technological externalities, in con trast, materialize through nonmarket interactions within the local community and, in principle, are accessible to all members of the local community. Theoretically, there is no a priori reason to exclude either pecuniary externalities or technological external ities as drivers of innovation in regional clusters. Em pirically, it is difficult to discern direct and indirect contributions to knowledge production. Consequently, some authors maintain that the old fashioned Mar shallian pecuniary economies are still relevant to learning and innovation in the contemporary setting. In the course of time, however, local knowledge spillover (LKS), without explicit consideration of pecuniary externalities, appears to have gained ascendance in academic discourse vis a` vis Marshallian pecuniary externalities as the principal explainer of regional innovative capacity. Local knowledge spillovers can be defined as know ledge externalities bounded in space, which allow com panies operating nearby important knowledge sources to introduce innovations at a faster rate than rival firms lo cated elsewhere. The ascendance of LKS approach comes from the accredited importance of learning in the know ledge based economy. Many economic geographers also claim that traded ‘pecuniary assets’ becomes less important to regional knowledge creation in the globalizing know ledge economy, while ‘relational assets’ or ‘untraded interdependencies’ are seen as increasingly important. A linkage between learning and geography usually is made through the notion of collective learning: the cu mulative creation of common knowledge that takes place among a community of actors in a locality by interactive mechanisms based on shared rules, norms, organizations, and procedures. It is argued that co location of economic agents provides multiple opportunities to benefit from inter firm linkages, high density communication, interactive learning, collective problem solving, and en ables firms to develop a shared cognitive frame (code book) and common understanding. In large enterprises,

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organizational learning is enabled through the creation of common rules and routines, imposed by hierarchy and control. Within a regional innovation system, the litera ture suggests that organizational learning is achieved through user–producer relationships, formal and in formal collaborations, inter firm mobility of skilled workers, and the spin off of new firms from existing or ganizations (firms, universities, and public research cen ters) through the formation of new enterprises. In the geographic literature of collective learning, emphasis has been placed on the role of ‘tacit’ as against ‘codified’ knowledge, in that the former is seen as more conducive to rapidly changing markets, and flexibly specialized innovative activity, whereas codified know ledge is equated more with standardized mass production type activity. In a world in which codified knowledge is becoming increasingly ubiquitously available, tacit knowledge attains a higher premium in deriving com petitive advantage owing to its uniqueness. Direct, face to face interactions enabled by geographic proximity are considered as crucial for the exchange of tacit knowledge. However, economic geographers emphasize that it is not geography per se that matters for learning and in novation, but it is the embeddedness of firms in localized networks that facilitate the diffusion of knowledge and enhance collective learning in clusters or regional in novation systems. First, knowledge spillovers are con sidered to occur mainly through direct interactions on the individual level. Second, to enable and foster these interactions, it is argued that the existence of social networks and their perceived stability and reliability are of pivotal importance. In this sense, tacit learning is a form of social learning. It depends not only on spatial proximity, but also on social embeddedness or ‘social capital’, which is built upon particular relational con ditions, common cultural understandings, and shared norms of trust and reciprocity. The origin and sources of such social capital, or regional culture, however, are not yet adequately understood. Knowledge that spills over through social networks has also been argued as a local public good. As collective learning processes develop, it is suggested that knowledge becomes diffused pervasively in an unstructured manner through the channel of business networks, turning into a public good within the local, or regional, boundaries. In this view, all firms within a region or an industrial district are assumed as relatively homogeneous. Knowledge cre ation and regional development, however, continues to be very much shaped by decision making firms as private, profit seeking agents. Firms in industrial districts or clusters are usually characterized by heterogeneous and asymmetrically distributed knowledge bases and ab sorptive capacities. Embodied scientific and technical knowledge (individual tacit) also largely remains a private good, unless sharing agreements turn it into common

property or a club good. Meanwhile, social networks are not necessarily fair or democratic; rather they are often characterized by strategic behavior and unequal power status. Moreover, the communication of tacit knowledge can be willfully manipulated to serve as a key ex clusionary mean, so that certain actors (even local ones) can be prevented from understanding the content of scientific and technical messages. In light of these, recent literature has come to emphasize that the local diffusion of innovation related knowledge is selective and uneven, a property that reflects the different internal capabilities and willingness of firms to transfer and absorb knowledge. Another challenge to the KLS approach is the lack of empirical evidence. The empirical studies so far do not offer any definite answer to the question of ‘the role of geographical distance in the economics of knowledge transmission’. Networking, which is said to be a central feature of local cluster and new industrial districts, is as much an international phenomenon linking actors in the global economy as it is a characteristic of regional pro duction nodes. Moreover, it has been recognized that tacit knowledge can also be shared within physically dispersed ‘epistemic communities’ as long as the decoding cap ability of the addressees can be adequately developed. As a result, economic geographers have increasingly acknowledged the fact that geographic proximity per se is not sufficient to explain processes of localized learning and innovation. The knowledge spillover argument thus has been reformulated. The assumed correlation between learning and geographic proximity is now relaxed, while the association between learning and networking re tained. Now it is largely agreed that the creation of new knowledge must be based on the combination of close and distant interactions. The importance of local net works remains emphasized, but nonlocal linkages are considered as vital in order to pump novel ideas and technologies into the local knowledge system to increase its dynamics and to reduce the risk of lock in. However, when the LKS approach is increasingly questioned, the role of geography becomes blurred and a viable alter native theory is yet to emerge. In any case, the notion of cluster seems to be central to many of the geographic accounts of technological in novation. Many high tech clusters, or technopoles, have been identified to support various geographic accounts of technological innovation. These include the traditional machinery and automotive districts of Baden Wu¨rttem berg in southwestern Germany, emerging information and communication technology (ICT) clusters in Beijing, China, and Banglore, India, as well as Silicon Valley, the ‘grand daddy’ of them all (Figure 1). The evidence of a positive association between clustering and innovation is not consistent, however. Far from being the general rule, the benefits realized from geographical clustering appear to be specific to certain industries at certain stages of

Technology and Regional Development

Cambridge London Paris-Sud Silicon Valley

Boston 128

175

Baden-Württemberg Munich Beijing Shanghai

Third Italy

Tokyo Seoul/Incheon Hsinchu

Bangalore Singapore

Figure 1 Major technopoles and high-tech regions of the world.

development in certain places, and are only realized under particular conditions. Particularly, an emphasis on the desirable geographic externalities always faces the challenge to explain how such externalities arise in the first place. Apparently, knowledge is absorbed relatively easier in regions that already have a relatively higher productivity level and a larger stock of knowledge. The meaning, origin, and function of historical endowment to regional innovation are not yet clear, neither the effect of regional competition based on highly uneven historical endowments in a politics ridden playing field. Last but not least, the emphasis on extra firm factors and local environment has led to a lack of any serious analysis or theory of the internal learning mechanism of business enterprises. The mechanism of collective learning re mains ambiguous and its interactions with firm based learning are nearly left completely unexamined. Further research efforts need to be devoted to exploring how knowledge is actually transmitted, among whom, at what distance, and on the basis of which codebooks. Above all, it is highly questionable whether a parochial focus on firms as the only actor of regional technological innov ation can offer a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of regional development.

Actors of Innovation and the Scale(s) of Explanation Recent geographic accounts of technological develop ment have been centered on the actor of firms, although the emphasis is largely placed on inter firm linkages

rather than intra firm organizations. Consequently, the cause of regional development is largely explained at the local scale as the capacity or responsibility of local eco nomic agents and/or local culture, even when the im portance of nonlocal connections is recognized. In the process of regional technological development, however, multiple actors other than firms residing at multiple geographic scales play a crucial role. In the evolution of the computer industry in the US, for example, six types of actors, each of them highly heterogeneous in terms of competences and behavior, have been identified to play a major role: (1) firms; (2) universities and public labora tories; (3) the government (especially the Ministries of Defense, Industry, Trade, and Science and Technology); (4) suppliers (of semiconductor components, disk drives, etc.); (5) users (consumers, banks, insurance companies, manufacturing firms, etc.); and (6) financial institutions (such as venture capitalists and banks). Incorporating more actors into the analysis of regional technological development can be disruptive to existing geographic approaches, but it may well be a desirable ‘creative destruction’. It implies that the current con ceptualization of ‘resources’ and ‘institutions’ must be re formulated. With regard to resources, the current focus on knowledge and relational resources need to be broadened to take pecuniary and political resources more seriously. At the same time, immediate resources (or causes) need to be distinguished from deeper resources. When institutions are concerned, the present focus on institutions as ‘‘the ways things are done’’ (i.e., norms, routines, and conventions) must also be broadened to treat institutions simultaneously as ‘the basic rules of the game’ and ‘governing structures’.

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Institutions shall be treated as a system, consisting of at least all the three aforementioned layers. Some insti tutions, such as ‘respect for the rule of law’, affect broadly a wide range of economic activities. Other institutions are sector or activity specific. To be useful, analysis of how institutions affect economic growth and productivity needs to explain the complementarity and inter connection of all these layers of the institutional system at work, as well as to get into the details of how such in stitutions affect behavior. From this point of view, it is a mistake to search for a small set of institutions that are necessary and sufficient for economic productivity and progress. Many different but complementary institutions are needed at the same time, and the institutions that are effective are very context dependent. Such a con ceptualization of institutions means that geographers have to treat seriously both culture and politics, as well as the implied interactions of multiple geographic scales therein. Due to the centrality given to knowledge and learning, current geographic literature generally assumes that purposeful economic agents will pursue knowledge and learning automatically above any other goals. Under such an assumption, the incentive shaping public institutions are frozen and thus excluded from the analysis. However, there is no guarantee that firms will devote resources to invest in skills and knowledge that will increase prod uctivity. Schumpeter reminded us half a century ago that innovation activities are costly, risky, and uncertain. Profit seeking firms will invest in skills and knowledge for innovation if, and only if, this is perceived as the best way to obtain profit. The absorptive capacity of a firm is determined not only by its cognitive capacities, but also by its willingness to incur costs of learning new know ledge. The direction of organizational investment in skills and knowledge will reflect the underlying incentive structure defined by the institutional matrix. If the highest rate of return in an economy is to piracy we can expect that the organizations will invest in skills and knowledge that will make them better pirates. Inefficient political institutions and mechanisms of corporate gov ernance frequently act as barriers that prevent the ap propriation of knowledge spillovers in many economies. In other words, the willingness of firms to absorb knowledge about new production technologies is quite likely to differ between regions and countries depending on the actual pay off structure that they face. The institutional environment, while durable, also evolves through time and is itself shaped by local, na tional, and international politics and power struggles. Organizations are not just constrained by institutional environments. In fact, law, legitimacy, and political outcomes all somehow reflect the actions taken by or ganizations to modify their environments for their inter ests of survival, growth, and certainty. Our present level of

understanding of regional technological dynamics still remains woefully underdeveloped, with seemingly little or no room for power and politics. Without a holistic theory of uneven regional development, much of the current work tends to provide snapshots of successful regions, overlooking the richer set of factors and con ditions that account for the geography of innovation. It is an urgent task for our interpretation of regional techno logical dynamics to be modified to incorporate purposeful human agency as well as the structural preconditions and contextual influences that shape the emergence and evolution of firms and industries. See also: Embeddedness; Industrial Districts; Institutionalism/Institutional Geographies; Knowledge Economy; Learning Regions; Network Regions; Regional Innovation Systems; Technological Change.

Further Reading Amin, A. and Cohendet, P. (2004). Architectures of knowledge: Firms, capabilities and communities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 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. 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, 32 56. Breschi, S. and Francesco, L. (2001). Knowledge spillovers and local innovation systems: A critical survey. Industrial and Corporate Change 10, 975 1005. Breschi, S. and Malerba, F. (eds.) (2005). Clusters, networks and innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castells, M. and Hall, P. (1994). Technopoles of the world: The making of twenty first century industrial complexes. London: Routledge. Doring, T. and Schnellenbach, J. (2006). What do we know about geographical knowledge spillovers and regional growth? A survey of the literature. Regional Studies 40, 375 395. Gertler, M. S. (2003). Tacit knowledge and the economic geography of context, or the undefinable tacitness of being (there). Journal of Economic Geography 3, 75 99. Gertler, M. S. (2004). Manufacturing culture: The institutional geography of industrial practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malecki, E. J. (1997). Technology and economic development: The dynamics of local, regional and national competitiveness (2nd edn). Essex: Longman. Malerba, F. and Orsenigo, L. (1996). The dynamics and evolution of industries. Industrial and Corporate Change 5, 51 88. Maskell, P. and Malmberg, A. (1999). Localised learning and industrial competitiveness. Cambridge Journal of Economics 23, 167 186. Nelson, R. and Sampat, B. (2001). Making sense of institutions as a factor shaping economic performance. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 44, 31 54. Schumpeter, J. A. (1959/1912). The theory of economic development: An inquiry into profits, capital, credit, interest, and the business cycle (trans. Opie, R). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scott, A. J. (1988). New industrial spaces: Flexible production organization and regional development in North America and Western Europe. London: Pion. Simmie, J. (2005). Innovation and space: A critical review of the literature. Regional Studies 39, 789 804. Storper, M. (1997). The regional world: Territorial development in a global economy. New York: Guilford Press.

Technology Industries C. G. Alvstam, Go¨teborg University, Gothenburg, Sweden & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Process Technology The provision of modern machinery and equipment to suppliers, technical support in product planning, quality management, inspection and testing, as well as advice on tooling, maintenance, production layout, and operations. Product Technology The provision of proprietary product know-how, for example, through patents or licenses, the transfer of product designs and technical specifications, technical consultations with suppliers to help the partners to master new technologies, and by giving regular feedback on product performance. Research and Development An activity within the firm in which new physical products, services, and processes are invented and developed into commercial applications. Technological Innovation A learning process, within which knowledge is continuously accumulated and developed. Technology Industry A branch of industry with a high value added in research and knowledge production. Technology Transfer The transfer of technical skills from one economic actor to another.

Basic Concepts and Definitions The notion of technology in economic theory is often related to the works of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950), who in a classical text, published 1912, emphasized the crucial impact of innovation and technological change in the continuous, evolutionary process of economic development. In Schumpeter’s terms, technology and innovation are seen as part of a general entrepreneurial process. He coined the expression of ‘gales of creative destruction’ to describe the process within capitalism in which radical innovations and technological breakthroughs make established competence and physical machinery and equipment suddenly obsolete. Technological innovation can in this context be viewed upon as a learning process, within which know ledge is continuously accumulated and developed. The development of knowledge is localized in the sense that it is considered to be produced in specific places. The preconditions for creation of knowledge, or how to construct and to cultivate an environment of creativity, can therefore be regarded as the most crucial location factor in contemporary economic geography, surpassing

traditional factors like access to raw materials, capital, and proximity to final markets. There is usually a clear distinction made in the literature between technological knowledge that is codified, that is, explicitly expressed, and tacit knowledge, which is implicitly possessed and communicated in informal contexts. Furthermore, there is often a distinction made between embodied and dis embodied technologies, related to the physical versus the nonphysical character of technological transfers, as well as between product technology and process technology, the latter being broader and encompassing a wider range of factors related to production efficiency. The technology concept can cover every aspect from simple and routine procedures on the shop floor level to advanced and complex operations within a production system. In this sense it is often related to the process of learning. It does also incorporate every stage from basic research, via applied research, the breakthrough of an innovation and the continuous product development to the commercialization and marketing of a physical product to various distribution and after sales activities. Infra structure related to research and development (R&D) of a product – office and laboratory space, machinery, appar atus and equipment, various service functions connected with the main activity, etc. – are normally also included in the R&D budget. In order to grasp such an elusive element of production, it is common to measure the impact of technology in terms of expenditures directly related to R&D within the firm, in proportion to sales or gross output value. These expenditures may be variously de scribed in the accounting systems of different firms in different countries, and it is therefore implicitly stated that the pecuniary estimate of the level of technology in a private firm or in a country involves an arbitrary element, and should be used and compared with great cautiousness, especially when it comes to planning and implementation of a technology policy in the local or national economy. A second commonly used definition of the technology level in different manufacturing subsectors is to measure the number of highly educated technical employees, scientists, engineers, and professional specialists as a percentage of the total workforce, thus estimating the technical inputs into production in addition to R&D. A definition of a high technology industry would then be that these groups are over represented, compared with the industrial average. A third way of approaching the technology concept is to describe changes of productivity in a company, for example, in terms of manufacturing value added per

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employee, implying that an increase in the measured productivity is ceteris paribus, an effect of improved technology. The impact of technology is largest in the initial phases of the product life cycle, in which the costs of technological innovation are high, production techni ques are rapidly changing, the immediate commercial yield is limited, and the economies of scale, as well as the capital intensity, are low. A fourth approach to describe the level of technology intensity is to measure the number of patent applications and approvals. A large number of patent applications per capita in a country is considered as a sign of high level of research activity. A methodological problem by using the geography of patent applications as a measurement of the concentration or dispersal of technology is related to different traditions of legislation regarding intellectual property rights between countries, and also to the glob alization of R&D, with the effect that the country where a patent is applied for, may not be the locus of the underlying research activity itself. Rather, it may reflect the need to protect the commercial distribution of a product within a certain market. The usually adopted industrial classification nomen clatures are aggregates of different types of firms and workplaces. Accordingly, a single branch of industry within the statistical group of classification contains all different technical levels from advanced basic research to standardized routine work. One example is that the re tailing of electronic articles, where a large number of individuals are employed, is often classified as belonging to the electronic industry in general, and is in such cases grouped within a high technology segment, even though this activity as such does not represent a high level of technical knowledge. Therefore, by using a classification of different levels of technology intensity between dif ferent branches of industry, one should take into account that such a classification encompasses a broad range of inner variations. The Organisation for Economic Co operation and Development (OECD) categorization of various levels of technology, using the measure of R&D intensity (R&D expenditure/output), is widely used, but should, accordingly, be interpreted with cautiousness (Table 1). The aerospace industry is, not surprisingly, considered to be among the most technologically advanced indus tries by adopting this measure. However, it is also an example of the fact that a significant part of the tech nologically most intense industries is often related to military expenditure. Apart from the measurement problem that the distinction between the defense budget in general and investments in military R&D is not clear cut, it is even more difficult to assess in advance which breakthroughs of military research may lead to appli cations in civil production and therefore should be an ticipated in a comparison between countries of

Table 1 Classification of manufacturing industries based on technology intensity Industries

1991

1999

High-technology industries Pharmaceuticals Aircraft and spacecraft Medical, precision, and optical instruments Radio, TV, and communications equipment Office, accounting, and computing machinery

9.4 9.4 13.9 6.6

8.7 10.5 10.3 9.7

7.9

7.4

10.9

7.2

Medium-high-technology industries Electrical machinery and apparatus n.e.c. Motor vehicles, trailers, and semitrailers Railroad equipment and transport equipment n.e.c. Chemicals excluding pharmaceuticals

3.1 4.2

3.0 3.6

3.7

3.5

2.9

3.1

3.4

2.9

Medium-low-technology industries Building and repairing of ships and boats Rubber and plastic products Basic metals and fabricated metal products Coke, refined petroleum products, and nuclear fuel

0.9 0.9

0.7 1.0

1.0 0.7

1.0 0.6

1.2

0.4

Low-technology industries Wood, pulp, paper, paper products, printing, and publishing Food products, beverages, and tobacco Textiles, textile products, leather, and footwear

0.3 0.3

0.4 0.4

0.3

0.3

0.2

0.3

OECD (2005). Science, technology and industry scoreboard, annex 1.1 2, p 182f. Note: Figures are based on 12 OECD countries.

investments in technology. Accordingly, one may argue that a not insignificant share of investments in techno logical development is concealed in general defence ex penditure, particularly in the world’s largest economic and political powers, and, thus, are underestimated when one compares the technology intensity between coun tries. On the other hand, it is also possible to argue that a broad range of military activities can be classified as applied research, and should therefore not normally be incorporated among general technology investments. The most technology intense industry, according to the OECD, the pharmaceutical sector, is an illustrative example of the significance of risk taking when making investments in R&D. The imbalance between R&D ex penditure and costs of manufacturing the resulting commercial product in mass production is extremely high. The winner in the ‘patent race’ between pharma ceutical firms will enjoy the entire yield of investment, while the losers will face only sunk costs. It is therefore

Technology Industries

natural that competing firms tend to share the technology risk by merger and acquisitions, and by making strategic alliances and other forms of research collaboration. In the bottom of the list of technology intensive in dustries one finds sectors of industry that represent later stages in the product life cycle, for example, food, tex tiles, and forest products. It would, however, be a too precipitate conclusion that there is little or no techno logical development within these sectors. Rather, it can be sign of a different institutional setting, compared with those industries that report a high level of R&D. There is a tendency in mature sectors that R&D is outsourced and concentrated to separate research institutes, which are separately classified from manufacturing itself.

Technology Industries and Location One particular field in which the technology factor has changed the basic theoretical assumptions in economic geography is its time–space shrinking impact, for example, the decreasing costs to move raw materials and manu factured products over longer distances, due to more ef ficient transport and handling systems, and the opportunity to marginalize the distance factor within many service sectors as a result of the development of new information and communication technologies. New sub sectors within the service industry have emerged based on new technology, for example, call centres, while a number of traditional service sectors have developed into entirely new spatial patterns. These forces of transition can be acting in a direction of either geographical concentration or dispersal. The managerial control over technological inputs, for example, R&D, design, quality control within the globally organized corporation has tended to become more concentrated in the geographical sense, while the operational activities have become more dispersed. R&D activities, that previously were concentrated to a few lo cations within the transnational corporation (TNC), may today often be geographically dispersed in a pattern of ‘islands’ of smaller research centers in a global ‘archi pelago’, while at the same time closely connected in a dense intranetwork, substituting physical exchange of in formation and communication to the use of advanced in formation and communication technologies. In both cases, there is a regionally uneven distribution of industries characterized by using advanced technology and em ploying a high level of scientists. Michael Storper has pointed out three ‘schools’ of explanation: First, those who emphasize the research university spin off process, high quality of life, and good infrastructure, exemplifying with the Silicon Valley concentration and Route 128. Second, the ‘regional politics’ approach, that holds that regional coalitions push for the transfer of high technology re sources. Third, those scholars who put forward the ‘milieu’

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of innovation and creativity. The milieu is described as a system of regional institutions, rules, and practices which lead to innovation and as a network of actors: producers, researchers, politicians, etc., in a region. Richard Florida has, in his research on the bases of creativity, focused on the combination of ‘technology’, ‘talent’, and ‘tolerance’ as significant factors to understand why certain geographical locations are more successful and competitive as others when it comes to develop new knowledge intensive pro duction. Michael Porter, finally, has put technological strength within a larger context of factor conditions, which, in their turn, form an integrated part of a ‘diamond’ of competitive advantage of a firm or a nation. With Silicon Valley serving as a major model, many policy makers have tried to combine the three ‘schools’ as explained above, to put together the advantages of proximity to scientific researchers, access to venture capital, good physical infrastructure, excellent avail ability to newest information and communication tech nology, and a favorable geographical location in order to ‘create’ a milieu of technological innovations and to en hance employment in technology intensive industries, by establishing ‘technopoles’, ‘technology districts’, or ‘technology parks’. This policy has been particularly popular in emerging markets in Asia, beginning with Tsukuba in Japan, and copied in Hsinchu in Taiwan, Inchon in Korea, Cyberjaya in Malaysia, Xingwang in Beijing, China, and Bangalore in India. The success of national or local policies to stimulate localized tech nological knowledge varies, but seen in longer time perspectives, it is evident that these initiatives have contributed to an acceleration of local, as well as national technological development and industrial upgrading through the concerted public action. For example, Cindy Fan and Allen Scott have recently investigated the role of industrial agglomeration and economic development in Chinese regions and found a positive correlation between agglomeration and economic performance and that many manufacturing sectors are characterized by strong posi tive relationships between spatial agglomeration and productivity. In its larger theoretical context, the notion of tech nology can, very simplified, be seen as having been de veloped from being an implicit exogenous factor in the neoclassical production function, to being given a more explicit and endogenous role in the ‘new growth theories’ developed mainly in the 1990s. Here, the conventional production function is expanded to incorporate invest ments in R&D, in infrastructure, and in human capital. The ‘new growth theories’, for example, described by R. R. Nelson and others, are in many ways inspired by the evolutionary setting in its Schumpeterian sense, but they are at the same time criticized for their lack of attention to institutions and institutional change. Recent theore tical contributions have aimed at developing the original

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Schumpeterian models in order to more explicitly identify the evolutionary process of ‘localized’ techno logical change. Technological change, and the location of technical innovation is in Michael Storper’s terms seen as ‘path dependent’, that is, the time sequence of the de velopment of technological knowledge is crucial to understand the decision to locate a certain type of pro duction to a certain place.

Technology Transfer as a Spatial Process At the same time, the technological skill is not stuck in a certain location. It can ‘spill over’ and be transferred through formal (codified) exchanges, and through untraded interdependencies. The transfer of technology between firms and between countries is seen to be a decisive factor in understanding economic growth and industrial transformation in developing countries. Since many developing countries still possess a limited capacity to generate new technology themselves, the power to import technology from abroad, and to combine this ability with domestic human resources and know how, becomes crucial for their long term economic growth. In the literature more specifically focused on technological change in developing countries we can also observe a growing interest in the role played by agglomerations and industrial clusters. However, the role of geographical proximity is often ignored or unclear in most of these studies. For example, in the ‘technological capability’ approach, originating in the 1980s by researchers in spired by evolutionary theories of technological change and following many disappointing experiences with international technology transfer projects, it is shown that the import of new technologies from advanced countries are insufficient for enhancing productivity and inducing self sustaining industrialization in developing countries. The access to foreign technology does not necessarily imply mastery over it, since high entry barriers to the effective implementation of new technologies exist, mainly because of the tacit nature of knowledge and because foreign technologies are often unsuitable for needs of the importing country. Thus, substantial in vestment in time and resources is needed to assimilate, adapt, and improve known technologies imported from abroad, ultimately leading to the capacity to create new technologies independently. While technological im provements in individual enterprises are often seen to be enhanced by being part of innovation systems or net works of actors and institutions involved in comple mentary activities, there is a lack of systematic conceptual and empirical treatment of how and why spatial proximity between actors in such networks or innovation systems can contribute to improve the tech nological capability within individual firms.

One important source of technology imports is foreign direct investments, where TNCs are transferring tech nology, know how, and information through their foreign located affiliates to local suppliers. The importance of interfirm linkages for technology learning and upgrading is especially evident in modern growth theory literature. A key perspective in this literature is that capability building is to a significant degree built through relations between firms and institutions, and that it involves efforts at all firm levels and not only the R&D departments, for example, at the shop floor, engineering, quality manage ment, and procurement. Thus, technological learning in a firm does not take place in isolation; rather the process is rife with externalities. As claimed, by Sanjay Lall, these external linkages are often so dense and crucial for technology development that it can be questioned whe ther they should be called ‘externalities’ at all. Moreover, this literature also shows that the process of learning and technical change in successful industrial enterprises is not an easy task, and may involve con siderable economic risks, costs, requiring conscious de cisions by firms rather than the mere accumulation of enterprises with enhanced experiences of production. For example, although in theory the hardware is equally available to all countries and firms, for example, through imports, the disembodied elements of technology cannot be bought and transferred like physical products. The embodied elements cannot be used at best practice levels unless they are complemented by a number of tacit elements that have to be developed locally. Therefore, as is showed by many students of technology transfers, technological learning calls for conscious, purposeful, and incremental efforts to collect new information, to create new skills, and to strike new external relationships. This process must be located at the production facility and be embodied in the institutional and organizational setting of the manufacturing enterprise. United Nations Conference on Trade and Develop ment (UNCTAD) has developed a classification of vari ous types of technological assistance, in order to give advice regarding the most efficient ways of using tech nology transfers as a tool for enhancing economic growth and industrial transformation in developing countries. Broadly speaking, technological assistance between a globally organised TNC and a domestic local partner can be distinguished between two categories: those related to product technology and process technology, respectively. The main types of product related technology transfers include the provision of proprietary product know how, for example, through patents or licenses, the transfer of product designs and technical specifications, technical consultations with suppliers to help the partners to master new technologies, and by giving regular feed back on product performance. Major areas of process technology transfer comprise the provision of modern

Technology Industries

machinery and equipment to suppliers, technical support in product planning, quality management, inspection and testing, as well as advice on tooling, maintenance, pro duction layout, and operations. In addition to these types of technology transfers, TNCs can assist their suppliers by transferring organ izational and managerial know how, for example, inven tory management and the use of various delivery and logistical systems. Another important area of technology transfer is related to different types of training programs offered by TNCs in order to upgrade the human re source base of their suppliers. A more detailed classification to distinguish between different types of technological assistance between the global TNC and its local supplier, developed within UNCTAD, and used with an empirical material by Ivarsson and Alvstam in a study covering technology transfer by a foreign TNC to local suppliers in China, Brazil, India, and Mexico, is the following (Table 2). One important issue, in order to provide a better understanding of the geography of technology industries, is to what extent spatial proximity can affect technology transfer from TNCs to their suppliers. Are suppliers located at a short geographical distance from the pro duction plants in a better position, compared to those located at longer distances from the plants, to absorb and learn from the technological assistance that the TNC Table 2 companies

Types

of

technological

assistance

between

Product technology Provision of product designs and technical specifications Provision, advice, or financial assistance to obtain raw materials and components Regular feedback on product performance to improve existing product-technology Technical consultations on product characteristics to master new product technology Organised R&D collaboration in product-related areas Production technology Provision, advice, or financial assistance to obtain machinery and equipment Technical support to improve existing production technology Technical consultations on machinery operation to master new production technology Advice concerning production layout and organisation Assistance with quality assurance systems (e.g., ISO certification, TQM, etc.) Training programmes for suppliers’ personnel In-plant training for managers and technicians Training for managers and technicians in the host country or abroad In-plant training for workers Training for workers in the host country or abroad From Ivarsson, I. and Alvstam, C. G. (2004). International technology transfer to local suppliers by Volvo tracks in India. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 95, 27 43.

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provides the suppliers as a part of an on going business relationship? Empirical studies indicate that the TNC provides the suppliers with technological assistance in a number of important areas, including both ‘embodied’ forms of assistance, especially through product designs and technical specifications, but also through the pro vision of materials and components. It does also give the suppliers technological assistance through the transfer of disembodied technology, where all are given regular feedback in order to improve existing product technol ogy as well as process technology, both through written documents and personal meetings. Comparing the form, extent, and effects regarding the technological assistance between local and nonlocal suppliers, geographical proximity seems to have a role to play. Although there are rather small differences in the extent and forms of technology assistance, taking geography into account, in particular aspects, for example, support to obtain raw materials and components, as well as machinery and equipment and assistance with quality assurance systems, a significantly larger share of local suppliers are provided with technological assistance, compared to nonlocal suppliers. It seems also that geographical proximity is more crucial for opportunities among the suppliers to absorb external technology. This is to a large extent an effect by the commitment and resources that the sup pliers have had to invest in order to learn from their interaction with the foreign TNC. For many smaller, domestic companies, low transaction and communication costs and an opportunity to collect valuable information through regular and spontaneous inter firm meetings, seem to be an important determinant for the successful absorption of external technology. The future challenges in technology industry research are to further understand the intangible assets in tech nological development, and to describe and explain the factors that affect the geographical pattern of new pro fessional business service sectors that arise as a result of technological change. The complex relationship between technology trans fer and knowledge transfer should also be given more attention. Technology transfer refers normally to a transfer between two well defined economic units, while in a knowledge based economy, it becomes more difficult to define the contribution of each separate element in the value chain. Thus, the spatial divisions of expertise, that is, the importance of proximity to intellectual assets, or ‘core competences’ will become even more emphasized for an understanding of the intricate factors behind the creation and diffusion of tomorrow’s technology industries. See also: Economic Geography; Knowledge Economy; Technological Change; Technology and Regional Development.

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Further Reading Amesse, G. and Cohendet, P. (2001). Technology transfer revisited from the perspective of the knowledge based economy. Research Policy 30, 1459 1478. Bryson, J. R. and Rusten, G. (2006). Spatial divisions of expertise and transnational ‘service’ firms: Aerospace and management consultancy. In Harrington, J. W. & Daniels, P. W. (eds.) Knowledge Based Services, Internationalization and Regional Development. Aldershot: Ashgate. Buza´s, N. (2005). From technology transfer to knowledge transfer: An institutional transition. In Alvstam, C. G. & Schamp, E. W. (eds.) Linking Industries Across the World: Processes of Global Networking. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dicken, P. (2007). Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy (5th edn.). London: SAGE. Florida, R. (2005). The Flight of the Creative Class. London: Harpercollins Publishers. Freeman, C. (1994). The economics of technical change. Cambridge Journal of Economics 18, 463 514. Ivarsson, I. and Alvstam, C. G. (2004). International technology transfer to local suppliers by Volvo trucks in India. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 95, 27 43. Ivarsson, I. and Alvstam, C. G. (2005). The effect of spatial proximity on technology transfer from TNCs to local suppliers in developing countries: The case of AB Volvo’s truck and bus plants in

Brazil, China, India and Mexico. Economic Geography 81, 83 111. Lall, S. (2000). Technological change and industrialization in the Asian newly industrializing economies: Achievements and challenges. In Kim, L. & Nelson, R. R. (eds.) Technology, Learning & Innovation: Experiences of the Newly Industrializing Economies, pp 13 68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malecki, E. J. (1997). Technology & Economic Development (2nd edn.). London: Longman. Nelson, R. R. (1994). The co evolution of technology, industrial structure and supporting institutions. Industrial and Corporate Change 3, 47 63. OECD (2005). OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard. Paris: OECD Publishing. Porter, M. E. (1990). The Competitive Advantage of Nations. London: Macmillan. Schumpeter, J. A. (1934). The Theory of Economic Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press (original title in German: ‘Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung’, 1912). Storper, M. (1995). The resurgence of regional economies, ten years later: The region as a nexus of untraded interdependencies. European Urban and Regional Studies 2, 191 221. UNCTAD (2001). World Investment Report: Promoting Linkages. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Geneva: United Nations.

Telecommunications B. Warf, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Digital Divide Social and spatial inequalities in access to the Internet. Space of Flows The society and geography typified by hypermobile capital and information. Time–Space Compression The shrinking of relative distances between places when measured in terms of travel or communication times.

In the massive rounds of time–space compression char acteristic of post Fordist capitalism, telecommunications play a central role in the organization and transformation of economic activity. As production systems have become stretched over ever larger distances, including the world wide spaces of the global economy, and as the division of labor has become markedly more information intensive, the need and ability to transmit vast quantities of data have grown accordingly. Telecommunications have been critical to this process for more than 150 years, acceler ating the flow of information across distance and bringing places closer to one another in relative space. The origins of telecommunications can be traced to the invention of the telegraph in the early nineteenth century, which initiated the process by which com munications became detached from transportation. The telephone, starting in 1876, elevated this process to in clude aural information, and until the 1960s, tele communications was essentially synonymous with simple telephone service. The telephone quickly became critical to the growth of industrial city systems, allowing multi establishment firms to centralize their headquarters’ functions in the cores of large cities while they spun off branch plants to smaller towns. Even today, despite a plethora of sophisticated digital technologies, the tele phone remains by far the most commonly used form of telecommunications for businesses and households. In the 1980s and 1990s, as the cost of computing capacity dropped and its power increased rapidly with the microelectronics revolution, new technologies, particu larly fiber optics, and satellites, drastically increased the capacity of telecommunications. With the digitization of information in the late twentieth century, telecomm unications companies formed integrated information networks, most spectacularly through the Internet. Fiber optics lines, which now comprise the backbone of the global telecommunications industry, allow enormous quantities of data to be transmitted securely and almost

instantaneously. Electronic Data Interchange and wireless services are becoming increasingly popular. A substantial literature has demonstrated the importance of tele communications in the globalization of producer services, particularly finance. Within cities, digital networks have contributed to an ongoing reconstruction of urban space. This article begins by dispelling some popular myths about information systems, particularly simplistic post industrial, technological determinist views that argue telecommunications entail a uniform decentralization of economic activity and the ‘end of geography’ by ob literating the importance of proximity. Second, it dwells on the role of telecommunications systems in financial markets, particularly global banking and securities. Third, it examines the decentralization of clerical jobs at the local, regional, and global scales. Fourth, it focuses on urban infrastructural investments in this area, including telecommuting. Fifth, it addresses the origins and impacts of the Internet and social discrepancies in access to it.

Popular Misconceptions about Telecommunications There exists considerable confusion about the real and potential impacts of telecommunications, largely as the result of early advocates of ‘postindustrial’ theory such as Daniel Bell and Alvin Toffler. This perspective, which has long been remarkably widespread among many aca demics and planners, hinges upon a simplistic, utopian technological determinism that ignores the complex, often contradictory, relations between telecommunications and local economic, social, and political circumstances. For example, postindustrial theorists offered repeated proclamations that telecommunications would eventually allow everyone to work at home via telecommuting, dispersing all functions and signifying the eventual ob solescence of cities through the ‘death of distance’. Yet such predictions have fallen flat in the face of the per sistence of growth in densely populated urban areas. In fact, telecommunications are generally a poor substitute for face to face contacts, the medium through which most sensitive corporate interactions occur, particularly when the information involved changes quickly, is ir regular and context dependent, proprietary, and un standardized in nature. Thus, the vast bulk of high wage, white collar, administrative command and control func tions remain clustered in downtown areas. In contrast, telecommunications are ideally suited for the transmis sion of routinized, standardized forms of data, facilitating

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Telecommunications

the dispersal of functions involved with their processing (i.e., back offices) to low wage regions. In short, the notion that telecommunications inevit ably lead to the dispersal or deconcentration of economic functions is erroneous; rather, information systems facili tate the simultaneous concentration and deconcentration of economic activities. While the costs of communications have decreased, other factors have risen in importance, including local regulatory regimes, agglomeration econ omies, and the cost and skills of the local labor force.

and regulatory ones have increased in importance, and financial firms have found the topography of regulation to be of the utmost significance in choosing investment lo cations. Generally such facilities are very capital inten sive in nature and generate relatively few jobs, although this aspect varies widely. Because such facilities are fre quently used by merchants of illegal commodities such as drugs and weapons to ‘launder’ money, offshore banking centers often operate under a cloud of suspicion by ‘le gitimate’ financial centers and governments in the eco nomically developed world.

Telecommunications and Finance Telecommunications and Global Cities The digital revolution in telecommunications generated the greatest impacts in financial markets. Banks, insur ance companies, and securities firms – all highly infor mation intensive industries – aggressively promoted the construction of an extensive worldwide network of leased and private fiber optics lines in the 1990s and early 2000s. A primary purpose of these systems is electronic funds transfer systems, which form the nervous system of the global financial economy, allowing banks to move capital around a moment’s notice, arbitrage interest rate differ entials, take advantage of favorable exchange rates, and avoid political unrest. With the breakdown of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1971 and the shift from fixed to floating exchange rates, electronic trade in national cur rencies skyrocketed. By some estimates, the world’s banks move more than $1.5 trillion around the globe every day. In securities markets, telecommunications systems have facilitated global trading of stocks, bonds, and other equities through computerized trading programs. In es sence, under the influence of digitization, information and capital have become two sides of the same coin. Moving through fiber optics lines at the speed of light as streams of digital zeros and ones, global money crosses the boundaries of nation states with such ease and in such volumes that national bank interventions have become increasingly problematic, making national monetary controls over exchange, interest, and inflation rates ever harder to sustain. It is simplistic to conclude that the nation state has no impact on this process, for national regulatory controls still exert some, if diminishing, degree of leverage. The simplistic notion of a perfectly seamless global economy has yet to materialize, if it ever will. One arena in which telecommunications have power fully affected the financial industries is through the growth of offshore banking. Typically in response to highly favorable tax laws implemented to attract foreign firms, offshore banking has become an important source of revenue to many microstates in the Caribbean, Western Europe, the Middle East (e.g., Bahrain), and the South Pacific. As the technological barriers to moving money around internationally have steadily fallen, legal

One of the most significant repercussions of the inter nationalization of financial markets has been the growth of ‘global cities’, particularly London, New York, and Tokyo. Global cities act as the ‘command and control’ centers of the world system, serving as the home to massive complexes of financial firms, producer services, and corporate headquarters of multinational corporations. In this capacity, they operate as arenas of interaction, facilitating dense networks of face to face contacts, access to repair and ancillary services, political connections, artistic and cultural activities, and elites to rub shoulders easily (e.g., through easy access to meetings). While other cities (e.g., Paris, Toronto, Los Angeles, Osaka, Hong Kong, and Singapore) certainly can lay claim to being important national cities in a global economy, the trio of New York, London, and Tokyo has played a dis proportionate role in the production and transformation of international economic relations in the late twentieth century. At the top of the international urban hierarchy, global cities are simultaneously: (1) centers of creative innov ation, news, fashion, and culture industries; (2) metrop oles for raising and managing investment capital; (3) centers of specialized expertise in advertising and mar keting, legal services, accounting, computer services, etc.; and (4) the management, planning and control centers for corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that operate with increasing ease over the entire planet. At their core, global cities allow the generation of spe cialized expertise upon which the management of the current global economy heavily depends. Each city is tied through vast tentacles of investment, trade, migration, and telecommunications to markets around the world. All three metropolises are endowed with enormous tele communications infrastructures that allow corporate head quarters to stay in touch with global networks of branch plants, back offices, customers, subcontractors, subsidiaries, and competitors. This phenomenon again illustrates how geographic centralization can be facilitated by telecomm unications.

Telecommunications

However, telecommunications simultaneously threaten the agglomerative advantages of urban areas, particularly those obtained through face to face communications. This trend is particularly evident in finance, the bread and butter of global cities. For example, the National Asso ciation of Security Dealers Automated Quotation system (NASDAQ) has become the world’s largest stock market by volume of shares; unlike many other exchanges, NASDAQ lacks a trading floor, connecting a million tra ders worldwide through fiber optics lines. Numerous stock markets have recently abolished their trading floors in favor of screen based trading.

Telecommunications and Back Office Relocations The flip side of global cities is back office functions, another industry profoundly reshaped by the tele communications revolution. Back offices essentially per form standardized functions such as data entry of office records, telephone books, or library catalogs, payroll and billing, bank checks, insurance claims, and magazine subscriptions. The jobs they generate are typically filled by semiskilled workers, primarily women. Unlike cor porate headquarters, with their extensive backward and forward linkages to other sectors, back offices have linkages to other sectors. They tend to be energy in tensive and require extensive data processing facilities, reliable sources of electricity, and high capacity tele communications facilities. Until the 1980s, back offices were clustered in the same building as headquarters’ activities in downtown areas to facilitate close management supervision. How ever, as central city rents rose in the late twentieth century, a force evident in the corporate reclamation of many downtown regions and associated rounds of gen trification, many large firms detached their back offices from the headquarters, moving the former out of the urban core to lower cost locations in the suburbs, for example, in office parks. Suburban areas typically offer easier access via the automobile, lower rents, and better skilled workers. As the international telecommunications infrastructure grew by leaps and bounds, many firms began to relocate their back offices on much broader spatial scales. For example, many financial and insurance firms and airlines moved their back offices from expensive sites in metropolises such as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to relatively low wage labor markets in the Sunbelt. At the global scale, the relocation of back offices took the form of the overseas offshore office. Often the industries involved were subject to enormous com petitive pressures brought on by de regulation and globalization, and were intensely interested in the cost savings generated by relocations to lower wage regions.

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In the 1990s, for example, numerous American insurance firms established back office facilities in Ireland with the active encouragement of the Irish Development Au thority. Likewise, US airlines utilized offices in Anglo phone Caribbean countries such as Jamaica and Barbados, and to a lesser extent, the Dominican Republic. Manila, in the Philippines, has emerged as a back office center for British firms, with wages 20% of those in the UK. The Indian city of Bangalore has developed a fam ous comparative advantage in call centers, which provide customer assistance to clients of firms such as computer software, telecommunications, banks, airlines, and inter national hotel chains. Thus, in addition to fueling the growth of high skilled jobs in metropolitan cores, the telecommunications revolution simultaneously en couraged the flight of many low wage, low value added jobs to the developing world. Far from being a simplistic ‘end of geography’, this process has led to new rounds of centralization and decentralization.

Telecommunications and Urban Space Telecommunications have had profound effects on the organization of urban space. Although large cities typi cally have much better developed telecommunications infrastructures than do small ones, the technology has rapidly diffused through most national urban hierarchies. In the future, therefore, the competitive advantages based on telecommunications will diminish, forcing competition among localities to occur on the cost and quality of labor, taxes, and local regulations. Regions with an advantage in telecommunications generally succeed because they have attracted successful firms for other reasons. One increasingly important effect of new information systems is ‘telework’ or ‘telecommuting’, in which workers substitute some or all of their working day at a remote location (almost always home) for time usually spent at the office. Telework is most appropriate for jobs involving mobile activities or routine information handling such as data entry or directory assistance. Proponents of telework claim that it enhances productivity and morale, reduces employee turnover and office space, and leads to re ductions in traffic congestion, air pollution, energy use, and accidents. The extent to which telecommuting has become popular is unclear, but some estimates hold that roughly 5% of the US labor force engages in this activity at least once per week. Future growth of telecommuting will encourage more decentralization of economic activity in suburban areas. However, the growth of teleworking may ironically increase the demand for urban transportation services rather than decrease it, as was widely expected. While telecommuters travel to their workplace less frequently than do most workers, many have longer ‘weekly’

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commutes overall, leading to a rise in aggregate distances traveled. In addition, the time released from commuting may be utilized traveling for nonwork related purposes. Thus, while telecommuters may have different reasons for traveling, the frequency or volume of trips may not change. Moreover, even if telecommuting did reduce some trips, the associated reductions in congestion could simply induce other travelers onto the roads. In short, whether or not an actual trade off between telecomm unications and commuting occurs (their substitutability rather than complementarity) is not clear. Another potential impact of information systems on urban form concerns transportation informatics, in cluding smart metering, electronic road pricing, auto mated toll payments and turnpikes, automated navigation and travel advisory, remote traffic monitoring and dis plays, and improved traffic management and control systems. Such systems are intended to minimize con gestion and optimize traffic flow, especially during the critical rush hour peak travel times. The rapid growth of wireless technologies, particularly cellular phones (which constitute the majority of phones on the planet today), allows commuters stuck in traffic to use their time more productively. Such systems do not so much comprise new technologies as the enhancement of existing ones. The widespread use of telecommunications has led to important changes in the nature of urban and regional planning. Desperate for investment capital and jobs, many localities vie for one another with ever greater concessions to attract firms, forming an auction that re sembles a zero–sum game. The effects of such a com petition are hardly beneficial to those with the least purchasing power and political clout. Left to sell them selves to the highest corporate bidder, localities fre quently find themselves in a ‘race to the bottom’ in which entrepreneurial governments promote growth – but do not regulate its aftermath – via tax breaks, subsidies, training programs, looser regulations, low interest loans, infrastructure grants, and zoning exemptions. As a result, local planners have become increasingly less concerned with issues of social redistribution, compensation for negative externalities, provision of public services, and so forth, and more enthralled with questions of economic competitiveness, attracting investment capital, and the production of a favorable ‘business climate’.

The Internet By far the largest and perhaps most important tele communications network is the Internet, which con nected an estimated 1 billion people in more than 200 countries in 2006, or roughly 15% of the planet’s population. From its military origins in the US in the 1960s, the Internet emerged upon a global scale through

the integration of existing telephone, fiber optics, and satellite systems, a process made possible by the tech nological innovation of packet switching, in which indi vidual messages maybe decomposed, the constituent parts transmitted by various channels, and then re assembled instantaneously at the destination. Spurred by declining prices of services and equipment, the Internet is the most rapidly diffusing technology in history, allowing any individual with a microcomputer and modem to ‘plug in’ to cyberspace. However, given rela tively low incomes, personal computers in poorer coun tries are often difficult to afford; in such contexts, cybercafes often provide a major point of access. The Internet has had significant economic and social impacts. For well educated elites, it offers a means to be connected to the global economy while becoming in creasingly disconnected from the local environments of their own cities and countries. Online retail shopping, or ‘e tailing’, has grown exponentially, particularly for large firms (e.g., Wal Mart) and given birth to entirely virtual stores such as Amazon.com. The Internet is central to reservation and ticket systems for airlines and hotels. The higher levels of competition that the Internet has facili tated have reduced costs for consumers. Many schools and universities use it for online courses, allowing stu dents who otherwise might not have access to their ser vices to partake. Most newspapers offer online versions, greatly facilitating access to the news and entertainment. Downloading of music files and films has become a big business, raising concerns over intellectual property rights. Internet based telephony (e.g., Skype) has grown rapidly. e Business, or Electronic Data Interchange, allows firms to advertise, recruit, submit contracts and bills, monitor in ventories, and perform other functions quickly and cheaply, reducing transactions costs and raising product ivity. The use of the Internet for political purposes, in cluding weblogs or ‘blogs’, has increased the domain of popular political participation. Graphical interfaces have made the Internet a major source of recreation, including online games, while others browse for pornography, rais ing widespread concerns about its impacts on traditional mores, especially with regards to children. For many users, cyberspace allows for the creation of ‘communities with out propinquity’, that is, groups of users who share com mon interests but not physical proximity. Political groups of various types and marginalized groups such as gays have used the technology to great advantage. The extent to which digital relations can substitute for ‘real world’ face to face interactions, however, is open to debate. However, the Internet may be used for illegal, un savory, or illegitimate purposes. ‘Spam’, or unsolicited e mail advertising, is estimated to comprise the bulk of electronic traffic on the Internet. Online gambling has grown rapidly. Electronic systems are used to monitor everyday life, including credit cards, visas and passports,

Telecommunications

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Internet penetration rate, 2006 0 5 5 20 20 50 50 86.9

Figure 1 Internet hosts per 100 000 persons, January 2006.

tax records, medical data, police reports, telephone calls, utility records, automobile registration, crime statistics, and sales receipts. The growth of Internet fraud and identity theft raises serious concerns about privacy. Thus, telecommunications can be used against people, as well as for them. The unfortunate tendency in the popular media to engage in technocratic utopianism largely ob scures these power relations. Contra this perspective, so cial categories of wealth and power and geographical categories of core and periphery continue to be rein scribed in cyberspace. Despite utopian expectations that the Internet would obliterate the importance of social and spatial differ entials, there remain significant discrepancies worldwide in terms of access to the Internet. In all countries, access to computers linked to the Internet, either at home or at work, is highly correlated with income, educational level, and employment in professional occupations. Because they are often not well served by telecommunications firms, rural areas often have slow or substandard con nections. The elderly often find the Internet to be in timidating, although they comprise the fastest growing demographic group of users. Difficulties in procuring the skills, equipment, and software necessary to get Internet access threaten to exclude economically and socially marginalized groups from the benefits of cyberspace, a phenomenon that reflects the growing inequalities through out industrialized nations generated by labor market polarization. Thus, the microelectronics revolution has accentuated the digital divide between groups that are proficient with computer technology and those who

neither understand nor trust it, reinforcing and deep ening the inequalities in broader social relations. At the international level, inequalities in access to the Internet reflect the long standing bifurcation between the First and Third Worlds (Figure 1). The best connected nations are in Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, and Singapore, where more than 70% of the population is connected. In the US, the Internet penetration rate was 55% in 2005 (with substantial internal variations); how ever, due to the enormous size of the American economy, 80% of all international Internet traffic is either to or from the US. Outside of the economically advanced First World, the vast bulk of the world’s people, that is, the Third World, have comparatively little access, particu larly in Africa. Low incomes, inadequate infrastructures, and unhelpful or oppressive governments play major roles in this context.

The Oligopolization of Telecommunications Telecommunications, an industry characterized by high fixed costs and low marginal ones, has long experienced waves of corporate consolidation. Over the last three decades, two overlapping and intersecting industries, telecommunications and the media, have been dramat ically transformed by technological change and de regulation. The microelectronics revolution annihilated geographic and industry boundaries by making it possible for firms in one sector to produce outputs easily used in

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Conclusions

information, and communications are critically important. The geography of the world economy rests heavily upon invisible flows of data and capital, binding places unevenly to the world system. Telecommunications has also trans formed the ways in which economic landscapes are con structed, suturing localities to global ‘spaces of flows’ that move at the speed of light and giving firms unprecedented mobility and flexibility. Under the impetus of the micro electronics revolution, telecommunications ushered in a vast round of time–space compression, linking places together to a historically unprecedented degree. Markets, labor processes, transportation routes, planning policies, and spatial structures have changed accordingly. Cities and regions search for a competitive advantage in this world in several ways. In large metropolitan areas with dense complexes of firms bound together by face to face interactions, telecommunications have left skilled, high wage functions largely intact, but not unchallenged – as the electronic trading of stocks suggests. By allowing firms to stay in contact with operations around the world, telecommunications have contributed to the central ization of key activities in global cities such as New York, London, and Tokyo, which rely upon their extensive connections to the global telecommunications infra structure to serve as nerve centers of the world economy. For such tasks, telecommunications have been largely unable to substitute for face to face interactions. Other services that process routinized information, however, and rely upon unskilled, low wage labor, are highly vulnerable to substitution by new telecommunications systems and have decentralized (e.g., back offices). A key theme in understanding the new economic land scapes of the information economy is that tele communications tend to reinforce the agglomeration of high wage, high value added, white collar functions while decentralizing low wage, low value added, blue (or pink) collar ones. In short, telecommunications have a variety of impacts upon cities and regions, both positive and negative, local and global, centralizing and decentralizing. To appreciate the complexity of these effects requires a step back from the simple utopianism and technological determinism that tends to pervade much public opinion and policy making. Telecommunications systems are a social prod uct, interwoven with relations of class, race, gender, and power. Given the rapid rate of technological change in the late twentieth century, predictions about the future of telecommunications are hazardous at best. Capitalism has had a very long history of technological and economic changes that periodically refashion local and global landscapes; the information revolution is but the latest chapter in this story.

Economic activity today is overwhelmingly dominated by the production of intangibles, in which knowledge,

See also: Cyberspace/Cyberculture; Information Technology; Internet, Economic Geography; Space II.

Table 1 World’s largest seven international telecommunications carriers, 2005 Company

Origin country

Assets ($ billions)

Employees (thousands)

AT&T Nippon Telephone & Telegraph Versio´n France Telecom Deutsche Telekom WorldCom SBC Communications

USA Japan

252.3 170.3

156.7 215.2

USA France Germany USA USA

164.7 118.2 115.2 98.9 98.6

258.3 188.9 211.9 51.5 209.8

Source: www.forbes.com.

another; digital convergence – the blurring of the tradi tionally separated industries of telephone, cable, and computers – allows conglomerates to provide more than one service over the same medium. In the United States, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 ushered in signifi cant changes in the industry’s regulatory environment, changing foreign ownership controls, allowing tele communications firms to acquire and control foreign firms, and relaxing cross industry ownership rules that prohibited firms in one telecommunications sector to operate in and control firms in another. Large tele communications firms relied on horizontal integration to enhance their competitiveness and penetrate new mar kets, leading to a tsunami of mergers and acquisitions. The result has been an increasingly oligopolistic market structure. Across the planet, the market for media services has become dominated by a few giants that have established powerful distribution and production net works (Table 1). Corporate control over the world’s production and distribution of information includes the five largest media conglomerates, AOL Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, News Corporation, and Vivendi, behemoths that own numerous information related sec tors, including book publishing, cable and network tele vision, radio, movie studios, and music companies. Such firms tend to be led by well known media CEOs, in cluding, for example, Michael Eisner of Disney, Cable News Network’s Ted Turner, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, and Thomas Middelhoff of Bertelsmann, the robber barons of the digital age. These companies’ size, financial resources, infrastructure, and human capital effectively give them control over a vast share of the world’s media, the channels through which billions of people get their news and entertainment, and thus collectively play a hugely influential role in shaping the outlooks and views of their viewers and subscribers.

Telecommunications

Further Reading Cairncross, F. (1997). The death of distance: How the communications revolution will change our lives. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. De Sola Pool, I. (ed.) (1977). The social impact of the telephone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gibbs, D. and Tanner, K. (1997). Information and communication technologies and local economic development policies: The British case. Regional Studies 31, 768 774. Graham, S. and Aurigi, A. (1997). Virtual cities, social polarization, and the crisis in urban public space. Journal of Urban Technology 4, 19 52. Graham, S. and Marvin, S. (1996). Telecommunications and the city: Electronic spaces, urban places. London: Routledge. Kurtzman, J. (1993). The death of money. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co. McChesney, R. (1999). Rich media, poor democracy: Communication politics in dubious times. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. McChesney, R. (2001). Global media, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Monthly Review 52, 165 178. O’Brien, R. (1992). Global financial integration: The end of geography. Washington: Council on Foreign Relations. O’Kelly, M. and Grubesic, T. (2002). Backbone typology, access, and the commercial Internet, 1997 2000. Environment and Planning B 29, 533 552. Schiller, D. (1999). Digital capitalism: Networking the global market system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shields, R. (ed.) (1996). Cultures of Internet: Virtual spaces, real histories, living bodies. London: Sage Publications.

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Solomon, E. (1997). Virtual money: Understanding the power and risks of money’s high speed journey into electronic space. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Warf, B. (1995). Telecommunications and the changing geographies of knowledge transmission in the late 20th century. Urban Studies 32, 361 378. Warf, B. (2003). Mergers and acquisitions in the telecommunications industry. Growth and Change 34, 321 344. Wheeler, J., Aoyama, Y. and Warf, B. (eds.) (2000). Cities in the telecommunications age: The fracturing of geographies. London: Routledge.

Relevant Websites http://www.webmergers.com/ http://opennet.net/ Collaborative Partnership of Four Leading Academic Institutions. http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/550/resources.html Geography of the Information Economy. http://www.internetworldstats.com/ Internet World Stats, Usage and Population Statistics. http://www.sibis eu.org/ Statistical Indicators, Benchmarking the Information Society. http://www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries.

Territorial Production Complexes B. Doman´ski, Jagiellonian Univeristy, Krakow, Poland & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Industrial Complex Analysis A method of analysis of the linkages between industries in the industrial complex developed in regional science. Input–Output Analysis A method of analyzing interindustry connections in the economy, where material and financial flows between sectors are presented as rows (outputs) and columns (inputs) of a matrix (table). Least-Cost Location Theories Conceptualizations of industrial location based on the assumption of the minimization of costs of inputs, especially materials and labor, rather than the maximization of profit. Technical–Economic Indicators Indices measuring the amount of materials, energy, labor, and transportation inputs per ton of the final product and/or per worker. Vertical Integration The centralization of productive units which represent various stages of production process, including upstream suppliers and downstream buyers.

A Basic Explanation of the Concept The territorial production complex (TPC) is a concept introduced in Soviet planning of spatial organization of the economy – industrial production, in particular. The classic definition given by M. K. Bandman (1976: 15) defines a TPC as ‘‘an aggregate to be created in ac cordance with the plan of persistently interrelated and proportionally developing units of national economy sectors (industry, agriculture, construction, transport, non productive sphere) whichyare concentrated over a relatively limited and compact (not disunited) area.’’ In other words, the TPC is a planned economic entity consisting of various economically linked industrial and nonindustrial activities in a particular geographical area. Two types of TPCs can be distinguished on various geographical scales: 1. industrial centers (towns) 2. industrial regions or vast interregion areas (macro scale TPCs); they may cover several local TPCs. There are three major groups of interrelated components of the TPC which have to be harmonized: production, infrastructure, and local resources. The key element is

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specialization industries, the development of which provides a rationale for the planning of the TPC. These industries are accompanied by complementary product ive activities, which are auxiliary to the specialization of the complex or service to the local population. Infra structure is understood in a very broad sense as every thing which serves production, from railways and power transmission lines to housing, education, and healthcare facilities. Local resources (inputs) include natural re sources and manpower (see Figure 1). The TPC is a deliberately planned structure created in order to achieve a rational spatial organization of economic activities and infrastructure. Its aim is illus trated by the following quotation from Bandman: Optimization of TPC creation is referred to as de termination of the best (from the viewpoint of the na tional economy) variant of utilizing all kinds of resources, of time limits, rates, scope and proportions of develop ment; of production structure and spatial organization of all elements of the economy as a complex, its external and internal relationships on the condition that there should be maximum savings in social labour input in order to fulfil the task of producing the output of spe cialization industries and providing fixed living con ditions for the population. The basic function of the TPC is thus to produce specific quantities of goods (and necessary services) as efficiently as possible, with mini mization of labour expended as the operative criterion. (Bandman, 1976: 19 20)

Thus, the task is to design the optimum form for the TPC, which means selection of appropriate proportions of various components (economic activities, infra structure, labor force, and natural resources) and their spatial distribution, together with linkages of all the elements. This can only be achieved by central planning. The main rationale for planning the TPC is making savings in investment outlays on infrastructure (including social infrastructure) and transportation costs. Analytical measures used in calculating the optimization of the TPC include the following: reduced use of land for factories and new residential housing, decreased length of railway lines and other infrastructure (e.g., electricity lines), lower expenditures on social infrastructure, fuller use of local natural resources, byproducts, and manpower, both male and female. Probst and Secomski emphasized that the aim is to maximize the use of all the stock of infrastructure. Savings are derived from the economies of

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Local natural resources

Infrastructure

Productive

Social

Productive activities of specialization industries

Auxiliary

Servicing

Completing productive activities

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Figure 1 Interrelationships among elements of a territorial production complex affecting its planned development. Reproduced from Bandman, M. K. (1976). Content, succession, and tools of optimizing creation of territorial production complexes. In Bandman, M. K. (ed.) General questions of modelling territorial production complexes, p. 33, Chart 2. Novosibirsk: USSR Academy of Sciences, Siberian Branch, Institute of Economics and Organization of Industrial Production, by permission of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

scale of large production and infrastructure units, ag glomeration economies of better utilization of capacity of interlinked plants and nonproductive facilities and re duced transportation costs. A set of technical–economic indicators all play an im portant role. They include indices measuring the amount of various material and energy inputs per ton of the final product, similar to Alfred Weber’s material indices and/or interindustry coefficients expressing linkages between various industrial branches in input–output analysis, as well as inputs and output per worker and transportation effort. The technical–economic indicators provide the basis for planning the composition of and linkages within the TPC. In addition, they may reveal the significance of various location factors in planning the TPC. The planning of a TPC has two successive stages: the economic structure is determined first, and the spatial (territorial) structure is decided second. Thus, at the beginning the basic proportions of industrial branches in the structure of production are specified. Then, the functional units of the economy in the form of aggregates of specialization industries, their supporting activities and infrastructure, transport facilities, and manpower are assigned to specific territorial units. The concept of a TPC was primarily elaborated in the planning of the industrial development of the un developed lands of Siberia. TPCs were projected here on a macro spatial scale and could cover vast territories of more than 1000 km in diameter. The core industries were those utilizing the natural resources of the region. Since the TPCs were mainly established in sparsely populated lands of the inhospitable eastern frontier, the shortage of labor was one of the major issues here. Wages were used as an economic incentive to encourage migration from the European core regions, and forced

labor could also have substantial significance. This also explains the strong emphasis on the maximum savings of manpower input in the optimization of the TPC. The most famous and widely discussed example is the Urals–Kuznetsk Combine created in the 1930s. It was originally meant to unite the iron ore of Magnitogorsk in the Urals with the vast coal reserves of Kuznetsk Basin (Kuzbas) in Western Siberia, some 2000 km away by rail (Figure 2). Later formulations led to the integration of various economic activities of broader regions of the Bashkir Autonomous Republic and Kazakhstan. Later applications of the TPC include the Sayan TPC in the Angara–Yenisey region of Siberia related to the huge hydroelectric power stations at Bratsk, Ust’ Ilimsk and Krasnoyarsk, Rudnyy Altay TPC oriented to nuclear weapons components and products for the aviation in dustry (Semipalatinsk and Ust’ Kamenogorsk), and the Norilsk region for nickel and related metals. The major intellectual center where the concept and mathematical modeling of TPCs were developed in the 1970s and 1980s, was the Institute of Economics of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, headed by M. K. Bandman. The idea of TPCs was introduced to American and Western European geographers, regional scientists, and economists by the translation of N. N. Kolosovskiy’s article in 1961, but aroused broader interest in the decades that followed.

The Characteristics of a TPC in Relation to Other Concepts and Approaches The notion of a TPC avoids focus on a single plant and/or firm, which is a weakness of classic location theories of the Weberian type. The concept of the TPC

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Figure 2 Location of selected territorial production complexes in the Soviet Union.

applies to all sorts of economic activities and various geographical scales at the same time. In addition, it is not just concerned with the question of location of economic activities, but also takes into account linkages between these activities and between the places where they are situated. Consequently, the TPC approach provides a far more comprehensive perspective on the spatial organ ization of economic activities than many other view points. In fact, the TPC may be regarded as a spatial system: a large, complicated entity consisting of a number of elements and the relationships (linkages) between them. The popularity of systems analysis in the heyday of the development of the TPC concept in the Soviet Union may explain the fact that the latter bears several prop erties of a system, even though it has rarely been ex plicitly discussed as such. It can also be argued that the TPC might be interpreted in the categories of a network. The TPC has to be distinguished from a combine (Russian and German Kombinat) – another typical elem ent of state socialist industrial organization. The combine is a large organization usually comprising vertically in tegrated production activities. It can be seen as a socialist equivalent of the capitalist corporation with several en terprises under centralized control (one decision making body). The Kombinat can cut through divisions between various industries and combine activities normally belonging to different ministries and/or industrial

associations in a single organizational unit. In general, the combine is basically an industrial organizational entity and the territorial dimension is not a constituent element of its formation, in contrast to a TPC. A typical TPC may include several combines. The TPC can be seen as one of the attempts to link the perspective of industry and place. It belongs to the family of approaches which perceive spatial location and linkages by and large as technology driven. As a result, on an analytical level, the TPC shows some resemblance to the industrial complex analysis developed by Walter Isard and other regional scientists in the 1950s. They share the use of a sort of input–output analysis in studying the links between industries in industrial complexes. There are several important differences between the concept of TPC and the notion of cluster. Among others, TPCs are constructed mainly in newly developed regions with low population density and involve production chains between different industries, especially producer oriented heavy industries and machinery, in contrast to cluster firms specialized in production of buyer oriented goods and services, where information flows and con nections with Research and Development (R&D) and other supporting institutions are crucial. The essential feature of the TPC, making it funda mentally different from all the concepts conceived in

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Western geography and economics, is that it was de veloped for the practical purposes of determining and creating the territorial organization of production, rather than simply analyzing or explaining it. At the advanced stage, especially in the form de veloped by the Novosibirsk researchers grouped around M. K. Bandman, the TPC rested on the use of sophisti cated econometric modeling. It aimed to optimize re gional and local economic structures according to the economic goals established on the national level. The TPC was a concept meant to bridge the basic division into economic and territorial (spatial) planning and decision making in the centrally planned economy. It was believed to provide a tool for both economic plan ning and regional development at the same time.

How Is the Concept Embedded in the Socialist Economic and Planning Ideas? The idea of TPCs is based on a belief in the necessity and possibility of designing and controlling economic life at the macro spatial level. This belief was one of the fundamental assumptions of the centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union and other state socialist countries. Views on location criteria of industry had evolved in the Soviet Union. Until the early 1930s, there were many voices supporting dispersal of production and population as a direct spatial expression of the egalitarian aims of socialism. TPCs manifested the departure from the idea of dispersal and towards the seeking of advantages of spatial concentration. It can be argued that the TPC represents the most advanced and comprehensive con cept of the spatial organization of economic activities, and industrial production in particular, in centrally planned economies. At the same time, it inevitably re flects the limitations and weaknesses of these economies and their underlying ideology. Serious doubts exist as to whether the TPCs were really implemented, due to the often cited lack of co ordination between autonomous ‘functional’ ministries in the Soviet Union. The major inherent contradiction in the central planning system was a permanent conflict between economic ministries and the territorially or ganized administration. The former were always more powerful as they controlled the basic assets. Probst, along with other Soviet researchers of spatial organization of production and TPCs, emphasizes strongly that the TPCs required creation of organizational conditions, where the TPC was designed as a single entity from the beginning, and then the creation of a common governing body. This rarely happened, as the entire political and economic system was built on branch industrial minis tries responsible for individual sectors. The only form of

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‘coordination’ of economic and territorial planning was the subordination of the latter to the former. Thus, the solution to this problem in the case of the Urals–Kuz netsk TPC was an attempt to create the Urals–Kuznetsk combine. Nevertheless, the typical TPC would consist of dozens, if not hundreds, of huge enterprises and com bines, which could be controlled by many ministries. As a result, the TPC was probably too large and complex a structure to be managed as a single Kombinat. In addition, the TPC as a combine would have reduced the power of branch ministries, which were the pillars of the Soviet administrative system. In general, the significant practical and theoretical deficiency of the TPC was that it did not allow for the recognition and subsequent reconciliation of conflicting interests and objectives of various agents involved in economic activity: ministries, combines and enterprises, regional and local authorities, not to mention various social groups. In fact, socialist planners faced immense difficulty in resolving contradictory goals and actions, which are endemic to any large complex social system (organization) that has to cope with scarcity. They struggled to find a formula for resolving these conflicts in the immense system of the centralized state. Two central attributes of TPCs could be subject to criticism: the top down approach and the subordination of social to economic objectives. The notion of TPCs was developed under the ideo logical system resting on the conviction that the state performs the mission of creating a new, better social order. This led to the seeking of large scale, top down solutions to problems of regional and local development. The idea of a central decision making body, ignoring local agency, sharply contradicts the contemporary trend to promote the bottom up approach and emphasizes the role of indigenous agents, local institutions, civil society, and social participation. Another important issue is the question of the aims of TPCs. Bandman’s definition makes it clear: ‘‘The basic function of the TPC is thus to produce specific quantities of goods (and necessary services) as efficiently as possible, with minimization of labor expended.’’ This is in ac cordance with the overriding objective of central socialist planners concerned with the growth of industrial pro duction perceived as an element of historical necessity. In other words, there is little doubt that the TPCs had to develop according to productive rather than social in vestment. Social benefits (aims) and costs were sub ordinated to economic objectives. This is expressed by the fact that fixed living conditions for population appear as constraints, not as goals in the optimization modeling of the TPC. Moreover, services for population are re garded as supporting (‘completing’) activities only, which are needed as long as they serve the functioning of the specialization industries. The criterion for optimizing the

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TPC is the minimization of labor required for a given set of outputs. All this reflects an instrumentalist approach to society reduced to manpower consumed by production facilities and assigning socialist towns the function of storage place for the labor force. Critics attribute this to the economism and reductionism of Marxian political economy.

Other Limitations and Weaknesses of the Concept It is striking that the TPC borrows two important ideas from Alfred Weber’s location theory: 1. The quest for minimization of costs of input (materials and labor), and 2. The vital role of transportation. The affinity with the least cost location theories rather than market area approach (e.g., Lo¨sch) is understand able in the case of supply side socialist economy. The disadvantage is that demand (consumption) is absent here, except for the output targets determined in an unspecified way by central decision makers. At the same time, the basic difference remains that Weber’s analysis focused on the location of a single plant, while the TPC concerns entire industrial complexes of activities toge ther with the accompanying wide ranging infrastructure. The use of a form of Weberian locational analysis, where physical properties of materials and products are considered in relation to transportation costs, can be explained more easily if we realize that one of the major objectives of industrial location in the Soviet Union was to ease tightening bottlenecks in freight movements on railways. The TPC is strongly oriented towards the utilization of natural resources and fits commodity chains linked by vertical integration. This may be the reason why in other socialist countries outside the Soviet Union the concept of TPC was mainly present in the academic world, with little practical impact on industrial planning. The emphasis is on technical and economic linkages, whereas social and institutional relationships are ignored. This limitation is shared with industrial complex analysis. This also makes the TPC different from clusters, where numerous independent enterprises are concentrated, linked by various sorts of cooperation and competition. Environmental issues were practically neglected in the planning of TPCs, except for some lip service paid in the late writings of M. K. Bandman and his group.

Conclusion TPCs represent an attempt to create an integrated sys tem of linked economic activities which are theoretically

planned to ensure the coordination of productive and infrastructure investment. They were perceived as an opportunity to carry out the changes in the spatial or ganization of industrial production and to plan the ra tional distribution of other elements, such as infrastructure and labor force, according to the needs of the former. They were basically a planning concept grounded in the overall system of the centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union under state socialism. At the same time, they stemmed from the need for new planning and management mechanisms and aimed to overcome one of the critical weaknesses of the central planning and decision making system, namely the di vergent aims and actions of ministries responsible for various industries and territorial planning. The lack of such coordination underlay practical difficulties in the implementation of TPCs. There have been attempts to search for parallels with planning systems of transnational corporations. We can also find some analogy with industrial complex analysis at the technical level, as this too is characterized by its interest in interindustry linkages. However, the approach of TPCs fundamentally differs from any theoretical and planning concepts developed and/or applied in market economy: first by its comprehensive (total) character, and second by its practical orientation towards creation of, rather than intervention in, the spatial organization of economic activities. TPCs led to spatial concentration of economic activities on a local and regional scale, but they were able to facilitate dispersal on an interregional scale, promoting growth in non European regions of the Soviet Union. See also: Industrial Location; Input-Output Analysis.

Further Reading Aganbegyan, A. G. and Bandman, M. K. (1984). Territorial production complexes as integrated systems: Theory and practice. Geoforum 15, 25 32. Bandman, M. K. (1976). Content, succession, and tools of optimizing creation of territorial production complexes. In Bandman, M. K. (ed.) General questions of modelling territorial production complexes, pp 5 100. Novosibirsk: USSR Academy of Sciences, Siberian Branch, Institute of Economics and Organization of Industrial Production. Bandman, M. K. (ed.) (1985). Regional development in the USSR: Modeling the formation of the Soviet territorial production complexes. New York: Pergamon Press. Baransky, N. N. (1956). Economic geography of the USSR. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Barr, B. M. (1974). The changing impact of industrial management and decision making on the locational behavior of the Soviet firm. In Hamilton, F. E. I. (ed.) Spatial perspectives on industrial organization and decision making, pp 411 446. London: John Wiley and Sons. Doman´ski, B. (1997). Industrial control over the socialist town: Benevolence or exploitation. Westport, CT: Praeger.

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Holzman, F. D. (1957). The Soviet Ural Kuznetsk combine: A study in investment criteria and industrialization policies. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 71, 368 405. Kolosovskiy, N. N. (1961). The territorial production combination (complex) in Soviet economic geography. Journal of Regional Science 3, 1 25. Koropeckyj, I. S. (1967). The development of Soviet location theory before the Second World War. Soviet Studies 19, part one 1 28; part two 232 244. Linge, G. J. R., Karaska, G. J. and Hamilton, F. E. I. (1978). An appraisal of the Soviet concept of the territorial production complex. Soviet Geography 19, 681 697. Pilipienko, I. (2005). Clusters and territorial industrial complexes Similar approaches or different concepts? First evidence from

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analysis of development of Russian regions. Paper at the 45th Congress of the European Regional Science Association, Amsterdam. Probst, A. (1971). Voprosy razmeshcheniya socyalisticheskoy industrii. Moscow: Izdatyelstvo Nauka. Probst, A. (1974). Certain questions on the general theory of the location of industry. In Demko, G. J. & Fuchs, R. J. (eds.) Geographical perspectives on the Soviet Union, pp 352 364. Columbia: Ohio University Press. Rutt, S. (1986). The Soviet concept of the territorial production complex and regional development. Town Planning Review 57, 425 439. Smith, D. M. (1981). Industrial location: An economic geographical analysis. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Territory and Territoriality D. Delaney, Amherst College, Amherst, MA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction Territory and territoriality are among the most basic and significant terms in human geography. Territories and territorial ensembles are fundamental elements of human sociospatial organization. Although most commonly as sociated with the modern nation state, this is merely one – albeit, highly significant – manifestation of terri toriality. Territoriality is much more pervasive. Indeed, it is inescapable. Its operations have become increasingly recognized in other ‘nonpolitical’ contexts. The present era can be regarded as something of a golden age of reflection on territory and territoriality within human geography and other disciplines. This, in part, is the result of increasing theoretical pluralism and interdisciplinarity. How territory looks from one theo retical or disciplinary perspective may differ markedly from how it looks from other perspectives. Scholarly cross fertilization has been productive of novel under standings. The increasing attention to territory is also the result of profound perceived transformations in the worlds of experience associated with, among other things, globalization and the emergence of the Internet. In short, the ways in which territory and territoriality had ap peared to work have changed sufficiently to require fundamental rethinking. This reinvigorated scholarship highlights what may be the central paradox of the topic. Long regarded as a social device for simplifying and clarifying the scope and limits of power through its in side/outside, either/or dichotomizing effects, territori ality has been revealed to be complex, subtle, often ambiguous and unstable. Still, it continues to ‘work’, that is, to have effects, even if many of these effects are not intended by anyone. This article examines some of the complexities of territory and territoriality. First, it touches on some preliminary and definitional issues. This is followed by an analytic examination of the topic in terms of the con nections with space, power, and meaning. Finally, the topic is situated historically vis a` vis a discussion of the relationship to time and notions of modernity.

Preliminaries Issues Basic Definitions A territory is a bounded, meaningful social space the ‘meanings’ of which implicate the operation of social

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relational power. It is, in a sense, an expression of the fusion of meaning, power, and social space. The proto type territory may be that of the territorial nation state. Here, territory delimits the spatial scope and limits of sovereignty, jurisdiction, administration, and citizenship. But there are innumerable other generic forms and ex pressions of territory. Many directly implicate govern ance, for example, municipalities, voting and school districts, indigenous reserves, police precincts, and na tional parks. However, many exist in and give spatial expression to the so called private realm – residential lots, the micro spaces of work places, dioceses, and sales territories of businesses. In some situations even the human body can usefully be regarded as a kind of ter ritory. Some territories are formal and relatively enduring (e.g., Bolivia). Some are informal and relatively ephem eral (my seat in a diner). Some aspire to general com prehensive application (the nation state); some are very specific (the protest buffer zone around an abortion clinic). Among the most pervasive and significant, if over looked, territories are those organized by ‘the public/ private distinction’ itself. Regardless of the form it takes, one never encounters a territory in isolation. Rather, territories are organized in relational ensembles or mo saics that have the effect of differentiating segments of social space. Again, this pertains as much to the smaller territorial constitution of rooms, cells and neighborhoods as to the global grid of the international system of states, as well as to intermediate configurations such as those associated with federal political structures. This differ entiating is not simply a matter of sorting. Rather, it entails the inscription of meaning (e.g., in the form of rules, or the terms of access, entry, confinement, or ex clusion) and the spatialization of power of various kinds. The term ‘territoriality’ is used in a number of senses. It has often been noted that these senses do not neces sarily add up to a coherent definition, and that the term is frequently used in vague or ambiguous ways. Con ventionally, if ‘territory’ refers to a bounded space, ‘ter ritoriality’ refers to behaviors related to the establishment and defense of territories. Such behaviors include de marcating or partitioning space; classifying spaces as territories; communicating that a territory exists and where the boundaries are; communicating the conditions for entering or leaving the territory; communicating the consequences for not abiding by the conditions; and following through with the implicit or explicit threats.

Territory and Territoriality

‘Territoriality’ may also refer to the involvement of territorial ensembles with other social phenomena such as power or identity. In this sense of the term one might say that the international system of states represents the territoriality (or territorialization) of sovereignty; or that South African apartheid gave expression to the terri toriality of ruling racial ideologies. Similarly, the terri toriality of labor can be seen to involve various components that include border control and the seg mentation of tasks on the shop floor. Territoriality in this sense often implicates specific projects and practices such that verb forms such as ‘territorialize’, ‘de territorialize’, or ‘re territorialize’ become useful. Territoriality can also refer to these projects and practices themselves. In many treatments of the topic it is common to focus attention on those actors who engage in creating territories or enforcing territoriality in order to control others through the control of territories. These sorts of practices are, of course, significant. Many such practices, however, concern not only the establishment of territories but the activities bearing on already existing lines and spaces. At least as significant as the practices of the controllers, territoriality is also performed by those who would be controlled. This can be seen in the simple compliance or conformity with the asserted rules of space. Or it may be seen in the evasion or overt resist ance. Squatters, smugglers, intruders, fugitives, and asy lum seekers participate in territoriality no less than do owners, customs officials, and prison guards (Figure 1). Also, not all expressions of territoriality are centrally concerned with hierarchy or the maintenance of dom ination and subordination. Other kinds of social relations (e.g., those based on equality, cooperation, solidarity, and mutual respect) may also be given territorial expression. These might be implicated in common property spaces predicated on the right not to be excluded or in the constitution of sanctuaries. Regarded holistically, terri tories are artifacts that give spatial and material ex pression to a wide range of social relations which are themselves instantiated through a range of socially sig nificant (or even trivial) practices and projects. What makes these relations and practices ‘territorial’ is their involvement with the dynamic interplay of power, meaning, and bounded space. Another preliminary issue concerns the naturalness of territoriality. There is a long tradition of conceiving human territoriality as ‘natural’ in some nontrivial sense. This may involve pseudo biological claims about terri torial instincts that are attributed to individuals or col lectives (tribes and nations). In this tradition human territoriality is continuous with the territorial behavior of other primates, or, indeed, birds and insects. Of course, the distinctive characteristics of each species – language, flight, and olfactory repellent – are recognized as contributing to the distinctive territorializations. The naturalness claim

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Figure 1 Squatters united against global gentrification. Source: www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/02/333663.html.

may be supported by the apparent cultural universality of human territoriality. However, even if one were to grant the innateness of territoriality to human beings as such, one would not get very far in understanding its operations. Language is also a human cultural universal but there are (or have been) tens of thousands of languages. Just as one cannot argue for the naturalness of ‘King Lear’ or ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ from the innateness of language, one cannot derive the naturalness of the modern territorial state, historical forms of gender segregation, or the exist ence of supermax prisons from the apparent cultural universality of human territoriality (Figure 2). The issue matters, however, because ‘naturalizing’ territory and ter ritoriality may have the effect (intended or otherwise) of naturalizing what is associated with it or what it is giving spatial–material expression to. For example, the state, identity, private property, and various sorts of hierarchies that have been territorialized (such as those associated with racism, colonialism, male supremacy, or homo phobia) have all commonly been naturalized. In these contexts ‘naturalizing’ may imply the denial of contin gency, and the de politicization (and thereby, the tacit justification) of inherited or proposed territorializations. Naturalizing power also commonly facilitates justifying opposition to proposed changes. Naturalizing territory also facilitates simplifying territory. In contrast to the innateness tradition are more ‘constructionist’ understandings that locate the practical operation of territoriality and its profusion of forms and

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Analytics By definition, territory and territoriality involve the practical interrelationships among ‘space’, ‘power’, and ‘meaning’. Each of these refer to complex social phe nomena in their own right. In combination they account for much of the complexity of territory and territoriality. In this section we examine territory and territoriality through an analysis of these three components. Space Figure 2 Supermax prison. Source: www.polilceinteractions.com/homepage.html.

expressions in the contingencies of history, culture, pol itics, ideology, and agency. Constructionism locates ter ritoriality in ‘social’ as opposed to ‘natural’ processes. In a sense this framing posits a false dichotomy. In any case, seeing territories or territoriality as ‘natural’ or as ‘so cially constructed’ (and therefore, perhaps, as contingent, arbitrary, or illegitimate) are not simply descriptive acts. They may represent political–normative positions. As such, they may be not only views about territory, but interventions in the politics of territory. To that extent they might better be understood as internal to the practice of territoriality itself. Another related preliminary issue concerns the func tions of territoriality. Territory is commonly discussed in terms of the social or psychological functions it serves. It is seen as a device for accomplishing certain ends. Among these may be control of resources, efficiency or conveni ence, stability or security, and clarity of definition. There is no doubt that territory is functional insofar as it may help to accomplish desired ends. But too narrow a focus on functionality may have the effect of concentrating ex clusive attention on ‘the controllers’ (those who are em powered to impose their will on others) and the facile identification of ‘function’ with their desires and inten tions. As already mentioned, this tends to exclude from consideration the ‘others’ who act in relation to the con trollers. Functional analysis also tends to privilege rational calculation over other modes of behavior that, in a given context, may be as or more significant. Often territoriality is used as a means toward ‘irrational’ ends such as the expulsion or confinement of feared others. Finally, func tional views may be relatively blind to the unintended effects and consequences of territorialization. In sum, while particular instances of territoriality may accurately be assessed in terms of functions (whether successfully realized or not), functionality cannot be attributed to territoriality as such or to complex territorial configur ations. Indeed, its dysfunctional features may be as or more salient.

‘Space’ is a basic vocabulary item in English. One might imagine that it does not need to be defined. Space simply is. But some features and distinctions should be noted. Our concern here is with social space – space as a fun damental element of social formations, social relations, and social life. Space often refers to two dimensional extent. It may be conceptualized in terms of distance and proximity; betweenness; distributions of phenomena across space; or motion through it. Not all that is spatial (or ‘sociospatial’) is territorial, but territoriality neces sarily implicates partitioned social space. By definition, territories are bounded spaces. Even the simplest territory, then, is a composite of at least three components: (1) the boundary or line that defines the edge of the territory, (2) the enclosed space, and (3) ‘the outside’ to which ‘the inside’ is set in relational contrast. Territories need not be entirely closed, though typically they are. ‘Public space’ can be understood as a kind of territory even though it may be defined by its relative openness. Even so, as a territory, public space may be highly regulated. Insofar as it is, it works like other kinds of territories. What is necessary is that there be a differentiation that establishes an in/out or off/on orientation. Often, ‘like’ territories (territories of the same general kind) are organized in horizontal complexes. Political or administrative territories border each other. People and things can pass from one to another, for example, at an international border. Instances of passing (of crossing the lines) may be governed by complex rules of ingress and egress, and the passage itself may be consequential in ways that motion within a given space is not. The same is true with respect to other kinds of spaces: property lots, rooms, or cells, may border each other and this bordering has effects. As this list suggests, different kinds of terri tories are used to accomplish a wide variety of different social objectives. A prisoner’s cell, the designated critical habitat of an endangered species, and a gated community are established for different purposes. The social world is also composed of and structured by heterogenous en sembles of territories. These may be arranged in more complex configurations. For example, private property lots abut wildlife refuges and military bases. Movement across these lines is also movement across kinds. These

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territories are also embedded within jurisdictions, dis tricts, and zones of various kinds. While to some extent a prison cell is a prison cell, it might matter a great deal whether that cell is also located within the territorial spaces called China, Sweden, or Guantanamo Bay Naval Station. The signs of partitioned space are ubiquitous. The lines and spaces that constitute territoriality are rarely ques tioned. The spaces themselves can appear to be self evident, quasi natural ‘containers’, or compartments within which social life takes place. Indeed, this apparent self evidentness is important to how territory works. Contemporary human geographers (and other scholars), however, have developed alternative understandings of social space that render such assumptions problematic. Among the many recent ‘retheorizations’ of social space that have a direct bearing on territory four are of par ticular significance: (1) the mutual constitutivity of ‘soci ety’ and ‘space’, (2) space as product and process, (3) the production or construction of scale, and (4) the geo graphical imagination and its relation to identity. One important strand of recent sociospatial theory has shifted attention away from ‘spaces’ as such and turned attention toward a concern for ‘spatiality’ or ‘the spati ality of social life’. Among the fundamental premises of this conceptual reframing is the idea that ‘space’ is not simply a backdrop or context against which social events take place. Rather, the spatial and the social are under stood as inextricably bound to each other. Spatiality is a fundamental dimension of ‘the social’ through which the social becomes as it is and operates as it does. As Edward Soja has put it, ‘‘As a social product, spatiality is simul taneously the medium and outcome, presupposition and embodiment of social action and relationship.’’ Thinking about social space this way means that ‘space’ or any given space or spatial arrangement is not self evident or quasi natural. Therefore, understanding spatiality (and territoriality) requires a deeper (i.e., more sophisticated, noncommonsensical) understanding of the social order of which it is a constitutive element or ingredient. For ex ample, the whys and hows of spatiality (and therefore territoriality) under conditions of modernity, capitalism, or liberalism may differ markedly from their dynamics under other conditions. This assumption then directs attention toward the ways in which spatiality is ‘pro duced’, and the historical conditions and social dynamics of its production. It also raises questions about the social and experiential consequences of how it is produced and transformed. This is a second strand of retheorization that has in fluenced theorists of territoriality. Territories are in creasingly understood less as inert things (‘containers’), and more like activities or events. Prominent theorist of territoriality Anssi Paasi (2003: 109–122) describes ‘‘yterritories as processes in which social space and

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social action are inseparable.’’ The insistence on the complex ‘mutual constitutivity’ of the social and the spatial through the dynamics of territoriality has also facilitated closer scrutiny of the various dimensions of social life (e.g., economic, political, cultural, etc.) that contribute to the dynamic spatialities of social life, in cluding the specifically territorial. Territory, then, is less like a grid and more like choreography. Another development in sociospatial theory with direct relevance for understanding territory has been increased interest in the social – especially political – construction of scale. In contemporary human geography scale commonly refers to the spatial extent or ‘level’ of operation of some relevant phenomenon. As with other aspects of ‘space’ scale has conventionally been regarded as a quasi natural ‘objective’ framework that sets the scope and level of detail of analysis. Typically, ‘the glo bal’, ‘the national’, and ‘the local’ are seen as the most useful scales of analysis or description. For present pur poses, ‘scale’ is used to identify processes and forces that operate on or through territoriality at different ‘levels’. Such processes may have different effects or character istics when examined through different scalar lenses, or when examined through interrelations among scales. Labor migration, for example, looks different (different aspects are highlighted or obscured) when situated at different scales of analysis. However, social actors may have an interest in asserting or denying the relevance or appropriateness of one or another posited scale over contenders. For example, a particular event (say, an in stance of violence against women, or the detention of ‘unlawful combatants’) may be conceptualized as impli cating human rights and international law (global scale), or as implicating civil rights and sovereignty (national scale), or as implicating privacy rights or local control (local or corporeal scale). As with other aspects of spa tiality, contemporary geographers have come to see ‘scale’ not as a quasi natural, objective framework for analysis but as an interpretive construct. The ‘(political) construction of scale’ suggests that claims about the ap propriate scale of analysis are not necessarily disinter ested. Another implication of this is that the sociospatial dynamics associated with territoriality can be seen to unfold not only with respect to two dimensional space – but also as may be commonly represented on maps. In stead, territoriality as process takes place within multiple, perhaps overlapping or interpenetrating spaces. Much of the practical work of territoriality, then, concerns the ‘vertical’ relationships between or among these overlap ping, mutually conditioning ‘levels’ – again, commonly, but not only, ‘the global’, ‘the national’, and ‘the local’. A fourth recent development in geographical theory that pertains directly to territory is the attention paid to ‘the geographical imagination’. This notion addresses the ways in which images, concepts, dispositions, or

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ideologies about social space condition forms and ex pressions of self and social consciousness, and thereby inform the practices associated with the production of space. One implication of this is that space generally, and territory more specifically, are understood not as external to human thought, imagination, and language. One might say, in fact, that territories are primarily ‘imagined’. This is not to say that they are ‘subjective’ or ‘not real’, only that they necessarily implicate aspects of social and self consciousness. Of special importance for understanding territory are the connections among material territorial spaces, geographical imaginaries, and aspects of ‘identity’ (nationality, citizenship, race, and gender). Themes of identity and difference are commonly expressed through the territorialization of elements of self and social consciousness. Consider how images of territory stabilize (or potentially de stabilize) categorical identities such as ‘American’ and ‘Mexican’, ‘citizen’ and ‘alien’, ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’, and ‘rights holder’ and ‘rightless’ and how these reciprocally stabilize conceptions of territory. Other ex amples of territorial imaginaries may come into play in contexts involving racial or gender segregation, privacy, or ownership. As can be seen, ‘space’ has come to refer to much more than the apparently self evident, ‘objective’ features of the external world. It also implicates the dynamic relationship between ‘material’ spaces (such as states, lots, rooms, and zones) and the ideologies that inform and are reinforced through them. We will return to this theme below. For the present it is sufficient merely to note that there are different ways of understanding the spatial, and that which view among competing views is taken as more accurate or explanatory will have consequences for how territory and territoriality are understood. Power By definition, territory and territoriality implicate social relational power. But, as with ‘space’, this concept is, in its own right, among the most fundamental, if complex and controversial, terms of social analysis. One can take a rather simple, unexamined understanding of power and draw inferences from it, or one can avail oneself of any number of more sophisticated theories and problematize it. As is the case with ‘space’, different conceptions of power are likely to yield different understandings of territory and territoriality. By ‘power’ one often simply means the capacity to act or the capacity to impose one’s will against the will of others. Power may be expressed, exercised, and experi enced in countless ways. Scholars identify and dis tinguish, for example, political, economic, military, ideological, familial, and other forms or sources of power. Each of these, by itself or in complex combinations, may be territorialized or may condition the workings of

territoriality in a wide variety of ways. Military power may be effected through a territoriality of ‘theaters’, fronts, war zones and free fire zones, invasions, and oc cupations, whereas economic power may more com monly implicate trade zones, trade barriers, investment zones, and real property. Also, different social formations (‘cultures’, historical eras) exhibit differing sources, bases, and expressions of power. The workings of power in, say, tenth century Hopi culture, fifteenth century France and contemporary France all differ significantly from one another. The dynamics of power under conditions of modernity operate differently than under other conditions. Here simply mention some common limiting as sumptions about power. Then I sketch more complex elements as they pertain to contemporary scholarly understandings of territory and territoriality. First, al though in ordinary speech we might say that power is something that persons or institutions ‘have’ and ‘use’, one important feature of most theoretical conceptions of social power is that it is relational. Second, discussions of power are frequently short hand for ‘power over’ (A ‘has power over’ B). This formulation privileges certain forms such as domination and coercion within hierarchical re lations. But power can also be manifest as ‘power to’ in the absence of domination. As mentioned earlier, power might also reflect relations of cooperation, solidarity, protection, and altruism. As reference to protection suggests, ‘power over’ and ‘power to’ are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they may be mutually dependent. Third, discussions of power are frequently cast in bi lateral (often zero sum) terms (again, A and B, ruler and ruled). But, while bilateral power relations have an un deniable experiential significance, it is also useful to consider power relations in terms of complex networks or configurations. Fourth, power can usefully be analyzed in more or less structural terms, as intrinsic to any social order. Power as it relates to capitalism, patriarchy, racism, caste, etc., can usefully be thought about in structural terms. This is especially important for understanding (and misunderstanding) territoriality. One highly sig nificant feature of power is the degree to which it is institutionalized. Indeed, many expressions of territory are themselves institutionalized structures of power. Power is often most clearly discerned through examining enduring impersonal role relations that an agent (this or that person) contingently occupies or engages (think of the supervisor, the bishop, the teacher, the border patrol agent; Figure 3). At the same time, power can be ana lyzed in more situational terms. Power is realized, per formed, and experienced by and through agents in actual contexts in relation to specific others. Examining power situationally draws attention more precisely to the practical strategies and tactics, accommodations, and negotiations through which it is realized. That is, while

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Figure 3 A border patrol agent frisks a would-be crosser. Source: www.desertexposure.com/200707/200707 immigrat.

power often inheres (or is ‘deposited’) in institutions, organizations, and broader social structures, it is realized (exercised, experienced) in concrete situations. Institutionalized power can be territorialized in vari ous ways. The territorialization of forms of power through the institutions of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘ownership’ (via the state and property) may be most obvious. But there are many other significant power projects that also implicate territoriality. Referencing a different sense of ‘institution’ one might consider how sexism and/or homophobia, for example, are territorialized through notions of ‘separate spheres’ for women and men, or through the construction and deconstruction of the ma terial spaces of ‘the closet’. Often these other dimensions of structural (and situational) power work through the fundamental liberal spaces of governance and property, as, for example, the exclusion of gays and lesbians under some immigration laws or the insulation of forms of private power (domestic violence, workplace discipline) from democratic intervention (Figure 4). Social power can be understood as relatively static (as corresponding to set roles within a hierarchy) or as more dynamic. The operations of power are seen not only in discrete events, they also condition the unfolding of subsequent chains of events. Power is not only discern able in explicit acts. Rather, we – collectively or indi vidually – are never not engaged with, partaking of, participating in the structures and situations of power. Part of what exercising power means is the capacity to exert control over future events. Each of these aspects of power have important implications for territory and territoriality. That territoriality and power are intertwined is in contestable, but the practical details of such intertwining are complex and subtle. One might begin with analysis of the power to ‘territorialize’ and inquire about the sources of this power. One might ask: who ‘has’ the power (the authority, the rights) to draw the lines, to create the

Figure 4 Territory as sanctuary. Source www.svsu.edu/clubs/ gsa/left.htm.

borders, to set or change the rules of entry and exit, of inclusion and exclusion? Who has the power to partition, or annex? Who has the power to disregard the desires of others who may be effected: to invade, trespass, or oc cupy? Who is obligated – or obliged – to acquiesce? (Again, by ‘has the power’ here we mean, ‘who is pos itioned within networks of power in relation to whom such that these acts may be effectively performed’.) One point of connection between power and territory involves the structures of power that position different social actors with respect to the power to engage in authori tative (or otherwise effective) acts of territorialization. Although all social actors ‘do’ or ‘perform’ territory simply by virtue of being alive, some people do it in ways that are more consequential than others. Territorializing is often the prerogative of state agents. The source of this power is usually ideologically de rivable from notions of sovereignty. In the early twentieth century, for example, Great Britain (which is to say, agents such as High Commissioner Sir Percy Cox) par ticipated in the invention of ‘Iraq’ by partitioning and re assembling portions of the Ottoman Empire. Likewise, just weeks before the British were to leave India, the Viceroy established the Bengal Boundary Commission. Its Chairman, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, partitioned India and created Pakistan, the eastern portion of which became Bangladesh in 1971. Boundary disputes may be resolved by diplomats aided by cartographers. Municipal govern ments (again, actual persons employed by these insti tutions) create and revise school districts, voting wards, and policing precincts. Other state agents may be em powered to incorporate municipalities, set city limits, annex territory; to establish wilderness areas, Native

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Reserves, free trade zones, or free fire zones. Judges may issue restraining orders that effectively create territories around specific people or create buffer zones around abortion clinics. The police may establish boundaries around protesters at demonstrations or order a particular space cleared of people. But it is not only official state actors who may be empowered to territorialize (or de territorialize). Property owners, employers, parents, gangs, and even children may set rules along a line, ef fectively ‘communicate’ these rules, ‘enforce’ compliance, and punish noncompliance. It is no exaggeration to say that one of the common incidents of ‘authority’ (of whatever form) is the power to territorialize within one’s space of authority. Obviously, this power to territorialize is often deployed with the aim of achieving power over others. Territory is also commonly used to demarcate the scope and limits of power itself (again, in various forms and expressions). Property and jurisdiction tell the world: my/our power (rights, authority) is presumptively su preme and legitimate and requires deference within these boundaries; it is presumptively illegitimate and imposes no obligations just over the line. The boundaries of ter ritory confine the practice of jurisdiction, and define the edge of sovereignty or regulation. They may mark the limit of legitimacy, membership, participation, and voice. Territory is also important in establishing the spatial scope of rule application. It delineates what is allowable, forbidden, or mandatory where. That is, territory pro vides communicable limits to spatial fields of action and to the sociospatial applicability of power. Again, this applies not only to political or governing spaces but to households, workplaces, public space, personal space, and other territories. As will be discussed in detail in the following section, any such performance of territorial authority may be assessed in terms of its ‘legitimacy’. Legitimacy entails an evaluation of the power claimed against possible sources or justifications. Occasionally, assessments of the legit imacy of a given territorialization can be negative. Others – particularly the others over whom power is wielded, or those whose actions are to be constrained by territory – may not recognize the legitimacy of the territorializing power and with it the obligations imposed through territoriality. The denial of legitimacy, in turn, may provide justification for the deployment of other forms of counter territorializing power in resistance. Ultimately, though, claims of ‘legitimate authority’ (to territorialize) may be put aside and replaced by physical coercion and the violent imposition of will. But even this may be insufficient to effect the desired territorialization. For example, in the 1950s, the United States government (again, some actors within that institutional structure) and some Vietnamese collaborators asserted the exist ence of ‘the Republic of Vietnam’ (South Vietnam) as a

sovereign space separate and separated from what they called North Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Political actors throughout Vietnam repudiated this fiction and, in 1975, Vietnam was unified. This asserted partition proved no more successful than the invention of the Confederate States of America or many other secessionist projects have been. Territory effects other aspects of power (authority, legitimacy, obligation, sanction) in various ways. Terri torial spaces are frequently created in order to amplify, intensify, or consolidate various forms of power. They may simultaneously disempower, subordinate, or injure others. Territory is commonly employed to divide and conquer, to dilute opposition, to confine, exclude or de prive others of access to necessities, to impose burdens, to create relations of dependency or vulnerability, and to dispossess. At the same time it may be a device for cre ating the conditions for security, self determination, or sanctuary. That is, it is frequently an instrument of power (to and/or over) that further conditions the operations and relations of power. As with space and spatiality more generally, it is im portant to look beyond a single space/line or a specific territorializing event and examine more extensive en sembles or configurations. Territory has the effect of channeling the circulation of power through the social world. Territorialized regimes such as apartheid (with its ‘group areas’, its ‘Bantustans’, its ‘influx control’, and its political prisons) or classic American Jim Crow (with its separate schools, seating assignments in busses and waiting rooms, and racialized hospital wards) represented the complex hyper territorialization of racialized power. In practice, the territorialization of racialized power provided innumerable occasions and opportunities to ‘enforce’, to perform whiteness as dominance, to compel submission, to punish those who refused to submit. These are extreme examples, but analogous arrangements structure more ordinary territorial mosaics (Figure 5). Social power is not static, it is political. ‘Politics’ here refers to unfolding and shifting contests for and about power. Just as discussions of territory are frequently confined to (by) the territorial state, so ‘politics’ is often restricted to contests for formal state power. Viewed more expansively though, contests about power take place in many other contexts. The old adage that ‘‘war is politics by other means’’ and the feminist credo that ‘‘the personal is the political’’ open up some of these other possibilities for locating the political in contexts ranging from the international to the interpersonal. Political ob jectives can be accomplished through violence, voting, negotiation, persuasion, bureaucratic rule making, legal argument, economic transactions, and many other means. Territorial politics, always about space and power, are often focused on the politics of meaning and interpretation.

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Figure 5 Signs of racialized territories. Source: www.ferris.edu/ jimcrow/traveling2/THEM/34.htm. Ferris State University.

Meaning Conventional treatments of territory recognize that in order for it to ‘work’ – to do what is expected or intended – something has to be ‘communicated’. At minimum some agent, typically the controller, has to communicate to relevant others that a territory exists or is being claimed; that entry (or exit) is prohibited or conditional upon certain specifications; and that there are consequences to be ex pected if one disregards these claims. The image that this calls to mind, perhaps, is that of a gate keeper or bar bouncer. No doubt territoriality does seem to work this way on occasion. But whether this is the usual way, and whether thinking about territory and territoriality this way is most useful, are debatable propositions. As with the components ‘space’ and ‘power’, communication – or what the author refers to more broadly as ‘meaning’ – is much more com plicated and has undergone rather profound rethinking in contemporary investigations of territoriality. ‘Meaning’ here refers to distinctively human social symbolic capacities in volving consciousness, language, and communication. It implicates thought, discourse, ideology, feelings, and prac tical significance. This should give some suggestion as to the potential complexity of its relationship to space and power through territoriality. ‘Keep Out’ means (presupposes, en tails) much more than keep out. The increased concern with questions of meaning in human geography reflects, in part, the heightened influence of the humanities, especially Continental philosophy, in this and other social disciplines. Taking questions of meaning, meaning production, and signification more seriously – and more problematically – reveals a greater degree of complexity and subtlety of

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territoriality than is usually acknowledged. Of specific concern here are meaning’s interconnections with ‘power’ and ‘spatiality’ that constitute territory. The discussion here proceeds from rather simple to more complex and am biguous connections. Perhaps the simplest and most obvious role of ‘meaning’ in connection with territoriality implicates territories as ‘meaningful’ spaces or spatial ‘containers’ of social meanings. They are claimed, defined, dis tinguished, and differentiated from other spaces. Lines and boundaries are established as defining, differen tiating, signifying features of the landscape. Often in modern, literate contexts, territories are named (Bolivia, Manitoba, Ludlow State Prison, Pine Ridge Indian Res ervation), or numbered (714 Second Street, Apartment 4 G, Mining Concession Block 1240). They are identi fied, mapped, and made known. In the modern world there are innumerable generic territories (the state, the refugee camp, the wilderness area) that designate an area as a particular kind of space. Within each category there may be innumerable instances of specific territories (Australia, Jabalia Refugee Camp, Weminuche Wilder ness Area). Through the establishment of generic kinds and specific instantiations of territories, ‘meaning’, at this most basic level, is ‘inscribed’ or projected onto social space. The resultant territorializations can then mean ingfully differentiate locations and events in space. This sort of meaning is, of course, able to be communicated. In the modern hyper literate world this level of meaning is often communicated through both physical structures and linguistic markers. Our world is saturated with signs announcing, directing, prohibiting, allowing, and man dating behaviors with respect to partitioned space. Per haps the most salient effect of these communicative events is their dichotomization: the inscription of either/ or; in/out; on/off; mine/not mine; public/private; and domestic/foreign (and so on) categories onto social space at territorial boundaries. As we know from daily experience, territorial(ized) meanings are frequently propositional. Propositions sig nify, for example, what it means to cross the defining line. Sometimes these are implicit. People in any social order are habituated into the territorial regime that constitutes that order. In our world a key component of this is seen in the territorialization of privacy and publicity. But often the propositional aspect of territorialized meaning is explicit. Meanings are encoded on signs that state, for example, the conditions of entry, or the rules of accept able, unacceptable, or punishable behavior. These terri torial meanings can be ‘performed’ in a number of ways, for example, through the rituals of asking, granting, or withholding permission to enter or leave; by knocking and waiting; by demanding and presenting papers at the border; or by being picked up and bodily thrown back across the line.

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As discussion of the propositional content demon strates, the meanings of territory are frequently encoded in rules. Rules are a special form of proposition; they convey a special sort of meaning. Again, these (or some small subset) may be ‘posted’ at the point of ingress or around the perimeter. Rules, like territory itself, ‘work’ best to the extent that they are taken to be simple and unproblematic. However, many rules that appear simple and clear from one perspective can appear to be much more complex or ambiguous when seen from a different, perhaps less deferential, point of view. Moreover, when one pulls on a rule (even the simplest, clearest of rules such as ‘Keep Out’) one often finds that it is entangled in a potentially endless cluster of other rules, principles, exceptions, restrictions, syllogisms, ideologies, fears, de sires, etc. These constitute what might be called the ‘deeper’ meanings of territory and territoriality. Questions concerning rules (and ruling, being ruled) connect most directly to questions concerning power. Rules of territory are much more than direct propositions about what it means to cross a line. A given territorial rule im plicates other rules about the authority to rule (to inscribe meaning). Not all commands to Keep Out issue from rec ognized authorities. As we saw in our discussion of power, questions about legitimacy may be raised. Sometimes the appropriate response to Keep Out is ‘who says?’ (Were you to encounter a sign reading: ‘You Are Now Entering The Republic of Bonzonia: Underwear is Prohibited’, you might reasonably disregard it. But if the sign said ‘Private Prop erty: Trespassers will be Shot on Sight’ you might inquire into the existence of the authority to claim or to shoot.) Again, behind the question of authority is the question of legitimacy of that authority. An agent may, in fact, be for mally authorized to condition territoriality. For example, during the period of classical American Jim Crow segre gation conditioning entry and exit on the basis of ‘race’ was not only allowed by law (presumptively legitimate author ity) but also mandated by State Constitutions. Nonetheless, the legitimacy of that authority was also repudiated by relevant others. Pushing still further, one may challenge the source of the asserted legitimacy of that claim to authority. Significantly, claims to legitimate authority are often re ferred back to territory itself by way of the (by no means simple) notions of jurisdiction, sovereignty, or ownership: it is simply, self evidently ‘the law of the land’. However, a particular territorial (territorializing) rule may and often does raise questions about the obligation to follow it, that is, to conform one’s actions to the asserted meanings inscribed through territory. This, in turn, may and often does raise questions about the authority or legitimacy to compel compliance with the rules laid down. As a particular kind of proposition, a rule is typically prescriptive. Prescriptive rules have a syllogistic (IF>THEN) structure which, again, may raise questions concerning the consequences (sanctions, immunities)

associated with not following the rule (>THEN). That is, ‘meaning’ as encountered in ‘rules’ implicates potentially dense, open ended questions about power relations. This potential open endedness or indeterminacy contributes further to the complexity of territory. It reveals a dimen sion of possible (and possibly useful) ambiguity. It opens up the further possibility of multiple interpretations. With the possibility of multiple plausible interpretations comes the possibility of instability and of transformation through re interpretation or re inscription. These possibilities are commonly ignored in conventional treatments of territory. The issue of interpretivity may be compounded in literate social orders where much (by no means all) meaning is textualized, not just in ‘signage’ (or what is called ‘official graffiti’) but in treaties, deeds, contracts, constitutions, policies, regulations, doctrines, etc., the interpretation of which is required to stabilize the sometimes slippery meanings of power in social space. In whatever manner they are communicated or stabil ized, rules are just rules: words, propositions, categories, syllogisms. But territorial rules are fundamentally lived. As noted above, territorialized meanings may be internalized, often as common sense dispositions toward social power and space. We learn, and usually conform to, and thereby ‘perform’ territoriality. Occasionally, though, we disregard, resist, or reject these ruling meanings. This is to say that ‘meaning’ is not free floating or untethered to lived ex perience. Neither is it simply communicated un equivocally. Like space and power, meaning is relational. It is meaning for subjects and agents. This may have impli cations for ‘meanings’ of a difference sort: meanings as affective significance. Here consider the meanings of ‘home’ or ‘homeland’, and associated feelings of belonging and attachment, or fear and aversion. These kinds of meanings may align with more formal propositional or prescriptive meanings (as ‘home’ may align with property, or ‘homeland’ with citizenship and sovereignty), but they may also be in tension with these formal propositional expressions. These kinds of ‘meanings’ and their con nections to space and power through territoriality are no less important to understanding how territory works. Digging still deeper beneath the apparent clarity of territory there are other (in some sense subtler) contri butions to the meaningfulness of territories that implicate space and power. We can gather these under the headings of ideology and discourse. For present purposes by ‘ideology’ is meant a more or less elaborate, internally coherent, shared set of beliefs, dispositions, images about power. Discourses can be thought of as conventional or institutionalized ways of thinking; the categories through which thinking (and doing and being) happens and which determine the limits, in any given context, of what can be thought or of what is acceptable thinking. Ideologies are represented through discourses. Ideologies tend to be justificatory, but (according to which among many

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theories of ideology one accepts) they need not be. What is important for present purposes is how ideologies can inform and condition territory and territoriality. Like wise, territorializing projects can give social–material expression to ideologies. One might say that territoriality is per se ideological insofar as any territory reflects ideological conceptions of space and power. It has proven useful to examine various territorial arrangements through the interpretive lens of ideology. A given ideology may be said to be hegemonic, or taken as common sense for nearly all participants in a social order – those who rule as well as those who do not. One example of this is ideologies of statism. In our era, claims about globalization notwithstanding, ‘the state’ and more specifically ‘the territorial state’ is such a taken for granted feature of the social world that questioning it or identifying the belief in it as ‘ideological’ is tanta mount to a request not to be taken seriously in most political discussions. In contrast, an ideology may be said to be dominant (but not hegemonic) insofar as a large number of people (or, at least a large number of the most powerful people!) take it to be common sense, even though it may be challenged, or resisted by a significant number of others. Relevant examples of this include ideologies of colonialism or racism that inform the crafting and maintenance of colonial and/or racial(izing) territorial structures. Likewise, territorially significant ideologies may be seen as insurgent or emergent. At one moment in time marginal or heretical, they may, over time, become more plausible or acceptable. Examples here include anti colonial, nationalist ideologies, and ideologies of racial separatism or desegregation. It may be useful to see these contending ideologies as giving expression to rival geographical or territorial imaginaries of how social worlds should be put together or how social space should be organized so that desirable worlds might result and undesirable worlds be avoided. These terri torial and territorializing ideologies are at once a kind of mapping, tools for making meaning, and tools for (re )making worlds. The meaning of ‘meaning’ in the context of territory, then, is much richer, more complex, and subtler than ‘No Trespassing’ or ‘Now Entering y ’ may suggest. Both the complexity (and the obscurity of this complexity) are important to grasp. The dynamic, intertwining, mutually conditioning relationships of power, space, and meaning (and, therefore, their connections to lived experience) are much more complicated than is commonly acknow ledged. This, again, is one of the central paradoxes of territory and territoriality. The apparent (and func tional?) simplicity and clarity of lines and spaces is belied by the complexity and potential ambiguity and in determinacy. Recognizing this is indispensable to understanding how territory actually operates in the world. Indeed, at least under conditions of modernity one

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of the most important forms that the politics of terri toriality takes is to be seen in efforts oriented toward (selective) interpretive restructuring. Rival projects often operate primarily – if not exclusively – at the register of meaning: propositions, rules, ideological commitments, and discourses, in order to effect the re signification of space. Through the operations of the territorial imagin ation spatialized meanings may be taken as self evident. Old meaning may be repudiated, new meanings re imagined, asserted, inscribed, and imposed. Spatialized power – understood relationally – is continually re configured both structurally and situationally. Temporalities Because territory is regarded primarily as a spatial phe nomenon, and because space (and geography) is com monly contrasted with time (and history) in social thought, territory may too readily be understood as relatively atemporal or static. Insofar as they implicate relatively enduring spatial structures that give order to elements of social flux, territories can easily be under stood as effectively fixing aspects of social order in space. This view is also facilitated by conventional cartographic representations. The preceding discussion suggests something different. Space, spatialities, and spatializa tions are now frequently seen as more dynamic. Territory as process; power as necessarily concerned with the un folding of events in time; the making and remaking of meaning; the increased prominence in theoretical writ ings of process verbs such as ‘territorialize’ and ‘de or re territorializing’ all suggest that temporality is an ir reducible dimension (or co participant) in the workings of territory and territoriality. Just as scale allows us to comprehend a multiplicity of interpenetrating spaces, so time can be parsed into time – frames of various inter related durations from the momentary to the deep historic. As a practical matter, there seems to be an inherent temporal dimension insofar as territory implicates mo bility or immobilization. It is often concerned with (controlling) access, entry, exclusion, expulsion, or con finement. Disjunctures in space (in/out; here/there) often cause disruptions in the smooth flow of experiential time. Vectors of motion often slow down or come to a halt at the edges of territories. We stop and knock, we show our passports, our passes, and tickets. We are moved into or out of spaces. While many territories are relatively en during and are marked by borders, fences, or doors that are fixed to the landscape, others are more fleeting and fluid. They emerge and dissipate. Their contours shift. Others may be described as rhythmic or characterized by periodic openings and closings over the course of a day or year. A special case may be that of spatially defined curfews by reference to which a territory may exist only

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during darkness or the duration of an emergency. One particularly dramatic example of such temporal terri tories can be seen in the Israeli policy of ‘closures’ in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Figures 6 and 7).

Figure 6 Boundary of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Source: www.fmep.org/y/checkpoint kalandia.html. Foundation for Middle East Peace.

Just as attention to scale allows one to examine the spatial ‘nestedness’ or embeddedness of territories, at tention to the range of durations allows one to examine the different temporalities that condition territories and territorial projects. Territorial configurations change over different spans of time. These changes may register pri marily in the domain of meaning, rules, and interpret ation. Here, the spaces remain relatively constant but the meanings and associated power relations change. Con sider, for example, the decades long projects of segre gation and desegregation, or the vicissitudes of immigration laws of different states, or long term chan ges in landlord–tenant relations. Other large scale transformations may entail the spatial reconfigurations of governance. Examples of this include the spatial expan sion of the United States during the nineteenth century, the consolidation of the European Union in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, and the dis integration of the Soviet Union. Or consider the local dynamics of subdivision, ‘development’, and suburban municipal incorporation and metropolitan fragmentation. Taking into account even larger spans of time, terri toriality as such is commonly said to have a history. If one subscribes to a naturalistic theory of human territoriality, then the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of it might be understood as temporally contiguous with primate forms and the spe cifics of human territoriality could be linked to theories of evolution. Without this naturalistic assumption it is possible to link transformations of human territorial practices to those large scale ‘stage’ transformations associated with history as such. Archeological and ethnographic evidence may be drawn on in support of explanatory claims about transformations in human

Figure 7 Checkpoint Kalandia the most notorious checkpoint between Israel and the occupied territories. Most traffic between Jerusalem and Ramallah has to go through here. Source: www.youthbuild.org/site/c.htIRI3PIKoG/b.14090.

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territorializing practices. The differences among, say, hunter–gatherer, nomadic, and sedentary social orders (or cultures), and the transformation of a given social order from one type to another may be suggestive of such an historical understanding. This kind of evidence also supports the broader claim that territoriality is an inte gral aspect of every and any social order. Depending upon how a given social order is organized (e.g., in terms of dominant mode of production, practices and insti tutions of governance, gender and social reproduction, technology and material culture, or conceptions of self hood), certain territorial expressions will be possible and more or less serviceable and others will be less likely. These differences are commonly conceptualized as ‘stages’, and these stages are conceptually organized around ideas of progress, development, or advancement. This understanding of time or history suggests that sedentary cultures engaged in agricultural production are more ‘advanced’ than either nomadic or hunting–gath ering peoples and that the modes of territorializing are also more advanced. Drawing on our earlier discussion of the importance of the geographical imagination, such thinking facilitates the belief that ‘modern’ forms and expressions of territory are the most advanced or, as it is sometimes put, ‘mature’. It is with respect to the problematic of modernity that territoriality is most commonly historicized. Modernity, as a frame of reference, historicizes and temporalizes territory and territoriality in at least two important senses. First, it posits a radical disjuncture within the whole of human history. As a frame of reference it pos itions most social orders not only as other than modern but as premodern. To invoke the premodern – or what is still often referred to as the primitive or the ancient – is to gather some thousands of ways of organizing human collective life under one rubric that emphasizes their imagined commonality, ignores the profound differences among them, and positions them ‘before’ the advent (or local arrival of ) modernity. Thus, as different as they may be in other respects, the modes of territorializing asso ciated with inhabitants of the Kalahari Desert, Lapp landers (Suomi) and eleventh century Pueblo peoples such as the Zuni or Hopi are all taken as instances of premodern territoriality. It follows that reconfiguration of these spatial arrangements to conform to the require ments of capitalism and modern statist forms of sover eignty constitutes ‘modernization’, and maturation or development. There is a common temporal narrative that describes and explains the local emergence and global diffusion of distinctively modern forms, expressions, and practices of territory and territoriality. It is necessarily the case that ‘premodern’ social formations (even those that continue to exist) change and that these changes are evinced in territorial reconfigurations: territorial systems of land

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tenure, settlement patterns, and household organization change over periods of time; more or less formally ter ritorialized state structures emerge, coalesce, and dis integrate; empires rise and fall. But the distinctiveness of modernity implicates temporality in a different sense. Modernity as such is defined in part by its allegedly novel modalities of change as these are understood in relation to ‘progress’ and ‘development’. As a frame of reference modernity is associated with continuous transformation and continuously intensifying and accelerating transfor mations in virtually all aspects of social life. These transformations are reflected in and effected by territory and territoriality. One can see them registered in the emergence and diffusion of the (modern) territorial state, including the colonial and postcolonial state; in ‘land policy’ and ‘indigenous policy’; in patterns of trans con tinental and trans national migrations; in urban form; and in the territorial aspects of rights. Until late in the twentieth century, ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’ were most commonly taken as self evident (and self evidently positive) facts and processes in Western (that is to say, modern) thought. While there were debates about the most appropriate path to mod ernity, modernization as such was rarely questioned. In the late twentieth century there arose an increased skepticism about modernity and about any of the ‘paths’ that might lead to it. In intellectual circles some of this criticism took the form of postmodernism understood as a suspension of generally dominant understandings about the West in itself and in ‘its’ relation to the rest of the world. But in whatever form, this skepticism put into problematic perspective ‘modern’ and ‘modernist’ understandings of territory and territoriality. There are three dimensions of this that warrant closer attention. First, under the impetus of the various processes asso ciated with globalization many have come to see the withering away of the modern territorial state. The as serted ‘erosion’ of sovereignty as a spatialized form of power and the attendant diminution of regulatory cap acity within and beyond territorial boundaries entails (seemingly by definition) the arrival of a de territor ialized world. Some observers celebrate this while others decry it. In either case distinctively modern forms of territoriality are seen as passing into oblivion. However, other observers criticize this de territorial thesis as sim ple minded. The argument here is that ‘the state’ – or at least some states and their associated capacities – may exist in new relationships with other forms of economic, cultural, and political power, but they (or some subset of developed states) are fully capable of maintaining meaningful sovereign and regulatory power within and beyond territorial boundaries. Moreover, even if the as serted de territorializing processes are in play, they only pertain to this specific expression of territoriality. While borders may no longer be understood as absolute

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barriers, the processes associated with globalization also entail re territorializations at other scales and in other contexts. Second, the related emergence and increasing sig nificance of the internet and cyberspace is also seen as a harbinger of the demise of modern territoriality. The disassociation of actions and events from ‘real’ spaces and places is imagined as entailing the erosion of the terri torial conditions of not only sovereignty but privacy as well. While it is incontestable that the cyber revolution has had profound consequences for territorial practices, the extent to which this signals the passing of the dis tinctively modern is by no means obvious. Third, ‘postmodern’ modes of social analysis and criticism more explicitly question the seemingly timeless verities of modernism’s self understandings. They are also productively applicable to assessments of global ization and the cyber revolution. This kind of analysis has been especially prevalent in the (Anglo American) spa tial disciplines of human geography, international re lations and architecture, as well as in anthropological and sociological examinations of territory and territoriality. Some of the fruits of these endeavors have been men tioned throughout this article, for example, in the shift in assumptions from territory understood as clear and simple to increasingly ambiguous and complex; the understanding of territory as ‘process’ and not fixed container; the novel emphasis on the construction or production of scale; and the invigorated attention to in terpretation. These are all, in part, the results of a turn away from modernist assumptions about space. Not only would these newer assumptions have been disputed by earlier scholars, they would have been quite unintelli gible. But note: some of these claims seem to be about the world of territory and territoriality while others seem to be more about the concepts or interpretive conventions through which scholars describe and explain that world. These are not identical. But neither are they unrelated. The novel practices and processes associated with ‘globalization’, the cyber revolution and postmodernist modes of analysis are all instances of and ingredients in novel ways of ‘doing’ territory and territoriality. They all implicate the intricate mutual involvement of time in the workings of territoriality and the interplay of space, power, and ‘meaning’ that this entails.

Finally, just as many territorial projects are informed by (sometimes competing) elements of a spatial or geo graphical imaginary, these may be inseparable from elements of (sometimes competing) historical narratives that project the significance and meaning of time or history onto spaces of power in order to justify the de ployment or resistance of power in concrete situations. These may be ‘backward looking’ as is frequently the case with nationalist discourses and ideologies. But they may also be forward looking, asserting the inevitability of a sociospatial outcome. Examples of this are the American ideology of Manifest Destiny and, some suggest, the contemporary discourse of globalization. See also: Critical Geopolitics; Geopolitics and Religion; Ideology; Place, Politics of; Political Boundaries; Political Geography; Sovereignty; State; State Theory.

Further Reading Agnew, J. and Corbridge, S. (1995). Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy. London: Routledge. Allen, J. (2003). Lost Geographies of Power. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Brenner, N. (1999). Beyond state centrism? Space, territoriality, and geographical scale in globalization studies. Theory and Society 28, 39 78. Cox, K. (2002). Political Geography: Territory, State and Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Delaney, D. (2005). Territory: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Gregory, D. (1994). Geographical Imaginations. Waldon, MA: Blackwell. Newman, D. (2003). Boundaries. In Agnew, J., Mitchell, K. & O´ Tuathail, G. (eds.) A Companion to Political Geography, pp 123 137. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Paasi, A. (2003). Territory. In Agnew, J., Mitchell, K. & O´ Tuathail, G. (eds.) A Companion to Political Geography, pp 109 122. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Sack, R. (1985). Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sassen, S. (2006). Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assembladges. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shapiro, M. and Alker, H. (eds.) (1996). Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Soja, E. (1985). The spatiality of social life: Towards a transformative retheorization. In Gregory, D. & Urry, J. (eds.) Social Relations and Spatial Structures, pp 91 127. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Storey, D. (2001). Territory: The Claiming of Space. Harlow: Pearson Education. Taylor, P. (1995). Beyond containers: Internationality, interstateness, interterritoriality. Progress in Human Geography 19, 1 15. Walker, R. (1993). Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Terrorism D. Mustafa, King’s College London, London, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Critical Geopolitics It is a rejection of the traditional geopolitics whereby politics are deemed to be influenced by physical geography of places. Instead, critical geopolitics critiques conceptions of places and spaces produced by those in power to facilitate practice of politics and statecraft. Discourse A regulated system of knowledge to which authority is ascribed to the extent that it becomes the arbiter of truth within a certain context. A discourse in this sense does not just produce knowledge but also the reality that it is describing. Place A geographical space in which social relations and identities are constituted. Place is formed when geographical space intersects with human experience, memory, and social relations. Political Ecology An intellectual perspective within human geography that has focused on how environmental quality and resource use is influenced and changed by political economic factors. Post-Structuralism An intellectual perspective that rejects the dualistic conception of reality, for example, between nature and culture, mind and body, etc. Instead the perspective posits that what is relevant is reality that is created by humans through language. Reality, in other words, cannot be separated from the language used to describe it. Simulacrum A representation or image of something.

Introduction In the first decade of the twenty first century, few terms have come to dominate the public and policy discourse as terrorism. This popular and policy attention to terrorism – bordering on obsession – is primarily driven by the events of 11 September 2001 when a group of hijackers crashed commercial airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon building in Washington, DC. Although the events of 11 September 2001 were the most dramatic, the term had been gaining a higher profile among the Western policy elites with reference to the violence in the Middle East, in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Despite its increasing importance to policy, the phenomena of terrorism had received relatively scant attention within the discipline of geography until the events of 11

September 2001, and the ongoing ‘war on terror’ in its aftermath. Geographers’ pre and post 9/11 engagement with the issue of terrorism has been along three major themes: clarifying the contested meaning and impli cations of the labels, ‘terror’, ‘terrorist’, and ‘terrorism’; unpacking the dominant discourses on terrorism and thereby clarifying the issue of the root causes of terror ism; and lastly through an engagement with the spatiality of terrorism linking it to wider concerns with war, vio lence, and state oppression. This article discusses the geography of terrorism with reference to these three thematic concerns.

What and Who of Terror, Terrorist, and Terrorism Terrorism does not have a universally accepted definition. The term entered the Western popular and scholarly lexicon with reference to the excesses of the Jacobin re gime in the aftermath of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century – though some have used the term to refer to secret societies of assassins in first century Palestine and eleventh century Persia. In fact, through most of the early nineteenth century the term was mostly used with reference to state violence. In mainland Europe and Russia in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the terms terror and terrorism were mostly applied to substate left wing anarchist and revo lutionary movements. The concept had a brief realign ment with the state during the Fascist/Nazi era in Germany and Italy, but it reverted back to being under stood as a substate phenomenon during the second half of the twentieth century. Despite concern on part of many for lack of an ac ceptable definition of terrorism, geographers have not been very attentive to the definitional issues surrounding terrorism. This is partially because they have tended to approach it as a discourse rather than an absolute con ceptual category to be defined, and secondly because of their concern with a critical engagement with the dom inant understanding of the concept and its implications. Even beyond the discipline of geography, the exact def initions of terrorism are contested. Webster’s dictionary defines terrorism as ‘‘the act of terrorizing; use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate, and subjugate, esp. such use as a political weapon or policy.’’ Other major or ganizations such as the US Federal Bureau of Investi gation (FBI) and the US State Department define terrorism as follows:

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Terrorism is the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate and coerce govern ment, the civilian population or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives. (Federal Bureau of Investigation) Premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by sub national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience. (US Department of State 2000)

Predictably, the dictionary definition is broad enough to include almost all types of violence because it does induce fear in the victims of violence. The FBI and State Department definitions, because of the nature of the organizations, also predictably emphasize the legal and state centric perspectives respectively. Within the dis cipline of geography, many have defined terrorism as violence that could be perpetrated by state, nonstate, as well as criminal elements to instill fear. Following is a more specifically geographical definition of terrorism: Terrorism is an act of violence, different from other acts of violence, e.g., genocide, war, war crimes, political as sassinations etc. in that it is (1) a spectacle directed towards a wider audience than the immediate victims, (2) directed towards place destruction and/or (3) place alienation. (Daanish Mustafa)

Even though these other types of violence may also have a spectacular aspect to them, the difference between these types of violence and terrorism is twofold. First, in say an assassination, the prime motivation is to kill the target, with accompanying possible publicity as a sec ondary objective. The person in an assassination is killed not because of the message it sends but because of the attributes of the person, and what they were doing or had done. Second, the definition links terrorism to place an nihilation/alienation. Without the latter, it is argued that the act will not qualify as terrorism. Besides, there is no hierarchy implied in the label terrorism. Genocide, or war crimes or other acts of violence are at times just as morally reprehensible as terrorism, if not more. The definition stresses the theatrical aspects of ter rorist violence and goes on to draw attention to the spatial focus of the perpetrators of terrorism, both state and nonstate. The definitional exercise on terrorism is concerned with delimiting the scope of terrorism, that is, all violence is not terrorism, and the need to distinguish it from other types of violence, for example, genocide, assassinations, war crimes, etc. for which there are es tablished legal definitions. In talking about place de struction and place alienation, the above definition draws upon earlier work by geographers who draw attention to the traumatic psychological impact of destruction of places from aerial bombing and environmental extremes

on war and disaster victims. This attention to the spati ality of the terrorism phenomena has been a prominent theme in the geographical literature on terrorism.

Spatiality of Terror: Globalization, Scale, and State Violence Geographers have been concerned with the activity, policy, and perceptual spaces of terror which form the context for understanding where the terrorists operate, the government policies that impact the patterns of ter rorism, and the perceptions of spaces that make them iconic or mundane places in the minds of the terror victims and the terrorists. The spatiality of terror and social violence has been a subject of research in many terrorism hot spots, from Northern Ireland to Israel to the global terrorist network of Al Qaeda. In the case of Northern Ireland, terrorists have targeted everyday spaces of pubs, public transpor tation, dance halls, etc., to engender a climate of fear and terror. The spatial variation in terrorist targets closely matches the spatiality of underlying sociocultural and political differences in the Irish society whereby religious groups were systematically excluded from everyday spaces. Similar theme of targeting of mundane spaces by Palestinian suicide bombers is also evident in case of Israel. Mundane spaces of bus stops, cafes, and restaur ants formed the bulk of suicide bombings targets, to the almost complete exclusion of iconic buildings and spaces of Israeli society. Here again the spatiality of Israeli oc cupation that denies the Palestinians access to everyday spaces of markets, cafes, roads, and means of mobility and in fact engenders those spaces with the terror of being searched, detained, and even shot, seems to match the Palestinian suicide bombers’ target selection in Israel proper. Al Qaeda leadership on the other hand has different geographical concerns and ambitions that lead it to target a different class of spaces from the Palestinian suicide bombers and the Irish Republican Army. Al Qaeda’s geographical concerns are hierarchical and based prin cipally on perceptions of sacred spaces, for example, the holy places of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. Con sequently, Al Qaeda’s targeting bias is also toward what it perceives as icons of Western civilization, for example, the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, US naval vessels, and embassies. Policies directed toward defending everything and anything from water purification plants to harbors to television stations from terrorist attacks are clearly wasteful, misguided, and likely to be ineffective in the face of evidence regarding the targeting biases of dif ferent terrorist groups. Most international terrorists of the Al Qaeda variety seemingly have a very good grasp

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of the symbolic values of different spaces for Western society and they target them accordingly. Consequently, a values vulnerability nexus as suggested by hazards geographer Ken Mitchell is likely to be more effective in anticipating terrorist violence, where a reflection on values attached to spaces by a society, and the spatial imaginations of the terrorists is matched with the likely vulnerability of those spaces to violence. Much of this research lends credence to the geographical definition of terrorism suggested above whereby the geography of perceived injustice, as well as the terrorists’ geographical imaginations bear upon target selection, in addition to the need for a spectacle for furtherance of their cause. Unlike the government sponsored research, geo graphical research on terrorism has not limited itself to subnational perpetrators of terrorism. In fact, nation state scale terror and its spatiality has been a prominent re search theme within geography. The state centric scale of General Agusto Pinochet’s geographical ruminations for example was integral to his highly successful coercive remaking or destruction of places in Chile under his dictatorship. The complex of the Chilean prison system, torture chambers, and penal colonies as well as the urban streets and plazas under curfew and military guard cre ated and maintained very well known geographies of the spaces of terror. All of that terror was justified in the name of the nation state and the supreme national interest. The geography of state terror is not gender neutral or race blind either, for example, in case of the Guatemalan military’s excesses against Mayan women, there were very specific racialized and gendered geographies of violence. In case of Guatemala, as in other cases of state terror, persons became victims of state violence by virtue of where they were and their family and social connections, rather than what they were doing or had done. Another common denominator of state terror is its rather limited spectacle only at the nation state or even local scale. The Israeli violence against the Palestinian population instilling an atmosphere of terror in the Palestinian population is meant to be a spectacle only for the Palestinian population and not for the world at large, while the Palestinian suicide bombings against Israel are meant as a spectacle for a global audience. This theme of only a national level theater of state violence is found in most instances of state terror, for example, Pinochet’s Chile, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Russia’s war in Chechnya, and so on. Nation states are not necessarily the direct perpet rators of terror, their policies coupled with wider geo political contexts and foreign policy compulsions can spawn types of social capital and civil society actors which are decidedly antisocial and uncivil by virtue of their extremist violent agendas. The spatiality of Pakis tan’s role in the Afghan war, for example, in the 1980s contributed heavily to the development of violent

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religious movements within the country, which were subsequently to go global in their operations. It is also not the case that violent movements once spawned by state policies have the social sphere to themselves in the so ciety. Democratic and inclusive forms of social capital and civil society can also form in opposition to state and nonstate violence with very specific geographies of op eration. Institutional analyses of terrorist related as well as democratic and peaceful civil society organizations using a social capital lens is an under explored theme within geography, but a theme that is likely to pay rich dividends in terms of analytical insights. The spatiality of terror and terrorism is not just lim ited to the traditional enclosed territorial spaces at the nation state or subnation state scales. There has been considerable unease with the geopolitics of conceptual izing, defending, and targeting terrorism, terror targets, and terrorists, respectively, in terms of countries and places. Network spatiality of terror networks like Al Qaeda and their fluid mutable sense of place and po tential targets has been a challenge for governments and counterterrorism experts worldwide. The implications of a move away from the Cartesian space of latitudes/lon gitudes, toward a network based spatiality and spatial imagination have profound implications for counter terrorism. Instead of a focus on locations and countries harboring terrorists, from a network perspective, the emphasis in counterterrorism will have to be on con ditions and social relations that foster terrorism, therefore making intelligence about networks, not just about lo cations and specific people but a sociospatial inquiry. A sociospatial inquiry of the type called for above, for example, will perhaps go a long way toward showing that poverty and the poor of the world, far from being the cause of terrorism, are, in fact, its most numerous victims. While the West, quite legitimately, asks for sympathy from the rest of the world when it becomes the victim of terror, it has little sympathy to offer to the millions of the poor of the world who have been victims of state and nonstate terrorism for much longer and much more in tensely. The sociospatial inquiry would also further show that international terrorism is, in fact, a deeply middle class phenomenon carried out by professionals who in today’s world of strong border controls against the poor crossing into the rich countries have the wherewithal to secure visas to the West. Last but not the least, empathy for the daily violation of the life spaces of poor may just help form alliances with a promise for a lasting peace.

Unpacking the Discourses of Terrorism In the aftermath of the events of 9/11, there was a sense of urgency within the scholarly community in general, including geographers about how to explain the events,

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and to produce research that could contribute toward preventing such events from happening in the future. Potential contributions of geographers range from dis course analyses, to critical geopolitics to vulnerability analyses to GIS and remote sensing based techniques. In fact, much of the attraction of geography as a useful discipline in the sphere of counterterrorism has been on account of its strong spatial analysis techniques. Human geographers on the other hand have preferred to adopt a more critical approach. Some of the prominent research on human geographical themes in a critical mode with regard to terrorism include: (1) the importance of geo historical context and US role as the prime hegemonic power in understanding the role of contemporary ter rorism; (2) the spatiality of terrorist networks (3) the negative outcome of the so called ‘war on terrorism’; and (4) unpacking the varied discourses of terrorism and counterterrorism. Critical geopolitics has been the most commonly used analytical lens to unpack the discourses of terrorism and counterterrorism. First, the discursive engagement with terrorism from a critical geopolitical perspective has challenged the geographical specifications of American power by the media and the policy elite, definition of the spatiality of its enemies, and war as an appropriate re sponse to the terrorist acts of 11 September 2001. Second, the critical geopolitics has focused on how the official rhetoric about terrorism has emphasized the ‘evil’ char acter of the ‘Other’ thereby legitimizing the unjust and inhumane state responses in the name of justice and humanity. Finally, the critical geopolitical perspective has drawn attention to the links between terrorism and globalization. Globalization is the main structure, through which geographies of inclusion and exclusion are determined – the prime modernity or hegemonic power of the US can be a cause of considerable resentment on part of those who are excluded or perceive to be threa tened by globalization. The need is for an empathetic attitude toward those who are excluded in order to understand their particularities in the face of the uni versalizing tendencies of globalization. Analyses of terrorism discourses have not been lim ited to the critical geopolitics perspective. Historical re flexivity, postcolonial theory, political ecology, and even post structuralist and postmodern perspectives have also been applied to unpack the hegemonic discourses on terrorism. An immediate response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and its aftermath was a reflection on the historical parallels to the events. David Alexander drew a com parison between the cataclysmic impact of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the 11 September attacks on two very cosmopolitan and commercial hubs of their times. He further drew a parallel between the extreme reaction of the inquisition in response to the earthquake and the sheer futility of that reaction and the present day ‘war on

terrorism’. In both cases he argued that the events sig nified the apparent victory of chaos over order, but in the long run the philosophical and cultural reflections in stigated by the Lisbon earthquake led to beneficial cul tural and material contributions to the European society. The question of whether similar emancipatory develop ments could be expected to emerge out of the violence of the ‘war on terror’ remains an open question and some thing of a faint hope for many. The postcolonial perspective, in the context of ter rorism in the Middle East has shown that Islamic identity is as unstable as a European, US, or Israeli identity and all of them are subject to (at times theologically driven) attempts at consolidating political authority and power. Construction of idealized geographies of the Middle East – on part of the West and the Israeli government, or of the West on part of the Palestinian suicide bombers or Al Qaeda – are attempts at creating a demonized Other. The politics of the demonic other are deeply implicated in perpetuating the cycles of violence characterizing the region’s social landscape. Political ecologists have also contributed to the ana lyses of terrorism and social violence. Although some political ecological work on violence has been missing the terrorism label, its insights have nevertheless been pertinent. In terms of resource wars over precious metals and stones, mostly in Africa, the political ecologists have argued that the perceived criminal character of rebel movements and corrupt governments’ inclusion in the global commodity market responds to an exclusionary form of globalization. In response to terrorism, the Western democracies have been metaphorically and literally treating it as a disease whose outbreak must be isolated, controlled, and finally eliminated. But political ecological analyses have pointed out that terrorism unlike a biological process is innately human in its causes and consequences. Terror ism and the spaces vulnerable to it are humanly con structed with the litany of emotions, symbolism, ideas, and values bound up with those spaces. Consequently, bottom up human participation and input in building resilience against terrorist acts would be key to terrorism response. Similarly, human centered research on under standing terrorism’s cause and potential will provide the best guides for action. The post structuralist inspired research on terrorism has problematized the surveillance ethos of the ‘war on terror’ as well as the complicity of the Western media in the same. Electronic borders are becoming a ubiquitous frontier in the war on terror. These electronic borders purport to distinguish between legitimate mobilities, for example, leisure and business from illegitimate mobilities such as terrorism and illegal immigration. The efficacy of the electronic borders is predicated upon electronic identities as a source of prediction and prevention. The

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Figure 1 A signboard of an Islamist student organization on the campus of the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan. Photograph by James L. Wescoat Jr.

electronic borders are particularly disturbing because they hand over the traditionally state role of surveillance to private corporations. But the electronic surveillance and borders are not exactly watertight because they are based upon false assumptions about airtight boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate boundaries and correspondence between electronic and real human identities. Post structuralist analyses have shown that it is not that the so called free Western media has been appro priated by the state in the war on terror but rather that the ‘form’ of the media necessarily leads it to distort the nature of reality itself. Electronic media coheres around a simulacrum, where there is no longer the image of the event but rather the event of an image. Human com munication is not just verbal or written; it is the totality of body language, environment, facial expressions, feel ings, etc. Electronic media while pretending to facilitate communication by its very nature cannot capture the totality of human communication. Consequently what seems like human communication mediated through electronic mediums such as the Internet, television, radio, etc., is actually ‘mediatized’ communication. In this me diatized communication, the referent events and actors become subordinated to their media representations. Since in a post structuralist sense the self is constituted through a web of communication, the mediatized

communication about terror in fact, not just defines the self (as Western, democratic, enlightened, humane) but also the Other (as violent, fanatic, terrorist). The social interaction then in this world becomes really a clash of fundamentalisms (Figure 1) in a philosophical sense, that is, two antagonistic beliefs in unmediated static reality violently trying to subdue each other. One may ask why should there not be a war of/on terror in a world like this.

Conclusion Geography like any other social science has to engage with the issues of the day and engage in research that not only helps elucidate reality but also provides guides for thoughtful action. Geographical engagement with the phenomena of terrorism has been varied conceptually and topically. Beyond the broader categories of problem definition, spatiality, and discourse analyses, geographers have used multiple intellectual perspectives, including critical geopolitics, political ecology, historical parallels, and post structuralism toward the study of terrorism. Topically, geographical research has dealt with obvious issues such as the legitimacy, efficacy, and morality of the war on terror, the spatiality of terrorism, terror, terrorists and terror victims, state terror versus substate actor

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terrorism, globalization, resource induced wars, elec tronic borders, and the role of the media. One consistent theme in the geographical research on terrorism has been confusion at the contradiction between the modernist pretensions of the West with its belief in reason, Enlightenment and search for explanation and the complete refusal of the contemporary policy elites to en gage in the type of reasoned explanation for terrorism. The almost teleological construction of terror and ter rorists as evil and motivated by evil has been deemed to be a root cause, not just of the war on terror but also of the ongoing terrorist threat. Violent movements and terrorists are likely to be around for some time. Victory in the war on terror in terms of physical elimination or apprehension of ter rorists is unlikely, if not impossible. The closest re quirements for reducing and perhaps even eliminating terrorism would be eliminating the perceptual distortions about the other; recognition of the spatiality of injustice – real and perceived – that spawns violent responses; and reflexivity about state policies that create spaces of terror, and empathy for the victims of that terror. Attention to the processes producing spaces of justice and injustice, spatial imaginaries, and cultural fundamentalisms may yet be the greatest contribution of human geography to not just counter terrorism but a just and peaceful world. See also: Critical Geopolitics; Discourse; Political Ecology.

Further Reading Agnew, J. A. (2001). Not the wretched of the Earth: Osama bin Laden and the ‘‘clash of civilizations’’. The Arab World Geographer 4(2), 85 88. Alexander, D. (2002). Nature’s impartiality, man’s inhumanity: Reflections on terrorism and world crisis in a context of historical disaster. Disasters 26(1), 1 9.

Amoore, L. (2006). Biometric borders: Governing mobilities in the war on terror. Political Geography 25, 336 351. Coleman, M. (2003). The naming of ‘terrorism’ and evil ‘outlaws’: Geopolitical place making after 11 September. Geopolitics 8(3), 87 104. Cutter, S. L., Richardson, D. B. and Wilanks, T. J. (eds.) (2003). The Geographical Dimensions of Terrorism. New York, NY: Routledge. Dalby, S. (2003). Calling 911: Geopolitics, security and America’s new war. Geopolitics 8(3), 61 86. Ettlinger, N. and Bosco, F. (2004). Thinking through networks and their spatiality: A critique of the US (public) war on terrorism and its geographic discourse. Antipode 36(2), 249 271. Flint, C. (2003). Political geography II: Terrorism, modernity, governance and governmentality. Progress in Human Geography 27(1), 97 106. Flint, C. (2003). Terrorism and counterterrorism: Geographic research questions and agendas. Professional Geographer 55(2), 161 169. Hanlon, C. N. and Shankar, F. (2000). Gendered spaces of terror and assault: The testimonio of REMHI and the commission for historical clarification in Guatemala. Gender, Place and Culture 7(3), 265 286. Hewitt, K. (2001). Between Pinochet and Kropotkin: State terror, human rights and the geographers. The Canadian Geographer 45(3), 338 355. Hobbs, H. J. (2005). The geographical dimensions of Al Qa’ida rhetoric. The Geographical Review 95(3), 301 327. Jones, S. H. and Clarke, D. B. (2006). Waging terror: The geopolitics of the real. Political Geography 25, 298 314. Kliot, N. and Charney, I. (2006). The geography of suicide terrorism in Israel. GeoJournal 66, 353 373. Le Billon, P. (2001). The political ecology of war: Natural resources and armed conflict. Political Geography 20, 561 584. Mitchell, J. K. (1979). Social violence in Northern Ireland. Geographical Review 69(2), 179 200. Mustafa, D. (2005). (Anti)social capital in the production of an (un)civil society in Pakistan. Geographical Review 95(3), 328 347. Mustafa, D. (2005). The terrible geographicalness of terrorism: Reflections of a hazards geographer. Antipode 37(1), 72 92. Sidaway, J. D. (1994). Geopolitics, geography, and ‘terrorism’ in the Middle East. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12, 357 372.

Relevant Websites http://denver.fbi.gov Counterterrorism, Denver Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). http:///www.state.gov Patterns of Global Terrorism, U.S. Department of State.

Text and Textuality J. M. Smith, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Deconstruction A hermeneutic that purports to show that nothing stands behind texts – no author, no referents – and that all presence is illusory. Hermeneutic Principles and presumptions brought to the act of reading or interpretation that complete or settle the meaning of an indeterminate text. Interpretive Community A social group that shares common interests and hermeneutic practices, and so produces a characteristic reading of a text in the act of reading. Intertextuality A network of mutual reference between texts, and between texts and the linguistic and metaphysical systems they rely on. May be seen as the sum of all referents, but as simulating reference to entities outside the text. Scholia Marginal commentary typographically segregated from a text. Text Formerly a writing specimen deemed authoritative; now frequently any coherent signifying system or configuration of signs. Textual Indeterminacy The proposition that the meaning conveyed in any text is incomplete, and is only completed, in one of may possible ways, in the act of reading through interaction with the interests and hermeneutic practices of an interpretive community. Textuality Formerly a principle of literal interpretation; now to be a coherent system of signs or to possess the qualities of a text.

Introduction Geographers began to make frequent use of the concepts of text and textuality in the 1980s, as part of the wide spread hermeneutic, interpretive, or cultural turn then underway in all of the social sciences. In geography, as elsewhere, the social scientists who took this turn were a motley collection of humanists, Marxists, feminists, and postmodernists who shared little beside an aversion to positivist social science and an intuition that a more satisfying human geography could be fashioned after the likeness of the humanities. Geographers who took this turn wished to practice geography as a hermeneutic discipline in the manner of literary critics, not as a positivist science in the manner of physicists or biologists. The appeal of the literary critic as a role model was hardly the same for every geographer drawn in this

direction, but for most it lay in the geographers’ per ception of the literary critic as a scholar who responded to meaning, changed meaning, produced meaning. Al though a scientist may study meaning, explain how it is generated and what social function it fulfills, he should not be himself moved by those meanings or motivated to produce them. As Max Weber famously put it, the sci entist is disenchanted. His concern is to explain the nu minous power of language and ritual, not to fall under their spell or to take them up as instruments of social manipulation. For geography to be practiced as a hermeneutic dis cipline with mental habits and scholarly practices like those of literary criticism, the concept of the text would have to move to the center of geographic thought. A her meneutic is, after all, an interpretive strategy or way of reading a text, and literary criticism criticizes literature. The concept of the text was, moreover, assured of a central place in the thought of anyone concerned with meaning by the fact that, just before geographers made the hermeneutic turn, a revolution in literary criticism had produced and promulgated a new theory of text that made the word text applicable to many things that were not literary works or verbal artifacts, and that also ap peared to have in it power to change the world. This new theory posited what might be called the textuality of human experience – its pervasive text like quality – and it gave geographers who took the her meneutic turn an alternative to positivist science that was, nevertheless, an alternative reassuringly similar to science in its universal pretensions, abstraction, seeming rigor, and promise of instrumental power. Before pro ceeding any further into this new theory of text and textuality, we must, however, review the traditional concept of the text and its relevance for geography.

Text as Authoritative Edition Historically and in vernacular usage, text is written words, and a text is a discrete unit of written words such as a book, poem, or letter. Textual scholarship is the study of this sort of text as a verbal artifact. It is not only concerned with the meaning encoded in the text, but also with problems such as assigning the probable date of composition, attributing authorship, and identifying and excising corruptions, such as errors unwittingly introduced by typesetters and copyists and emendations intentionally inserted by redactors and commentators. The original purpose of textual scholarship was to

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produce authoritative editions of important verbal artifacts, editions that textual scholars believed most perfectly embodied the final intention of the person or community that wrote it. This sort of textual schol arship does not attempt to stop controversy over the proper interpretation of the words, only over the words themselves. Biblical scholarship is the prototype of all Western textual scholarship. Given that the Bible was generally believed to be inspired, authoritative, canonical, and the word of God, it is hardly surprising that serious efforts were made to recover and then preserve the words of scripture in their original form. The character of text and the basic function of textual scholarship can be seen by briefly considering one book of the Bible, the Gospel according to Mark. Textual scholarship suggests that the story told in Mark (and the other gospels) began as an oral tradition in the early Christian community. This oral tradition combined eyewitness accounts of the words and acts of Jesus with commentary added when the com munity recursively interpreted these words and acts in light of the crucifixion and resurrection. So long as this remained an oral tradition, this description and com mentary was an ‘open text’ subject to emendation and deletion. When it was written down sometime around AD 64, however, the text was closed and the words were more or less fixed for all time. Commentary did not stop when the words were fixed, however. It moved to the margin of the page, as scholia and footnotes, to the front or back of the book, as preface or endnotes, or into separate texts such as homilies and commentaries. This may be the defining character of a text understood as an authoritative edition: the separation and subsequent typographic segregation of the original, edited, and now closed text (normally placed at the center of the page or volume) from subsequent com mentary on that text (pushed to the margins, ends, or outside the covers). Separation and segregation mark the two basic functions of textual criticism: editing, which judges which available version is the best expression of authorial intention, and annotation, which judges which interpretation of this intention is the best understanding of authorial intention. Annotators and commentators who perform this sec ond function make the meaning of a text accessible. Their work has three basic aspects. The first is proposing the hermeneutic, interpretive strategy, or way of reading appropriate to the work at hand. In the case of early Biblical commentators, this came down to urging literal or allegorical readings, although in time Biblical her meneutics multiplied to include typologically, anagogi cally, and moral readings. The second aspect is exegesis of cryptic, difficult, or recalcitrant passages intelligible only to a reader skilled in the hermeneutic. The third aspect, which becomes important as the closed text ages,

is historical explanation of the increasingly alien cir cumstances of the author and intended audience. Beginning in the Renaissance, an ever growing num ber of texts were thought to deserve textual treatment. Scholars edited authoritative editions of classical authors and resumed the work of classical annotators. By the nineteenth century, scholars produced authoritative edi tions of, and copious commentaries on, works by living authors. It must be noted that the several functions of textual criticism assume or loose importance when tex tual scholarship shifts its attention from ancient to modern texts. The editorial function does not disappear, as there remain questions of which draft or edition to accept as the best expression of authorial intention, as well as questions about the degree to which the text expresses intentions of editors and collaborators rather than the author, but it ceases to be an exacting philo logical exercise. Annotation and commentary at the same time become largely a matter of proposing the appro priate hermeneutic and exegesis of cryptic passages, for the circumstances and language of the author are, when the author is modern, very often the circumstances and language of his audience. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that literary criticism in the twentieth century became very largely a matter of proposing alternative readings of cryptic texts. We may suppose that if the critic of modern literature is to be employed, it will have to be at interpretation of cryptic material, for the works of modern authors are seldom badly corrupted or rendered inaccessible by archaism. At the same time, modern authors who wish to attract critical attention will have to write inaccessible works that give critics room to exhibit interpretive virtuosity. This is not the whole story, but it goes some way toward explaining the difficulty of much modern literature, and why twentieth century literary criticism, which geog raphers making the hermeneutic turn took as their model, was almost entirely a hermeneutic enterprise. Before describing the character of this hermeneutic enterprise, we should note some examples of authori tative editions in geography. Richard Hakluyt, who be came the first academic English geographer when he was appointed to a post at Oxford in 1617, was an editor of what might well be called an authoritative edition. Hakluyt’s Voyages, released in three volumes between 1598 and 1600, collected accounts written by European mariners. Few geographers since have taken on this editorial task, a notable instance being the collection of ancient, medieval, and early modern geographic texts edited by George Kish in 1978. Geographers have more often engaged with texts as commentators, although here, again, the tradition is weak because the field acknowledges no great and indispens able work from the hand of a past geographer. Nothing in the geographical literature is thought to possess the

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enduring value that the other social sciences grant to works by scholars like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber. It is telling that what may be the most admired commentary by a geographer, David Harvey’s Limits to Capital, elucidates a text by the political economist Karl Marx. Because geographic literature is largely modeled on the natural sciences, where books are rare and the half life or articles is short, and because the aim of the academic geographical has so frequently changed, geographers have limited experience with text in the sense of authoritative edition.

Textuality Until about 1970, textuality was a rather arcane legal term denoting a principle to be followed when inter preting constitutions, laws, and treaties. Following the principle of textuality, such documents were to be in terpreted almost exclusively on the basis of the actual words in which they were written. This principle of textuality was opposed to the principle of contextuality, or the teleological approach, which maintained that ju dicial interpretation of legal documents should attempt to recover and follow the intentions of the parties who wrote the constitution, law, or treaty. An electronic search of academic papers shows that, beginning in 1970, the word textuality became increas ingly, and in time overwhelmingly, a term of academic jargon concentrated in literary criticism but present throughout the humanities and social sciences. The term climbed to a peak of popularity in 1994, and thereafter fell into a notable but by no means terminal slump. In this literary usage the word textuality has several rival definitions, all of which come down to possessing the properties of a text. The popularity of the term textuality was a direct consequence of a radical change in what academics meant by the word text. Carried out under the heading of post structualism, this change had two parts. The first was that ‘text’ no longer denoted only verbal artifacts, but now denoted any system of signs possessed of textuality. Thus it became possible to speak of a building, a dream, a social situation, a landscape, or anything else not utterly meaningless as a text. Indeed, because systems of signs referenced one another in a vast ‘intertextual’ network, which embraced the conceptual apparatus of language and metaphysics, as well as par ticular verbal and nonverbal works, the entire world appeared possessed of textuality, and one could describe world of human experience as a text. The second part of the change was a presumption of textual indeterminacy. The meaning of a text was no longer thought to have completely resided in the author’s intentions, or to completely reside in the words on the page or the signs in the system. The meaning, indeed for

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some the text itself, was now thought to be produced by a relationship between a system of signs and an inter pretive community. Post structural meaning was not conveyed from author to reader by the written word (or other sign system); it was produced in the act of reading or interpretation that occurred when certain hermeneutic presumptions and practices were brought to bear on a particular sign system. Semiotic Anthropology and Humanistic Geography The expanded definition of text as any system of signs had immediate appeal for anthropologists who followed Max Weber in the belief that humans desire meaning above all else, and who began to speak of rituals, ordinary behavior, and even the whole of culture as a text. The most influential and eloquent proponent of this semiotic approach was Clifford Geertz, but he was part of a broad consensus that spread beyond anthropology into fields like geography. This consensus maintained that culture is essentially expressive, so that the behavior of any culture should be understood, not as a functional adaptation to the environment, but as an expression of the conscious ness and subjective experience of persons in that culture. Culture is not a tool, as functionalists had argued, but a collective work of art that externalizes the unique sens ibility of the group, much as a poem externalizes the sensibility of the poet. Perhaps the most famous example of this interpretive approach is Clifford Geertz’s essay, Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight (1972), which ar gues that the popular but, to the casual eye, mundane cockfight is, for the Balinese, ‘‘a Balinese reading of Balinese experience.’’ Geertz explains this reading as a subtle meditation on the ambivalent feelings toward rage and the fear of rage that lie at the heart of Balinese sensibility. Externalizing these emotions in the cockfight serves to communicate this sensibility to young Balinese, who must be socialized to the mores of the group, and as a means of catharsis for adults already socialized to the Balinese style of feeling. Thus culture is, in this semiotic account, very largely a matter of edification, instructing youth in the sensibility (or hermeneutic) that is the culture, and permitting adults to reflect on this under standing. Much the same approach was taken in geog raphy by writers like J. B. Jackson, Pierce Lewis, and Wilbur Zelinsky who spoke of ‘‘reading the landscape.’’ In this work, best exemplified in the essays collected in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, there is an assumption that the landscape is expressive, as well as functional, and that what it expresses is the unique sensibility of the people who made and inhabit it. This approach is often criticized for overinterpreting the ordinary. The proffered interpretation may fit the facts, but it is also very often a post hoc construction

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made by the interpreter with little resemblance to any message actually sent or received by members of the group whose behavior or landscape is being interpreted. The Balinese cockfight can be interpreted as something rich and suggestive as a symbolist poem – this much Geertz has shown – but there is no evidence that anyone but Geertz and his students intends or sees these meanings. Geographers who read ordinary landscapes as expressive texts are open to this same criticism. The meaning they discover in the landscape is, in fact, often a meaning largely supplied by their own subtle, educated, and articulated intelligence. The charge of overinterpretation is not altogether devastating if one is working with post structuralist as sumptions, though, for if meaning is produced in the act of reading, then every interpretation is an over interpretation. To say that a reading overinterprets is simply another way of saying that the text alone is in determinate, and does not by itself force any single meaning onto every reader. The Hermeneutics of Suspicion Critics of literary and other texts have various responses to the problem of textual indeterminacy, authorial in tention being the most common solution. For others, indeterminacy reduces a text to something like a blank page onto which any reader may project his or her interests. Reader response theory expresses this in the formula: ‘you can only read what you’ve already read’ (how you read anything in the first place being a trou bling enigma). More commonly, critics recognize that, while many readings are possible, some readings are better, more powerful than others. The better reading is often said to be the reading that is most comprehensive, that accounts for most of what there is in the text, and perhaps context, to be accounted for. Reading C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a Christian allegory is, for instance, more comprehensive than reading it as the adventures of three children in a magic land because the first reading finds meaning in actions that are, to the second reading, arbitrary and accidental. Comprehensiveness does not settle disputes between interpretive communities, though, since the interpret ation that impresses me as most comprehensive is the interpretation that takes into account those aspects of text and context that my interpretive community tells me ought to be taken into account. A materialist critic would not be satisfied to take Lewis’s religious views into ac count, for instance, and would likely insist that a powerful interpretation comprehend his sexual behavior or class interests. Beginning in the 1960s, the hermeneutic disciplines were increasingly dominated by an interpretive com munity that believed any comprehensive interpretation

must take in the concealed intentions and hidden agendas that the community presumed to stand behind all texts. Paul Ricoeur (1970) called this reading strategy ‘‘the hermeneutics of suspicion,’’ and described it as ‘‘a method of interpretation which assumes that the literal or surface level meaning of a text is an effort to conceal the political interests which are served by the text,’’ and that ‘‘the purpose of interpretation is to strip off the con cealment, unmasking those interests.’’ This hermeneutic suffers the flaw of the liar’s paradox, for writing about writing describes itself, but it has been very popular among geographers, who practice it in the forms of de construction and the power/knowledge analysis of Michelle Foucalt. Deconstruction Summarizing deconstruction is more difficult than doing deconstruction, because paraphrasing Derrida is difficult as lifting a haystack with two hands: the problem being not the weight, but the incoherence. Equivocation and the portentous jargon impress some readers as profund ity; others feel only irritation. The central claim of de construction is that ‘presence’ is an illusion conjured by the text. Presence denotes being, or that which exists outside the text as independent reality. Deconstruction maintains, roughly, that everything referred to in every text has the ontological status of a character in a novel, so that words like Sun, I, or truth can no more be said to have a real world referent than the name Oliver Twist can be said to have a real world referent. To think of a world of beings independent of the text is, therefore, deluded in the same way it would be deluded to think that the characters in a soap opera continue their affairs after the program has ended. This argument rests on what many see as two rather obvious category mistakes. The first is the mistake of reading nonfiction as if it were fiction, a misreading surely as disastrous as reading a novel believing that the char acters, places, and events it describes are real. The second is the error of treating concepts, and even things, as if they were words. In the linguistics of Ferdianand de Sassure, from which deconstruction is derived, a sign is said to have two parts: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the sound with which the word is vocalized, or the mark with which it is written; the signified is the concept or meaning communicated by that word. Now, as we can see by the fact that humans speak many languages, signifiers are arbitrary and conventional. Deconstruction takes this fact, true of signifiers, and extends it to the concepts they signify, and holds that these, too, are arbitrary conven tions. One reason to doubt this is that human languages, though many, are translatable. Deconstruction is a critical technique suited to works of fiction, and appealing to scholars who believe, or wish

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to believe, that the world itself is fictional, a cultural construction that was made up after the fancy of one imagination, and that might, therefore, be revised to suit the fancy of another imagination. Critical geography rightly supposes that deconstruction underwrites claims for the cultural construction of reality, and wrongly supposes that it supports progressive politics. Knowledge/power Interpretation In deconstruction the textualized and fictional world is the mask of nothing; in the hermeneutic propounded by Michelle Foucault it is the mask of power. In the first reading, texts conceal the abyss of a cosmos that is as nonexistent as Oliver Twist. In the second reading, texts conceal a conspiracy that legitimates and naturalizes an interpretation of the world that serves the interests of powerful people. Foucault’s analysis rests on the two basic features of the post structuralist text. First, it sees the world as an object of interpretation rather than sci entific investigation. It is a text, but an indeterminate text construed by ‘discourses’ and open to many interpret ations, no one intrinsically deserving privilege over any other. Second, it sees the meaning of this text as created in the act of reading by a particular interpretive com munity, for whom the readings is a tool serving the interest of the community. Dominant or hegemonic groups are able to impose their interpretation on sub ordinate groups, and so trick them into working against their own interests. The mighty are aided in this ideo logical swindle by the fact that the discourses that make up their interpretation of the world are embodied in language, law, science, and landscape, and so come to be naturalized and accepted as normal. This sort of power/knowledge analysis has much in common with deconstruction, which is hardly surprising since both grew out of the same mix of Marxist exist entialism and the counterculture of the 1960s. Foucaldian readings have been more popular in geography, no doubt because the hermeneutic is more obviously suited to social analysis, and because it seems, at first, to offer aid to marginalized minorities in their struggle against power. This last impression is almost certainly mistaken, since reducing knowledge to power deprives the weak of truth, historically their best weapon against power.

Conclusion Geographers who practice geography as a hermeneutic discipline typically work with one of these three views of textuality. Humanistic geographers who take the semiotic approach have generally interpreted landscapes as ex pressive sign systems; however this approach has fallen out of favor as the view of culture as consensus has

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been replaced by a view of culture as contested and conflict ridden. Deconstructionists have generally decon structed the concepts and ontological presumptions of scientific geography, the text they criticize being the conceptual apparatus of language and metaphysics. Fou caldians have generally directed their power/knowledge analysis at particular embodiments of hegemonic know ledge that, they believe, permeate everyday practices and the written word as minutely as ‘capillaries’. Exposing the self serving assumptions of colonial literature has been especially popular. The concepts of text and textuality were undoubtedly central to the transformation of a part of human geog raphy into a post positivist hermeneutic discipline. The existence of today’s ‘critical geography’ is proof that geography can be practiced after the fashion of literary criticism – at least literary criticism of one sort – and not only after the fashion of positivist science. The great limitation of text, textuality, and the critical mode, and their great hazard, is that they tempt geographers to exaggerate the similarities between the sign systems of landscapes or nonfictional geographic writing and the sign systems of novels and poems, to mistake things for words. See also: Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems; Creativity; Critical Geography; Cultural Studies and Human Geography; Culture; Deconstruction; Discourse; Humanism/Humanistic Geography; Landscape; Landscape Iconography; Language; Media; Nature, History of; Oral History; Orientalism; Polyvocality; Representation and Re-presentation; Representation, Politics of; Resistance; Semiotics; Text, Textual Analysis; Travel and Travel-Writing.

Further Reading Barnes, T. J. and Duncan, J. S. (eds.) (1992). Writing worlds: Discourse, text and metaphor in the representation of landscape. London: Routledge. Curry, M. R. (1996). The work in the world: Geographical practice and the written word. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Duncan, J. S. (1990). The city as text: The politics of landscape interpretation in the Kandyan kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grant, R. (2003). Imagining the real: Essays on politics, ideology, and literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hanks, W. F. (2000). Texts and textuality. Annual Review of Anthropology 18, 95 127. Meinig, D. W. (ed.) (1979). The interpretation of ordinary landscapes: Geographical essays. New York: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schneider, M. A. (1987). Culture as text in the work of Clifford Geertz. Theory and Society 16, 809 839. Sosnoski, J. J. (1977). The use of the word ‘‘text’’ in critical discourse. College English 39, 121 137. Steiner, G. (1989). Real presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Text, Textual Analysis D. Wilson, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Intertextuality The shaping of meaning in a text by other texts whose usage may be advertent or inadvertent. Metaphor A term used, or regarded as being used, to represent another object or process to suggest a resemblance or similarity. Metonymy A figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another to represent or depict attributes of an object or process. Sanitary Coding The representing of strong or potentially objectionable ideas or meanings in text by rendering them more acceptable. Text The content of spoken words, written language, or built physical form that communicates ideas, concepts, and realities to interpreters.

The concept ‘text’ has become important in human geography in the last 20 years. Commonly understood as the content of written language, spoken words, or sym bolic content embedded in built physical form, it is examined by geographers as a complex form of com munication that often seamlessly builds understandings and realities. It is seen to exude standard and con ventionalized communicative symbols and rhetorical tropes and power plays (hidden positionalities, imposed presences and silences, metonymies, metaphors, and sanitary codings) that structure and organize the com munication process. Even within the most seemingly innocent and neutral symbolic ensembles rely upon this ‘troping’ to communicate. What geographers have identified as text is enormous: city growth coalition discourses, mayoral and politician pronouncements, family storytelling, linguistic utterances of planners, community architectural styles, everyday newspaper reportage, informal banter on the streets, federal codifying of housing policy, and many other things. Perhaps, what now passes as text threatens to burst the bounds of a simple unitary category. But in being an intuitively resonant and easily grasped focus, textual analysis now approaches the status of quasi paradigm. It has spun out whole debates around issues such as ‘the crisis of representation’, ‘the politics of ontology’, and ‘the power of the discursive versus the material’ which solidifies the institutionalization of this focus. Heightened sensitivity to the power of text and discourse, to David Harvey, now makes many writers and analysts acutely

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sensitive to two key things: how the world is represented and the authorial place of textual composers. In this context, the notion ‘text’ has ascended to confront the foundational notions that have historically anchored conceptions of knowledge generation. Two central influences have been Francis Lyotard’s The Post modern Condition and Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Lyotard suggests that science continuously produces and draws on texts of authenticity that corroborates their privileged standing, a text termed ‘philosophy’. Lyotard asserts and popularizes a prominent thrust of textual analysis: that scholars should be skeptical of metanarra tives and representations in purveying realities. Textual analysis, to Lyotard, should be sensitive to the insepar ability of power and representation. A fruitful kind of knowledge, to Lyotard, is one that is paralogical, that is, one that searches for and creates instabilities in dominant worldviews. Derrida provides the conceptual ground for Lyotard, arguing that seemingly solid and objective text acquires this only via a mix of supplements, plays, and chains of signifiers. Derrida’s view of the history of dominant ideas is a history of metaphors and metonymies. Yet, there are multiple interpretations of how text made and used is powerful. This article briefly discusses two prominent takes which are extremely influential today: neo Marxian and neo Foucaultian. Since c. 1990, ‘the representational turn’ has greatly influenced neo Marxist analysis. It has posited intimate connections between text and the deploying of class power in diverse and variegated capitalist settings. Here, text helps con struct understandings of the world that builds social realities (e.g., social relations, class categories, gender fractions, and racial groupings), state formations (e.g., economic programs, fiscal policies, and government re distributive schemes), and material realities (e.g., land scapes, cities, neighborhoods, and nations). For example, text in the form of technical documents and planner pronouncements helps sanitize and legitimate efforts of city and regional planners to balkanize space and seg regate classes of people that assist capital accumulation projects. At the core of this, offers of emotion invoking ‘realities’ frequently center for common consumption two themes: the truths of dangerous and encroaching streets and dark and foreboding inner cities which need to be isolated or annihilated, and the need to concentrate up grading in the service of cities which need to ‘go global’. Catherine Kingfisher’s recent work personifies this focus. She unearths the crucial role of text in producing

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and maintaining understandings of homeless people as undeserving citizens in Canada. Kingfisher’s starting point is the power and imperatives of neoliberal gov ernance. To regulate people, spaces, and economies in distinctive economic times, texts offer elaborate under standings of the homeless as ‘a people’ devoid of what localities now need: rugged, staunchly individual, entre preneurial beings. Kingfisher weaves a persuasive set of connections between capitalist realities and needs, forms of political governance, strategies of making and regu lating people, and texts that do the bidding of political governances and capital. Here, social constructionism, textual formation and maintenance, patterns of human management, and capitalist realities deftly interconnect within one conceptual frame. Text here is a profoundly relational element. Text always needs to be understood against the realities of societal organization, prevailing class dynamics, and the imperatives of capital accumulation. Offers of truth are hardly a simple effect of the rules of a text; they are rather outgrowths of this formation’s relational dynamics. Understanding text becomes displaced to a key domain: how texts are constituted and used within the totalizing reality of current political–economic forces. Texts, from this position, are typically cast less as the essential ground that defines social life than as tools whose usage provides the crucial injection of ‘realism’ into a turbulent, class stained world. Text is never neutral or passive in shaping social and spatial outcomes: capital put it in the service of classes to pursue their materialist desires and aspirations. Paralleling this neo Marxist development has been neo Foucaultian accounts of the power and prowess of text. Foucault’s notion of text (‘discourse’), methodo logically laid out in Archeology of Knowledge, offers a cri tique of how modern societies manage and discipline populations in sanctioning the claims and practices of the human sciences. Texts here are systems of possibility for knowledge, that is, fields of knowledge formulated via sets of discursive rules. Through these subjectively con stituted fields, ‘regimes of truth’ are always specific to them. Systems of possibility for suggesting and labeling truth and falsity – carried in the text’s behind the back rules for producing ‘logical’ assertions – make these en tities potent sources of power. To Foucault, texts are lynchpins of power rather than mediums through which power is asserted. He presents these as complex, organic units whose usage by anyone puts power in the service of their renditions and statements. Power and prowess, in the final analysis, embeds in the potentiality of text to manage, control, and discipline people. But geographer’s use of this framework has often been oblique and tentative. Usage has emphasized two key tenets: texts as power laden entities unto themselves and texts as fields of political assertions reflecting the desires of individuals to manage and control. Power, then, is seen

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to lie in the local, in the individual, and in the flow of periodic and unstable moments. Texts ultimately or chestrate worlds seemingly unconnected to broader scale political and social dynamics. They rise, live, and fall in the micro scale spaces of the everyday: in workplaces, school rooms, hospitals, welfare offices, public parks, private board rooms, planning meetings, government of fices, street encounters, and youth centers. In the process, some important Foucaultian aspects of text have been neglected. First, discursive rules that structure and enable the formation of statements have been all but ignored. We thus know little about the rules and principles that permit certain statements to be made (the behind the backness of text) and how they come to be and evolve. Second, the complex and multitextured mediation of texts against which they are constructed and meanings extracted have been greatly simplified. To Foucault, all texts are mediated in many ways: by lan guage, cultural systems, conventions of writing genre, intertextuality (the infiltration of meanings from one text into another), and acts of deciphering meanings. This point, as much as any in Foucault’s arsenal, places the status of truth in the realm of subjective and relative. Yet these investigations in geography have proved fruitful, particularly with their sensitivity to the spatial ities of the human condition, that is, the production of space, the constitution of places, and the construction of scale. These studies have examined how texts codify and regularize patterns of thought and practice around city and regional planning strategies, provision of public housing and social welfare, state actions, and the choices of people and populations to choose residential locations and imagine patterns of acceptable residential structur ing. Texts here are akin to powerful prisons without walls; they lock people into ways of seeing and under standing as systems of imposed possibility that are fluid but grounded sources of power in their own right. There is much subtlety to this work. Thus, it widely dis tinguishes between the dual spheres of grammar and rhetoric as operative forces. Grammar is identified as the syntagmatic protocol that serves as the vessel for com municating, and rhetoric as the intertextual system of signifiers that fill the grammar with content. Moreover, texts are seen as hybrid constructs that draw on other texts to imbue it with meaning. With this point, texts become patched together mosaics whose origins are multiple and variegated. What, then, unifies these different frames? Most funda mentally, text is seen as a creative human offering that enables power, structures, and interests to be reproduced at diverse scales in diverse settings. While the issues of sources of this power and who wields it are contested by these frames, texts nevertheless are identified as central sites for the naturalizing of power and political striving. Texts may be turfs for the genesis and application of power, or simply

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fragments of context that are capillaries in a circuitry of power wielding, but both acknowledge their crucial role in purveying authority and regulation. As Loretta Lees notes, the power for text may lie in formations of enabling rules rather than the text, or in passions and impulses displaced into these formations, but texts are always recognized as locations which render a world transparent, ordered, and knowable. Set against this, texts become potentially powerful coercive terrains that are at the interface of poli tical drives and necessary to influence human beings. See also: Discourse; Foucauldianism; Text and Textuality.

Further Reading Derrida, J. (1974). Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University.

Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell. Hubbard, P. (2000). Desire/disgust: Moral geographies of heteroesexuality. Progress in Human Geography 24, 191 217. Kingfisher, C. (2007). Spatializing neoliberalism: Articulations, recapitulations, and (a very few) alternatives. In England, K. & Ward, K. (eds.) Neoliberalization, pp 195 223. Oxford: Blackwell. Lees, L. (2002). Rematerializing geography: The ‘‘new’’ urban geography. Progress in Human Geography 26, 101 112. Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. MacLeod, G. (2002). From urban entrepreneurialism to a revanchist city. Antipode 34, 602 624. McCann, E. (1999). Race, protest, and public space: Contextualizing Lefebvre in the US city. Antipode 31, 163 184. Mumby, D. (1991). Narrative and Social Control. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Smith, J. (1996). Geographical rhetoric: Modes and tropes of appeal. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86, 1 20.

Theocracy Nick Megoran, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Clergy The class of people constituting the formal leadership and functionaries of a particular religion. Iranian Revolution The 1979 overthrow of the Iranian monarchy that eventually led to the establishment of an Islamic theocracy under Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini died in 1989, but the status of Iran as an Islamic Republic persists to this day. Islamism The political ideology that modern states should be reconstituted constitutionally, economically, and judicially in accordance with what is posited as a return to authentic Islamic practice. Laity Followers of a particular religion outside of the formal clergy. Majority Catholic/Muslim States Countries where the majority of the population formally identify themselves with these particular religions, whether or not that influences constitutional government. Permanent Observer Mission (at the United Nations) An entity that is not a member state of the United Nations, but which has received a standing invitation to participate as observer in the sessions and the work of the General Assembly and maintain permanent observer mission at the Headquarters. These include entities such as the Holy See, the Palestinian Authority, the African Union, and the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries. Religion A set of beliefs about the divinity, practices emanating from these beliefs, and institutions that represent them. Secularization The name given to a process whereby a previously highly religious society becomes increasingly less religious. Taliban Political movement emerging from Islamic schools in Pakistan that ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, enforcing a strict form of Islamic Shari’a law. Vatican City The world’s smallest state, governed by the Pope as Bishop of the See of Rome. Voluntarism Voluntary action for the common good.

Introduction Theocracy is the exercise of political power by the clergy of a particular religion, usually (although not necessarily) claiming to be acting primarily on behalf of a divinity and

governing according to its principles and requirements. Although the worldwide influence of religious political ideologies has grown over the past three decades, there are very few theocratic states, or theocracies, in the world. Nonetheless, those that do exist can have pro found and highly idiosyncratic impacts on development.

Three Definitions of Theocracy Theocracy at first appears to be a simple concept – clerics ruling a state instead of, say, the general popu lation via a professional class of politicians (democracy) or hereditary potentates advised by appointed specialists (monarchy). Based on this definition, there are hardly any theocracies in the world today. Even states that enshrine religious legitimization or codes in their legal existence or practice of statehood fall short of this standard. The monarch of the United Kingdom is crowned by the country’s senior cleric (the Archbishop of Canterbury), and some other clerics have seats in the upper chamber of Parliament (the House of Lords), but the clergy’s ac tual political power is negligible. Saudi Arabia enforces a strict form of adherence to a variant of Islamic Shari’a law, even to the extent of forbidding non Islamic worship, yet is ruled by an extended royal family, not a class of clerics. Likewise, the Je Khenpo, the highest Buddhist religious official of Bhutan, is traditionally considered to be the king’s most important adviser, but the state is formally a monarchy. Such a strict definition leaves few states in the world as theocracies. However, this traditional definition is more problem atic than it first appears due to complications regarding the meaning of the word religion. Although the term religion is an old one, its contemporary usage is heavily influenced by medieval Christian conceptions of separate spheres of power exercised by the church and the civil authorities, and enlightenment classifications of epi stemic communities. The word religion is therefore an attempt to demarcate a specific sphere of belief, practice, symbols, and institutional organization, separate from other such religious systems or from what therefore be comes defined as the secular – the realm of law and government of a specific jurisdiction. If the disciplining of knowledge implied by the tra ditional definition of religion has been called into ques tion, then religion (and the sacred) can be seen as a more diffuse set of practices, beliefs, and symbols, and social formations that embrace a wider range of phenomena. It also permeates supposedly secular civil society in fluid

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ways, rather than being hermetically sealed from it. Such an understanding has recently provided the basis for a reworking of the idea of theocracy. Rather than being simply formal clerical rule, it can be considered as the multiple patterns of the intertwining of religion in the language, practices, and substance of the politics of modern statehood. From the 1960s and 1970s, for a var iety of complex reasons, the increasing importance of religion in national politics can be seen in polities as diverse as the USA, Israel, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories – a phenomenon that Giles Kepel has mem orably termed, ‘The revenge of God’. A number of authors have thus seen fit to describe the USA under the presidency of George W. Bush as a theocracy. In the longer term, this reflects the adaptation of Republican Party policies to appeal to an increasingly important conservative Christian support base. This process advanced under George W. Bush as the most personally deeply religious president for many decades. Under the Bush Presidency, the influence of Christianity in the White House grew markedly, from prayer meet ings to formal and informal links with notable Christian leaders. George W. Bush’s personal religiosity arguably influenced both domestic and foreign policy. Some scholars and commentators have seen fit to label these processes as instances of theocracy. A certain school of political thought has des cribed some Western European and North American states as secular theocracies. According to this argument, these societies are therapeutic states that attempt to re design social conscience by legislating morality. This is performed by moral crusades to re educate populations away from what become constructed as social pathologies such as sexism, racism, homophobia, and the questioning of multiculturalism. This is a feature of contemporary Western governments that can be understood as part of the historical trajectory of secularizing Protestantism. Just as protestant cultures dwelt upon the individual finding divine grace by confessing one’s sins and cleansing one’s soul, the therapeutic state works by allowing the majority to dwell on its collective sins of the past yet feel per sonally righteous by expiating them in enforcing toler ance. This governmental practice arose within the cultural milieu of secularizing Protestantism and is thus deemed, oxymoronically, secular theology. However, there are analytical disadvantages to re defining theocracy to mean any trace of the influence of religious discourse or practice in the field of formal state politics. It would be difficult to identify a society where the influence of religion or the sacred, widely defined, would be entirely absent from political culture. Fur thermore, genuine theocracies in the classical sense of the term where clerics have captured state power pro duce modalities of governance startlingly different to those of absolute monarchies and democracies merely

influenced by religious ideas, and map different geog raphies of development. The failure of many European and American thinkers to grasp the significance of the Iranian revolutionary theocratic movement headed by Ayatollah Khomenei, which took power in 1979, was arguably due to their inability to comprehend the im portance of the religious context. Paradoxically, re defining theocracy could reduce our sensitivity to certain intersections of politics and religion, not increase them.

Theocracy and Geography The geography of religion has been a recurring, if somewhat marginal, topic of cultural geographical an alysis over many decades. Traditionally, geographers mapped phenomena such as the spatial incidence of re ligions measured by demography, and temporary migra tory patterns of pilgrimage. More recent analysis has afforded greater sensitivity to the multiple intersections of religion/the sacred in constructions of space and place, and to geopolitical imaginings of the world. Theocracy, however, has been of marginal interest to geographers. The founder of modern political geography, Friedrich Ratzel (1969, 1896: 17–28), wrote that, ‘‘All the ancient states and all states on lower cultural levels are theocracies,’’ dismissing analysis of them as an unworthy task for the modern discipline. However, presently existing theocracies (or movements to create them) present fascinating examples of the reconfiguration of the political geographical relationships between territory, sovereignty, and (religious) identity. They are increas ingly hard to overlook in debates about the re making of the world map and the emerging shape of contemporary patterns and processes of territory and sovereignty. This article considers two examples in relation to develop ment: the Holy See, and movements for the restoration of a Caliphate/the construction of Islamic states.

Modern Christian Theocracies Christianity emerged in the context of Roman imperial oppression of first entury Palestine. Unlike contemporary violent Jewish nationalist movements, its establisher, Jesus Christ, did not seek to capture state power and create a theocratic state. His immediate followers adop ted the same position, which has been described by twentieth century theologians as pacifism or non violence. However, by the fourth century, this position was reversed as Christianity came to play an increasingly important role in the Roman Empire. A contemporary inheritor of this legacy is the Holy See.

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Figure 1 The Papal States in 1861. Copyright Nick Megoran.

Roman Catholicism and the Holy See The largest branch of Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church, meaning in effect all churches in communion with and under the spiritual authority of the Bishop of Rome, is unique among world religions by virtue of its relationship to the territorial expression of the Holy See in the form of the State of Vatican City. Crucially for this article, the association of these entities with various Catholic relief and development agencies, and the alli ance of these agencies and the Holy See in international lobbying, creates a network able to have profound and unique impacts on the development process. The Holy See is a nonterritorial entity composed of the Roman Catholic College of Cardinals and the Bishop of Rome (the Pope). The two bodies are not to be confused – the Roman Catholic Church is composed of its members around the world, while the Holy See is the supreme organ of government of the Roman Cath olic Church. The Holy See has acquired a juridical personality which permits it to sign treaties and receive and send diplomatic representation with states – in ef fect, it has achieved the juridical equivalence of statehood.

Although the Holy See has engaged in diplomatic exchanges with rulers and states at least as far back as the late fifteenth century, part of the reason that it has been able to accrue this unique power is its territorial ex pression in the State of the Vatican City (Vatican City). This is a legacy of the Pope’s territorial possessions in Central and North Italy, the Papal States (see Figure 1), held until the creation of the modern united kingdom of Italy in 1861. Vatican City, an enclaved state in the city of Rome, is the world’s smallest microstate with a mere 0.44 km2 territory and a population under 1000, entirely male. It was created in 1929 by the Lateran Treaty between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy. The Treaty also recognized extraterritorial rights of noncontiguous properties deemed necessary for the functioning of the Holy See, such as the Pope’s summer residence of the Palace of Castel Gandolfo and administrative buildings in other parts of Italy. The Pope, who is elected by the College of Cardinals, governs as ‘Sovereign of the State of Vatican City’, with full legislative, judicial, and executive powers, through a commission of cardinals nominated by him. Vatican City’s system of government, which is

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highly anomalous, may thus be regarded as both an elective monarchy and an elective theocracy (although its representatives would be unlikely to accept that label). The Pope is head cleric in the Roman Catholic Church as incumbent of the Holy See and sovereign of Vatican City. This dual role of head of the world’s largest religion and sovereign of the world’s smallest state can be con fusing (especially as, colloquially, the central authority of the Roman Catholic Church is shortened to ‘The Vati can’). Nonetheless, understanding it is crucial to grasp the remarkable juridical position that the Holy See oc cupies as a state. Indeed, since 2002, when Switzerland joined the organization, it has been technically the only nonmember state to maintain a Permanent Observer Mission at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, with all the privileges and opportunities that this entails. The nexus of various state, quasi state, religious, and NGO structures of Roman Catholicism/the Holy See/ the State of the Vatican City and nonstate development agencies such as the Catholic Agency for Overseas De velopment (CAFOD) has created a unique political geographical network. As the next two examples show, this can result in range of different forms of engagement with development.

The Holy See at the Cairo and Beijing conferences

The Holy See’s engagement at two United Nations de velopment conferences, the 1994 International Confer ence on Population and Development in Cairo and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, exemplify the ambiguities of this theocracy cum religion cum nonstate actor. The Cairo conference was intended to stabilize population growth. The Holy See, reflecting the Catholic Church’s long standing opposition to both contraception and abortion, lobbied strenuously against language in the draft and final documents that legitim ized forms of both practices. Before the conference, it did this in official pre conference meetings and through bi lateral diplomatic negotiations with individual states. During the conference, it fought over wording at every stage, allegedly attempting to form an alliance of majority Catholic and Muslim states (although the Holy See itself denied this). The final document represented a com promise between the militant pro abortion position ad vocated by the USA under President Clinton, and the militant anti abortion policy of the Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II. Pro abortion delegates not merely criticized the Holy See’s negotiating position (criticism which was unsurprising), but also its presence at the conference as a state rather than as a religious NGO. It was questioned whether a microstate with zero natural growth rate, indeed with no permanent

population, women or children, had a legitimate voice at a conference of states on population growth. Likewise, at the Beijing Conference the Holy See’s position was controversial. It allegedly lobbied to exclude certain religious NGOs, such as ‘Catholics for a Free Choice’, from attending – an example of different elem ents of Roman Catholicism at odds over a contentious issue. Along with certain majority Muslim states, it also challenged references in the final document to abortion and sexual orientation. Objections to its policy position are part of the normal process of debate, but the conference again raised questions about the Holy See’s participation as a state. Essentially, the Holy See derives its authority from its position as the world’s largest religious organ ization, yet it uses its association with a tiny enclaved state to act as a state, obtaining privileges in negotiation that no other religious body possesses. Commentators such as Yasmin Abdullah have questioned whether this unusual arrangement ought to be allowed to continue.

Liberation theology and development in Latin America

A very different form of impact on development can be seen in the Catholic Church’s ‘Basic Christian Com munities’ in demographic strongholds, Latin America. The 1960s and 1970s saw the growth of liberation theology in the continent, a Marxist informed structural critique of poverty and political repression in Latin America combined with the praxis of a traditional Christian commitment to assist the poor. At a time when much of the continent was ruled by repressive dictator ships, grassroots resistance and pressure for change was often conducted through the movement for Basic Christian Communities (Communidade Eclesial de Base). These were small grassroots groups of Catholics who met for Bible study and to reflect and act on pressing social problems – illegal arrests and land expulsions, lack of basic services, etc. Activism – hiring lawyers to defend rights, pressing for healthcare facilities, building schools, founding trade unions, forming the basic constituencies for democratic opposition politicians – arose from these bodies, which numbered in their tens of thousands across the continent. Commentators such as Thomas Bruneau thus argued that these bodies had a profound potential for grassroots led development in the continent at a time when formal church structures were relatively weak compared to the violence of oppressive regimes. Basic Christian Communities, although grassroots organizations, were often initiated and encouraged by the Roman Catholic priests and nuns disseminating politic ally radical theological ideas and practices under the gaze of state apparatuses. Although far from the formal structures of the Holy See and the theocracy of the State of the Vatican City, this grassroots development initiative

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was, ultimately, part of the same network. The Roman Catholic Church can thus be conceived of as a network of diverse entities, incorporating often conflicting nonstate actors, theological structures, grassroots communities, and a theocratic state. This multiplicity opens up nu merous spaces for multiple forms of intervention in processes of development.

Modern Islamic Theocracies The unusual case of the Holy See notwithstanding, there exist no formal Christian theocracies today, nor import ant or widespread movements advocating their creation. The same is not true in the majority Muslim world, where the relationship between religion and state has been one of the major topics of debate among Muslim intellectuals for the past two centuries. Unlike Chris tianity, the establisher of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, sought to lay the foundations of a polity based on re ligious teaching to displace other forms of political power, a polity that was to be defended, where necessary, by military force. Although this historical precedent is very important, the recent intellectual situation can be explained to a significant degree by the struggles of Muslim peoples against Western colonialism, and dis appointment with forms of self rule that replaced formal foreign sovereignty with often corrupt, authoritarian, and incompetent patrimonies supported by ongoing forms of Western political and military intervention. The failure of secular political paradigms such as nationalism and Marxism to deliver tangible benefits in majority Muslim countries has intensified this process since the 1970s, particularly in promoting Islamism. Hizb ut-Tahrir: Resurrecting the Caliphate The Caliph was the title given to the leader of the Islamic community, although since the death of the Prophet Muhammad in the year 632 there was no unanimous agreement at any one time about who that should be. A key moment in debates about modern Islamic theocracy was the abolition of the Caliphate in Istanbul by Mustafa Kemal secularist republican Turkish government in 1924. This move prompted many differing reactions. Some Muslims sought to adopt European and American models of secular governance, while others devised new concepts of the Islamic state. Some argued for the restoration of the Caliphate as being the only theologically legitimate political goal for Muslims. An active group that advocates this latter position today is Hizb ut Tahrir (Party of Liberation). Founded by the Palestinian jurist Muhammad Taqiuddin al Nabhani in 1953, it seeks to re establish the Caliphate as a single state sovereign over all lands where Muslims form a

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majority of the population. It considers the modern map of the Middle East to be the work of Western imperialist powers intent on dividing the Islamic community by supporting corrupt and un Islamic rulers, and considers it the duty of Muslims to work, using political means, for their abolition. It is thus repressed in most majority Muslim states where it represents a threat to the in cumbent regimes. It is also banned in some countries without majority Muslim populations. Development is an important concern of Hizb ut Tahrir. A key appeal of the Caliphate to its modern ad vocates is that it would redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, in sharp contrast to rulers who have often lived lives of indulgence and opulence while ordinary Muslims have suffered in poverty. Opponents of this group argue that Muslims have never agreed on a single legitimate Caliph and would be unable to do so now, but the appeal of this form of theocracy persists for many Muslims. It is worth observing that Hizb ut Tahrir itself rejects the label that it is advocating a theocracy. It argues that the Caliph is a representative not of God but of the people, as he would be elected by them, and that ultimate sovereignty belongs not to the clergy but to God. Islamism in Egypt and the Horn of Africa Another major reaction to the abolition of the Caliphate was the emergence of Islamist ideas in Egypt associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamism is a political ideology which posits that modern states should be re constituted constitutionally, economically, and judicially in accordance with what is held as a return to authentic Islamic practice. Founded in 1928, the Muslim Brother hood sought to establish a modern Islamic theocratic state by political means. It wields considerable influence in Egypt although it is formally banned and repressed by the state, wary of a group whose members have assas sinated, among others, President Sadat in 1981, and at tempted to assassinate President Nasser in 1954. Its ideas have subsequently spread into neighbouring Sudan and Somalia, as well as elsewhere. Abdel Salam and Alex de Waal argue that the project of Islamism has failed in Egypt and the Horn of Africa. They point not only to the failure of an Islamist leadership in Sudan to maintain a competent, peaceful, and popularly legitimate system of rule, but also of Islamists in Egypt to gain formal state power. This ‘impasse’, they suggest, is an indication of the intellectual failure of the project to move from generalizations and resistance to designing structures for establishing secure and popular successful rule. This impasse has had two consequences. The first is a tendency to violence and repression of dissent, by those in power, or the intimidation and murder of anti Islamist Muslim intellectuals. The second impact of the failure of

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political Islamism is the growth of nonstate voluntarism which has led to a culturally specific form of development. Islamism sees political and social action as inseparable, and the failure to secure power in Egypt and elsewhere has channelled energy into the nongovernmental field. In the field of education, Islamists in Egypt have provided free public transport to ferry students to uni versity. They introduced segregated seating in lectures to protect women from sexual harassment, and distributed subsidized veils and long robes to women for the same reason. They have established hospitals and healthcare provision, and taken over professional associations sup porting the causes of groups such as engineers and medical professionals. Multiplying Islamist NGOs have supported commerce and become involved in disaster relief. The strength of Islamist voluntarism was demon strated following a devastating earthquake in 1992 that killed over 500 people. While the state response was slow and ineffective, Islamist volunteers swiftly set up tents, and distributed food, blankets, and medicine. All of these activities increased support for the Islamists by embed ding them in civil society. Such strategies have given Islamists unprecedented control over many areas of life in Egypt. However, de Waal and Salam argue that they are still unable to get beyond the impasse – they nurture intolerance and re inforce practices of censorship that deepen authori tarianism – allowing the Egyptian state to continue to repress them. Furthermore, the exploitation of Islamic NGOs by violent terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda has, since 2001, brought the activities of these organizations under the tight scrutiny of criminal in vestigators throughout the world.

Conclusion From Bhutan to Britain, there are some states in the world in which the clergy play a formal role in politics and from the USA and Russia to Israel and Egypt, many where explicitly religious political ideologies are increasingly important. Some thinkers would describe these processes as ‘theocracy’. However, there are very few theocracies, as classically understood in the sense of the formal exercise of political sovereignty by the clergy. In the case of the State of the Vatican/the Holy See, this appears a unique historical aberration – for revolutionary Iran, Taliban Afghanistan, and Sudan, a highly contested project whose medium term durability remains uncertain.

Nonetheless, the mobilization of Islamist ideologies, with their promise of social renewal and economic just ice, has made theocracy an increasingly realistic alter native to other forms of government in some parts of the world. The general inability of these projects to capture states and establish popular legitimate and stable and peaceful systems of government has led many commen tators to proclaim the failure of modern Islamist variants of theocracy. However, in spite of their relative rarity on the global stage, theocracies have been able to influence geographies of development at different scales. See also: Political Geography; State.

Further Reading Abdullah, Y. (1996). The Holy See at United Nations Conferences: State or Church? Columbia Law Review 96(7), 1835 1875. Agnew, J. (2006). Religion and geopolitics. Geopolitics 11(2), 183 191. Bayes, J. and Tohidi, N. (eds.) (2001). Globalization, gender and religion: The politics of women’s rights in Catholic and Muslim contexts. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bruneau, T. (1980). The Catholic Church and development in Latin America: The role of Basic Christian Communities. Development 8(7 8), 535 544. Enayat, H. (2005). Modern Islamic political thought: The response of the Shi’i and Sunni Muslims to the twentieth century. London: I.B. Tauris. Gottfried, P. E. (2002). Multiculturalism and the politics of guilt: Towards a secular theocracy. London: University of Missouri Press. Kepel, G. (1994). The revenge of God: The resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the modern world. Cambridge: Polity. Proctor, J. (2006). Religion as trust in authority: theocracy and ecology in the United States. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96(1), 188 196. Ratzel, F. (1969, 1896). The laws of the spatial growth of states. In Kasperson, R. & Minghi, J. (eds.) The structure of political geography, pp 17 28. London: University of London Press. Ryall, D. (2001). The Catholic Church as a transnational actor. In Josselin, D. & Wallace, W. (eds.) Non state actors in world politics, pp 41 58. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Salam, A.H.A. and Waal, A.d. (2004). On the failure and persistence of jihad, In de Waal A.(ed.), Islamism and its enemies in the horn of Africa, pp 21 70. London: C. Hurst and Company. Secor, A. (2001). Islamist politics: Antisystemic or post modern movements? Geopolitics 6(3), 117 134. Strozier, C. and Swiderski, K. (2005). The pyschology and theocracy of George W. Bush. Journal of Psychohistory 33(2), 102 116. Sykes, S. (2006). Power and Christian theology. London: Continuum. Yorgason, E. and Robertson, D. (2006). Mormonism’s raveling and unraveling of a geopolitical thread. Geopolitics 11(2), 256 279.

Relevant Websites http://www.hizb.org.uk Hizb Ut Tahrir (UK). http://www.vatican.va The State of Vatican City.

Therapeutic Landscapes W. M. Gesler, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Cultural Ecology The study of the interactions between a group with specific material and symbolic practices and the natural environment. Cultural Landscape The landscape that results when a culture group interacts with a natural environment. Humanism A body of ideas and approaches that emphasizes the importance of human awareness, consciousness, and creativity. Post-Structuralism A body of thought that stresses the importance of language as constituting reality; the formation or identity of subjects; power and its intimate connection with knowledge; an opposition to thinking in terms of binary opposites; and an insistence that there are no facts, only interpretations. Structuralism The theory that surface appearances can be explained only by hidden causal mechanisms that produce divisions in society such as class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age. Therapeutic Landscape A conceptual framework used to analyze physical, social, and symbolic environments as they contribute to physical and mental health and well-being in places.

Introduction Therapeutic landscapes is a conceptual framework that has been developed mainly by health geographers for the analysis of physical, social, and symbolic environments as they contribute to physical and mental health and well being in places. The term is a geographic metaphor for how the healing process works itself out in specific sites such as the home, a physician’s office, or a hospital ward. It has its origins in the ‘new cultural geography’ of the 1980s and the reform movement within medical geog raphy in the 1990s. The concept is aligned with the socioecological model of health and the holistic health paradigm. It integrates scholarship from the social sci ences, humanities, medicine, and public health from a geographic perspective. Use of the concept extends the study of healthcare beyond the prevailing emphasis on physical environments, clinical studies, and quantitative assessments. The framework has been used to examine places with lasting reputations for healing, well being, and health maintenance in places, and a variety of Western and non Western settings such as gardens,

healing retreats, deprived neighborhoods, and fictional places.

Origins of the Concept The therapeutic landscape concept borrows heavily from the notion of a cultural landscape developed throughout the twentieth century by cultural geographers. It is based on three strands of thinking. The first, arising from tra ditional cultural geography, is cultural ecology, which investigates human interactions with and transformations of natural environments. The emphasis is on the material aspects of culture such as agricultural practices or the building of cities. This aspect of therapeutic landscapes is operationalized as the physical environment. It includes healing elements found in nature such as water, medi cines from plants, and scenic beauty, as well as aspects of built environments such as the material used in and the layout of hospital wards. The second and third strands of thinking behind therapeutic landscapes derive from a broadening of the cultural landscape idea through the application of social and cultural theory. From structuralism and post struc turalism came ideas about the social construction of beliefs and institutional practices, the importance of power in human social relations, social exclusion, legit imization, marginalization, and resistance to attempts to control others. This aspect of therapeutic landscapes is operationalized as the social environment. It encompasses such aspects of healing situations as patient–doctor interactions, labeling people as deviant mentally or physically, Michel Foucault’s notions about govern mentality and surveillance, and healthcare consumerism. Humanism provides a theoretical background to the third aspect of therapeutic landscapes. Here the focus is on mental constructs, on people’s perceptions and ex periences, on what a landscape or place is interpreted to mean. Physical and abstract symbols, myths, and stories are important to this perspective. This aspect of ther apeutic landscapes can be operationalized as the sym bolic environment. In healthcare situations this environment might include the language used by a healer in talking to a patient, the color of a room in a hospital, or stories told by a shaman during a healing session. It should be noted that the three environments de scribed above are merely convenient categorizations. In practice, aspects of a healing situation may fall into more than one category. For example, a discussion about a patient between a nurse and a doctor in an operating

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theater could have both symbolic meaning and reveal social hierarchies. Furthermore, the content and relative importance of the three environments will vary greatly by time and place.

Applications of the Concept The first use of the therapeutic landscape framework was to investigate places that achieved lasting reputations for healing. An example is the sanctuary at Epidauros in Greece where the healing God man, Asclepius, was be lieved to heal people in dreams over a period of 1000 years. The remoteness of the site, the presence of water and trees, the involvement of sacred animals, and the construction of several magnificent buildings that blen ded in with the natural surroundings were important aspects of the physical environment. Aspects of the social environment conducive to healing included a degree of equality in patient–doctor relationships, access of doctors and patients to Asclepius as a personal God, and the many activities that took place in the sanctuary. The symbolic environment encompassed location on sacred ground, dream healing, and myths about Asclepius’ birth and healing powers. Over time, the use of the therapeutic landscape con cept was extended beyond famous healing places to in clude places associated with the maintenance of health and wellness. The concept has seen international appli cations. A wide variety of places and subjects from countries around the world have been examined: a na tional forest in England, a wilderness area in Alaska, a children’s hospital and children’s health camps in New Zealand, home care workers and declining urban neighborhoods in Canada, First Nations Peoples in Canada and Native Americans in the US, a mental hos pital in East London, mental health user collectives in Nottingham, the chronically homeless in the UK, a rural respite care center in southwest England, and fictional settings in France and the US. Reacting to the Western bias of most studies, research was carried out using non Western examples such as the Navajo of the South western United States, the First Nations Peoples of Canada, and Havana, Cuba. Ongoing critiques of the therapeutic landscape con cept have enhanced its theoretical underpinning and its usefulness. Some researchers have emphasized its appli cation to everyday pursuits of health and well being. It has been suggested that the negative aspects of healing environments be emphasized, as well as the positive ones. Several scholars have pointed out that environmental features that are therapeutic for one person may not be for others.

Engagement with the therapeutic landscape concept facilitates interactions with other health related disciplines. Perhaps most obvious are connections with environmental psychology, sociology, medical anthropology, public health, and biomedicine. Recent studies have incorporated such fields of study as nursing, comparative literature, psycho analysis and psychotherapy, history, politics, and environ mental perception. Scholarship based on the therapeutic landscape con cept has been one of the key developments in the tran sition from medical to health geography and one of the principal components of the identity of the latter. At the same time, it has helped to broaden the scope of health geography by connecting it to the broader fields of cul tural and social geography. Overall, therapeutic land scapes have proven to be an important contribution by health geographers to the study of health and well being in places. The idea continues to evolve and can be ap plied to new locales and types of healthcare situations. It promises to inform an increasing body of literature within health geography and beyond. See also: Cultural Geography; Difference/Politics of Difference; Gardens and Gardening; Health Geography; Humanism/Humanistic Geography; Land Change Science; Sense of Place; Social Geography; Structuralism/Structuralist Geography; Wellbeing.

Further Reading Cosgrove, D. and Jackson, P. (1987). New directions in cultural geography. Area 19, 95 101. Gesler, W. M. (1992). Therapeutic landscapes: Medical issues in light of the new cultural geography. Social Science and Medicine 34, 735 746. Gesler, W. M. (2003). Healing Places. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Gesler, W. M. (2005). Therapeutic landscapes: An evolving theme. Health and Place 11, 295 297. Gesler, W. M., Bell, M., Curtis, S., Hubbard, P. and Francis, S. (2004). Therapy by design: Evaluating the UK hospital building program. Health and Place 10, 117 128. Gesler, W. M. and Kearns, R. A. (eds.) (2002). Culture/Place/Health. London: Routledge. Kearns, R. A. (1993). Place and health: Towards a reformed medical geography. Professional Geographer 45, 139 147. Kearns, R. A. and Gesler, W. M. (1998). Putting Health into Place. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Palka, E. J. (2000). Valued Landscapes of the Far North: A Geographical Journey through Denali National Park. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Williams, A. (1998). Therapeutic landscapes in holistic medicine. Social Science and Medicine 46, 1193 1203. Williams, A. (ed.) (1999). Therapeutic Landscapes: The Dynamic between Place and Wellness. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Wilson, K. (2003). Therapeutic landscapes and First Nations People: An exploration of culture, health and place. Health and Place 9, 83 93.

Thiessen Polygon L. Mu, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Delaunay Triangulation Triangulate a finite set of points, if all the triangles satisfy the empty circle criterion, we call this triangulation a Delaunay triangulation. Dual Graph The dual graph of a planar graph with tessellated polygons is formed by taking the center of each polygon as a vertex and joining the centers of adjacent polygons. Empty Circle Criterion Triangulate a finite set of points, if the circumcircle of a triangle in the triangulation is a circle and contains no other points than the three nodes, the triangle satisfies the empty circle criterion. Euclidean Plane The two-dimensional Euclidean (or Cartesian) space that is parameterized by coordinates, so that each point is located based on its position with respect to two perpendicular lines, the coordinate axes. Triangular Irregular Network (TIN) A 2.5dimensional surface model of digital elevation. A TIN is created based on the construction of a Delaunay triangulation. Each node is raised to its z-value (elevation or another numeric attribute).

Definition The formal definition of Thiessen polygons derives from topological relationships between points in a two di mensional (2D) space. Given a set of two or more distinct points in the Euclidean plane, we associate all locations in that space with the closest member of the point set with respect to Euclidean distance. The result is a div ision (tessellation) of the plane into a set of the regions associated with members of the point set. We call this tessellation the planar ordinary Voronoi diagram gener ated by the point set. The regions associated with each point are called ordinary Voronoi polygons (Thiessen polygons). Mathematically, let P be a finite set of points in the Euclidean plane, P ¼ {p1, y, pn}, where 2pnoN. Let x be any location in the plane. The Euclidean distance between x and pi is de(x, pi). Let T(pi) denote the Thiessen (Voronoi) polygon of the point pi, that is, pi’s influence region in P, then T ðpi Þ ¼ fx d e ðx; pi Þrd e ðx; pj Þ; for all j ; j ai and i; j rng ½1

In Figure 1, the Thiessen polygon of point p1 is the shaded area. Any location within that polygon has a shorter distance to p1 than to all other points (p2, p3, p4, and p5). Thiessen polygons are named after American meteor ologist, Alfred H. Thiessen, for his contribution of de veloping a method for estimating average areal climate conditions from data collected at scattered points rep resenting weather stations. Thiessen used the method to define regions around each weather station, so that every location in a given region has the enclosed station as the nearest among all stations. These regions, known as Thiessen polygons, define the territory that is closer to a particular point (in this case, a weather station) than to any other point. In Thiessen’s original work, the area of each Thiessen polygon was used as the weight of that weather station in estimating the average rainfall for the whole study area. The term Thiessen polygon is widely used in geography, hydrology, and meteorology. These polygons are also commonly called Voronoi polygons in fields of mathematics, computer science, computational geometry, and astronomy, as the Russian mathematician George Voronoi is believed to be the first to formally introduce the concept in mathematics. In this article, the terms Thiessen polygons and Voronoi polygons are used interchangeably.

Discoveries and Rediscoveries of Thiessen Polygons Mathematicians and scientists discovered and redis covered Thiessen polygons many times, and often referred to them using different terms. Among those, Voronoi diagram/polygons and Thiessen polygons are the most well known. However, a dozen other terms have been used to describe Thiessen polygons, and these terms have been associated with the development of theories, algorithms, and applications in various fields. The earliest examples of Thiessen polygons can be traced back to the seventeenth century, when Descartes discussed cosmic fragmentation of the ‘heavens’ in 1644. He divided the sky into polygons. Each polygon has a star in the center with concentric circles representing orbits, and the interaction of all the orbits from different stars form the boundaries of the polygons. Those polygons are actually Thiessen polygons. The process Descartes used in creating the polygons is consistent with the ‘growth model’ which is used today for constructing Thiessen polygons and is

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Thiessen Polygon

discussed further in this chapter. Table 1 summarizes the names associated with Thiessen polygons found in the literature. Thiessen polygons are not only named differently, but also viewed and understood from different perspectives. Thiessen polygons draw attention from researchers across many fields because their spatial patterns can be found in natural situations such as crystal growing and describing the potential areas from which trees draw moisture and nutrients from soil. There are interesting and surprising mathematical properties of those polygons, and they are robust enough to solve many seemingly unrelated com putational problems. In 1991, Aurenhammer gave a comprehensive bibliography on Voronoi diagrams that summarized various viewpoints and concerns of Voronoi diagram/polygons from different fields. In geography and related fields, researchers have made great progress in developing methods and applications using Thiessen polygons in varied forms. Because

P3 P2

P4

P1 {x} P5

Figure 1 A Thiessen polygon T(p1) {x | de(x,p1)pde(x,p2), de(x,p3), de(x,p5), de(x,p4)}. Source: Modified with permission: Okabe, A., Boots, B. N., Sugihara, K., and Chiu, S. N. (2000). Spatial Tessellations, Concepts and Applications of Voronoi Diagrams, Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics, pp 44. New York: Wiley.

Table 1

Thiessen polygons integrate considerations of location, distance, influence range, and topological relationship, they are viewed and used by geographers in many dif ferent ways. They serve as a proximity method that can be used to assign school children to the nearest school, for example. They are also used as an automated topology for point data to define neighbors in geostatistics, and as a basic data structure in geographic information systems (GIS). Thiessen polygons have been applied in de lineating influence regions or service areas for points such as fire stations and newspapers, in defining neighbors for spatial analysis, and in calculating weighting factors as in the original Thiessen study.

Methods of Constructing Thiessen Polygons Conceptually, the construction of Thiessen polygons can be achieved by two types of spatial processes: growth and assignment. The growth process is usually simulated using a buffer like growing model (Figure 2). The buf fers expand around each point at the same speed. With the expansion of the circular buffers, their frontlines intersect with each other and form the boundaries of Thiessen polygons. In contrast, the assignment process is implemented mathematically based on topological relationships among the points. For the assignment process, there is a wide variety of methods and algorithms ranging from very straightforward and naive to quite complex yet robust. Five representative methods are discussed in the fol lowing section. Since many of these methods derive from mathematics and computer science, the term Voronoi is used more often. Plane intersect. For a given point pi, generate half planes for each pair of points pi and pj (all other points) by bisecting a line between the two, then intersect all half planes. The resultant space is the Voronoi polygon of pi.

Alternative terms for Thiessen polygons in different fields

Date

Term

Author(s)

Field

1644 1850 1908 1909 1911 1927 1933 1958 1965 1966 1967 1985 1987

Heavens Dirichlet tessellation Voronoi diagram/polygons Area of influence polygons Thiessen polygons Domains of action Wigner-Seitz regions Atom domains Areas potentially available Plant polygons Blum’s transform Capillary domains Voronoi foam

Descartes Dirichlet Voronoi Boldyrev Thiessen Niggli Wigner and Seitz Frank and Casper Brown Mead Blum Hoofd et al. Icke

Astronomy (cosmic fragmentation) Mathematics Mathematics Geology Meteorology and geography Crystallography Chemistry and physics Physics Ecology (intensity of trees in a forest) Ecology Biology and visual science Anatomy Astronomy

Thiessen Polygon

(a)

(b)

233

(c)

(d)

Figure 2 Growth process to construct Thiessen polygons.

This method is simple, but it is a direct translation of the definition of Voronoi polygons. In Figure 3, the shaded area is the Voronoi polygon of p1, which is ob tained by intersecting half planes of p1 p2, p1 p3, p1 p5, and p1 p4. Incremental. The method starts with constructing a simple Voronoi diagram with a subset of original points (referred to as generator points), and updates it by adding other points one by one. This method is robust and efficient, thus it is one of the most practical methods. In Figure 4, a simple dia gram is constructed from points p2, p3, p5, and p4. An additional point p1 is inserted, and the new Voronoi polygon of p1 (dot lines) is updated. The process con tinues for other points. Divide and conquer. All generator points are recur sively divided into smaller subsets (Ethe integer of n/2) until the number of points is p3. Voronoi diagrams are constructed for each subset and the subsets are then merged recursively into the final Voronoi diagram. This is another popular method. Figure 5 shows a simple example. The left subset constructed from p1, p2, and p4 (dashed lines) is merged with the right subset constructed from p3 and p5 (shaded lines). The thick line

P3 P2

P4 P1

P5

Figure 3 Plane intersect method. See text for details.

is the merged boundary composed of segments of bi secting lines of near boundary points. Plane sweep (Fortune’s algorithm). An imaginary sweep line is moved over the plane from top to bottom. A parabola is formed between each generator point (focus) above the sweep line and the line itself (directrix).

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Thiessen Polygon

P3

P3

P2

P2 P1

+

P4

P4

P1 P5

Figure 4 Incremental method. See text for details.

Beach line

Sweep line

P5

Figure 6 Plane sweep method. See text for details.

P3 P2

P3 P2

P4

P1 P4

P1 P5

P5

Figure 5 Divide-and-conquer method. See text for details.

The collection of all intersection points of the parabolas during the sweeping constructs the Voronoi diagram. This method offers an important and fundamental algorithm in computational geometry. In Figure 6, with the move of the sweep line (straight, thick, black line), a ‘beach line’ (parabolas: curved, thick, grey line) forms the final Voronoi diagram. The dual graph of the Delaunay triangulation. All points are input to create a triangular irregular network (TIN) that meets the Delaunay criterion. The Delaunay cri terion, also called empty circle criterion, states that a circle drawn through the three nodes of a triangle will contain no other point. Each TIN edge is perpendicu larly bisected to form the Thiessen polygons. The centers of TIN polygons are vertices of Thiessen polygons. The Thiessen polygons are the dual graph of the Delaunay triangulation. This method is used in many GIS programs because the TIN model is an important model for representing surfaces. In Figure 7, the dash lines show the TIN edges,

Figure 7 The dual graph of the Delaunay triangulation method. See text for details.

and the solid lines are the boundaries of Thiessen polygons.

Variations of Thiessen Polygons: Generalized Voronoi Diagrams People have long been aware of the limitations of or dinary Thiessen polygons. The primary concerns are: first, the shape of the polygons is completely dependent on the locations of the sample data points, and does not reflect differences in attributes of the points. For example, some points may be larger or more important than others, and one might expect the areas of influence for these larger points to extend further than those for smaller points. These differences in attribute values are not considered in constructing ordinary Thiessen polygons. Second, in using the polygon areas as weighting factors, the weight value for each polygon is estimated from a sample of one point which may lead to inaccuracies, errors, and

Thiessen Polygon

difficulties in estimating weights for points other than the generator points. Finally, Thiessen polygons do not as sume that points closer together are more similar than points far apart, and thus ignore spatial autocorrelation. Thus, ordinary Thiessen polygons are restricted in terms of point location, weight, rules for assignment or growth, and space, and so on. Complex, real world en vironments often cannot meet these simplified assump tions. In recent years, scientists have relaxed these assumptions in research on generalized Voronoi dia grams. An important extension is to introduce weights for each point so that the extent of the Thiessen polygon for each point is a function of both distance and weight. For instance, consider the problem of identifying service areas for hospitals. Let the capacity of each hospital be the weighting factor. Figure 8 shows the capacity weighted Thiessen polygons for the same set of points as in Figure 1. The diagram demonstrates that when a weighting factor is considered, the derived weighted Thiessen polygons (weights in parentheses: solid, black lines) show a very different spatial pattern as compared to the simple Thiessen polygons (all weights ¼ 1: gray, dashed lines). Other extensions of Voronoi diagrams in clude the use of different distance metrics, such as net work distance, and the incorporation of barriers to movement in generating Voronoi polygons.

Applications of Thiessen Polygons in Geography In addition to using Thiessen polygons to determine weighting factors for calculating areal averages for point data, there are many other uses of this method in geo graphic information science and human geography. In geographic information sciences, researchers are using Thiessen polygons to revisit traditional GIS operations like buffer zone and polygon overlay and to extend the

P3 (0.5) P2 (2.0)

P4 (2.0)

P1 (1.0)

P5 (4.0)

Figure 8 Weighted Thiessen polygons. See text for details.

235

algorithmic foundations of GIS. The Voronoi diagram has also been applied as an ‘automated’ topology for point data to define neighbors, and as a basic data structure in GIS. Spatial weights, used in identifying ‘nearby’ areas in spatial analysis methods, have been generated based on Voronoi methods. Finally, Thiessen polygons also inspire profound thinking about proximity relationships, the meaning of ‘neighbor’ and the issues of human versus computer models of space. Applications in human geography include identifying market areas for retail stores and service facilities such as hospitals and libraries. In fact, Voronoi diagrams are most famous for solving the ‘post office problem’ which in volves delineating postcode/delivery boundaries based on known post office locations. Thiessen polygons pro vide a convenient method for identifying territories or ‘areas of influence’ around points. This is an important topic in research on the geographies of retail and service activities, media outlets, and sociocultural institutions – all activities whose influence extends over nearby terri tories. The diagrams have also been used to study the changing hierarchy of cities in the United States and to analyze central place settlement patterns. Applications in the social sciences and humanities include using the Voronoi model to understand linguistic structure and conducting qualitative analyses with the Voronoi model of space, and, from the viewpoint of a social scientist, the Voronoi model of space has its advantages because it can consider location, distance, and influence range and re lationship. Table 2 provides a glimpse of some research of the applications and development of Thiessen polygons.

Summary and Conclusion Thiessen polygons are widely used in geography, com puter science, and other fields. The major application of Thiessen polygon in human geography is to delineate dominant regions or service areas for point data, such as stores or hospitals. Thiessen polygons are models of spatial processes, nonparametric techniques in point pattern an alysis, organizing structures for displaying spatial data, and information theoretical approaches to point patterns. Al though ordinary Thiessen polygons are used most com monly in human geography and other fields due to their simplicity, their limitations have hindered applications. Such limitations include using point location as the only determination factor to construct the model, lack of weight consideration for each point, and inadequate con sideration of spatial relationships among points. Research developments in weighted Thiessen polygons and Thies sen polygons for lines, polygons, and three dimensional (3D) objects have effectively overcome the limitations of ordinary Thiessen polygons. Future research of Thiessen

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Thiessen Polygon

Table 2

Some examples of Thiessen/Voronoi research

Author(s)

Date

Topic

Hyson and Hyson Gambini et al. Illeris Huff and Jenks Hubbard Beckman Hogg Boots Huff Boots Boots Wood Cox and Agnew Fraser Getis and Boots Jones Huff and Lutz Edelsbrunner et al. Aurenhammer and Edelsbrunner Vincent and Daly

1950 1967 1967 1968 1970 1971 1971 1973 1973 1975a 1975b 1974 1974 1977 1978 1979 1979 1983 1984 1990

Economic law of market areas Market place properties Functional regions of urban centers Urban systems Functional regions Market potential Archaeology site territory define Subdivision of space Urban spheres of influence Patterns of urban settlement Structure of socioeconomic cellular network Functional regions Theoretical counties Forest sampling Spatial processes Economic law of market areas Urban hierarchy Voronoi diagram, alpha-shape, and Delaunay triangulation Constructing the weighted Voronoi diagram Weighted Voronoi diagrams in GIS

Study area

Denmark Jamaica England Great Britain

Great Britain Kenya Ireland

Ireland

Reproduced from Mu, L. (2004). Polygon characterization with the multiplicatively weighted Voronoi diagram. The Professional Geographer 56(2), 223 239.

polygons in human geography may investigate issues of Thiessen polygons of multidimensions (e.g., multiple socioeconomic variables), Thiessen polygons of dynamic phenomena (e.g., transportation network and human movement), and Thiessen polygons of real time inputs (e.g., wireless communication). See also: Point Pattern Analysis; Spatial Data Models.

Future Reading Aurenhammer, F. (1991). Voronoi diagrams: A survey of a fundamental geometric data structure. ACM Computing Surveys 23(3), 345 405. Boots, B. N. (1980). Weighting Thiessen polygons. Economic Geography 56, 248 259. Boots, B. N. (1987). Voronoi (Thiessen) polygons. (Concepts and Techniques in Modern Geography). Norwich, UK: Geo Books. de Berg, M., van Kreveld, M., Overmars, M. and Schwarzkopf, O. (2000). Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications. New York: Springer Verlag.

Edelsbrunner, H., Kirkpatrick, D. and Seidel, R. (1983). On the shape of a set of points in the plane. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory IT 29(4), 551 559. Edwards, G. (1993). The Voronoi model and cultural space: Applications to the social sciences and humanities. In Frank, A. U. & Campari, I. (eds.) Spatial Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS, pp 202 214. Springer Verlag: Berlin. Fortune, S. (1987). A sweepline algorithm for Voronoi diagram. Algorithmica 2, 153 174. Gambini, R., Huff, D. L. and Jenks, G. F. (1967). Geometric properties of market areas. Regional Science Association: Papers 20, 85 92. Gold, C. M. (1992). The meaning of ‘neighbour’. Theories and Methods of Spatio Temporal Reasoning in Geographic Space, pp 220 235. Springer Verlag: Berlin. Gold, C. M., Remmele, P. R. and Roos, T. (1997). Voronoi methods in GIS. In van Kreveld, M., Nievergeld, J., Roos, T. & Widmeyer, P. (eds.) Algorithmic Foundations of GIS, pp 21 35. Springer Verlag: Berlin. Griffith, D. A. (1983). The boundary value problem in spatial statistical analysis. Journal of Regional Science 23, 377 387. Huff, D. L. (1973). The delineation of a national system of planning regions on the basis of urban spheres of influence. Regional Studies 7, 323 329. Okabe, A., Boots, B., Sugihara, K. and Chiu, S. N. (2000). Spatial Tessellations, Concepts and Applications of Voronoi Diagrams, Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics. New York: Wiley.

Third World J. Connell, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary CARICOM Caribbean Community and Common Market. COMECON The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance was an economic organization of communist states and a kind of Eastern Bloc equivalent to, but more inclusive than, the European Economic Community. Cold War The protracted geopolitical, ideological, and economic struggle that emerged after World War II between the global superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States, supported by their military alliance partners. Dependency School A school of thought, initially associated with Latin American economists, that argued that development problems were primarily a function of exploitative links between less-developed countries and those of the West. G8 The ‘Group of Eight’ had its origins in the 1973 oil crisis and subsequent global recession. It links eight nations, the last of which (Russia) joined in 1991, that have a combined two-thirds of the world’s economic power. Millennium Development Goals Eight wide-ranging development goals agreed to by all members of the United Nations to be achieved by 2015. NICs Newly Industrialized Countries. OPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Sahel The savanna area on the southern border of the Sahara desert characterized by considerable poverty and other crucial development issues.

Introduction Broad consensus exists that the term ‘Third World’ was first coined by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952 at the height of the Cold War, between the largely Western capitalist and Eastern socialist blocs. It was then used to apply to less developed countries that remained outside these two blocs, then respectively centered on the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR). The first sense of the phrase was actually the French tiers monde that was usually glossed as ‘third force’, indicating non alignment rather than ‘underdevelopment’. The concept thus emerged in a primarily political sense. The original political dimension was emphasized at a conference in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 when a group of African and Asian nations sought to assert their unity,

common interests, and independence from both the capitalist and socialist world, identifying themselves as a nonaligned alternative world. Leading members of this group were Yugoslavia (under Tito), India (under Nehru), and Indonesia (under Sukarno). Subsequently the group lost identity and purpose as new nations became caught up in the spheres of influence of the two rival blocs. Over time, notably in the 1960s, as more colonies be came independent and the Cold War weakened, the phrase increasingly took on an economic rather than political sense. This reflected a new distinction, if not confrontation, between relatively rich and relatively poor nations, the former sometimes being referred to as in dustrialized states. That distinction had new geographical connotations. Rather than there being a confrontation between East and West, the growing division was between North and South, as most of the emerging Third World states were in the Southern Hemisphere, especially around the tropics. The original confrontation between East and West was retained in the growing use of First World to refer to the industrialized market economy states (the capitalist countries) and the centrally directed, socialist states, which became known as the Second World. Around the start of the 1960s, the term ‘Third World’ essentially became a synonym for ‘underdeveloped countries’, or even as one geographer Norton Ginsburg had called them: ‘‘retarded countries.’’ Such derogatory terms later disappeared largely, to be replaced by ‘de veloping’ or ‘less developed’, or ‘two thirds world’ and ‘Global South’, but the connotation of some sort of fail ure never entirely disappeared from the concept of Third World. By the 1970s the term had acquired global usage though there was no general agreement over what or where it was. Some authors and studies took a geo graphical approach, where the Third World was essen tially Africa, Asia, and Latin America (and later, by extension, Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and Pacific Islands), and where there was ambivalence about parts of the Middle East (such as Israel and Saudi Arabia), Japan, and South Africa. Others had a more structural approach that centered on poverty and the lack of significant indus trialization. In either case early Eurocentrism was evident in relatively poor and less developed counties (such as Portugal and Greece) being placed in the First World, and the world being seen in primarily ethnic terms. In both perspectives socialist states remote from Eastern Europe, and with limited industry (such as Laos and Cuba), were usually regarded as part of the Second

237

238

Third World

World, hence the political perspectives partly survived. Equally, most countries grouped as Third World were also members of the Non Aligned Movement that came into existence in 1961, reflecting both – some sense of shared identity and some unity of both political and economic purpose – despite growing ties with one or the other of the northern blocs (Figure 1). As most colonies eventually became independent states, such general groupings were increasingly found wanting. Much smaller countries also became in dependent, a process that continued until decolonization had almost reached its finale. By the end of the 1970s there were some 97 members of the United Nations from Africa, Asia, and Latin America alone, and thus well over 120 countries that might loosely be grouped within the Third World. Within this group there were evident and significant differences. As smaller countries, and especially small island states, became independent the differences between countries like Tuvalu (with barely 10 000 people scattered over eight coral atolls in the central Pacific), recently created city states such as Singapore, and India were evident. India, for example, had human and natural resources, fertile land, large domestic markets, access to overseas markets and capital, while Tuvalu had none of these. Singapore had a growing financial service and manu facturing sector. Their colonial histories and cultures

were also different. It made little sense to consider either the status of development, or the prospects for future development, in the same way for such disparate places. Beyond obvious distinctions of geography (location, physical structure, and resources), culture, and history, there were other key distinctions, centered on natural resources and industrialization. Some countries were able to achieve a greater degree of economic growth through the export of mineral resources, especially oil. The am biguous status of Middle Eastern oil producers was evi dent early on, but after the establishment of OPEC in 1960, and declining oil production in the United States, the first ‘oil shock’ led to a rapid increase in oil prices and equally rapid economic growth amongst the Gulf states especially. To some extent the very success of these states meant further challenges for poorer states that were oil importers. Other countries achieved less dramatic success with different commodities, such as copper in Chile, but economic growth was not always sustained, as in the case of Nauru, which went from great wealth to extreme poverty after the extinction of its phosphate in the late 1990s. Similarly rapid economic growth did not always equate with development in other arenas such as edu cation and health. Industrialization was successful both in what became known as the Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs),

Figure 1 First, Second, and Third Worlds and the North South division (indicated by the broken line). Source: Barke, M. and O’Hare, G. (1984). The Third World, p 1. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.

Third World

notably four in Asia – Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore – and Mexico and Brazil in Latin America. Based on economic performance alone, there were substantial differences within the evolving Third World.

UNCTAD and the Fourth World As significant changes occurred within what was still la beled the Third World, the United Nations, through the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), distinguished a further group of countries, those that appeared to experience particular develop ment challenges. Beyond general and unspecified notions of poverty, for the first time a set of basic indicators was developed to enable classification. These three indicators, first set out in 1968, were gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, the percentage share of manufacturing in the GDP, and the extent of adult illiteracy. For the first time this provided a simple measure of development centered on one social and two economic variables. While the resultant classification excluded otherwise impoverished countries such as India, where there had been significant industrialization, it resulted in a list of 25 countries, 16 of which were in sub Saharan Africa, and seven in Asia. One (Haiti) was in the Caribbean and one (Western Samoa) in the Pacific. A particular concen tration of such states existed in immediately sub Saharan Africa, the Sahel region stretching from the Atlantic coast to Ethiopia and Somalia in the east, where poverty was associated with intermittent drought and natural hazard. The intent of the classification was to distinguish coun tries that were in particular need of assistance whether through new overseas aid strategies, investment priorities, or trade arrangements. Over the next two decades other countries were added to the list, mainly in sub Saharan Africa, but none were removed. By 2004 some 50 countries had been formally desig nated by the UNCTAD as ‘least developed countries’ in comparison with the ‘less developed countries’ of the Third World. Again most were in sub Saharan Africa (Table 1). The list is reviewed every three years. Three broad criteria were used to designate the least developed countries: low income, weak human assets (based on nutrition, health, education, and literacy), and economic vulnerability (based on instability in agricultural and industrial production, trade, diversity, and size). This group, with their seemingly greater problems, became known to many as the Fourth World. (The concept of the Fourth World has also been used, but much less fre quently, to refer to either women or distinct ethnic mi norities within the Third World.) Differentiation within the Third World was paralleled by obvious divisions within the Second and First Worlds.

239

In the First World, there were vast differences in struc tures and levels of economic development between countries such as the United States, Ireland, and Aus tralia, the last retaining a largely nonindustrial economy. Much later these became evident in groupings such as the G8 countries (USA, France, Japan, Canada, UK, Italy, Germany, and later Russia), self selected as the leading global economies. Similarly, in the Second World, the COMECON countries of Eastern Europe had pursued largely indus trial development strategies, while the socialist states of Asia (and Cuba) had more mixed, but primarily agri cultural economies. Moreover there were tensions be tween the two main socialist powers, China and the Soviet Union.

The Meaning of Development Even by the time the UNCTAD had established its classification in 1968, it was evident that there were a series of problems attached to notions of the Third World. First, there were disagreements on what might be defined, and also measured, as parameters that consti tuted ‘development’. Second, there were objections to these terms as neocolonial imperialist phrases that either had no meaning or were to be rejected as slurs on the status of people in many countries. Indeed such ob jections, largely following from the arguments of what was in the 1970s the emerging dependency school, em phasized that problems in developing countries were a function of active underdevelopment by rich world countries. Conceptualizing One World, in which coun tries were interlinked through relationships of trade, aid, investment, migration etc., seemed a more appropriate perspective. Indicative of other perspectives, in 1974 Mao Tse Tung, the Chinese leader, said, ‘‘In my view, the United States and USSR form the First World. Japan, Europe and Canada, the middle section, belong to the second world. We are Third WorldyWith the exception of Japan, Asia belongs to the Third World, the whole of Africa belongs to the Third World and Latin America too.’’ In the midst of a new Cold War between China and the Soviet Union, Mao was arguing that the principal exponents of imperialism and capitalism were the United States and the Soviet Union. Political perspectives might therefore be quite different, and there was no consensus on how the world might be perceived. As development problems appeared more acute, further thought went into the conceptualization of de velopment, and two broad perspectives emerged. The first, which emphasized economic growth, centered on historical models, and primarily on that of Rostow, argued that the success of northern countries as they moved

Table 1

.. 987 220 339 279 172 125 .. .. 338 168 434 330 .. .. .. .. 282 .. 151 751 513 .. 233 712 427 173 .. 255 317 149 .. 137 298 232 .. .. 434 318 561 ..

.. 934 246 329 466 182 143 204 956 293 216 425 269 1209 973 .. 76 281 328 191 568 457 199 295 194 341 141 .. 210 296 135 .. 173 216 216 .. 340 444 277 766 ..

.. 863 329 410 698 225 109 266 1390 282 232 343 111 861 4517 146 87 280 380 149 437 512 304 405 174 267 158 2000 251 350 211 .. 223 188 210 1482 321 501 166 517 ..

.. 0.5 1.1 0.5 5.4 0.8 1.2 1.6 3.8 1.0 3.4 0.3 1.3 6.7 0.8 .. 2.1 0.1 1.7 1.5 2.6 1.4 1.0 2.5 8.2 1.7 1.9 .. 1.6 0.5 1.0 .. 2.3 3.2 0.9 .. 0.4 0.2 1.8 3.1 ..

.. 1.2 2.4 1.7 3.4 1.5 3.6 1.8 3.7 0.3 0.8 1.8 7.3 3.6 19.0 3.9a 1.6 0.3 1.3 1.8 2.1 1.5 3.9 2.8 0.4 0.9 2.0 3.8 1.3 1.5 3.3 .. 2.5 1.0 1.6 3.0 0.8 1.1 5.6 1.0 ..

1990–2000 .. 6.5 2.7 2.4 4.4 2.5 0.7 2.8 1.5 1.4 6.5 0.4 2.1 0.4 1.9 5.6 3.7 0.2 2.5 4.8 2.6 0.7 2.9 3.5 0.2 6.1 2.0 0.2 2.4 1.8 9.8 .. 0.3 1.3 4.4 2.7 0.4 1.6 1.9 9.7 ..

2000–2002

1980–1990

2002

1980

1990

Annual average growth rates of per capita real GDP (%)

Per capita GDP (in 2002 dollars)

Bas c data on the east deve oped countr es (per cap ta GDP and popu at on: eve s and growth)

Afghan stan Ango a Bang adesh Ben n Bhutan Burk na Faso Burund Cambod a Cape Verde Centra Afr can Repub c Chad Comoros Dem. Rep. of the Congo Dj bout Equator a Gu nea Er trea Eth op a Gamb a Gu nea Gu nea-B ssau Ha t K r bat Lao PDR Lesotho L ber a Madagascar Ma aw Ma d ves Ma Maur tan a Mozamb que Myanmar Nepa N ger Rwanda Samoa Sao Tome and Pr nc pe Senega S erra Leone So omon s ands Soma a

Country

22.9 13.2 143.8 6.6 0.9 12.6 6.6 13.8 0.5 3.8 8.3 0.7 51.2 0.7 0.5 4.0 69.0 1.4 8.4 1.4 8.2 0.1 5.5 1.8 3.2 16.9 11.9 0.3 12.6 2.8 18.5 48.9 24.6 11.5 8.3 0.2 0.2 9.9 4.8 0.5 9.5

2002

Level (millions)

1.3 2.8 2.6 3.0 2.1 2.7 3.2 4.1 1.9 2.5 2.6 3.1 2.9 5.1 5.0 2.8 3.2 3.7 2.6 2.4 2.4 2.2 2.6 2.1 1.4 2.8 4.6 3.2 2.5 2.3 0.9 1.8 2.3 3.2 3.1 0.3 2.0 2.9 2.4 3.4 0.8

1980–1990 4.5 2.9 2.3 3.0 3.0 2.9 1.0 3.0 2.2 2.4 3.1 3.0 2.6 2.3 2.6 1.7 3.0 3.4 2.9 3.0 1.5 1.6 2.5 1.3 3.5 2.9 1.8 3.0 2.8 2.7 3.0 1.6 2.4 3.5 1.3 0.8 2.6 2.5 0.7 3.2 1.9

1990–2000 3.5 3.2 2.1 2.7 2.8 3.0 2.6 2.5 2.1 1.4 3.0 2.9 2.7 2.0 2.7 3.7 2.5 2.9 1.5 3.0 1.3 1.5 2.3 0.4 4.9 2.9 2.2 3.0 3.0 3.0 1.9 1.4 2.3 3.7 3.5 0.9 2.5 2.4 3.9 3.0 4.3

2000–2002

Population Annual average growth rates (%)

240 Third World

..

265 418 .. .. .. 1113 .. 481 .. 761 18 813

3160

264 338 .. 161 241 1231 482 389 253 901 23 832 2781

410 288 .. 235 259 1133 538 344 281 1195 28 388 1.0

0.2 1.6 .. 0.6 1.9 0.5 .. 2.2 0.1 1.6 2.6 2.1

3.0 0.6 .. 3.9 0.0 0.5 1.6 1.9 0.9 3.1 1.7 4.3

6.3 0.2 .. 2.2 3.6 3.5 0.5 2.6 2.4 1.5 0.2 335.1

32.9 4.8 0.0 25.0 36.3 0.2 19.3 10.7 699.6 5018.5 871.4

b

1993–2000 Population 10 466 and area 26 km2 Source UNCTAD Handbook of Statistics 2003 World Bank World Development Indicators online data Note GDP per capita data are based on World Bank data on GDP and population data are based on United Nations/DESA/Population Division Data for Ethiopia prior to 1992 include Eritrea Population data for Bhutan is from national sources

a

Sudan Togo Tuva ub Uganda Un ted Rep. of Tanzan a Vanuatu Yemen Zamb a A LDCs A deve op ng countr es Deve oped market economy countr es Countr es n Centra and Eastern Europe 0.7

2.5 3.3 1.6 3.4 3.3 2.4 3.9 3.2 2.6 2.1 0.6 5.5

2.4 2.8 1.4 3.0 3.0 2.8 4.2 2.4 2.6 1.7 0.7 0.4

2.3 2.6 1.3 3.2 2.0 2.5 3.5 1.3 2.4 1.5 0.5

Third World 241

242

Third World

through the industrial revolution provided an appropriate model for other countries to follow (Walt Rostow was an American economic historian and national security ad visor, whose book The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), subtitled. ‘A Non Communist Manifesto’, provided strong advocacy for capitalist development). If developing coun tries adopted modern democratic and education systems, constructed adequate transport infrastructure, and in vested in industry they could achieve economic growth. Primacy was continually extended to industrialization, rather than agricultural development. The basic idea was persuasive, since Western countries certainly had evolved and hence suggested that national decisions could influ ence progress. This was criticized, initially by the dependency school, who pointed out that many countries not only lacked the preconditions to achieve economic growth but were ac tively held back by processes emanating from the rich world, including unequal exchange in trade and transfer of profits from peripheral countries through large corpor ations (that gave rise to generalizations about ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ countries, with the former group in the capit alist West exploiting the others). Moreover, growth was not necessarily linked to distribution of wealth or services and thus to ideas of development that had some relationship to notions of equity, while a sole focus on growth had po tentially negative environmental consequences. While emphasis on economic growth and trade had resulted in indicators of development that focused on industrial development and income generation, sub sequent emphasis was placed on more distributive aspects of development, including access to health, housing, nutrition, employment, and education, and issues such as ecological stability and equity. Though this resulted in a wider range of development indicators, that came to be known as Basic Needs, some of these could be conten tious and were often difficult to measure. Thus equity might be seen in terms of income levels, which were relatively easy to measure, but could also be perceived as relating to gender issues, which varied enormously across cultures, and were largely immeasurable. For a quarter of a century broad ideas of basic needs, centered on health, nutrition, employment, education, freedom, housing, ecological stability, and some notion of equity (at national, regional, and household levels), in formed most institutional perspectives on development. Over time they became more subtle, and were regularly assessed through the United Nations’ global ‘Human De velopment Index’, undertaken irrespective of the political status of countries. By the end of the century this had effectively evolved into the ‘Millennium Development Goals’ (MDGs), which gave greater emphasis to poverty and hunger, education, gender equality, and educational sustainability. The MDGs, developed by the United Na tions, both specified particular goals (such as the reduction

of child mortality by two thirds between 1990 and 2015) and emphasized that a ‘global partnership’ was required to achieve the goals, since individual countries could not achieve the task on their own, and that trade reform and greater and more effective aid delivery were crucial to change and development. While basic needs, and also MDGs, tended to be used at national levels they enabled international comparisons that both stressed that over time there had been little general shift in the manner in which development problems remained highly concentrated in sub Saharan Africa, and that in many counties in this region there was deprivation on multiple scales. Since there could be no ultimate consensus on which variables were most critical, and which should be included, or how they might be measured and compared, it made little sense to draw up league tables of success and failure and seek to identify particular worlds as demarcated by these indicators. The maps of the worlds that had accompanied early studies usually became things of the past, as development be came more complex and subtle, even though the broad parameters were changed little, especially in terms of poverty, malnutrition, and access to basic needs. While the evolution of the basic needs and MDGs gave a more subtle and nuanced perspective on devel opment they remained essentially ahistorical indicators that did not necessarily imply particular policies or strategies to meet them, at national or international levels, or in what circumstances these goals had not been met. They therefore stood somewhat outside history and development in a broader sense and, rather like Rostow’s model, implied a critical role for national development. They were primarily of value in focusing the attitudes and policies of international agencies, and emphasizing the needs of particular countries.

New Geopolitics and State Failure Further geopolitical changes brought new global struc tures. The most dramatic was the collapse of the formal structures of communism, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, symbolically marked by the de struction of the Berlin Wall (between the then separate nations of East and West Germany) in 1989, and con sequently the effective disappearance of the Second World, though several countries, including China, Cuba, and North Korea, continued to maintain avowed socialist development strategies. In Europe, formerly socialist states entered a period of postsocialist reconstruction toward privatization. In other parts of the world, countries formed regional groupings, such as CARICOM in the Caribbean, often designed to improve regional and international trade structures. Small island states grouped themselves into

Third World

the Association of Small Island States (AOSIS) recog nizing their own particular needs which had much to do with environmental matters and exceptionally limited economic diversity. Though the Non Aligned Movement continues to meet, it has had decreasing relevance to the diverse needs, and particularly the political concerns, of the countries it sought to involve. Any sense of significant global blocs was thus dwindling. A contemporary manifestation of the Third World, with its implication of both failure and vulnerability, is the growing recognition of failed states, that can no longer perform basic functions such as education, se curity, or governance, usually due to divisive violence or extreme poverty, or more generally control the state, collect state revenue, and police state borders. Within this power vacuum, people fall victim to competing factions, crime, and hunger, and sometimes the United Nations or neighboring states have intervened to prevent humanitarian disaster. However, states fail not only be cause of internal factors. Foreign governments can also destabilize states by fueling ethnic warfare. The World Bank has identified around 30 ‘low income countries under stress’, the United Kingdom’s development agency (Department for International Development) has named 46 fragile states of concern, and the journal Foreign Policy has developed an annual global ranking of weak and failing states, using 12 social, economic, political, and military indicators to classify 60 failed or potentially failing states (Figure 2). Table 2 lists the indicators of instability for these countries. The analysis excludes

Figure 2 Weak states. Source: Foreign Policy (2006). The failed states index. Foreign Policy 154, July, 50 59.

243

island microstates in the Pacific, though both Nauru and Solomon islands have been seen as failed states. Most of the identified failed states, and those con sidered most at risk, are again in sub Saharan Africa, including Congo, Somalia, Sierra Leone, and Ivory Coast, but also include such countries as Iraq and Af ghanistan, and smaller island states such as Haiti and Nauru. In many of these states ethnic divisiveness often indicates irrelevant state boundaries, and several have experienced sometimes continuing internecine warfare, where external intervention has propped up the state. Uneven development is particularly significant in almost all the states that are high in Foreign Policy’s failed state index, suggesting that inequality rather than poverty is a critical factor in instability. Similarly important is the criminalization of the state where state institutions are regarded as corrupt, illegal, or simply ineffective. Demographic factors, stemming from refugee movements and environmental degradation, are further problems.

One World Over time greater subtlety of analysis reduced the value of simplistic and ideological terms such as Third World. Around 200 countries are too complex to be reduced to a simple three or fourfold classification, and within the nominal Third World, there was extraordinary variety in culture, history, and contemporary development. Homogeneity was spurious. No single organization ef fectively linked them. Values are crucial to any approach to development, hence development is partly a question of ideology, and is necessarily relative. Assessments of development may be both intuitive and biased, and linked to questions of power. All countries, even the most reclusive and isol ated, are interdependent and external links, such as trade and aid, are often critical in influencing national devel opment. This has intensified with new manifestations of globalization, including migration. Moreover, economic and even political power may more obviously reside in the hands of large multinational corporations, rather than countries, suggesting that examining development solely in terms of state issues and values is of limited relevance. Interdependence both imposes costs and enables gains, whether through trade, investment, migration, or other linkages. While in smaller, weaker countries, external influences may be particularly important this does not necessarily demarcate a group of countries with par ticular characteristics. While in the post Second World War years, numerous countries had identified socialist models of development as their objectives, almost all countries now exist within a ‘one world’ structure of ‘Western’ capitalism, although the means of achieving a more elaborate capitalist

Total

112 3 110 1

109 2 109 0 108 9 105 9 105 9 104 6 103 1 99 8 99 0 99 0 97 5

97 3 96 7 96 6 96 6 96 5 96 3 95 4 94 5 94 4 94 4 92 9 92 4 91 9 91 8 90 3 89 8 89 7 89 5 89 2 88 6 88 6 88 5

88 4 88 3 88 3 87 9 87 9 87 8 87 7 87 1 87 0

1 2

3 4 5 6 6 8 9 10 11 11 13

14 15 16 16 18 19 20 21 22 22 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 33 35

36 37 37 39 39 41 42 43 44

Table 2

Rank

Sudan Dem Rep of the Congo vory Coast raq Zimbabwe Chad Somalia Haiti Pakistan Afghanistan Guinea Liberia Central African Republic North Korea Burundi Yemen Sierra Leone Burma Bangladesh Nepal Uganda Nigeria Uzbekistan Rwanda Sri Lanka Ethiopia Colombia Kirgistan Malawi Burkina Faso Egypt ndonesia Syria Kenya Bosnia and Herzegovina Cameroon Angola Togo Bhutan Laos Mauritania Tajikistan Russia Niger

Country

65 80 70 60 80 90 70 80 94

80 90 78 85 89 90 85 80 80 77 95 80 90 70 80 90 90 80 75 70 90 65

88 89 97 90 90 88 93 79 75 80 90

96 95

Demographic pressure

nd cators of nstab ty

68 85 58 81 59 59 66 72 43

60 91 67 79 88 58 48 92 59 58 70 82 76 91 66 60 59 60 82 71 71 85

76 83 89 90 81 50 93 96 72 93 77

97 95

Refugees and displaced persons

65 63 60 70 63 85 62 80 85

72 70 70 71 90 95 92 78 91 75 90 91 70 74 70 60 65 85 63 80 67 86

98 98 85 85 80 88 86 91 81 70 88

97 91

Group grievance

80 50 65 67 66 50 65 70 60

50 67 82 89 60 85 60 57 85 75 82 67 75 85 75 70 66 60 83 68 80 60

85 91 90 80 70 80 81 70 84 71 55

91 80

Human flight

87 90 75 90 59 70 74 80 72

90 88 90 87 90 90 92 84 90 81 72 80 85 85 80 88 88 80 80 89 80 73

80 87 9 290 75 83 89 80 80 86 85

92 90

Uneven development

60 49 80 80 65 78 68 37 90

95 78 78 90 71 70 85 75 54 70 80 57 80 32 75 88 82 70 68 65 68 62

90 82 98 79 85 84 70 75 80 89 81

75 81

Economy

85 88 87 84 79 71 89 82 79

98 72 88 80 92 90 92 38 90 93 87 86 76 87 83 80 78 90 67 90 73 81

10 0 85 89 95 10 0 94 85 83 91 78 90

95 90

Delegitimization of state

80 76 81 60 80 82 75 69 85

95 85 82 80 82 75 62 80 83 70 69 70 62 65 73 90 84 73 72 55 72 58

85 83 95 90 10 0 93 75 80 90 90 80

95 90

Public services

72 78 81 86 82 71 86 91 65

95 75 72 70 98 78 91 80 71 93 77 72 80 76 79 80 65 80 75 98 69 53

94 97 95 91 95 96 85 82 81 72 75

98 95

Human rights

76 68 81 50 90 76 75 75 67

83 73 90 70 90 83 90 85 92 91 50 85 75 90 83 55 76 65 75 75 70 75

98 98 94 94 10 0 94 91 82 81 73 89

98 98

Security apparatus

79 80 78 84 89 79 87 90 60

80 78 94 77 80 89 90 79 90 91 89 89 87 92 79 67 77 77 79 71 76 87

98 97 35 95 98 96 91 80 90 88 80

91 96

Factionalized elites

67 76 67 67 67 67 60 45 70

75 10 0 75 88 35 60 67 75 59 70 68 65 63 71 60 70 67 75 73 62 70 10 0

10 0 10 0 80 80 85 10 0 92 10 0 85 10 0 85

98 10 0

External intervention

244 Third World

86 l 85 4 85 0 85 0

84 6

84 5 84 3 84 0

84 0 83 9 83 8

82 9 82 5 82 5 82 4 82 2

45 46 47 47

49

50 51 52

52 54 55

56 57 57 59 60

Turkmenistan Guinea-Bissau Cambodia Dominican Republic Papua New Guinea Belarus Guatemala Equatorial Guinea ran Eritrea Serbia and Montenegro Bolivia China Moldova Nicaragua Georgia

75 85 70 65 60

65 80 57

90 87 70

80

70 70 75 78

40 51 47 55 68

87 72 85

51 60 20

25

42 49 65 70

70 80 73 64 74

69 54 86

55 71 67

80

52 55 70 65

70 66 80 71 61

50 60 55

35 67 75

80

60 70 80 85

88 92 75 90 70

75 60 80

85 80 90

90

72 93 72 80

62 45 75 85 55

30 80 65

63 71 40

70

80 74 60 60

70 85 74 73 77

81 80 78

90 75 90

78

91 78 78 62

78 73 70 72 63

61 73 50

75 71 80

80

72 80 75 80

67 90 68 57 56

91 68 56

73 71 85

61

97 79 69 71

65 55 55 65 81

80 72 65

68 75 83

70

85 75 67 70

84 80 68 70 71

88 75 86

80 60 80

67

80 65 75 74

60 23 70 57 86

63 65 75

80 55 60

65

60 66 64 55

Third World 245

246

Third World

development necessarily vary considerably. However, they are often subsumed in the increased universality of policies based on neoliberalism and the primacy of markets, sustained by external interventions from such international institutions as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. At the same time there are significant differences within states as, on the one hand, capitalism and material success become evident even in parts of nominally so cialist states, such as Shanghai in China (sometimes re ferred to as ‘First Worlds within the Third World’) while on the other, pockets of material deprivation and poverty exist even in the wealthiest states. Uneven development is universal, as global complexity increases, evident particularly in significant rural–urban distinctions in some less developed countries. Further, enormous cultural distinctions between, and within, countries and regions remain important. These cultural distinctions suggest that critical global divisions are now rather more cultural, as once expressed in Samuel Huntington’s concern over the ‘‘clash of civil isations,’’ rather than in terms of broad economic orien tation. Once again, culture and politics may be more important than economics in shaping crude global divisions. Ultimately the Third World has largely become a journalistic handle that may effectively focus attention on parts of the world that experience high levels of multiple deprivation, both wide regions such as the Sahel or parts of many nations, such as remote inland Australia, that are not necessarily in the ‘conventional’ Third World. It is at this partly metaphorical level that the concept can be most effective and dramatic rather than in now archaic attempts to distinguish world regions, from a primarily Eurocentric perspective. In countries that see themselves labeled as Third World the term is regarded as outdated, colonialist, inaccurate, and essentialist, and a denial of

any notion of change and progress. The term represents a particular form of Orientalist discourse that has come to be known as ‘developmentalism’, whereby countries supposedly different from those of the West become essentialized, homogeneous entities that should evolve toward the status of the countries of the West. See also: Aid; Dependency; Development I; Development II; Eurocentrism; First World; Neoliberalism; Neoliberalism and Development; Orientalism; Second World; Transnational Corporations in Developing Countries.

Further Reading Berger, M. (1994). The end of the Third World. Third World Quarterly 15, 257 275. Corbridge, S. (1999). Development, post development and the global political economy. In Cloke, P., Crang, P. & Goodwin, M. (eds.) Introducing Human Geographies, pp 67 75. London: Edward Arnold. Dodds, K. (2005). Global Geopolitics. A Critical Introduction. Harlow, UK: Pearson. Escobar, E. (1995). Encountering Development The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Foreign Policy (2005). The failed states index. Foreign Policy 149 July August, 56 65. Lee, R. (2000). Third World. In Johnston, R., Gregory, D., Pratt, G. & Watts, M. (eds.) Dictionary of Human Geography, pp 827 830. London: Blackwell. Power, M. (2003). Rethinking Development Geographies. London: Routledge.

Relevant Websites http://www.shambles.net Third World Countries. http://www.twnside.org.sg Third World Network. www.undp.org United Nations Development Programme. www.worldbank.org World Bank.

Third World Cities S. Lloyd-Evans and R. B. Potter, University of Reading, Reading, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Desakota A term commonly used in Southeast Asia to refer to zones that are neither rural or urban in character. Dualism A theory that characterises Third World cities as comprised of two distinct economic sectors (traditional and modern). Extended Metropolitan Region (EMR) A term given to rural areas surrounding cities that are adopting urban economic characteristics. These boundary areas may extend up to 100 km from the city core. Informal Sector A collective name given to all remunerated work that is not recognized, regulated, or protected by existing legal or regulatory frameworks and all nonremunerated work undertaken within enterprises. International Labour Organization Founded in 1919, the ILO is a specialized agency of the United Nations that deals with labor issues. Kampungs Traditional villages in Southeast Asia. Mega-cities A term that defines cities with population in excess of 8 million inhabitants. Nongovernmental Organizations A term given to a heterogeneous group of organizations that are not part of the structure of government. It is commonly used to refer to voluntary sector, civil society, grassroots, and nonstate organizations. South or Global South Collective name given to the poorer countries of the world by the Brandt Commission. These are generally situated to the south of the globe. This term is now used in preference to the then common collective term the ‘Third World’. Third World A term coined in the 1960s to pinpoint those, primarily, former colonial countries that were emerging as independent states, in contrast to the free-market First World and the state-socialist Second World. Third World City A collective name given to cities in the Third World to differentiate them from cities in the socalled First World. United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) Established in 1978, it is the United Nations agency concerned with human settlements. World Cities A concept that refers to cities that undertake major economic, social, and political roles in the global accumulation of capital.

Introduction The Validity of the ‘Third World City’ Concept Third World cities have presented many challenges to those who have tried to explain their distinctive nature. The term ‘Third World city’ has been widely applied in urban and development geographies since the 1960s, and stems from a notion that there are distinct differences between cities in the developing and developed worlds. Its heyday as a popular geographical term was between the 1960s and 1980s, before criticisms were voiced from postcolonial writers attempting to deconstruct what they saw as an essentialist ideology based on the ‘othering’ of urban forms in the so called ‘Third World’. However, geographical interest in ‘Third World’ or ‘developing world’ cities continues as a result of heightened concern over the immense problems associated with unequal development and urban poverty in the twenty first cen tury, and as a backlash to the Western centricity of much contemporary urban geographical discourse. Although Third World cities are dynamic and com plex urban systems, legacies of colonialism, the sheer pace and scale of urbanization, and processes of unequal global development have led many commentators to suggest that there is some convergence in which social, economic, and political processes produce similar spatial patterns in housing, employment, and urban form. Many geographers believe that although each city is located in specific historical, cultural, and geographical space, Third World cities are shaped by a unique combination of local, national, and global processes that differ from elsewhere. While appreciating the contradictions that arise from generalization, it is argued that Third World cities reflect unequal urban development and poverty on a scale that is unprecedented in the developed world. Furthermore, structural inequalities visibly manifest themselves in different ways in terms of urban form, economic activity, and sociospatial diversity when compared to cities of the Global North. On the other hand, some critics have argued that growing diversity between cities in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean has served to weaken the validity of the ‘Third World city’ concept. Is it still possible to identify common processes in so called ‘Third World cities’ that make them distinct? Indeed, attempts to cat egorize all cities in the Global South as similar can be charged with adhering to neocolonial traditions that essentialize Third World cities as backward and poor ‘oth ers’. Hence, the extent to which cities in the ‘developing’ or

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‘Third World’ are different from ‘Western’ or ‘developed world’ cities continues to be widely contested. Recent Trends in Third World Cities The world is entering an historic phase of urban trans formation, and the latest projections suggest that over the first two decades of the twenty first century, the number of city dwellers in the developing world will increase from 3 to 4 billion. For the first time in history, the world will be predominantly urban, with most population growth oc curring in towns and cities in the Global South. According to recent projections, 61% of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2030, with cities in the South growing four to five times faster than in the developed world. It is predicted that rapid urbanization across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean will see 25 out of 30 of the world’s largest cities situated in the Global South with mega cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, and Mexico City heading the league tables by 2030. In fact, some de veloping world cities are growing so rapidly that they are merging together to form large compound urban systems referred to as ‘mega cities’, a term that defines cities in excess of 8 million inhabitants. A predominant reason for this rapid growth has been migration by people in search of improved livelihood opportunities, standards of living, and services. The sheer scale of this growth presents im mense challenges to local and national governments. The majority of this new growth will be absorbed by cities of less than 1 million inhabitants in the developing world where comparatively little research has been undertaken. In 1950, there were only 31 million cities in developing countries; by 1985, there were 146; and today there are around 400, with 75% located in low and middle income countries. In the writings on Third World cities, it is the largest cities such as Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Mumbai, or Lagos that have received most atten tion. However, socioeconomic conditions in smaller cit ies, particularly those with a population under 100 000, are frequently far worse than in the mega cities, as they often lack basic services such as piped water, waste dis posal, electricity, accessible education, and health ser vices. So, while globalization and economic liberalization may have improved lives within wealthier urban com munities, they have generally resulted in greater in equalities and worsened the everyday living conditions for the most vulnerable.

Deconstructing Third World City Research There is a vast body of literature that has explored dif ferent aspects of Third World cities over the last 50 years. Broadly categorized, there are six main literatures that

make claims about cities in the Third World, namely those dealing with (1) dualist interpretations of ‘Third World city’ structure; (2) cities as theaters of accumu lation and centers of diffusion; (3) models of ‘Third World city’ structure; (4) globalization and Third World cities; (5) urban poverty, livelihoods, and sustainable cities; and (6) spatial diversity within Third World cities. Each of these is now briefly considered in turn.

Dualist Interpretations of ‘Third World City’ Structures Early debates on cities focused on the structure of Third World urban economies. In the 1950s, it was argued by economists such as Arthur Lewis that Third World cities could be characterized by a dualist structure comprising of two separate economies: a ‘traditional’, ‘backward’, and ‘unproductive’ economic sector; and an ‘advanced’, ‘mod ern’, and ‘productive’ sector. The heyday of the dualistic approach was the 1970s, when advocates regarded the traditional economic sector as the major barrier to devel opment and argued that the backward economy would be eradicated once prosperity increased by industrial mod ernization. Dualist interpretations also provided a frame work for the informal and formal sector dichotomy that focused attention on the existence of a large informal sector providing jobs and services for the urban poor. Dualist perspectives have since been criticized for being oversimplified and failing to recognize the ways in which the different economic sectors are inextricably linked.

Cities as Theaters of Accumulation and Centers of Diffusion There exists an empirically grounded body of ‘Third World city’ research that stems from the same period, and that focused on the consequences of rapid rural–urban migration. In the 1960s and 1970s, cities and urban growth were largely regarded in the context of devel opment and underdevelopment, and development re search was accused of ‘urban bias’. The vast body of data collected on the economies and livelihoods of city resi dents drew attention to poverty and vast disparities in social equity in Third World cities. Research heightened our understanding of the economic structure of cities, the informal employment sector, squatter settlements and slums, environmental conditions, participatory planning, and the lives of the working poor. A distinguishing fea ture of Third World cities was their variegated appear ance with mixed land uses typified by poor spontaneous settlements juxtaposed with high rise commercial clus ters. In the 1980s, a useful initial framework devised by Armstrong and McGee to examine the changing role of cities in the developing world identified them as ‘theaters

Third World Cities

of accumulation’ and ‘centers of diffusion’. Cities were identified as national symbols of modernity, centers of capital accumulation and political power, and responsible for diffusing Western culture and consumption patterns. The extent to which cities in the developing world are converging with or diverging away from the ‘West’ is still under debate. Models of ‘Third World City’ Structure One way of attempting to identify common processes operating within Third World cities has been through the construction of models of ‘Third World city’ structures. Since the 1960s, a significant body of work has focused on developing models of Third World cities in order to identify them as distinct from ‘First World’ cities (see Figure 1). These models witness some appreciation of the heterogeneity of city forms across the developing world, while at the same time suggesting that Third World cities are different. The preindustrial city

In 1960, Sjoberg argued that in origin, Third world cities were quintessentially preindustrial. The concept of the preindustrial city as a distinct urban form identifies three main aspects of land use: the urban center tends to be preeminent over the periphery as elites and adminis trative power is centred close to the central core with disadvantaged groups occupying the periphery; broad social areas are differentiated into distinct quarters ac cording to wealth, status, or kinship; and there exists a lack of functional differentiation in urban land use pat terns, where plots are used for multiple functions such as housing and work. It is widely argued that today’s Third World cities do share some common attributes expressed in this model, particularly smaller Asian and African cities, but that processes of industrialization and global ization have transformed preindustrial city structures. The colonial city

Horvath classified the colonial city as a distinct urban form resulting from the domination of an indigenous civilization by colonial settlers. Colonial cities were seen as political, military, economic, and social entrepots be tween the colonizers and the colonized. In respect of internal structure, the colonial settlers retained their position through the development of culturally and ethnically distinct quarters. The colonial city model was seen to be particularly relevant in explaining the devel opment of cities such as Delhi with its old and new quarters. The African city

It has been argued that many African cities conform closely to the preindustrial model, an assumption that

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underplays the postcolonial development of African cit ies. The ‘African city’ model was developed by the United Nations in 1973, and was based on an indigenous core and the organization of different ethnic groups through density gradients in a pattern that ascribed low density housing to the colonial elites and high density to in digenous populations. The most extreme form of social segregation and economic division could be seen in South Africa’s ‘apartheid cities’. Criticisms of the African city model center on the postcolonial transformations that have restructured African contemporary cities. The Southeast Asian city

Terry McGee was the first to identify Southeast Asian cities as distinct and unique within the ‘Third World city’ paradigm. Of great importance was the mixed zoning of residential areas between modern and traditional types of housing and social structure. For example, in Jakarta, spontaneous as well as traditional villages known as kampungs occur throughout the city. Although there are zones of squatter settlements on the periphery, new in dustrial zones and agriculture are also located in a semirural periphery known as desakota zones. Desakota regions, which are perceived to be neither ‘urban’ nor ‘rural’ in any conventional sense, are transforming rural– urban interactions, rural livelihoods, and lifestyles in Southeast Asian cities. In this way, the core, inner, and outer zones typical of contemporary Southeast Asian cities are seen to constitute an Extended Metropolitan Region (EMR). Today, just how fast Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila are growing depends on where you draw the city boundaries. EMRs have been mostly examined in the Southeast Asian context where rural–urban interaction has produced a blurring of traditional rural–urban boundaries with rural economies and lifestyles becoming increasingly diverse. While some scholars have typified Southeast Asian cities as ‘Third World’, others have ar gued that globalization had made the paradigm of the ‘Third World city’ obsolete in Southeast Asia. The Latin American city

Primacy, the prominence of mega cities, and rapid growth due to rural–urban migration are all typical of Latin American cities. According to Griffin and Ford, the dominant characteristic of the Latin American city is a commercial spine or sector which extends from the Central Business District and which acts as the focus of the city’s more important economic, social, and cultural amenities, and a substantial proportion of high income residences. Away from the spine, there is a series of concentric zones: a zone of maturity, which refers to residential areas • that once housed the elite but have filtered down the social scale;

A

New industrial estate

WC

Government zone

High-class residential

AC Indigenous commercial zone WC Western commercial zone

Port zone

AC

B

Zone of in situ Accretion

Commercial/ industrial

Elite residential

CBD

Elite residential

Zone of maturity

Y

IT

EN

M

SA

DI

Zone of peripheral squatter settelments

The Latin American city

EN

IT

Y

Industry & large scale instituions

Shanties/villages

Elite

Indigenous/high Mixed/intermediate

Commerical/ residential Residential/density

Core

Figure 1 Mode s of Th rd Wor d c ty structure. Source: Adapted from Potter, R. B. and L oyd-Evans, S. (1998). The City in the Developing World. Har ow: Longman.

A Squatter areas B Suburbs

B

A

New high-class residential

Ethnic or occupational districts

Extended metropolitan region (EMR)

Market gardening zone

AC

Mixed land use

Middle-density residential zone

Zone of new suburbs and squatter areas

Residential patterns

The Southeast Asian city

Class pyramid

Outcasts

Lower class

Elite

G o v ern sec ment tor

spine

Domestic servants

The African city

M SA

The pre-industrial city

DI

250 Third World Cities

Third World Cities

a zone of in situ accretion where there is constant • change as residents move in and out; these are zones

• •

of gradual improvement where self built housing has consolidated over time; a zone of peripheral squatter settlements; and zones of disamenity that refer to slum areas which are unlikely to be upgraded such as the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

Critics of the Latin American model highlight the fact that since the 1980s, Latin American cities have been restructured by processes of suburbanization of the elites, and extended metropolitan development, in a way similar to cities in Southeast Asia. Mexico City provides an ex cellent illustration of how the vast urban subsystem is now encompassing the population of Toluca. Most spatial models are now outdated and criticized for being oversimplified and lacking in explanation of what exactly it was that was being modelled. Although models have been useful in highlighting processes, they give preeminence to structure and form rather than the social processes and groups that make up cities. Since the 1980s, many developing countries have undergone structural adjustment, liberalization, and the opening of their economies and such processes have had funda mental repercussions on city forms. Indeed, traditional paradigms fail to acknowledge the ‘First World’ elements of cities and there is a need for new debates that integrate ‘Third World’ cities within First World debates.

Globalization and Third World Cities Globalization has produced a changing urban geography in the developing world and the internal structures of cities must now be understood in relation to their evolving roles in the wider global economy. The world city literature, which explores the development of a global hierarchy of cities that form the basic networks of the global economy, has viewed some of the most prominent Third World cities, such as Singapore, as playing key roles in linking developing countries with global commodity markets. As cities are dynamic entities, undergoing contact transformations according to the prevailing macroeconomic and social conditions, it is not surprising that the question of how globalization affects cities in the developing world has received attention. Scholarly research on the impacts of globalization on Third World cities has been limited, partly as a result of the Western bias of globalization debates. Commentators have highlighted a gap between contemporary global theory and the empirical studies that characterized ‘Third World city’ research in the 1960s and 1970s. There are common perspectives that argue that as a result of globalization, Third World cities are becoming

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more like their Western counterparts, particularly in respect of their patterns of consumption, popular culture, and the built environment. New urban economies based on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and global capital have created new urban spaces for information technol ogy services which are replacing the traditional manu facturing functions of Southeast Asian cities in particular. The new international division of labor, in particular, the offshoring of data processing and call centers, has pro foundly impacted upon internal migration patterns and the labor markets in cities like Mumbai. Other scholars argue that global cities are not con stituted by corporate power alone, as they are also home to large concentrations of immigrants and undervalorized ‘others’, such as street children and the homeless. Con cepts of ‘transnationalism’ and ‘ethnoscapes’ that identify cities as constituted by flows of people articulated within specific local urban geographies, have helped scholars move towards a more postcolonial understanding of the processes shaping cities in the developing world. While this literature has highlighted the important role played by some mega cities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the majority of cities in the developing world have been ignored. Globalization is highly uneven with few African cities benefiting from FDI in manufacturing and services, unlike those in Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Smaller cities that cannot attract FDI may find it increasingly hard to compete for national re sources and this is likely to result in further geographical differentiation in the twenty first century between large wealthier Third World cities and poor cities with smaller resources.

Urban Poverty and Livelihoods: Toward Sustainable Cities The growing concern with Third World cities and urban poverty has resulted in a plethora of academic studies and policy reports from international organizations such as UN HABITAT the World Bank, and nongovern mental organizations (NGOs). In the recent past, pov erty reduction strategies have tended to focus on rural areas but the growing concern for urban poverty has focused much attention on the internal and external processes affecting Third World cities and their residents. The challenges facing these cities are enormous, given the sheer number of people requiring housing, services, opportunities for making a living, good governance, and civil society. It has been argued that there are four key underlying reasons for urban poverty: lack of access to basic services such as health, water, and education; lack of decent work and livelihood opportunities; a lack of power by local communities to access their rights and entitle ments; and poor governance by city authorities.

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Third World Cities

Central to these debates is a growing body of litera ture that examines the relationship between sustainable environmental development, livelihoods, governance, and civil society. Particular environmental areas of concern include the provision of safe water supplies, sanitation, waste and garbage treatment, safe shelter and work en vironments, infrastructure and good governance, and the eradication of disease. A number of initiatives, including the World Bank’s Brown Agenda and the Millennium Development Goals have attempted to prioritize en vironmental problems in Third World cities. They dis cuss the extent to which pro poor solutions can help build ‘liveable cities’, and examine the roles undertaken by new partnerships between NGOs, the state, and the private sector to encourage local civil society. A range of contemporary solutions that aim to integrate poor resi dents into what the UN defines as ‘the fabric of urban society’ include a focus on small business and the in formal sector, recent debates over legal frameworks, newly emerging City Development Strategies (CDSs), policy, and good governance. The commitments made by governments at the Millennium Summit in 2000 have not resulted in improving the living conditions among the majority of the urban poor. It has become increasingly recognized that urban poverty is different from rural poverty, and a better understanding of its nature is re quired in order to tackle the problems facing Third World cities in the twenty first century.

Spatial Diversity in Third World Cities While conceptual frameworks and models have served to enhance our understanding of transformation in the structures of Third World cities, contemporary research has highlighted the important spatial aspects of diversity within them. Focusing on issues of equity, urban well being, and urban social interaction, research has drawn attention to how people live through an appreciation of local everyday geographies and livelihood trajectories. Central to understanding Third World cities is the appreciation of the marked socioeconomic inequalities in the urban experiences and lifestyles of the diverse com munities living within their boundaries. Almost all cities include elite neighborhoods and modern commercial centers that are well served by public infrastructure,

Table 1

education and health services, retail and leisure facilities, as well as poor neighborhoods characterized by slums and lacking in infrastructure and opportunities for decent livelihoods. These positive and negative elements of city life are intermixed as cities are sites of intense social and economic interactions and opportunities in terms of so cial networks, education, and jobs as well as disbenefits of congestion, underemployment, or crime. Some of the most important issues within contemporary Third World city debates include housing, livelihoods and the informal sector, gender, and cities for children. Urban poverty and housing

Housing is a key economic resource for low income urban residents. Third World cities have traditionally been characterized by a substantial proportion of their populations living in slums, shanty towns, and squatter settlements. As cities grow, so do their slum populations. Slums already account for 1 billion of the world’s urban population, with the figure set to rise to 1.5 billion by 2020. Between 1990 and 2001, 65 million people moved into slums in Africa with 72% of its urban population living in slums. If achieved, the Millennium Develop ment Goal ‘to improve the quality of the life of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020’ will barely scratch the surface (see Table 1). The latest UN HABITAT ‘State of the World Cities’ Report 2006–07 states that slum dwellers in Third World cities are worse off than their rural counterparts. Shanty towns and squatter settlements are usually defined by the poor materials used to construct some kind of shelter, while squatter settlements refer to spontaneous housing built illegally on land without title to ownership. Although it is generally agreed that slums are physically inappropriate places for communities to live, there has been some controversy over the extent to which squatter settlements can present an answer to the housing problems of Third World cities. For migrants, they have been seen as ‘slums of hope’, places where new arrivals to the city can adapt to city life and/or centers of citizen solidarity and participatory power. However, spatial segregation limits the life course possibilities for poor urban families and the separation from dynamic service industries, professional workers, and political elites can serve to increase socioeconomic inequalities

Geographical variations in slum populations (in millions)

Year

South Asia

East Asia

Sub-Saharan Africa

Latin America/ Caribbean

North Africa/ Middle East

Industrialized countries

1990 2005 2015

199 276 345

200 272 355

101 199 313

111 134 153

50 68 85

42 47 50

Source: UNDP International Poverty Centre (2005). Poverty and the city, In Focus, August 2005.

Third World Cities

within cities. There is evidence to suggest that informal settlements can become consolidated over time and be come gradually linked to the city’s infrastructure and services. Well established squatter settlements often house middle class communities, including teachers and doctors, and they are embedded in local social capital and networks. NGOs have focused on empowering low in come communities to fight for their rights and participate in local planning decisions. Projects such as the Feder ation of Low Income Groups in Mumbai and the Self Employed Women’s Association in Ahmedabad have helped raise the political visibility of poor urban resi dents, often women, and helped them to create solutions through participatory ‘self help’ housing, land tenure, and microcredit projects.

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range of activities, which can be broadly divided into four subsectors (see Table 2 and Figure 2): 1. subsistence activities (e.g., urban agriculture); 2. small scale producers and retailers (e.g., street traders); 3. petty capitalists (those who operate small scale pro duction units that operate outside regulations and often employ casual labor); and 4. the criminal sector (e.g., prostitution, slavery, and drug trafficking). As such, the informal sector performs a variety of roles within society, encompassing wealth, productivity and inefficiency, and exploitation and liberation. It is largely

Table 2 Urban street vendors in developing countries (various years 1990 2000)

Urban livelihoods and the informal sector

Since the 1960s, research has also highlighted the di versity of economic activity in Third World cities through explorations of the informal and formal sectors of the urban economy. Commentators such as Santos, Hart, and the International Labour Organization (ILO) drew attention to the dualistic structure of Third World cities that they argued was distinct from cities in the developed world. The existence of both modern and traditional economic sectors was recognized, referred to as the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors by Keith Hart in 1973. The informal sector refers to a heterogeneous

Country

No. of street vendors

Women (%)

Tunisia (1997) Benin (1992) Kenya (1999) India (1999 2000) Brazil (1991) Costa Rica (1997) Guatemala (2000) Mexico (2000) Venezuela (1997)

125 619 45 591 416 292 3 881 700 1 445 866 13 685 259 203 1 286 287 318 598

2 81 33 14 30 18 55 44 32

Source: International Labour Office (2002). Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture. Geneva: ILO.

INFORMAL SECTOR

FORMAL SECTOR Labor productivity

Reproduction Domestic labor

Subsistence production

Petty commodity production Small scale operators Petty capitalists

Agriculture Household work

Household labor

Full capitalists productions MNCs Public sector

Subcontraction

Capital, goods, and services

Unremunerated

Unpaid

Self-employment/waged

Waged

Figure 2 The urban informal sector continuum. Source: Adapted from Potter, R. B. and Lloyd-Evans, S. (1998). The City in the Developing World. Harlow: Longman.

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Third World Cities

regarded as a continuum. Due to high unemployment rates and a lack of decent formal sector jobs, many cities are characterized by large informal sectors that provide a diverse range of livelihood opportunities for low and middle income communities. Recent figures suggest that around 60% of urban residents are employed within the urban informal economy of many Third World cities, with street vending constituting important income earning opportunities (see Table 1). The informal sector is a particularly important provider of livelihoods for women and children, many of whom are concentrated in the lower echelons of the economy as a result of unequal access to decent work, education, and resources. Gender and urban space

The gendering of urban space is central to understanding sociospatial diversity in Third World cities. The in creasing poverty of many women witnessed in the last 30 years has been attributed to their unequal position within the labor market, their subordination under patriarchal social systems, and the undermining of their status and power through capitalism. Structural adjust ment programs and global economic trends have ex acerbated all these factors. Thus, cities are influenced by gendered and racialized processes that shape women and men’s differential access and entitlement to work, shelter, capital, and resources. External forces have affected women’s ability to meet their basic needs and the gender division of labor in the urban economy is such that women are frequently engaged in low paid, exploitative, and arduous work, while also maintaining their households and communities. The ‘triple burden’ of reproduction, production, and community par ticipation often stretches women’s ability to cope in a crisis. Transformations in the global cheap labor economy have resulted in a feminization of rural–urban migration pat terns where young women are increasingly becoming new urban migrants. Although migration can be empowering for women as it can accord economic independence and educational opportunities, it can also further exploit their labor power and stretch their coping mechanisms as they adjust to city life. In the past, the literature on Third World cities has been criticized for being gender blind and urban policies accused of ‘male bias’. But this imbalance is starting to be redressed by enlightened research that highlights the importance of empowering women within urban develop ment programs. City spaces for children

Children in urban poverty are unquestionably at high risk. Cities are places of social turmoil for children with the capacity of adults to function as caregivers dwindling in many urban neighborhoods. One of the most hotly debated topics related to Third World cities has been the increasing incidence of child labor and street children in

cities of the Global South. In the 1990s, heightened concern over the future welfare of millions of the world’s poorer children largely developed from widespread media coverage of child related issues, such as the murder of Brazilian street children by police death squads, and increased documentation on child work by NGOs and international institutions such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Bank, and the ILO. The ILO estimates that 218 million children aged 5–17 can be classified as child laborers with the 5–14 age group constituting 166 million. Child labor takes on many forms, from paid work in factories and other forms of waged labor like street trading, to bonded domestic labor and prostitution. The incidence and visibility of child labor are more acute in the city due to increasing household vulnerability and the availability of waged work in urban industries such as glassware, carpet weaving, and rag picking. Societal and public views on child labor and related issues will depend on the meanings people attach to public ‘spaces’ and what they see as unnatural and inappropriate spaces for chil dren. In Latin America, millions of street children are perceived as criminal and a threat to family and social order. New geographies of childhood have highlighted the heterogeneity of childhood experiences in Third World cities and research on ‘other childhoods’ has sought to critique constructions of childhood that dom inate the understanding of child labor in the Global South. The United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child has been identified by many as the most appro priate framework for creating cities that are supportive of children. This movement has resulted in a more child focused development agenda which is linked to the focus of the Millennium Development Goals on the provision of ‘decent work’ for youth and universal primary edu cation, and the promotion of the largest global anti child labor program (International Programme on the Elim ination of Child Labour IPEC) by the ILO since the 1990s.

Conclusions – Cities within Cities The extent to which there are ‘Third World cities’ de pends on whether their characteristics are distinctive from today’s cities in the developed world. Despite claims that globalization is leading to homogenization between so called ‘First’ and ‘Third World cities’, there is com pelling evidence from the latest ‘State of the World’s Cities’ report’ by UN HABITAT to suggest that there are, in fact, two cities within one city, comprising one entity that has all the benefits of urban living and another where the urban poor live in worse conditions than their rural counterparts. Furthermore, the report also suggests

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that the world’s billion slum dwellers are more likely than ever to die earlier, experience more hunger and disease, and have less chances of gainful employment than urban residents living outside of slums. Such claims are not new and stem in part from dualistic interpretations of the urban economy mentioned previously, but they do highlight the need to reappraise ‘Third World city’ de velopment in an era of rapid globalization and urban ization. If nothing else, the existence of marked social inequalities in terms of access to wealth, urban services, employment, and adequate shelter tell us that Third World cities are not following exactly the same trajec tories as Western cities. Quite simply, the numbers of poor people involved and the socioeconomic transfor mations that are required are of a different magnitude.

Drakakis Smith, D. (2000). Third World Cities (2nd edn.). London: Routledge. Gilbert, A. (1994). Third world cities: Poverty, employment, gender roles and the environment during a time of restructuring. Urban Studies 31, 605 633. Grant, R. and Nijman, J. (2002). Globalization and the corporate geography of cities in the less developed world. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92(2), 320 340. International Labour Office (2002). Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture. Geneva: ILO. Montgomery, M. R., Stren, R., Cohen, R. and Reed, H. E. (eds.) (2004). Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its Implications in the Developing World. London: Eathscan. Potter, R. B. and Lloyd Evans, S. (1998). The City in the Developing World. Harlow: Pearson Prentice Hall. Robinson, J. (2002). Global and world cities: A view from off the map. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26(3), 531 554. UNDP International Poverty Centre (2005). Poverty and the city, In Focus, August 2005.

See also: Mega-Cities; Planning, Urban; Third World.

Relevant Websites Further Reading Armstrong, W. and McGee, T. G. (1985). Theatres of Accumulation: Studies in Asian and Latin American Urbanization. New York: Methuen. Bartlett, S., Hart, R., Satterthwaite, D., de la Barra, X. and Missair, A. (1999). Cities for Children: Children’s Rights, Poverty and Urban Management. London: UNICEF and Earthscan. Devas, N., Amis, P. and Beall, J. et al. (2004). Urban Governance, Voice and Poverty in the Developing World. London: Earthscan.

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http://www.citiesalliance.org Cites Alliance. http://www.eldis.org Eldis. http://www.ilo.org International Labour Organization (ILO). http://www.unifem.org United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). http://www.unhabitat.org United Nations Habitat.

Thrift, N. U. Strohmayer, National University of Ireland, Galway, Republic of Ireland & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Thrift, Nigel (1949–) The task of critically assessing the contribution an indi vidual has made to the rich tapestry that informs the practices of a particular discipline is no easy endeavor. Amalgamating the personal with the theoretical, such an undertaking all too often makes subtle demands on both author and reader while at the same time leaving little space for nuance. Hence, biographies or biographical sketches often tend to obscure as much as they help to illuminate. Accepting these limitations, we can access the contribution of Nigel Thrift to geography more con fidently. The relevant key biographical cornerstones can be summarized relatively quickly: born in Bath, Somerset in 1949, Thrift received his BA from the University of Wales in Aberystwyth and his PhD from the University of Bristol, before taking up a research post at the Aus tralian National University in Canberra. Subsequently, Thrift returned to Wales to pick up his first teaching post, this time to that once hotbed of creative energy within UK geographical practices, the Department of Geog raphy at the University of Wales in Lampeter. In 1987, he joined the Department of Geography at Bristol Uni versity, where he became a Professor in 1990. The new millennium saw Thrift – eager to accept challenges of a more administrative kind, successfully devoting his con siderable energy first to reinvigorating ‘geography’ at the University of Oxford (as ‘division head’), before accepting the post of Dean of Life Sciences at the same university. Since 2006, Thrift has been the Vice Chancellor of the University of Warwick (the equivalent, in US and Irish terms, of a University Presidency); in this latest capacity, Thrift is thus one of few human geographers to head an institute of higher education (Figure 1). Hidden beneath these raw places and dates is one of the more involving and interesting intellectual trajec tories within the world of human geography of the last half century. Like many of his generation, Thrift appears to have been driven to act by what he believes in, be it in academic or administrative contexts. He furthermore shares with those interested in ‘progressive’ or ‘emanci patory’ forms of geographic enquiry the double bind that came to characterize the post war generation: first, the desire to distance radical thought and praxis from the legacy of Stalinist aberrations, and, second, the ongoing struggle with structuralist temptations in the provision of geographical explanations. If the former characterized the 1960s and 1970s, the latter has been central to geo graphical discourses in the 1980s and 1990s.

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In addition, his work has also been motivated by a genuine desire not to abandon theory where theory ar guably matters most; in using it to shed light on material conditions of human existence, Thrift has been nothing short of prolific in his desire to dismantle any pre conceived borderlines between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. Both his writing and his administrative engagements are entirely consistent with this principled stance. Unlike other, no less ‘visible’ geographers of his and the pre ceding generation, however, Thrift has not been associ ated with the consistency of a lifelong project or set of beliefs. His writing is thus a more adaptable undertaking compared, say, to the writing of David Harvey, Yi Fu Tuan, or Denis Cosgrove. Thrift was making his entrance onto the world of academia with a number of publications on ‘time geog raphy’, including the decisive three volume edited work Timing Space and Spacing Time (1978), he was sub sequently to publish the seminal theoretical assessment of time geography in the launching issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (1983) – after having been centrally involved in the founding of this journal. For

Figure 1 Nigel Thrift.

Thrift, N.

many writing in geography today, the existence of this journal sums up what is one of the more lasting legacies of his work within the discipline: the creation of spaces for theoretically informed work beyond the narrow confines of what others would and did deem to be ‘proper geography.’ The ‘biographical spaces’ of personal de cisions and chance moments alluded to above here be come entwined in a complex manner that in turn creates conditions of possibility for others; the ‘human’ and the ‘nonhuman’ link up and thereby change the scope of opportunity for both. And while this may be truism of sorts, there is no better ‘biography’ than Thrift’s to ex emplify the often breath taking capacity for insights thereby created. In this sense, then, Thrift is perhaps the most effective of ‘gatekeepers’, working in geography today, both in the editorial sense of the term and in designating someone working both at and on the human/ nonhuman nexus. Thrift’s work on ‘actor network theory’ (about which more further on in this article) thus ‘makes sense’ on a biographical, theoretical, and professional level, weaving together supervisory roles, mentoring, and international collaborations along the way. It thus comes as no surprise to anyone that Thrift’s name can be found repeatedly among those of the most cited geographers or social scientists of his generation. As would furthermore be expected from the biographical sketch above, Thrift’s influence manifests itself in the numerous panels, review committees, and fellowships to which he was elected, appointed, or which were awarded to him over the years. ‘Influence’ here becomes a tightly woven but flexible network of global proportions cen tered around different places in the UK that he is or was associated with. Thrift’s ostensibly empirical work has centered mainly around the (mostly urban but increasingly virtual) spaces of finance, money, and globalization. Many – in fact most – of the publications that make up Thrift’s curriculum vitae are written in a joint capacity with other academics, including Michael Taylor, Paul Glennie, Andrew Ley shon, Kris Olds, Ash Amin, and scores of other well known geographers. A teamworker ‘par excellence’, Thrift continues to maximize the surface of possible encounters with interesting material; as an all too early assessment of an ongoing project, Thrift’s work has been nothing if not original and often eclectic in orientation and breadth. Take, for instance, his work on the development of the financial services and the anchorage of this work in Thrift’s livelong passion for the City of London. Char acteristic for the overall thrust of his work is the active role accorded to ‘space’ throughout Thrift’s writings. This attribution of agency to space differs markedly from an often criticized ‘fetishization’ of space precisely because ‘space’ no longer remains a stable entity that could be fetishized according to some inherent quality. In the less

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specialized context of work on ‘cities’ (and working with Ash Amin), this particular emphasis translated into the incorporation of such broad ranging terms and processes like ‘rhythm analysis’, ‘flow’, ‘escape’, or ‘software’ into the analysis of urban phenomena and politics, all adding a decidedly novel quality to ‘space’ and its (possible) effects. If this elevation of ‘space’ to the role of an active ingredient in the construction of geographies – rather than being conceptualized as a passive, Euclidean back drop – is de rigeur in today’s discipline, readers ought to remember that it was geographers like Nigel Thrift who were instrumentally involved in the turn toward a more dynamic and complex form of geographically informed construction of knowledge. It is hence no surprise to see Thrift’s work – although ostensibly classified under the rubric of ‘economic geography’ – stretching well beyond the bounds associated with the subdiscipline to cover aspects like the role of the media, citizenship, and the role of clocks alongside more traditional themes such as innovation, service industries, or consumption. Just as important, though, is the fact that each of these topical fields is approached consistently without the metaphorical crutches of a stable ontology that would automatically privilege particular routes towards ex planations. Neither ‘agency’ nor ‘structure’ – to use poles that have provided such a stable ontology in the past – continue to function in Thrift’s work in quite the same way they did in the past. If they ‘function’ at all, such concepts function momentarily only: within the precise context for which they were coined and in which they are used. Explanation here becomes a performed event that is recognizable as such without affording the means by which to translate or transpose it onto other contexts. Mention of ‘performance’ leads us to what is by far the most controversial of Thrift’s theoretical endeavors during the last decade and a half: his discovery of ‘non representational theory’, following from his earlier en gagements with ‘actor network theory’. Perhaps the most conventional of responses to the challenges borne of postmodernism and post structuralism, ‘nonrepresenta tional theory’ – at the same time has proven to inspire a sizable cohort of students to engage with geographical realities in a novel and different way. Key to theorizing the ‘nonrepresentational’ is the shift from a perceived static world of representations – the main target of the post structuralist critique of language often summarized under the heading ‘crisis of representation’ – into the realm of performances and their associated rhetorics. The inherent lack of a fixed identity lends to performances that which had rendered traditional anchors for under standing problematic: an identity entirely constructed through temporally and spatially nonfixed events. The orizing such events had been an ambition central to the hermeneutic strand of philosophy that had arguably

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culminated in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Thrift’s particular accomplishment has been to take these often abstract ideas and concepts and put them to work in material contexts. While the present circumstances do not afford suf ficient space for a critique of ‘nonrepresentational the ory’, it is nonetheless important to point toward the unresolved epistemic status of its knowledge claims. The question that must be asked, in other words, concerns the (continued) existence (or not) of a mimetic impulse at the heart of ‘nonrepresentational theory’: if such theoretical labor is thought capable of ‘mirroring’ what makes per formance performative and thus capable of representing their identity, such theorizing would not have escaped the epistemological binds of old. But what if it did not set its aim in this manner and onto such a traditional target? Could we – can we – write geographies beyond the es tablished norms that have governed academic modes of reasoning at least since the Enlightenment? Attempting to find an answer to this question is perhaps the lasting legacy of ‘nonrepresentational theory’; independent of such future ruminations, however, Nigel Thrift’s contri bution to the debate has been outstanding indeed. See also: Actor-Network Theory/Network Geographies; Financial Exclusion; Non-Representational

Theory/Non-Representational Geographies; Performance, Research as; Time and Historical Geography.

Further Reading Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2002). Cities: Reimagining Urban Theory. Cambridge: Polity. Carlstein, T., Parkes, D. N. and Thrift, N. (eds.) (1978). Timing Space and Spacing Time (3 vols.), Vol. 1: Making Sense of Time. Vol. 2: Human Activity and Time Geography. Vol. 3: Time and Regional Dynamics. London: Edward Arnold. Leyshon, A. and Thrift, N. (1995). Geographies of financial exclusion. Transactionsof the Institute of British Geographers NS 20, 312 341. Peet, R. and Thrift, N. (1989). New Models in Geography: The Political Economy Perspective, 2 Vols. London: Unwin Hyman. Thrift, N. (1983). On the determination of social action in space and time. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1, 23 57. Thrift, N. and Leyshon, A. (1992). Liberalisation and consolidation: The single European market and the remaking of European financial capital. Environment and Planning A 24, 49 81. Thrift, N. (1996). Spatial Formations. London: Sage. Thrift, N. (2000). Performing cultures in the new economy. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, 674 692. Thrift, N. (2004). Performance and performativity: A geography of unknown lands. In Duncan, J. S., Johnson, N. C. & Schein, R. (eds.) A Companion to Cultural Geography, pp 121 136. Oxford: Blackwell. Thrift, N. (2005). From born to made: Technology, biology and space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 30, 463 476.

Time and Historical Geography M. Kurtz, Open University, Ottawa, ON, Canada & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Diachronic Characterized by a developmental approach to time, or concerned with changes in an area over an extensive, noncyclical period of time. Synchronic Characterized by a snapshot approach to time, or concerned with a select area at a given moment or cycle in time with little reference to its antecedents or development. Temporality A specific construction or framing of time (e.g., circular or linear temporalities). When the word is used in the social sciences in a manner akin to ‘spatiality’, it especially accentuates the social contexts in which time is ordered and produced in a particular way. Time Consciousness A conception of time held by an individual or group. Since the work of E. P. Thompson, it is closely associated with the daily practices, shared experiences, and popular articulations through which one conception of time gained meaning and import. Time-Geography A method of analysis associated with Torsten Ha¨gerstrand, characterized by the use of diagrams to represent the particular and converging paths of a small number of individuals and objects across a closed unit of space and time. Time–Space Compression Processes through which the modern world is characterized by a constantly accelerating pace of life under capitalism. It is often understood to be driven by competitive laws of accumulation that require ever-shorter time horizons for production or transportation in order to return a profit on an investment.

Introduction ‘‘‘When I saw them lying there, I knew it. That there is not just one time, that there must be different sorts of time, all existing at once.’ She was now talking so quietly that I had to lean forward. y ‘I want to study it scien tifically,’ she said. ‘We’re going to touch time.’’’ In movies, time is a common motif (think of Back to the Future or Memento), and in fiction, writers often experiment with sequencing, folding time over on itself to create provoca tive temporalities and juxtapositions. The novel just quo ted, for instance, Borderliners, opens with a question from St. Augustine – ‘‘What is time?’’ – which then troubles its young protagonists throughout the book as its author, Peter Høeg, moves the story back and forth in time.

In contrast to novelists, ‘‘different sorts of time’’ have not troubled too many geographers much. There is a wealth of work offering sophisticated analyses of space and spatiality, but to see time and temporality given equal treatment is unusual. In Anglophone contexts, this tendency is poorly explained by reference to the ‘nature’ of geography, just as it would be mistaken to look to the discipline of history for an abundance of theorizations of social time or studies of different temporalities. Such work appears more often in philosophy, feminist studies, sociology, and anthropology. The article is organized into three sections. The opening section looks to the historical geographies of time. It constitutes a selective review of work that takes the rhythms, measures, and experience of time as the object of analysis. The subsequent section traces ways that geographers have understood and handled a tem poral dimension in recent decades, reviewing common notions of time and temporality in their analyses. The final section explores the difference that one represen tation of time can make. The analysis assumes that no tions of time and the subject of historical geography were both socially constructed. It looks particularly at a 1954 textbook to illustrate how specific understandings of time and temporality were used to distinguish and legitimate historical geography as an academic field.

Historical Geographies of Time While time and temporalities are not common objects of analysis in the discipline, two geographers have put time consciousness at the forefront of their research: Nigel Thrift and Paul Glennie. Indeed, Thrift has been writing about time for over three decades, and a recent essay he co wrote with Glennie, titled ‘Revolutions in the times’, is an effective starting point with which to examine contributions to the historical geographies of time offered in the discipline. Their paper is noteworthy insofar as it operates at two levels. First, it disputes a widely held proposition that popular perceptions of time saw rapid change in the Industrial Revolution. In a classic essay from 1967, the historian E. P. Thompson depicts a dra matic shift in the eighteenth century England, from a widespread task oriented sense of time in society to one where the measured times of employment and labor were predominant. For Thompson, the shift was not simply the result of industrialization, as the revolution in time consciousness involved broader cultural changes as well. Glennie and Thrift, however, offer us a different

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temporal model than the rapid sea change which Thompson describes: less that of revolution, more that of sequential diffusions of new technologies and interrelated practices for keeping adequate time. In short, their nar rative uses a model of time that explicitly challenges Thompson’s notion of a singular period of revolution. At a second and more mundane level, Glennie and Thrift offer a schematic account of time keeping practices in everyday life in England between 1300 and 1800. First they sample the diffusion of mechanical clocks across the country in the late medieval era, as the first devices in select public locations began to replace other means of dividing the day into equal hours for a variety of purposes: vespers, market bells, the dinner hour, appointments, etc. Then the authors trace a technological revolution in watchmaking that enabled greater precision in keeping minutes as well as hours, while arguing that uses for such precision were both highly selective and that needs for it in the sixteenth century may have preceded the technical achievements in minute keeping in the seventeenth cen tury. Lastly, they outline interactions between user groups whose need for accurate clocks and watches varied, and among whom a market for precision instruments leaked downward over the eighteenth century. Throughout, Glennie and Thrift offer an account driven, not by technological advance or by changing dispositions of quotidian practice, but by the circular reinforcements between technologies and practices. In geography, a more prominent narrative about changes in time consciousness is David Harvey’s account of time–space compression. Like Glennie and Thrift, he assumes time is a social construct: different societies produce different conceptions of time, and many people in the modern world accept clock time as an objective fact in daily life. Yet, in The Condition of Postmodernity, Harvey asserts that capitalism is the fundamental force shaping current understandings of time. In that regard, he shares some affinity with E. P. Thompson. Harvey sug gests that time consciousness is now marked by rapid and often disorienting accelerations in the pace of life. These follow as communication and transportation industries overcame more frictions of distance, a process that Donald Janelle described in 1968 with his notion of time– space convergence. Harvey extends the idea, arguing that the annihilation of space by time (captured with his image of progressively smaller globes) was the outcome of logics of accumulation that required competitive re ductions in the time it took to turn a profit on an in vestment. While ridden with contradictions, time–space compression – the quick delivery of news and com modities, the sense of a shrinking world, the experience of an accelerating pace of life, and not incidentally, a speed up in the production of new ideas – is seen to be driven fundamentally by the fact that, in capitalist soci eties, time costs money.

In historical geography, there is now a related body of work on the creation of ‘standard time’ in the nineteenth century when the coordination of telegraph and railway operations was a concern across a number of nation states. There is also a body of scholarship on the history of navigation, time, and estimation procedures for lon gitude. Others have written about the delivery of Royal Mail, tracking increases in the speed of communication in early modern England. Yet others have traced the unequal access to standard mail among different classes and the creativity with which postage was circumvented. The last topic serves to complicate the uniform trajectory of Harvey’s notion of time–space compression, and it can be used to argue, like Doreen Massey, that this ‘speeding up’ has been uneven as various social groups are situated in very different ways relative to spatial connections and temporal accelerations. Massey calls up a memorable contrast in this regard: consider at one end, a male ex ecutive on a jet between London and Tokyo, and at the other, a woman in sub Saharan Africa who spends hours each day collecting water on foot. Among the more elaborate empirical responses to the time–space compression thesis is the work of Jeremy Stein. He records the changing experience of time in the textile town of Cornwall in the nineteenth century On tario while arguing that the drama of time–space com pression is often exaggerated by scholars who draw from elite accounts. As he traces the incremental reduction of travel time between Montreal and Cornwall, he suggests that the majority of the town’s residents probably felt the benefits of time–space compression only gradually and indirectly through greater access to outside goods, at the same time that communication technologies increased commonplace contrasts between the metropolitan cen ters with their new capital intensive technologies and the relative ‘backwardness’ of other areas. Stein also finds that the temporalities of social discipline in Cornwall by passed a wholesale revolution: factory rhythms inter sected with other schedules as a factory manager, for instance, adjusted work schedules to accommodate existing religious routines. Multiple routines and times continued to coexist in the Ontario town, suggesting that accounts of time–space compression elsewhere may be overdrawn as well. This points to a general issue in the geographies of time and temporality: if time is held to be a social con struct, and if the experience of time varies across dif ferent societies (much as Harvey suggests), then some geographers hold that the means by which a particular sense of time is constructed, and how it comes to frame common understandings and practices, are also multiple and dynamic. The editors of Timespace : Geographies of Temporality, Jon May and Nigel Thrift, make such an argument. They outline four domains over which a sense of time can develop (1) natural rhythms and cycles, such

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as seasons; (2) systems of social discipline, such as waged labor; (3) its relation to devices and technologies, such as clocks; and (4) its relation to new conceptualizations and influential texts. Whereas Harvey’s account privileges a system of social discipline, contributors to the volume trace the varied impact and reach of these four domains upon time consciousness in different places. The result is less a singular sense of time that comes to stretch across space, more that of multiple temporalities in which the quality and importance of each domain varies from place to place. For instance, new production and transportation technologies may gradually reconfigure temporality in a nineteenth century Canadian town, much as Stein indi cates. But elsewhere, as Jenny Shaw, John Frow, and Karen Davies suggest, natural life cycles significantly affect the pace of activities in a British retirement com munity; a major report about the separation of aboriginal children from their parents makes the past altogether present in postcolonial Australia; and a different system of social discipline, an ethics of care, creates other tem poral priorities than that created by an ethics of contract within health and social work in Sweden.

Time in Historical Geography If the previous material illustrated two strands in the geographies of time and temporality, it did so with a considerable emphasis on contemporary work in geog raphy. In that regard, the last section displayed what has been called ‘chronocentricity’, a prejudice toward the present as an era worth particular attention. That tem poral focus may well be representative of geography more generally. Rhys Jones documents such a trend in Anglophone geography over the past two decades. His concern is not the varied notions of time in geography, rather the different time periods (or centuries) discussed in geographical research. He shows that, relative to work in the discipline 50 years ago, articles in the flagship English language geography journals have been focusing more on the twentieth century and the contemporary world to the neglect of earlier centuries. Jones offers five possible explanations, among them the potential signifi cance of wider demands for more ‘applied’ research, the ‘cultural turn’ in human geography, and the growing interests in the history of geography. If the latter move is chronocentric, this section will not be exempt. The outline is highly schematic, and while the material covered was not necessarily the most salient in historical geography, it was symptomatic of various conceptualizations of time. As such, it will broaden the review beyond contemporary studies of the geography of time. Recall, for instance, how Glennie and Thrift explicitly reconfigure Thompson’s singular revo lution in the history of time consciousness into a

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narrative of phased and gradual change. As their analysis draws on a number of ecological formulations (e.g., en vironments of information, communities of practice, and their growth and diffusion) to derive three successive dynamic phases in a history of time consciousness over the course of five centuries, the wording and staging of their sketch becomes reminiscent of plant succession in biology. Such a stimulus would not be the first. In the Annals in 1929, Derwent Whittlesey suggested that ‘sequent occu pance’ could be a foundation for work in the discipline, viewing geography ‘‘as a succession of stages of human occupance [that] establishes the genetics of each stage in terms of its predecessor.’’ He advocated a human geog raphy energized by visions of recording the legacy of the past in shaping a contemporary landscape. More than a ‘purely descriptive’ endeavor, he recommended that re gions be treated dynamically, with each stage of human occupance clearly linked to its predecessor in sequence. (The ‘analogy’ between plant succession and sequent occupance, he thought, would be ‘apparent to all’). Like Sauer and the Berkeley School (whose renown would last far longer), Whittlesey favored a geneticism that traced the history that produced the current landscape. The temporality invoked by such work was diachronic, a historical trajectory of changes over time that lead to the present and that presumably help to explain it. It was with Sauer rather than with Whittlesey, how ever, that a genetic approach began to represent an American vision for historical geography, distinct from the endeavors of H. C. Darby in Great Britain. Con vinced that he had to stake a claim for the field, Darby had consistently defined historical geography (as Oxford geographer, J. N. L. Baker, had before him) as ‘‘the re construction of geographical conditions of past times.’’ Ralph Brown’s work at Minnesota would bear strong similarities with Darby’s series of historical cross sections in England. Like Darby, Brown was stimulated by the meticulous regional histories that Vidal de la Blache had produced in France, and like Vidal, both held geography to be a series of contingencies. Yet, Brown’s early death and Darby’s link to the distribution networks of Cam bridge University Press, along with the magnitude of his multivolume project, helped to ensure that Darby’s syn chronic approach to geography – with its reconstructions of a region in a given period – would later be held as the British parallel to the diachronic and genetic approach taken by many other American geographers before the war. By the 1950s, Darby was starting to recommend a diachronic approach, while work such as The Making of the English Landscape brought popular attention to a more genetic historical geography. In North America, the new intellectual leadership of Andrew H. Clark in the 1950s also helped reconcile the diachronic and synchronic

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approaches in the field. A student of Sauer, Clark’s first book had traced the invasion of people, animals, and plants in New Zealand. Ten years later, his book on Prince Edward Island combined a sequence of cross sections, linked by chapters that trace changes in culture, settlement, and land use in the intervening years. More than simply enrolling Darby’s cross sections into motion, the temporalities in Clark’s work transformed the passing of time into an evolutionary schema whose object for explanation could become, not contemporary phenom ena whose history the geneticists traced, but the very processes of geographical change over time. Three fairly distinct temporalities informed the Anglophone traditions in historical geography at that point: some traced the history of a present landscape in a genetic fashion; many strove to record and contextualize the historical geography of a past period; and others worked a more evolutionary scheme concerned with the diverse processes of geographical change. The principal interests in Britain included agrarian transformation, industrialization, and regional environmental change, while scholars in North America documented the effects of European colonization on regions around the contin ent. In the early 1950s, such research was closely inter twined with economic history and economic geography, and historical geographers often published their work in journals of economic geography and history. Yet, a quantitative revolution soon cast economic and historical geography at opposite ends of the methodological spec trum as the former came to symbolize the new nomo thetic analysis, while the latter was often cast as a refuge for ‘outdated’ regional geographers and an idiographic approach. By the 1970s, a spate of publications began to appear that looked explicitly for ‘new’ theoretical dir ections in the field. In that context, structuration theory and a new humanism took root in historical geography. More than a reaction to the quantitative spatial sci ence, humanist geographers highlighted human creativity and agency in ways that resonated with the individualized experimentalism that was popular among many students. A focal point for humanism was lived experience: not just an awareness of place, but also temporal experience. Yi Fu Tuan, for instance, wrote about diverse experi ences of time in relation to space as motion, and to place as a pause. Elsewhere, Anne Buttimer sought a new vo cabulary to ask how space and time ‘speak’ in the everyday life world, and David Lowenthal explored se lect American attitudes to the past, describing people who felt themselves ‘‘uniquely untrammelled by the past.’’ Perhaps this future oriented quality of much American experience at mid century suited the con temporary foci of nomothetic spatial analysts in geog raphy as well, as Cole Harris once remarked. But before humanism had taken root, before some looked afield to Marxian–humanist historians such as E. P. Thompson

and Raymond Williams, many historical geographers of Clark’s days had largely disregarded lived experience in favor of disembodied narratives of regional change. By the 1980s, scholarly interests in subjective lived experi ence had rippled across the field, and geographers such as Thrift and Harvey could speak acceptably (though from very different theoretical orientations) about the chan ging everyday geographies of time consciousness. If humanists struggled to evoke a stronger sense of creativity in cultural and historical geography, struc turationists were more equivocal. Structuration theory drew schematic links between human agency, structures, and social change. In its formulation, daily practices both structured, and were structured by, wider social con figurations. The theory dovetailed with the techniques of time geography (first developed by Torsten Ha¨gerstrand, later modified with Buttimer’s input), where the actions and course of an individual were represented as a con tinuous ‘path’ across a unit of time–space, subject to in numerable, corporeal interactions and constraints. Among Anglophone historical geographers, work toward a structurationist time geography such as that of Don Parkes and Nigel Thrift was deemed too present oriented and formalist. Rather, Allen Pred’s work on urban family life in the nineteenth century America was often con sidered exemplary. While his work seemed to deploy a notion of time as a linear dimension through which people move, its greater significance, like that of hu manism, was its focus on ‘the event’ – rather than genetic, contextual, or evolutionary time – as the crucial tem porality in analysis. Agency was thus understood as a decisive moment, an event (or if unsuccessful, a non event) that served as a potential rupture in the residues of history. To date, work on gender and individual time budgets demonstrates the most practical implications of a struc turationist time geography. A number of feminist geog raphers have explored how women and men are positioned differently with respect to labour markets and how their work is valued differently in national ac counting systems. Accordingly, less than one third of men’s work worldwide is devoted to unpaid and un documented labor, whereas for women, such labor on average accounts for two thirds of their work. Others have used time geography to depict the daily paths of individual women in select locales. As Gillian Rose ar gues, time geography problematically erases passion and bodily difference when it reduces each subject to an object on a path. Yet, insofar as the technique treats time as a resource central to the production of privileged so cial networks, scholars such as Jackie Tivers and Isabel Dyck have used it to reveal the daily constraints and unnaturally limited options their informants faced as mothers, and to show, through a series of events, how the women negotiated and changed the conflicting demands

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of motherhood and paid work. Still others, leaning more toward historical than social geography, such as Jeanne Kay and Mona Domosh, made use of the inroads of humanist geographers in the 1980s (rather than those of time geographers) to reinterpret traditional forms of historical geographic narrative from feminist per spectives, in order to highlight the significance of women’s lived experience, domestic household econ omies, and the gendering of identities in the shaping of North America. Since then, feminist theory has become one of the three major strands of thinking – along with Gramscian– Marxist and postcolonial thought – that guide a vast new body of work on collective memory. Those three theo retical developments helped to reshape an understanding of memory in geography. Conceived as a social activity, memory was seen less as passive cognitive phenomena like perception, more as shared recollections that con tinue to forge a sense of identity, place, and social dif ferentiation. Yet the act of remembrance is instrumental as well, since people recall the past in support of their own agendas and understandings, and since the past that one calls up at any moment is necessarily selective: recollecting some things inevitably entails the neglect of other things. In the ‘historic’ village of Stockbridge in rural Massachusetts, for instance, popular memory tells of many national leaders, writers, and artists who lived in this posh, quiet community. Yet when residents consider the character of the place they now wish to endorse, it makes a difference whether they remember the large theater built on Main Street in 1888 to promote the arts, or the small working class homes built just behind the theater (secluded from view and easily forgotten), as that which made this historic village work. Along a similar vein, many historical geographers have been writing about the politics of memory. Among them, there is considerable work on symbolic landscapes, war memorials, relics, and museums. Like the time budget analyses, such work carries potent implications about what is valued in the molding of social memory. Many invoke Walter Benjamin, and his concern with arresting the ostensibly ‘progressive’ flow of history in the 1930s (Kevin Hetherington describes Benjamin’s as a more ‘kairological’ notion of time) resonates with the narratives of counter memory that historical geographers often offer. Here, a disjunctive temporality is sometimes deployed, one where time is folded over. The past is understood to be hauntingly present, active in the ‘now’ of structural forces, landscapes, practices, and objects, all while people work on the past through contemporary interpretation. From this perspective, time is seen less as a cyclical or progressive movement, more as the winding strands of a double helix, where the present and the past intertwine and change their interlocking course in un predictable ways.

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Time and Historical Geography It may be productive not only to call upon Benjamin and the unsettling temporalities he provokes, but also to ask why his conception of time has now become attractive in historical geography. Yet this article’s remaining space is devoted, instead, to suggesting how a different notion of time came to predominate with the emergence of his torical geography. This question enables one to render historical geography, like time, as an unsettled object, a configuration subject to contestation. If a title like ‘time in historical geography’ prefigures the certainty of sub disciplinary space, then the editors’ chosen title for this article, ‘Time and historical geography,’ affords more room for symmetry, so as to consider notions of time and the subject of historical geography both as social con structions. One might accordingly turn to a decade when boundaries of the subject were far less certain than they are today. In 1953, H. C. Darby published one of the first methodological treatises about historical geography, and Andrew H. Clark was just composing his 35 page in ventory that was to give the subject some shape and lineage. That was the context in which Jean Brown Mitchell’s book, titled Historical Geography : A Student’s Guide, was published in 1954. As a lecturer at Cambridge, Mitchell’s work was a noted contribution to the insti tutionalization of that which is called ‘historical geog raphy’ in the Anglo American academic world. Hers was a small volume (356 pages, with the dimensions of a field guide) and it was the last volume in a series called Teach Yourself Geography. The need to define the field was introduced at the beginning of the first chapter, titled ‘What is historical geography?’ Seven substantive chap ters followed, outlining first the sources that could be used, and then the processes of interest for a potential student: the peopling of England and Wales, the growth of farms and villages, and changes in the countryside, industry, and transportation. Mitchell ended each chapter with a dozen mapping exercises that ‘‘the reader may like to make of his area.’’ She apologized for her treatment of material that ‘‘may often seem local, even parochial, in scope.’’ Yet that focus was strategic: Mitchell’s was a deliberate effort in adult education for ‘‘readers outside the University Schools.’’ Its aim was not only the production of a more learned populace in Britain (building on the ‘citizens outdoors’ movement), but also the promotion of the new sub discipline while using a popular interest in local history as its springboard. As historian Raphael Samuel notes, organized historical landscape walks were ‘in the air’ with the nostalgia of post war England, enlisting energy from thousands of amateur historians in ‘do it yourself ’ pro jects that honored the hardships of regular people in Britain. Many universities were adding adult education

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Time and Historical Geography

courses in local history to their offerings, and by 1952, local historians in Britain had even started their own journal. Yet, before W. G. Hoskins and M. W. Beresford became prominent in that movement, Historical Geography had showed interested adults how they might use family names in their community to trace the histories of im migration through which their predecessors had come to Britain. In doing so, Mitchell capitalized on post war national sentiments and a wave of interest in local history in order to bring the emerging subdiscipline to broader public attention. If we are to better understand this emergence how ever, the context in which ‘historical geography’ was promoted is not the only critical component. The pre dominant temporality with which Mitchell configured this new subdisciplinary formation was also significant. As anthropologist Carolyn Greenhouse suggests, prop ositions and assumptions about the nature of time should be understood as situated ideas about the sources and circuitry of agency. Greenhouse argues that specific representations of time are deployed in order to legit imate an account, in order to render its distributions of relevance, responsibility, and agency credible within the political contestations of an institution. If Mitchell’s book, Historical Geography, is read with that in mind, then the primary temporality with which she operates is not simply as another development in the many theorizations of time in historical geography (that seemingly ‘pro gressive flow of history’ again). Rather, her major tem poral framing can then be understood as a political move, one that fortified the terms of accountability within which a subdisciplinary formation could be assembled and legitimated. Consider, for instance, Mitchell’s distance from the temporality of ‘the event’. She positioned its examination as an exercise ‘best left to the historian’, whose primary concern lies with a civilization and the individuals who, to many historians, constitute the primary sources of agency in constructing that society. Historical geog raphers, according to Mitchell, instead were to embrace the temporal frame of ‘development’. In contrast to ‘the event’, her developmental notion of time effectively distributed agency across the complex and ‘‘complete assemblage’’ of relationships between people, the en vironment, and technologies, an assemblage that in turn constituted a place or region. Configuring time in this way was advantageous, in that it distinguished the work of historical geographers from the work of historians. Moreover, it conformed to the diachronic temporalities that Darby and Clark were starting to advocate, and with such notions of time, Mitchell strove to legitimate her new subdiscipline as a developing assemblage in the evolution of knowledge. But this was not the only temporality configured in Mitchell’s book. At the end of her second chapter, after

reviewing a number of sources and methods for historical geography, she summarized its purpose. If we understand the subject as a formation in construction, then that moment might become one that we should pay attention to, for there Mitchell (1954: 40) wrote: ‘‘Equipped now with maps, note book, stout boots and a stout heart the historical geographer is ready to pursue his investigations o’er fell, field, and fen, down macadamed road, up cob bled street with eyes open and mind alert to see and appreciate the visible landscape as the present phase of an ever changing pattern indissolubly linked to its past and irrevocably the foundation of its future.’’ Here the dominant temporality was again diachronic, from the past to ‘the present phase’ in the evolution of a landscape, which she then posited as the basis for its future. Here she represented time as a progressive continuum in which an ‘ever changing’ landscape appears, and she distributed its sources of agency widely across an ‘as semblage’ of quotidian relationships in place, between technologies, social groups, and the environment. Yet a minor temporality was also at work, one that cultivated a moment of preparation and potential, a moment of an ticipation on the part of readers ‘ready’ to pursue their studies ‘‘o’er fell, field, and fen.’’ This other sense of time in Mitchell’s book was a decisive moment, now effaced from most disciplinary histories, when time and its cir cuits of agency were briefly framed so as to configure an open historical geography constituted through a fecund democratization of learning and knowledge production. See also: Historical Geography; Memory; Modernity; Postcolonialism/Postcolonial Geographies.

Further Reading Bassin, M. and Berdoulay, V. (2004). Historical geography: Locating time in the spaces of modernity. In Benko, G. & Strohmayer, U. (eds.) Human Geography: A History for the 21st Century, pp 64 82. London: Arnold Publishers. Glennie, P. and Thrift, N. (2005). Revolutions in the times: Clocks and the temporal structures of everyday life. In Livingstone, D. & Withers, C. (eds.) Geography and Revolution, pp 160 198. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gould, S. J. (1987). Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geologic Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Green, D. B. (ed.) (1991). Historical Geography: A Methodological Portrayal. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Greenhouse, C. J. (1996). A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics across Cultures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hetherington, K. (2008). The time of the entrepreneurial city: Museum, heritage, and kairos. In Cronin, A. & Hetherington, K. (eds.) Consuming the Entrepreneurial City, pp 273 294. New York: Routledge. Hoelscher, S. and Alderman, D. H. (2004). Memory and place: Geographies of a critical relationship. Social and Cultural Geography 5/3, 347 355. Jones, R. (2004). What time human geography? Progress in Human Geography 28(3), 287 304.

Time and Historical Geography

May, J. and Thrift, N. (eds.) (2001). Timespace: Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge. Mitchell, J. B. (1954). Historical Geography: A Student’s Guide. London: English Universities Press. Morin, K. and Berg, L. D. (1999). Emplacing current trends in feminist historical geography. Gender, Place, and Culture 6(4), 311 330. Pred, A. (1981). Production, family, and free time projects: A time geographic perspective on the individual and societal change in nineteenth century US cities. Journal of Historical Geography 7(1), 3 36.

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Thompson, E. P. (1967). Time, work discipline, and industrial capitalism. Past and Present 38, 56 97. Tuan, Y. F. (1978). Space, time, place: A humanistic frame. In Carlstein, T., Parkes, D. & Thrift, N. (eds.) Making Sense of Time, pp 7 16. London: Edward Arnold.

Time Geographic Analysis M. Dijst, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Authority Constraints Regulation of access to activity places in the form of social rules, laws, financial barriers, and power relationships. Base Location Activity places in which activities are conducted that act as pegs around which the rest of the activity and travel pattern is organized. Capability Constraints Biological, mental, and instrumental limitations. Coupling Constraints All limitations which arise when people, equipment, and materials are joined together at given times and places. Potential Action Space The area which encompasses all activity places that can be visited in a certain time window. Prism Three-dimensional space–time construct which contains all potential paths a person may choose given that person’s spatiotemporal constraints. Project Entire series of tasks necessary to the completion of any goal-directed behavior. Station Activity places with diverse physical extensions. Time Window A block of time in which travel and nonbase location activities can be conducted. Travel Time Ratio A share of travel time in the sum of travel time and activity duration in a certain time window.

Introduction The origins of time geography can be traced to the mid 1960s. It forms a part of the human ecological tradition in human geography, one that exceptionally has been de veloped by geographers alone. The founding father Torsten Ha¨gerstrand (1916–2004) sees it as a four dimensional (4 D) view of the world. Although there are various versions of time geography, in this contribution the focus is on classical time geography, which was mainly developed in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, with some later extensions. Ha¨gerstrand redefined the domain of this geo graphical discipline on the basis of his observations of approaches in human geography in the 1960s. His main problem with the typical geographer’s thinking and practices at that time was that these were unable to catch the conditions which circumscribe human action. His criticism of human geography was largely driven by his strong motivation to make geographical knowledge and

266

skills more useful for policymakers and planners. For that purpose it was necessary to develop a conceptual and instrumental framework that could capture the con nected human activities that are taking place in time and space bound situations. To address these shortcomings of human geography, Ha¨gerstrand proposed a new theory based on three pillars: space, time, and the identity of mankind. Ha¨gerstrand reproached quantitative geographers, asserting that they were more interested in the distri bution of human beings and other material entities across space than in their space consuming properties and the consequences of these for their ordering in space. Space is not only a matter of distance between material entities, but also of the room taken up by these entities. A housefly needs just a tiny piece of 3 D space, but an international airport consumes a relatively large amount. This notion of space as provider of room implies, at least in some relationships, competition for available room between human beings, animals, plants, roads, buildings, and other entities. Some sites in space offer better op portunities than others for reaching one’s goals. Once a site has been occupied by a certain entity that space is no longer available for other objects, which are then forced to search for another site in space. In addition to this constraining notion of space, the time dimension also sets limitations on relationships between entities. Time is not a budget like money that can be saved up for later use. Just like a clock, time in an individual’s life ticks away. Moreover, at every moment in time an individual is located somewhere in space. As a consequence, events in time, like the birth of a child, calling a dentist, buying groceries in a store, and traveling to a destination, are not discrete, but are located and connected within space–time blocks. Consequently, one event might have consequences for another event, like the birth of a child that triggers the move to another, larger dwelling, which in itself might disconnect the household from the local community. The third pillar of time geography forms the identity of humankind. Ha¨gerstrand stated that a human being is treated as a ‘dividual’ rather than an ‘individual’. By this he means that in human geography human beings are studied as shopper, husband, father, colleague, or sportsman separately, without taking account of the fact that a person has to integrate the activities which belong to these various roles in space and time. Many of these activities have specific durations, and times and places at which they can be carried out. For example, a full time

Time Geographic Analysis

job as a teacher binds an employee to a school for a long duration during daytime hours. This location in time and space limits a teacher’s opportunity to participate in other activities.

Basic Ideas of Classical Time Geography Time geography is based on the idea that the life of an individual, but also of other organisms and material ob jects, describes an uninterrupted ‘path’ through time and across space. The timescale of these paths can vary from a day to the whole life span. Every organism or thing is constantly in movement, even when they are themselves at rest. In this manner one can see society as built up from a large number of webs or networks composed of uninterrupted paths that have been drawn by people, other organisms, and nonliving elements through time and space. These individual paths cross each other in ‘stations’, also called ‘bundles’; these are activity places like a dwelling, an office, a shop, or a beach where an individual participates in activities. These activities are called ‘projects’ and can range from preparing a pie to performing surgery and includes people, resources, space, and time. In Figure 1, segments of paths are placed in a 3 D ‘aquarium’ in which the vertical time dimension is placed on a 2 D representation of space. The left side of this figure shows that each member of a household follows an individual path. From the perspective of a station (right side of figure), in this case a school, various paths of pupils and teachers come together within a certain time span to attend or to give lessons. The slope of the lines in the figure represents the speed of traveling: the steeper the slope, the slower or more time consuming is the transport mode moving across space. In time geography, participation in activities in pro jects is not a matter of choice, but is subject to three types of constraints. The first type is capability constraints: biological, mental, and instrumental limitations. For ex ample, people sleep on average 7–8 h a night at home, have certain intelligence and skills to carry out activities,

Time

and have transport modes at their disposal which enable them to travel through time and across space at various speeds. Coupling constraints, the second type, are en countered by people when they come together at a cer tain time and location with equipment and other materials for joint activities. Different time schedules and different locations of origins can complicate this coupling of individual paths. Finally, authority constraints regulate the access of individuals to activity places through social rules, laws, financial barriers, and power relationships. Business hours, the price of admission, and curfews are some examples of these regulatory constraints. At the foundations of these constraints lie eight fun damental interrelated restrictions that people cannot escape. These are given as follows: 1. Human beings, and many other living and nonliving entities are indivisible. 2. Human beings, and many other living and nonliving entities have a limited life span. 3. Human beings, and many other living and nonliving entities have a limited ability to take part in more than one task at a time. 4. All tasks have a certain duration. 5. Movement across space consumes time. 6. Space has a limiting packing capacity. 7. Each territory has a boundary, like a house, a city, a country, or the Earth as a whole. 8. Each situation is inevitably rooted in past situations linked by an individual’s paths through time and across space. In time geography, it is assumed that some activities such as work and home activities are fixed in time and in locations called ‘bases’ (e.g., home and work location) and determine the opportunities to conduct more flexible activities such as shopping or recreation in time and space. These flexible activities can be pursued in ‘time windows’, also called time intervals, which represent blocks of time in which travel and relatively flexible ac tivities can be carried out. The constraints mentioned above define for a certain time window a 3 D ‘prism’,

Time

Space

267

Space

Figure 1 Bundles: on the left a household as a bundle, on the right a school. From Thrift, N. (1977). An Introduction to Time Geography. Norwich: Geo Abstracts, University of East Anglia (CATMOG-13).

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Time Geographic Analysis Time Bases Accessible area

Prism Time interval

Space

Figure 2 Prism and potential action space. From Lenntorp, B. (1976). Lund Studies in Geography, Series B, Human Geography, no. 44: Paths in Space-Time Environment: A Time Geographic Study of Possibilities of Individuals. Lund: The Royal Society of London, Department of Geography.

A

B

C

Walking

By car At work

At home d a

b

c

w

Figure 3 Cross-sections of prisms. From Parkes, D. N. and Thrift, N. J. (1980). Times, Spaces, and Places: A Chronogeographic Perspective. Chichester: John Wiley.

which embrace the set of opportunities for traveling to activity places and to participate in activities (Figure 2). Each step taken in space and/or time transforms the prism into a path. The volume of the prism depends on the type of transport mode chosen (Figure 3 (a to b)). Faster trans port modes increase the size of the prism, which is also shown by the shallower slopes of the prism. Figure 3 (c to w) also shows that time spent at various stations cuts the original prism into several smaller prisms that all nest within the original one. The projection of a prism in a 2 D or 3 D space des ignates the ‘potential action space’, also called the ‘activity area’ or ‘potential path area’. This area contains all the activity places that can be visited within a certain time window: in other words, it represents the accessible area. Each individual carries around a personal potential action space like an air balloon, which expands and contracts under the influence of changes in the three constraints mentioned and behavioral decisions concerning the course of the daily path. An action space has not only a plastic,

but also a fluid character, as shown in Figure 4. This means that when an individual moves across space, other people and material objects move in and out of the po tential action space because of the change in the indivi dual’s spatial position. Conversely, when a person is fixated in space, others with their own potential action spaces move in and out of that person’s action space. Potential action spaces can be grouped into three basis categories according to their ideal shape: circular, linear, or elliptic (Figure 5). Circular action space results when a journey starts and ends at the same base, like shopping trips from home or in the lunch break from work. A linear action space starts in one base and ends in another and the available time is just enough to cover the distance between the two bases. This is often the case for daily commuting trips. After subtracting the time ne cessary to travel between the bases, some extra time re mains for visits to other stations en route; the resulting action space is elliptical. Of course, these three basis categories of action spaces are ideal forms. In reality, because of variations in spatiotemporal configurations of

Time Geographic Analysis

269

C B

T2 T4 T3

T1

A

Individuals

A, B, C Individual paths

Potential action space

T1...T4 Points of time

Figure 4 Composition of potential action space dependent on temporal and spatial location. From Dijst, M. (2006). Stilstaan bij Beweging: Over Veranderende Relaties tussen Steden en Mensen. Utrecht: Faculty Geosciences, Utrecht University.

road networks, for example, potential action spaces can take fanciful shapes (Figure 6). An individual’s prism or potential action space has in principle three temporal choices: to spend the entire available time budget on travel without spending any time in an activity place; to stay in the base location without traveling outside; or to spend time on travel as well as on activities in one or more activity places. It is assumed, however, that individuals will balance travel and activity duration, as reflected in the definition of the ‘travel time ratio’: the ratio between travel time and the sum of travel time and activity duration. In principle, this ratio lies somewhere between 0 and 1. For example, a travel time ratio of 0.45 for shopping means that 45% of the available time window in which a visit to a shop is included will be spent on traveling to and from the shop. Although no comprehensive studies are available, empirical evidence suggests that the ratios for commuting, maintenance, and discretionary activities are on average 11%, 45%, and 25%, respectively. Application of the travel time ratios to prisms means that the volume of the prism shrinks.

Application of Time-Geographic Analysis Ha¨gerstrand attached great value to the application of knowledge in planning practice. For that purpose, time geographers have developed simulation models to assess the effects of planning measures on the choice opportunities that individuals of various types have. Two examples of these models are Program Evaluating the Set of Alternative Sample Path (PESASP) and its improved

version Model of Action Spaces in Time Intervals and Clusters (MASTIC). These models facilitate the assess ment of the potential impact of time policies (e.g., the business hours of shops, flexible working hours, and ad justed public transport schedules), transport policies (e.g., new road constructions and new bus stops), and spatial policies (e.g., changes in the density or mixture of activity places) on the opportunities offered to people to par ticipate in their desired activities. The MASTIC model includes four variables that determine the size, shape, and location in time and space of potential action spaces. These determinants are: the distance between the bases, the length of the available time window, the speed of the main transport mode, and the travel time ratio. The characteristics of potential action spaces do not depend solely on the individual. Not only the supply and quality of transport systems, but also the spatiotemporal configuration of the activity places influence the quantity and quality of available oppor tunities within the action space. Application of this model is dependent on the availability of accurate data on at least the individual departure times from origins and arrival times at destinations, the transport modes used, and the street addresses of all types of activity place visited. In addition, a digital geographic database of the study area is necessary that includes information on ac tivity places (like type and business hours) and a detailed street network for all transport modes. The MASTIC model has been applied to the Dutch city of Zoetermeer. This new town is located 12 kilometers from The Hague and accommodates over 100 000 inhabitants and 40 000 jobs. The backbone of the

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Time Geographic Analysis

Circular action space

Linear action space

Elliptic action space

Base (home or job)

Accessible activity location

Action space

Inaccessible activity location

Figure 5 Three basis forms of action spaces. van Eck, R. J., Burghouwt, G. and Dijst, M. (2005). Lifestyles, spatial configurations and quality of life in daily travel: An explorative simulation study. Journal of Transport Geography 13, 123 134 with permission from Elsevier.

city is formed by a railway line with 12 stops within the city and connects Zoetermeer with The Hague. A sample of 222 respondents living in one neighborhood com pleted a travel diary for two successive days. They wrote down all the trips made, the departure and arrival times, the transport modes used, and the type and exact address of the activity places visited. These diaries gave infor mation on ‘activity programs’ or the activities carried out during the various time windows on two days. Data on the household composition and employment situation were collected in a complementary survey; this resulted in the definition of five types of couples and families: single earner households without children, single earner households with children, dual earner households with out children, two earner households with children, and retired households without children. During the simu lations the distance between the bases and their location, the timing and length of time windows, the travel time ratios, and the activity program for each time window, which comprises all activities in which the individual

participated, were not changed. Only the order in which activity places were visited, the location of activity pla ces, and transport mode could change. Various scenarios can be defined to show the impact of transport and spatial policies. The scenarios in Table 1 differ in the density of dwellings, namely 15 and 35 dwellings per hectare. It is made clear that these spatial configurations have different impacts on people’s op portunities to participate in activities outside the bases. As expected, a high suburban density offers relatively the best opportunities; on average, four fifths of all activity programs can be realized. In contrast, in a low suburban density with its longer travel times, only two thirds of all activities can be carried out. In this scenario everybody in low density areas, especially those who walk or cycle, and members of two earner households, encounter substan tial difficulties in their daily lives. Spatial configurations can be assessed not only in terms of the feasibility of activity programs, but also in terms of travel distance and travel time efficiency

Time Geographic Analysis

271

Figure 6 A potential path area (PPA) of 20 minutes travel duration between a pair of fixed activities. From Weber, J. and Kwan, M.-P. (2003). Evaluating the effects of geographic contexts of individual accessibility: A multilevel approach. Urban Geography 24, 647 671.

(Figure 7). The absolute differences in distance traveled by car users in the low and high density scenarios are between 2 and 5 kilometers or relatively between 15% and 40%. For travel time, the differences between the two scenarios are much smaller, but still substantial: between 3 and 6 minutes or relatively between 15% and 20%. Time geographic simulations could be valuable in facilitating the assessment of the impact of policies on people’s daily activity participation. The approach could also be valuable in assessing the impacts of policies on the use of various facilities. Figure 8 shows that a con sequence of seriously pushing back the use of the private car in a community to the benefit of public transport, walking, and cycling is that consumer flows and the economic basis of many stores will change.

Geographic Information System, Three-Dimensional Geovisualization and Time-Geographic Analysis The enormous increase in the power of personal computers, the availability of rich georeferenced

individual level data, and improvements in geographic information systems (GISs) facilitate the extension and enrichment of the analysis of human activity and travel patterns in time and space within a time geographical framework. This development has largely been made possible by GIS based geocomputation, which refers to a set of computer based techniques, such as data mining, genetic algorithms, cellular automata, fractal modeling, and visualization; as a result, geographical variations in phenomena across scales can be analyzed. Algorithms have been developed within the time geographical framework to refine the analysis of the spatiotemporal opportunities available for individuals. For example, procedures are available to take into account the spatial and temporal variations in travel speeds and business hours of activity places, the impact of traffic rules (like one way streets and turning prohibitions), minimum ac tivity duration, and maximum travel time budgets. The visualization of geographic information (geovi sualization) in particular offers ample opportunities to create, view, and understand the spatiotemporal images of individual paths in real geographic space of particular

272

Time Geographic Analysis

Table 1 Percentage of activity programs realized in different spatial configurations, by household type and main in transport mode Zoetermeer-Rokkeveen, The Netherlands Density/household type

Car

Suburban density scenario: high density a Single-earner households with child(ren) Single-earner households without child(ren) Two-earner households with child(ren) Two-earner households without child(ren) Retired households without child(ren) Total

Public transport

Walk/ bicycle

87 83

100 100

62 100

80 84

82 83 100 83

93 86 100 89

68 61 65

80 78 100 80

72 73

100 100

41 50

64 72

69 74 88 72

87 72 100 78

55 34

68 64 83 67

Suburban density scenario: low density a Single-earner households with child(ren) Single-earner households without child(ren) Two-earner households with child(ren) Two-earner households without child(ren) Retired households without child(ren) Total

41

Total

All differences significant at the p o 0.01 level. The dash in the table represents that the number of cases are too small. From van Eck, R. J., Burghouwt, G. and Dijst, M. (2005). Lifestyles, spatial configurations and quality of life in daily travel: An explorative simulation study. Journal of Transport Geography 13, 123 134.

35

14

30

8 6 4

25 20

Single-earner households without children

10

Two-earner households with children

2

5

0

0 High suburban density

Single-earner households with children

15

Two-earner households without children Retired households without children High suburban density

10

Low suburban density

Average travel time

12

6723

16

Low suburban density

Average kilometrage

a

Figure 7 Average car distance per journey (left) and car travel time per journey in minutes (right) for low and suburban densities by household type. Source: Ritsema van Eck, J., Burghouwt, G. and Dijst, M. (2005). Lifestyles, spatial configurations and quality of life in daily travel: An explorative simulation study. Journal of Transport Geography, 13, 123 134.

study areas. In the past, 2 D maps and geographic methods were applied to depict the web of paths created by individuals. 3 D offers not only 3 D complex and realistic representations of the (urban) environment, but also the opportunity to see immediately the effect of the user’s manipulation of the determinants of individual paths, such as changes in travel speeds, the location of activity places, and business hours. Finally, navigation tools, such as fly through, zooming, planning, and dynamic rotation together with multimedia capabilities, allow users to create their own virtual images of the real world. Individual paths through time and space in GIS are represented as a collection of vertical and diagonal

trajectories in a space–time aquarium (Figure 9). The vertical axis is the time dimension and the horizontal plane the geographic space of the study area. On this plane, the administrative boundary of the study area (Metropolitan Portland), rivers, and major car routes can be clearly distinguished. As the enormous bundle of paths in daytime shows, most individuals from the African American, Hispanic, and Asian American ethnic groups work in the downtown area. Many maintenance and leisure activities are undertaken by these individuals within and to the east of downtown Portland. By using the interactive capabilities of 3 D GIS, categorizations of paths can be displayed and readily interpreted. For

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Buildup area Research area Water

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Park Railway with station Zoetermeerline with station Frequency use of facilities

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Buildup area

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Figure 8 Actual use of facilities (upper) and without car use (lower) within Zoetermeer, according to location and frequency. From Dijst, M., de Jong, T. and van Eck, R. J. (2002). Opportunities for transport change: An exploration of a disaggregated approach. Environment and Planning B 29, 413 430.

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Figure 9 Space time aquarium showing the space time paths of African and Asian Americans in the sample. From Kwan, M.-P. and Lee, J. (2004). Geovisualization of human activity patterns using 3-D GIS: A time-geographic approach. In Goodchild, M. F. & Janelle, D. G. (eds.) Spatially Integrated Social Science. New York: Oxford University Press.

example, it can be shown that full time employees have a less fragmented space–time path than others; and, com pared with the other two ethnic groups, African Ameri cans have a much more compact spatial pattern of paths. Zooming in on this ‘aquarium’ brings up a more de tailed representation of the study area and the individual paths it contains (Figure 10). The image clearly shows the Willamette River and the ‘loop’ around downtown Portland. The heights of the buildings on parcels are shown and the use of color codes for specific types of urban functions, such as orange brown (commercial buildings) and green (industries), gives a good impression of the spatial opportunities offered in the study area. In combination with the portions of some space–time paths, the user can search on fine spatial scales for specific types of individual and the use of time and space and the op portunities to adjust these paths to changed individual or contextual circumstances. GIS based geocomputation also offers methods to extract patterns from the large number and on first sight highly diverse space–time trajectories drawn in the ‘aquarium’. One application is shown in Figure 11 for employed individuals from the three ethnic minority groups mentioned above. In this figure all home locations in the ‘aquarium’ have been moved to the origin (0, 0) and the diverse home work axes have been rotated until

it becomes the positive x axis. This standardization of space–time paths is depicted by the home work plane. In an interactive session it can be shown that many work activities are carried out in bundles in proximity of the home and that a considerable amount of nonwork ac tivities are carried out during the day often toward the home work axis. With the help of Global Positioning Systems (GPSs) it is feasible not only to show the origins and destinations on an individual’s path as in the former figures, but also to trace the actual travel routes followed in an urban en vironment. Figure 12 portrays the actual routes traveled by female car drivers without children under 16 years of age in the Lexington area in Kentucky. These car drivers’ trips mainly followed highways and major arterials. 3 D visualization can also be extended to the use by individuals of information and communication technol ogies (ICT). People can communicate with others with out moving across space with a personal computer at home or at work and with mobile communication devices on the road. Figure 13 represents an individual’s space– time path and ICT activities on three geographical scales: global (upper); regional (lower: 15 states in northeastern region of the USA); and local (middle: Franklin County, Ohio, USA). As the space–time path depicts, the person lives and works in Franklin County. She visits a

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Figure 10 A close-up view of downtown Portland. From Kwan, M.-P. and Lee, J. (2004). Geovisualization of human activity patterns using 3-D GIS: A time-geographic approach. In Goodchild, M. F. & Janelle, D. G. (eds.) Spatially Integrated Social Science. New York: Oxford University Press.

Home-work plane

y

(0, 0)

Figure 11 Standardize space time paths. Source: Kwan, M.-P. (2000). Interactive geovisualization of activity-travel patterns using three-dimensional geographical information systems: A methodological exploration with a large data set. Transportation Research C 8, 185 203.

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N

Figure 12 Space time paths based on GPS data collected in Lexington, Kentucky. From Kwan, M.-P. and Lee, J. (2004). Geovisualization of human activity patterns using 3-D GIS: A time-geographic approach. In Goodchild, M. F. & Janelle, D. G. (eds.) Spatially Integrated Social Science. New York: Oxford University Press.

restaurant at walking distance during a lunch break at work (see in Figure 13). She also engages in ICT ac tivities with other locations in the northeastern states of the USA, in South Africa, and Japan. At two moments at work she participates in nonpersonal communications. In the morning she subscribes to a webcasting service (a) where news from Yugoslavia, South Africa, and Nashville is forwarded to her web browser and in the afternoon she browsed web pages in New York, Charlotte, and An chorage in Alaska (d). At other moments of the day she participated in personal communications. In the morning she sent some emails to three friends living in Hong Kong, Chicago, and Vancouver (b). The difference in slopes shows that the friends read the email with different time lags. The friend in Hong Kong was the last to read the email but replied immediately (e). She read this email a couple of hours later at home (g). In the evening at home she chatted with friends in Tokyo, Melbourne, Memphis (Tennessee), and Dublin (Ohio) (f ). Analysis of the impact of ICT on human activity and travel patterns leads also to the introduction of new time geographical concepts such as ‘portal’, ‘message window’, and ‘digital box’. A portal is a type of station where in dividuals can access appropriate communication services. A message window is a time interval in which individuals can interact with portals. Finally, a digital box is a space– time block within which use of ICT devices and services is allowed.

Criticisms on Time Geography Criticism on time geography has been dominantly for mulated by supporters of structuration theory, feminist geographers, and those who embrace a relational per spective on geography. Anthony Giddens, the founding father of structuration theory, criticized time geography for its treatment of individuals as independent of their social settings in daily life. Ha¨gerstrand did not discuss the origins of people’s projects, stations, domains, and constraints. His emphasis was more on behavioral routines instead of the essentially transformational character of human action. ‘‘All types of constraints y. are also types of opportunity, media for the enablement of action’’ (Giddens, 1984: 117). As a consequence, time geography has a very weakly de veloped theory of power. The feminist geographer Gillian Rose opposed the unproblematized universality of bodies and spaces in time geography. Although corporeality is a basic notion in time geography there is little discussion on the body. The theory considers the body as undifferentiated and actually reduces it to a path through time and space. Based on rationalist considerations paths mesh at certain spatiotemporal locations but they never merge. This minimalist account of the body denies differences be tween sexuality, gender, and race which together with associated emotions all have a differentiating impact on

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g

e

f

d c b a

Figure 13 Travel and ICT activities in space time using 3-D GIS. From Kwan, M.-P. (2000). Human extensibility and individual hybridaccessibility in spacetime: A multi-scale representation using GIS. In Janelle, D. G. & Hodge, D. C. (eds.) Information, Place and Cyberspace: Issues in Accessibility, pp 241 256. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

consciousness and agency. For example, childbirth, mothering, and domesticity create a specifically different subjectivity and sociality for women than men who in daytime work in the office and return home after work. A related criticism of feminist geographers is on time geographer’s conceptualization of space. 3 D space is seen as infinite, unbounded, and transparent. Although in time geography participation in activities is constrained by constraints, it denies the feelings associated with these constraints. For example, women often experience fears caused by sexual harassment. The same is true for some homosexual men and nonwhites for violence in the streets. Comparable with bodies there is no universal unproblematized space but there are more spaces dif ferentiated by subjectivity and sociality. Differentiation of time and space is also the subject of relational perspectives on geography, like post structur alism, nonrepresentational theory, and actor network theory. Time geographers have an absolute perspective

on time and space. They use a 3 D time–space or ‘aquarium’ (Figure 1), in which individual paths are placed. It is a representation of: ‘‘ya singular or uniform social time stretching over a uniform spacey’’ (May and Thrift, 2001: 5). However, in a relative conceptualization of time–space this entity is understood as a network of relationships in which consciousness of temporal and spatial distances are measured in terms of processes and activities. These processes and activities could be related to nature (like temporalities of seasons and years), re ligion (like church attendance and feast days) and economy (mechanical clock and business hours).

Future Issues Time geographic analysis offers ample opportunities to analyze human activity and travel patterns. Although this approach can be applied at the individual, station, and

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population/activity system level, analysis on the first level dominates. For example, the spatiotemporal prob lems of women, household types, and ethnical minorities have been studied extensively. However, the other two levels also deserve more attention. Mapping out the prisms or potential action spaces of individuals will de pict the size and composition of the group of people who can visit a station and as a consequence the economic or social basis of an activity place. At a societal level a time geographic analysis could enhance our insights into total time investments in activities and travel and in inter actions and communications of various population categories. Although the development and spread of new ICT means and services can be said to be revolutionary, the knowledge on this subject is highly inconclusive and even contradictory. So far, the opportunities offered by the use of communication means and services have only been marginally developed in time geography. The integration of conceptual and methodological ICT in the time geographical framework and the analysis of its impact on activity and travel patterns will be a challenge. Finally, classic time geography does not integrate into the theoretical framework the meaning of cognitive processes, such as opinions and feelings, for the devel opment of paths through time and across space. In this respect the approach is reductionist situational. One can wonder whether this exclusion of the mental part of human activity and travel patterns remains a preferred approach or whether insights from other approaches from sociology and psychology should be integrated with time geography. See also: Geovisualization.

Further Reading Dijst, M. (2004). ICT and accessibility: An action space perspective on the impact of new information and communication technologies. In Beuthe, M., Himanen, V., Reggiani, A. & Zamparini, L. (eds.) Transport Developments and Innovations in an Evolving World, pp 27 46. Berlin: Springer.

Dijst, M. (2006). Stilstaan bij Beweging: Over Veranderende Relaties tussen Steden en Mensen. Utrecht: Faculty Geosciences, Utrecht University. Dijst, M., de Jong, T. and van Eck, R. J. (2002). Opportunities for transport mode change: An exploration of a disaggregated approach. Environment and Planning B 29, 413 430. Dijst, M. and Vidakovic, V. (2000). Travel time ratio: The key factor of spatial reach. Transportation 27, 179 199. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hagerstrand, T. (1970). What about people in regional science? Papers of the Regional Science Association 24, 7 21. Hagerstrand, T. (1973). The domain of human geography. In Chorley, R. J. (ed.) Directions in Geography, pp 67 87. London: Methuen. Kwan, M. P. (2000). Human extensibility and individual hybrid accessibility in spacetime: A multi scale representation using GIS. In Janelle, D. G. & Hodge, D. C. (eds.) Information, Place and Cyberspace: Issues in Accessibility, pp 241 256. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Kwan, M. P. (2000). Interactive geovisualization of activity travel patterns using three dimensional geographical information systems: A methodological exploration with a large data set. Transportation Research C 8, 185 203. Kwan, M. P. (2004). GIS methods in time geographic research: Geocomputation and geovisualization of human activity patterns. Geografiska Annaler B 86, 267 280. Kwan, M. P. and Lee, J. (2004). Geovisualization of human activity patterns using 3 D GIS: A time geographic approach. In Goodchild, M. F. & Janelle, D. G. (eds.) Spatially Integrated Social Science, pp 48 66. New York: Oxford University Press. Lenntorp, B. (1976). Lund Studies in Geography, Series B, Human Geography, no. 44: Paths in Space Time Environment: A Time Geographic Study of Possibilities of Individuals. Lund: The Royal University of Lund, Department of Geography. May, J. and Thrift, N. (eds.) (2001). Timespace: Geographies of Temporalities. London: Routledge. Miller, H. J. (2005). A measurement theory for time geography. Geographical Analysis 37, 17 45. Miller, H. J. (2005). Necessary space time conditions for human interaction. Environment and Planning B 32, 381 401. Parks, D. and Thrift, N. (1980). Times, Spaces, and Places: A Chronogeographic Perspective. Chichester: John Wiley. Raubal, M. and Miller, H. J. (2004). User centered time geography for location based services. Geografiska Annaler B 86, 245 265. Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. Thrift, N. (1977). An Introduction to Time Geography. Norwich: Geo Abstracts, University of East Anglia (CATMOG 13). van Eck, R. J., Burghouwt, G. and Dijst, M. (2005). Lifestyles, spatial configurations and quality of life in daily travel: An explorative simulation study. Journal of Transport Geography 13, 123 134. Weber, J. and Kwan, M. P. (2003). Evaluating the effects of geographic contexts of individual accessibility: A multilevel approach. Urban Geography 24, 647 671.

Time Geography M. Gren, Ho´lar University College, Sauja´rkro´kur, Iceland & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Conceptual Apparatus Time-geographic concepts with meanings and definitions which meet the requirements of the matter-realistic ontology. Corporeality In time-geography the everyday realm consisting of bodies (or material things) with the quality of being physical. Matter-Realism A philosophical basis for timegeography, which means that the conceptual apparatus and time-geographic notation should, in terms of representation, correspond to the everyday world of matter and corporeal existences. Notation System A system of representing or depicting by signs (or symbols). Time-Geographic Diagram A system of graphic representation that depicts by lines in relation to the coordinates of time and space the simultaneous movement of corporeal objects or material events on the reference plane of the Earth. Time–Space Corporeal objects and material events have both spatial extension and temporal duration and therefore time and space always come together in timegeography. Trajectory A graphical depiction of the movement of corporeal objects (or material events) in both time and space. The trajectory is the simplest and most fundamental concept in time-geography.

Introduction Time geography is a conceptual geographic framework. It is founded on a matter realistic ontology that explicitly takes departure from the material eventness of geo graphical phenomena and processes, in their dynamic time spatial situatedness on Earth. An essential charac teristic of time geography is thus that conditions of the physical world are conceptually acknowledged and in corporated at the outset. Most importantly, it means that matter with the dimensions of time and space is conceived of as fundamental in the constitution of human corporeal and geographical life, as well as for nonhuman configur ations. Time geography includes a notation system and a conceptual apparatus which in combination offers a time geographic methodology. By this methodology, the time spatial embeddedness of human earthly life, as well as various material events and their geographical orderings, can be studied regardless of their disciplinary belongings.

As a research program on its own, time geography has increased the conceptual and empirical knowledge of time–space material conditions of and for human cor poreal and geographical existence. Over the years it has been applied in numerous areas in human geography, as well as in a large number of studies in a variety of dif ferent disciplinary settings. One of its most successful applications has been in studies of mobility, accessibility, and everyday geographies. As an ontological approach, rather than a theory in a formal sense, time geography has also enabled through its methodology the utilization of other theoretical and empirical knowledges. For ex ample, feminist scholars have drawn on time geography in order to investigate social divisions of gender. This has meant that time geographic methodology has also been used for purposes and in contexts that as such may have had little to do with time geography per se.

On the History of Time-Geography The central ideas of time geography were initially de veloped in the late 1960s and the early 1970s by Torsten Ha¨gerstrand (1916–2004), the most influential Swedish geographer of our time. Especially during the final 10 year period of his tenure, when Ha¨gerstrand was holding a personal professorship (1971–82) at the University of Lund, he tried to distill and elaborate upon his own fundamental geographical ideas so as to give them a more consistent and systematic form. This development eventually came to include also contributions from a number of associates that together were to become known as ‘the Lund school’. Many of Ha¨gerstrand’s geographic ideas that were to be formative for time geography had been with him for a long time, in a professional sense, at least since the 1940s. For example, doing research in the area of dem ography acquainted him by necessity with problems and opportunities regarding the graphical representation of statistical data. When investigating migration patterns in the population of Asby in rural southern Sweden his collected data concerned 10 000 individual biographies, yet he managed to condense these into one small diagram. In terms of Ha¨gerstrand’s own biography, he grew up in the small village of Moheda in the Swedish country side, which, according to him, produced in his mind a ‘holistic’ geographic map of a place on Earth where it was visible where the milk, meat, and the firewood were coming from. It was a kind of a visible vertically enclosed geography that was soon about to be changed through

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various processes of modernization, leading to more horizontal, and increasingly invisible, geographies of and through society and space. In that modern world, the earthly trajectories of various materialities would pro liferate into complex and wide spanning geographies, now increasingly at a global scale. At the same time, Ha¨gerstrand came to argue that they were prone to disappear in the dematerialized language of growing modern social science. Such a verbal understanding of the social enabled one to move freely around in thought and tell stories about economy, culture, society, and the like, but without the necessity to establish an apparent and clear reference to the time–space embeddedness of material events and technological artifacts on Earth. The discipline of geography was also to be trans formed during Ha¨gerstrand’s career, and by the 1960s, it was no longer a synthesizing ‘Earth discipline’. A modern division had left physical geography to take care of na ture and the world of matter and set human geography with the task of establishing itself as a social science. Ha¨gerstrand, having been schooled in geography as a discipline that preceded the nature–culture divide and which included a significant German Earth tradition (Erdbeschribung or Erdkunde) done by great synthesizers like Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Ritter, and Alfred Hettner, always remained skeptical about the modern trajectory of the discipline. In that respect, his time geographic project was not an attempt to construct a version of human geography as social science. Instead, it was a way of holding onto, and to further develop, some of the fundamentals of a unifying geography. As an at tempt to counterbalance the fragmentation of disciplin ary knowledge by trying to keep nature, society, and technology within a single conceptual framework, time geography is then quite reminiscent of an ‘old geography’ interested in the transformation of habitats over time that included not only its people and artifacts but also its natural base. Time geography was also motivated and influenced by Ha¨gerstrand’s involvement in regional policy studies underway in Sweden in the 1960s, for example, in a major research project funded by the Bank of Sweden Ter centenary Foundation. A characteristic of Swedish modernity thus was that social scientists, to a large extent, were involved in governmental commissions and research projects that were meant to provide scientific evidence on which political decisions about the improvement and future betterment of society could be made. A central aspect of the policy studies that Ha¨gerstrand participated in was to compare the living conditions in various parts of Sweden and to figure out ways of equalizing these con ditions with respect to access of employment, education, healthcare, cultural resources, and recreation. Thus, in focus were various locational and spatial issues, for ex ample, how to delineate new municipal districts, or how

to plan for the supply of various public facilities and services such as transportation. One central representational problem Ha¨gerstrand then identified, which cuts into the very heart of time geography, was that there did not yet exist a ‘neutral frame of reference’ for describing and measuring the impacts of processes in society in such a way that their geographic implications and consequences for its people as individuals became visible. Eventually, he drew the conclusion that it was one thing to reason about social phenomena in society, for example, to make various calculations on the basis of dematerialized statistical ag gregates of living conditions, but quite another to place them and their consequences in actual space–time set tings on Earth. As a response to that representational problem, time geography was an attempt to create a combination of demography and geography. One of the original principal aims was to develop a notation system that, through a set of descriptive concepts, would make it possible to register and handle observations in their developing space and time dependent relations. Furthermore, such a system should make possible the meeting of different nonadditive and disparate knowledges in such a way that the time spatial effects and impacts upon individuals could be grasped and measured, for example, an individual’s pos sibility for actions somewhere. In the context of policy studies, the proper yardstick would then be how the de velopment of society affected the biographies of its people as individuals who are always living geographically spe cific lives rather than in a dematerialized social realm. The first publication by Ha¨gerstrand, which most explicitly presents the aim and postulates of ‘time geo graphic description’, was published in Swedish 1974. He there declared that the task was to counteract the pro cesses of differentiation in geography and further develop the art of putting the various materials of specialists and subfields together into a coherent and unified worldview. He also proposed the development of a ‘method of de scription’ which should fulfill four general represen tational requirements: 1. It should be easy to realize to what the description corresponds to in reality. 2. The description must have a wide scope of applicability. 3. It should have the ability to generate questions which one could not pose without it. 4. It should admit conclusions and calculations whose reality correspondence does not have to be verified by observations. The method should make it possible to put together, and hold on to, observations in such a way that data were not being pulled out from its place and time dependent context. It was to be developed into the notation system,

Time Geography

which has become something of a hallmark of time geography. Time geographic ideas were subsequently further formalized by Ha¨gerstrand himself, and increas ingly so also by his associates in Lund and other scholars, into a conceptual apparatus. In the 1970s time geography began to diffuse throughout human geography and social science, not least because of Ha¨gerstrand’s prolific pub lication in a broad spectrum of journals and with the help of internationally renowned scholars like Allan Pred and Nigel Thrift. After several decades time geography cannot be reduced to a conceptual entity that comes with only one unambiguous identity, nor to the initial geo graphical ideas of Ha¨gerstrand. Yet, the significance of his ontological skeleton prevails underneath the added flesh.

The Notation System and the Conceptual Apparatus Time geography includes a conceptual apparatus that consists of concepts that have in common that they have been given meanings and definitions in order to meet the requirements of the matter realistic ontology. These are by now almost too numerous to list; therefore, only a few of the most important concepts will be touched upon here. It seems, however, appropriate to begin with ‘the notation system’, since it has been so much equated with time geography and because its most important feature is the underlying ontology. In combination with the con ceptual apparatus the notation system provides the po tential to carry out analyses and make calculations that do not need to be tested empirically since the concepts are neither derived or decided nor affected by ephemeral contexts or situations. This illustrates the universal claims of the applicability of time geography. The development of time geographic notation has always been part of an attempt to overcome the limits of verbal language. Hence, an essential idea behind the graphic representation in time geography is that it should make it possible to hold on to an earthly material situatedness which verbal language too readily departs from. In time geography the importance of nonverbal graphic description must then be kept as a guiding ontological and methodological principle however dif ficult this matter realism may be to execute in practice. One could, for example, think of how to represent every person’s movements in a city during a day. Time geographic notation has also been motivated by a need to overcome a limit of the traditional map, as it represents a spatial configuration frozen in time. By contrast, a central characteristic of notation in time geography is that time and space always come together in order to keep track simultaneously of both spatial and temporal dimensions of material geographical events. As long as a ‘corporeal’ object exists, it will be somewhere

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Figure 1 A time-geographic diagram.

and it will endure in time. In other words, it will have and be a time geography. This means that positions of an object may change in reference to time only, or to both time and space (Figure 1). The time geographic diagram illustrates, in principle, fundamental time spatial conditions of material life and how these can be made observable by means of graphic representation. In the diagram an object is represented as a ‘trajectory’ (or path), which is both the simplest and the most fundamental concept in time geography. The tra jectory above graphically depicts an object that is first located somewhere enduring only in time. Then it moves in both time and space to another location, where it stops for a while, before returning to its original position. The trajectory thus internalizes the level of generality de manded by the conceptual apparatus by depicting the continuous movement of a corporeal material object, such as a car or a human, by reference to both time and space. It also erases the distinction between human and nonhumans because it graphically represents both as matter. Any physical object can in principle be repre sented by a continuous trajectory, as long as the object is indivisible and has a positive direction in reference to the time axis. That physical objects cannot move backward in time, or make discontinuous jumps into the future, are examples of basic time spatial constraints which time geography claims to be universal in the everyday cor poreal realm. In the everyday time geographical life of corporeal material entities there are three principal phases: ‘coming into being’, ‘survival’, and ‘death/destruction’. Matter/ energy is continuously changed, moved, and transformed on Earth so that corporeal entities may arise, or be cre ated, and thereafter embark on their own time geog raphies. The inhabitants of the Earth are thus corporeal humans, objects, trees, birds, technological artifacts, and the like, on their respective roads from cradle to grave. These corporealities constitute together various popu lations and, in turn, their aggregated time geographies. Every form of human, as well as nonhuman, geog raphy is thus preceded and succeeded by space–time regularities due to Earth bound conditions and con straints laid down by matter. The concept of ‘pockets of

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local order’ refers to the time spatial coordination of various resources, people, and artifacts. The home is thus a local pocket of order embedded in the wider web of flows of matter. In time geography the concept of local pockets of order is not only restricted to the human world but includes also the wider ecologies of nature. Plants, like humans, do not only need local pockets of order for their maintenance, they are their own local pockets of order during their time geographies of existence. The activities of humans in their geographies of everyday life, the most important scale of inquiry in time geography, necessarily demand a time spatial co ordination of various materialities. For example, work place, school, and home must be brought forth, arranged, and continuously maintained in order to serve their functions. In the conceptual apparatus, ‘domain’ and ‘station’ denote such time spatial locations and the or derings they imply. Like local pockets of order, domains and stations have to be negotiated when we need, or wish, to carry out projects either on our own or together with others in the choreography of earthly coexistence. The concept of ‘project’ used in time geography de notes a consciously goal directed undertaking which could range from short term ones, like reading this art icle, to long term projects such as getting an education. The successful execution of any project demands that one be able to time spatially establish and negotiate a series of local pockets of order that are advantageous to the goal in question. The realization of any project is subject to interactive constraints that in time geography often have been divided into three sets: 1. ‘Capability constraints’ are those that limit activities of individuals due to their own bodily capabilities, or needs like food, shelter, and sleep. Also included are nonhuman facilities and technologies that individuals are able to draw upon. 2. ‘Coupling constraints’ are those that define where, when, how, and for how long an individual must couple with others, which could also be tools and materials, in order to complete a task or fulfill a project. 3. ‘Authority (or steering) constraints’ are those of a more dematerialized kind that impose restrictions on access and modes of conduct, for example, legal and political regulations or praxis in a workplace. The concept of domain often denotes these more ‘invisible’ kinds of constraints. Together, these constraints define a set of possible time– space trajectories that individuals in principle are able to realize within their own specific time–space settings. In a certain sense ‘the prism’, which has been applied espe cially in studies of accessibility and potential movements, is in fact a much more important graphic representation than the trajectory. The reason is that the prism

Time

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Figure 2 The prism.

graphically discloses the constraints that circumscribe a time–space within which trajectories must progress (Figure 2). The prism depicts that, under given conditions like a certain access to transportation, one could only travel so far if one has to be back at a specific time. Thus, it also illustrates that time geography is primarily concerned with the identification and analysis of fundamental con ditions and constraints of geographical life. Although crucially important, the graphic represen tations should not be equated with time geography per se. Furthermore, the abstraction of the graphic representation used, with the two axes of time and space, has most likely contributed to an impression that time geography simply, or only, operates with a Newtonian like conception of time–space as a kind of absolute container in which ma terial events occur. There is some additional complexity and ambiguity attached to the usage of time and space in time geography than what readily may meet the eye. In time geography the concepts of time and space always come together or, preferably, as one time–space. Objects and material events are often accounted for as being situated ‘in time–space’. Of crucial importance, however, is that both concepts arise in time geography foremost as means of representing and keeping track of corporeal objects and events. In principle, then, time and space are conceptualized in time geography as intrinsic dimensions of matter itself, having both spatial extension and temporal duration. This means that neither time nor space is to be understood as absolute since they primarily refer to, and have no existence outside of, matter. In the conceptual apparatus these have been called ‘embedded time’ and ‘embedded space’. Since this conceptualization of time and space is de rived from the workings of the material world, it is also to some extent at odds with ideas that treat space and time as merely individual or mental categories deriving from dematerialized social understandings. Nevertheless, in the conceptual apparatus of time geography one also finds ‘symbolic time’ and ‘symbolic space’. These con ceptualizations refer to space and time as abstract or dering devices, for example, clock time and administrative spatial boundaries. In relation to time geographic diagrams, one could here imagine existence

Time Geography Time

Space

Figure 3 The Earth as plane of reference.

inside the trajectory as embedded time and space, whereas the external axis of time and space is of a symbolic kind. Indeed, the concepts of time and space are themselves symbolic constructions which only humans have access to because they operate in language. When it comes to reconceptualizations of time and space that may have arrived with time geography, it is therefore highly important to now point out and include one decisive element that, due to the economics and problems of representation, actually has been missing in both Figures 1 and 2: the Earth (Figure 3). In accordance with the matter realistic ontology of time geography, there is on Earth an almost infinite number of dynamic time geographies of corporeal objects and events in circulation and constant transformation. Any notational system is only able to represent limited samples of those time geographies. A time geographic diagram which uses time spatial notation should thus not be regarded as ignoring the geographical properties. It is the Earth that is the real plane of reference in time geography and its notation system, and not time and space either as separate or combined as time–space, however necessary and valuable these concepts may be.

Time-Geography Then and Now Time geography has been distinguished as one of few truly original geographical approaches. It is clear that over the years it has been influential on a number of dimensions, both inside and outside human geography. Even though it is not, and was never meant to be, a social theory, it has nevertheless been drawn into discourses of the social in various ways. Of particular significance was when Anthony Giddens in the 1980s made time geog raphy known to a wider audience operating inside social theory, by his usage of time and space in his theory of structuration. In that he drew on time geography and thereby came to acknowledge, among other things, that the physical mileux of social action is more than a passive backdrop. Time geography was thus taken up in the at tempts to spatialize social theory. It was recognized for

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having something profound to say about the material and time spatial grammar of everyday life, and it was also perceived as filling a gap for those interested in studying it, not least because it offered a firm methodology. Especially many feminist projects thus came to valuably incorporate time geographic method in order to time spatially map gender practices and divisions of labor. Yet, at the same time, this encounter with social theory also opened up room for critique as well as criticism. Through the years that followed time geog raphy continued to be criticized for being ‘too physical and mechanistic’, echoing Anne Buttimer’s remark that time geography was a ‘‘dance macabre’’ that left no space for mindful and passionate human beings, reduced as they were to mere trajectories in the bubble chamber of a transparent and unproblematic time–space. More broadly, many came to argue that time geography over emphasized the material, and because of that it was more likely to be just another variant of social engineering in disguise. In short, time geography lacked a sufficient substantial theorizing of the social. It could, for example, map and describe how daily life of individuals unfolded in time–space, but say very little about how stations and domains were socially produced. The notation system and the graphical representation, or more specifically the time geographic diagrams, also came under scrutiny. They came to be disclosed not merely as a privileging of the visual in time geography, but as an expression of a ‘masculine bias’ or ‘masculinist gaze’. This was shown by their conceptualization of time– space as a supposedly objective, transparent, and neutral frame of reference in which human bodies appeared as elementary universal particles erased from social and cultural markings such as gender. In retrospect this was something of a paradox because in few social areas, other than in studies of gender, has time geography been so successfully applied. To this, one could add that the criticisms were usually also dependent on a delineation of time geography which effectively excluded those that were situated in both time geography and social theory. Of particular importance in that respect were works by Allan Pred, who was always intimately aligned with time geography. In his theory of spatial practice he not only firmly acknowledged the time spatial and corporeal as pects of the human condition, also included the social through relationships of power and human systems of meaning. So it is, that every time and space often comes with quite specific observations and conversations. By now much has changed in human geography, as well is in social science broadly conceived. There is now a much wider recognition and understanding of material and nonhuman agency in social theory. Instead of equating time geography with ‘naturalism’, it is possible to

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consider it to be a forerunner to this ‘material turn’. Time geography effectively tried to sidestep social con structivism by emphasizing the physical and corporeal conditions as both constraints and possibilities on a human action always situated in wider networks of competing time spatial opportunities. Those diagrams then criticized for being signs of a ‘physical reductionism’ may now also be appreciated for attempting to in corporate nonhumans and humans in a common popu lation of time geographies, not that different from what Bruno Latour and others in actor network theory have referred to as ‘the Collective’. Although time geography was never intended to be a social theory, it has always acknowledged that humans make their geographies together with nonhumans and that society and the social include technology and artifacts. To this, one could add that time geography shares ingredients that appear in material variants of post structuralism as well in geophilosophy. In the former one could find an interest for the pragmatics of material events, their embeddedness and eventual unfolding in topologically complex time spatial networks, and a re fusal to reduce the world to language and texts. In the latter it is actually the Earth itself that appears as a primary plane of reference. Consequently, a geophilo sophically informed geography must somehow return to the discipline as an ‘Earth science’. So now, as well as then, there is still a challenge posed to those geographers who sit uncomfortably in between the two modern pillars of the discipline and would like to have some kind of synthesizing discipline and theory of geography re invented. In that respect, time geography still provides an ontological window from which one may see not so much of society and space, nature or culture, but instead the time geographies of matter on the reference plane of the Earth, however delimited. See also: Hagerstrand, T.; Human-Nonhuman; Maps; Philosophy and Human Geography; Physical Geography and Human Geography; Representation

and Re-presentation; Space I; Space II; Space-Time; Urban-Rural Continuum.

Further Reading Adams, P. C. (1985). A reconsideration of personal boundaries in space time. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85, 267 285. Carlstein, T. (1980). Time, Resources, Society and Ecology. Lund: Meddelanden fran Lunds universitets Geografiska institution avhandlingar LXXXVIII. Carlstein, T., Parkes, D. and Thrift, N. (eds.) (1978). Timing Space and Spacing Time II: Human Activity and Time Geography. London: Edward Arnold. Dyck, I. (1990). Space, time, and renegotiating motherhood: An exploration of domestic workplace. Environment and Planning D 8, 459 483. Gren, M. (ed.) (1994). Torsten Ha¨gerstrand’s geography of the visible In Earth Writing: Exploring Representation and Social Geography In between Meaning/Matter. Gothenburg: Department of Human and Economic Geography, University of Gothenburg. Gren, M. (2001). Time geography matters. In May, J. & Thrift, N. (eds.) TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality. London: Routledge. Hagerstrand, T. (1970). What about people in regional science? Papers of the Regional Science Association 24, 7 21. Hagerstrand, T. (1974). Tidsgeografisk beskrivning. Syfte och postulat. Svensk Geografisk Arsbok 50, 86 94. Hagerstrand, T. (1985). Time geography: Focus on the corporeality of man, society and environment. In Aida (ed.) The Science and Praxis of man, society and environment, pp 193 216. Tokyo: The United Nations University. Hagerstrand, T. (1989). Reflections on What about people in regional science? Papers of the Regional Science Association 66, 1 6. Kwan, M. P. (2004). GIS methods in time geographic research: Geocomputation and geovisualization of human activity patterns. Geografiska Annaler 86B(4), 264 280. Lenntorp, B. (1976). Paths in Time Space Environments: A Time Geographic Study of Movements Possibilities of Individuals. Lund: Meddelanden fran Lunds universitets Geografiska institution Avhandlingar LXXVII. Pred, A. (1981). Social reproduction and the time geography of everyday life. Geografiska Annaler 63B(1), 5 22. Rose, G. (1994). Feminism and Geography: The Limits of geographical knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Schwanen, T. (2007). Matters(s) of interest: Artefacts, spacing and timing. Geografiska Annaler 89B(1), 9 22. Tivers, J. (1985). Women Attached. The Daily Lives of Women with Young Children. London: Croom Helm. Wallin, E. (1980). Vardagslivets Generativa Grammatik. Lund: CWK Gleerup.

Time Series Analysis G. M. Robinson, Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Autoregression The correlation between observations at different time–distances apart in a time series. This is a measure of ‘self-correlation’ between one data point in the series and another data point in the same series to see if successive or near-neighbor observations are correlated. Correlogram A graphical plot depicting autocorrelation in a time series at various leads and lags. Cross-Spectral Analysis Comparing whether time series for two locations are in phase or whether one series leads or lags another. This can establish the intensity of the relationship between them for various lags and leads, enabling change at one location to be used to predict change elsewhere. Expansion Method Investigates the variation or drift in the temporal growth of a disease, in response to population density. Fourier Analysis Named after the French scientist and mathematician Joseph Fourier. A time series may be expressed as a series of fundamental harmonics, combinations of which are referred to as Fourier series. Hamer–Soper Model A process-based model for predicting the spread of a disease based on analyzing the stocks of susceptibles, infectives, and removals in a population. Harmonics A harmonic of a time series is a component frequency that is a multiple of the fundamental frequency. If the frequency is f, the harmonics have frequency 2f, 3f, 4f, etc. Power Spectra A plot of the percentage of the total variance accounted for versus frequency. ‘Power’ represents the percentage of total variance accounted for at each frequency. Different power spectra indicate different types of time series. Space–Time Forecasting Models The evolution of variables over time and space can be forecast using statistical models based on regression analysis, the variables’ past values, lagged spatial diffusion effects, and lagged exogenous or explanatory variables. Models are generally known by their acronyms, for example, STAR, STIMA, STARMA, STARIMA. Spatial Forecasting Analyzing spatial patterns based on past trends to use this information predictively. Spectral Analysis This distinguishes three components of a time series: the trend (long-term change), cyclical or oscillating functions, and random or irregular components. It breaks down the series into

aggregate or simple waveforms described by a series of sine and cosine waves. Stationary Series A time series with no systematic change in the trend, no systematic change in variance, and removal of strictly periodic variations. Time Series A sequence of data points for a variable, typically measured at successive times, usually at uniform time intervals. Time series analysis comprises methods to understand such time series and to make forecasts (predictions) of their future pattern. Wave Train A succession of waves in a time series, usually spaced at regular intervals.

Introduction Geographical research on spatiotemporal change has focused both on the development of spatially located variables over a relatively short time period and on forecasting the future using various techniques of time series analysis, such as Fourier analysis and spectral an alysis. The time series analyzed by geographers are usually affected by a diverse range of factors and so cannot be predicted exactly. Future values of a time series are regarded as having a possible range of values that are conditioned by knowledge of past values. These time series are said to be stochastic, that is, their pre diction contains a random element which can be esti mated using probability theory. If exact prediction is possible, the time series is said to be deterministic. Time series analysis has four basic objectives: 1. description of the main properties, usually after plotting the data in graphical form; 2. explanation – when observations are taken on two or more variables over time it may be possible to use variation in one time series to explain variation in another series, perhaps by using regression techniques; 3. prediction, by using time series to forecast future values; and 4. control, as in quality control of a manufacturing process by using time series for monitoring purposes.

Spectral Analysis Simple graphical description of time series can be per formed by calculating a moving mean that smoothes out sudden changes in values and portrays longer term

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trends (Figure 1). If a time series is stationary, that is, with no systematic change in the trend, no systematic change in variance, and removal of strictly periodic variations, then spectral analysis can be employed to examine the components of the time series. Spectral analysis distinguishes three components in particular: 1. The long term or trend component: this is the broad, smooth undulating motion of the series over a rela tively long period of time. This can often be partially isolated using a moving mean. 2. Cyclical or oscillating functions: these move about the trend, often exhibiting a seasonal effect or local variations. 3. Random or irregular components: these are revealed when cyclical and trend functions are removed from the time series. This is essentially a residual com ponent (Figure 2). These components generally represent disaggregations of a series into its trend, cyclical and seasonal elements, and random or white noise elements. A typical example is a time series of unemployment data, which may have a clear cyclical function reflecting seasonal factors. This type of discrete series (usually based on regular monthly data) can be modeled by breaking down the series into aggregate or simple waveforms described by a series of sine and cosine waves. Therefore, a time series may be expressed as a series of fundamental harmonics, com binations of which are referred to as Fourier series. These series can be fitted to a time series using least squares techniques. This enables the variance in the time series to be disaggregated into harmonics of different frequencies, each of which accounts for a proportion of the total variance. Principally, this process examines the extent to

which variance can be attributed to waves of various frequencies. Further description of time series data may be per formed using a diagram of the power spectrum: a plot of the percentage of the total variance accounted for versus frequency. Here ‘power’ represents the percentage of total variance accounted for at each frequency. Different power spectra indicate different types of time series (Figure 3): 1. If the time series are a set of random values, a hori zontal power spectrum should be generated. 2. For a cyclical time series a cosine angle with a fre quency corresponding closely with the main period icity in the time series accounts for the largest proportion of variability in the series. For example, in work by Haggett and associates on unemployment data in Southwestern England, power spectra revealed periodicities of 3, 4, 6, and 12 months corresponding to different seasonal cycles. The power spectra have a declining or damped waveform. The highest peak in the spectrum corresponds with the basic periodicity or fundamental wavelength. Other peaks correspond to waves with frequencies that are harmonics of the fundamental wavelength. Low frequencies produce waves with long periodicities while high frequencies produce waves with short periodicities. 3. Power spectra can be calculated for autoregressive time series (series where prediction about a location at time t is dependent only on its previous history at time t 1). It is possible to measure the correlation be tween observations at different time–distances apart in the series. Therefore, this is measuring ‘self correl ation’ between one data point in the series and another data point in the same series to see if successive or near neighbor observations are correlated. This can be

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Figure 3 Power spectra for autoregressive time series: (a) series positively autocorrelated and (b) series negatively autocorrelated. From Haggett, P., Cliff, A. D. and Frey, A. (1977). Locational Analysis in Human Geography. London: Edward Arnold.

calculated in the same manner as the Pearson prod uct–moment correlation and generates an auto correlation coefficient (rk), where k ¼ the ‘lag’. If t1 to t10 has the series of values 17, 27, 23, 31, 42, 31, 37, 48, 49, 46, and the lag is 3, then these values would be correlated with 31, 42, 31, 37, 48, 49, 46y when calculating r3. Autocorrelation for a time series may be

plotted on a correlogram, which shows distinctive forms for the various types of series (Figure 4). For autoregressive series, if rk is large and positive this suggests that adjacent values are similar and the time series varies smoothly through time. This smooth variation is approximated most closely by waves of low frequency. If rk is large and negative the time

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series alternates rapidly, producing a spiky appear ance. These short oscillations can be fitted most closely by waves of short wavelength. Positive auto correlation is associated with power spectra at low frequencies, and negative autocorrelation is associated with power spectra at high frequencies. In modeling a time series, a curve can be fitted to the data by making use of the basic forms of power spectra: flat for a random series (or white noise), smooth for a positively autoregressive series, and spiky for a series with cyclical components.

Spatial Forecasting One of the principal aims of time series analysis when performed by geographers is to make forecasts of future spatial patterns, ranging from just a few days ahead in the case of meteorological phenomena to perhaps 5 or 10

years in the case of economic geography. This requires a clear understanding of the processes that produce the spatial patterns, and then identifying patterns based on past trends to use this information predictively. In pre dicting values of a variable for a particular location, the past record of that variable at other locations can be taken into account in various ways. In human geography the chief applications have been regional forecasts for un employment and the incidence of disease. Pioneering work on regional forecasting of un employment was performed by Peter Haggett and asso ciates at the University of Bristol in the 1970s. This involved the development of procedures for estimating how trends in time series data would progress through time and space. The focus of this approach is xi(t), a time series for variable x at the ith location, which also has values for that variable for other locations. A set of time series for different locations can be compared using cross spectral analysis. For example, by comparing whe ther the time series for two locations are in phase or

Time Series Analysis

whether one series leads or lags another. This can es tablish the intensity of the relationship between them for various lags and leads. Behavior at a location that con sistently leads others can be used as a predictor of be havior in other locations. This largely descriptive and exploratory approach can be extended into the area of modeling by using the equation yt ¼ Bk xt k þ e

where yt ¼ time series in a region xt, t ¼ 1, y, T, xt ¼ the national series, e ¼ a random disturbance term, and the vector of Bk coefficients records the regional responses at each lead or lag (k). Autocorrelation can affect Bk and test statistics, but this can be calculated and incorporated into the model. The pattern of the variable being analyzed can be disaggregated into three components for which equations could be applied to each location, deriving coefficients using multiple regression analysis. For research on re gional unemployment patterns, the three components are: 1. Aggregate cyclical component: that part of a region’s unemployment rate resulting from cyclical variations at the national level. Sensitivity (aij) ¼ 1 if the aggre gative regional component behaves in the same way as the national pattern of variation. More prosperous areas with low unemployment rates tend to be cyc lically insensitive and vice versa. Ajt ¼ aj U t ¼ l j

where Ajt ¼ aggregative cyclical component in region j at time t, U ¼ national unemployment rate, lj ¼ length of lead or lag between the national and regional series, and aj ¼ sensitivity of region j to national cyclical variations. 2. Structural component: this is the component peculiar to each region, which reflects long term disturbances in the labor market. Sjt ¼ Cj þ bjt þ d 2jt

where Sjt ¼ structural component of regional un employment in region j at time t, which is measured in terms of a quadratic time trend, Cj ¼ structural com ponent in the initial time period, and bj and dj ¼ coefficients of the quadratic time trend. 3. Regional cyclic component: this is given by Rjt ¼ Ajt þ Sjt þ Rjt

where Rjt ¼ level of unemployment Ujt in region j at time t. If aj ¼ 1 and Cj ¼ bj ¼ dj ¼ Rjt ¼ 0, then no re gional unemployment problems exist.

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In theory these models enable areas to be classified on the basis of their performance with respect to the three components and there are applications in terms of regional planning and forecasting. However, the models assume that macroeconomic conditions are stable over a period of time, which is not true in any period of economic instability. To allow for this, more complex rules can be created and added to the basic equations, for example, using techniques that model directly the changing statistical relationships in a time series. Nevertheless, lack of stability between interregional lead–lag relations in one economic cycle and another can make forecasting very difficult. Hence, geographers have tended to use predictive models in other appli cations, notably in forecasting epidemic waves for diseases.

Space–Time Forecasting Models The evolution of variables over time and space can be forecast using statistical models. Using regression analy sis, the future values of a variable are predicted on the basis of its own past values (i.e., it is autoregressive), lagged spatial diffusion effects, and lagged exogenous or explanatory variables. A simple space–time model, taking account of both the spatial dependencies of a variable and its past behavior, takes the form xi;t ¼ f ðxi;t k ; xj ;t k Þ

where k ¼ 1, 2, y and is a predefined time interval, t ¼ time, xi,t ¼ a variable’s current value at location i at time t, and xj,t k ¼ a variable’s past value at location j at time t k. In this case a variable’s present value at a particular location is defined as a function of its past value at that location and its past value at another lo cation (Figure 5). Several variants of space–time forecasting models have been developed to forecast the evolution of vari ables over both time and space. They are generally known by their acronyms. 1. STAR, a basic space–time autoregressive model: this considers n areal units for T time periods, analyzing a variable y. For area i at time t, the variable ¼ yit. The model expresses the dependence of the values of y in area i at time t upon values of the variable in other areas in the previous time period (i.e., dependence that is first order autoregressive in time). Alter natively, a regressor variable can be used, for example, if a regressor variable has the same value for each area it could be used to isolate local effects. EðY it jpast historyÞ ¼ ayi;t 1 þ wij yj ;t 1

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where E(Yit|past history) ¼ the expected value of Yit conditional upon its past history, and wij ¼ structural weights as employed when calculating a spatial auto correlation coefficient. 2. STIMA, a space–time integrated moving average model, which induces random ‘shocks’ into the fore cast, for example, ‘chance’ closures of factories. Changes in the variable under consideration ( yjt) are viewed as a function of a series of shocks to the system arriving randomly in time and space. 3. STARMA, a space–time autoregressive moving average model, which is based on the equation: Y jt ¼ a1 yj ;t 1 þ a2 yj ;t 2 þ ejt þ b1 ej ;t 1 þ b2 ej ;t 2

where a variable ( y) in a region j at time t is predicted by regression on its own earlier values and by its delayed response to the impact of random shocks ejt, ej,t 1 and ej,t 2; and b1 and b2 ¼ moving average coefficients. 4. STARIMA, a space–time autoregressive integrated moving average model, which has been extended to include seasonal behavior. It expresses zi(t), the ob servation of a random variable at site i, i ¼ 1, 2, y, N, and time t as a weighted linear combination of past observations and errors which may be lagged both in space and time. Applications of these models are restricted by their complexity and decisions regarding which orders of temporal and spatial lags to include. A common aim is to

have as few parameters as possible to estimate in a model providing this gives an adequate representation of the time–space process.

Predicting Epidemic Return Times For nearly two decades geographers’ probabilistic simu lations of the spread of disease have been an important contribution toward gaining an understanding of the genesis and spread of disease. Based initially on spatial diffusion models developed in the 1950s by Swedish geographer Torsten Hagerstrand, increasingly it has ac companied research on cultural, social, and political contexts for various diseases, illustrating the multifaceted approaches to the same fundamental problem that can be made from a broadly geographical perspective. This re search has combined description, prediction, and inter diction (intervention to control diffusion of a disease). Work on the spread of diseases in human communities by Andrew Cliff, Peter Haggett, and Matthew Smallman Raynor developed a detailed understanding of the rela tionship between size of community and temporal spacing of epidemics. Three types of community can be distinguished (Figure 6): 1. a community large enough to sustain the virus and so having a continuous record of infection (with regular advance and decline of an epidemic, known as a Type I wave train);

Time Series Analysis

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Figure 6 Epidemics and community size: (a) impact of population size of towns on the spacing of measles epidemics and (b) characteristic epidemic wave trains for town types I III in (a). From Cliff, A. D. and Ord, J. K. (1995). Estimating epidemic return times. In A. D. Cliff, P. R. Gould, A. G. Hoare & N. J. Thrift (eds.) Diffusing Geography. Institute of British Geographers Special Publications Series, 31, pp. 135-167. Oxford and Cambridge, MA, Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

2. a community too small to sustain the virus (epidemics can completely fade out on a regular basis: Type II waves); and 3. a community with a very small population (irregular recurrence of epidemics that complete fade out: Type III waves). In the latter two cases, epidemics can only recur when the virus is reintroduced by the influx of infected indi viduals from reservoir areas of Type I. This has impli cations for the development of strategies to restrict the disease, based on vaccination procedures, but the strat egies rely on an ability to forecast the space–time oc currence of epidemic outbreaks. Accurate forecasts can enable targeted vaccination to reduce the susceptible population in particular localities so that it falls below the threshold at which an epidemic can occur and spread. Various forecasting models have been developed, both for a single city or region and for multiple regions. They fall into two categories:

1. Process based models: these take the stocks of sus ceptibles (members of the population who might catch the disease in question), infectives (those who have the disease), and removals (those no longer able to transmit the disease). They also formalize the transi tions that can occur between these subgroups and use these as the basis for studying the size and spacing of epidemics. They include the Hamer–Soper model, which detects the start of epidemics quite accurately but tends to give inaccurate estimates of total cases, making it difficult to estimate the amounts of vaccine and levels of healthcare provision required. These inaccuracies come from the deterministic nature of the model which damps successive epidemic waves, which is not observed in practice. 2. Time series methods: the past history of an epidemic in the area is used to predict the future with an autoregressive/moving average (ARMA) framework. However, these tend to miss the start of epidemics thereby restricting their practical utility.

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Pioneering work on forecasting epidemics, using the case study of measles epidemics in Iceland, demonstrated that significant gains in accuracy could be achieved by adding extra complexity to the models. This led to the devel opment of a process based model based on size of the susceptible population (S), the infected population (I), and the removed population (R) or those who have contracted measles but can no longer transmit it to others because of recovery, isolation, or death: and hence the term SIR model. The SIR model allows for four types of transition: 1. a susceptible becomes a removal, 2. an infective becomes a removal, 3. a susceptible ‘birth’ occurs as children are born or in migration occurs, and 4. an infective in migrates (no out migration is assumed). In these transitions it is assumed that the infection rate is proportional to the product, SI; that the removal rate is proportional to I, and the birth and immigration rates are constant. If transition i occurs at the rate of ri(i ¼ 1, 2, 3, 4) then in a small time interval (t, T þ dt) the probability of transition i occurring is ridt þ o(dt), where o(dt) is a term of smaller order than dt (and assuming that all events are independent and depend on only the present state of the population). This model can be developed to estimate the prob ability of the extinction of an epidemic and the time between epidemics. Simulation experiments can be used to evaluate the performance of estimators in the model, for example, in work by Cliff et al., this was based on the 16 main measles epidemic waves that have affected Ice land since 1945. This revealed certain weaknesses in the model, such as its sensitivity to accurate interpretations of epidemic commencement and ending, but it did reflect the general 3 to 5 year cycle of measles epidemics in Iceland. There was some underestimation of epidemic return times, especially for very small settlements where return times are more variable and reflect the chance arrival of the measles virus at times when the susceptible population has grown sufficiently to sustain an epidemic. It was concluded that incorporating seasonal and inter regional components would improve forecasting of return times. Such estimation has become increasingly signifi cant as the World Health Organization’s Expanded Programme of Immunization pushes measles into a di minishing part of the world’s surface. The research also revealed the importance of a threshold value for a sus ceptible population. Below the threshold an infectious disease becomes naturally self extinguishing. So if vac cination can be employed to reduce the susceptible population below a critical mass then biological processes

may work to end an epidemic. The critical threshold population for measles is between 300 000 to 500 000 people. In recent years, geographers have focused attention on the spread of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), again frequently using relatively isolated island communities as ‘laboratories’ to study the epidemic, for example, concentrating on the Caribbean where the majority of AIDS cases reported have also been mainly on some of the smaller islands. This research has com bined time series analysis with application of spatial diffusion models. The latter are based on probabilistic simulations of the spread of disease through direct per son to person transmission, known as expansion or con tagious diffusion. In simulating the diffusion of the disease through time and space, key variables can be incorporated based on results from multiple regression analysis. Typical variables are employment character istics, incidence of drug use, migration rates, incidence of sexual diseases, and numbers of tourist visitors. Simu lation can then be applied to the logistic growth curve of the disease. One major advance in developing these simulation models from the late 1980s is the expansion method, which investigates the variation or drift in the temporal growth of a disease, such as AIDS, in response to population density. This technique can be applied to orderly introduction of complexities into simpler math ematical formulations, modeling variations in selected parameters, and investigating whether models of the spread of a disease vary in different contexts. The expansion method permits various hypotheses to be tested, related to the distribution of disease with re spect to population density, noting that different mixes of mechanisms propagating diseases operate in different geographical environments. For AIDS this has enabled variables on levels of urbanization, housing types, crime levels, ethnic minorities, employment characteristics, student population, male headed households, and single person households to be investigated. For example, AIDS ‘hotspots’ in San Francisco have been shown to be related to the proportion of males aged 20–44 years, multiple male households, a poverty index, and homosexual intravenous drug users (IVDUs). The spatial pattern is closely associated with age, though with significant variation between ethnic groups. The expansion method enables predictions of the spread of the disease to be made, showing a division between the rapidly evolving epidemic in the east of the city and the slowly evolving epidemic in the West. In the east a continued intensifi cation of the heterosexual IVDU epidemic is predicted, with a secondary focus to the south, underlain by a growth rate of 170 new AIDS cases per month. Ethnicity and low socioeconomic status are important factors in AIDS among heterosexual IVDUs.

Time Series Analysis

Conclusion Attempts by human geographers to combine the study of change through both time and space have led to im portant advances in understanding the spread of disease. Applications to economic variables have often been less successful. The need for stability in broad economic parameters in order for time series analysis methods to be viable is one restriction. In addition, successful pre diction requires the principal influences on a system to be known, explanations to be complete rather than par tial, and for the system in question to be closed. Many human systems do not fulfill these requirements and hence space–time models have to cope with lack of completeness and closure, making prediction more problematic. The ‘solution’ with respect to predicting the occurrence and spread of disease has been to incorporate stochastic approaches into disease modeling. The most successful forecasting has tended to occur at a local (micro) level when information on individuals is avail able, and understanding can be enhanced through use of both quantitative and qualitative information. The incorporation of time series analysis in the rap idly evolving area of geographic information systems (GISs) has been relatively limited, partly because of the complexity of handling both temporal and spatial infor mation simultaneously. The greatest advances have ten ded to come from spatial simulation modeling, building on initial work on spatial diffusion processes in the 1950s. However, GIS based applications of spectral and Fourier analysis to relatively short term forecasting in the retail sector have produced effective and commercially valu able predictions. See also: Disease Diffusion; Monte Carlo Simulation; Regression, Linear and Nonlinear; Simulation; Space-Time Modeling; Spatial Autocorrelation; Spatial Expansion Method; Spatially Autoregressive Models; Statistics, Overview.

Further Reading Chatfield, C. (2003). The Analysis of Time Series (6th edn.). London: Chapman and Hall. Cliff, A. D., Haggett, P., Ord, J. K. and Versey, G. R. (1981). Spatial Diffusion: An Historical Geography of Epidemics in an Island Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Cliff, A. D., Haggett, P. and Smallman Raynor, M. R. (1993). Measles: An Historical Geography of a Major Human Viral Disease from Global Expansion to Retreat, 1840 1990. Oxford: Blackwell. Cliff, A. D., Haggett, P. and Smallman Raynor, M. R. (1998). Deciphering Global Epidemics: Analytical Approaches to the Disease Records of World Cities, 1888 1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cliff, A. D., Haggett, P. and Smallman Raynor, M. R. (2000). Island Epidemics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gould, P. R. (1993). The Slow Plague: A Geography of the AIDS Pandemic. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Haggett, P. (1994). Prediction and predictability in geographical systems. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 19, 6 20. Haggett, P., Cliff, A. D. and Frey, A. (1977). Locational Analysis in Human Geography. London: Edward Arnold. Peuquet, D. (2003). Representations of Space and Time. New York: Guilford Press. Robinson, G. M. (1998). Methods and Techniques in Human Geography. Chichester: John Wiley. Shumway, R. H. and Stoffer, D. S. (2006). Time Series Analysis: Its Applications with R Examples (2nd edn.). New York: Springer Verlag. Smallman Raynor, M. R. and Cliff, A. D. (2001). Epidemic diffusion processes in a system of US military camps: Transfer diffusion and the spread of typhoid fever in the Spanish American War, 1898. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91, 71 91. Smallman Raynor, M. R., Cliff, A. D. and Haggett, P. (1992). The London International Atlas of AIDS. Oxford: Blackwell. Smallman Raynor, M. R., Haggett, P. and Cliff, A. D. (2004). World Atlas of Epidemic Diseases. London: Hodder Arnold. Warner, R. M. (1999). Spectral Analysis of Time Series Data. New York: Guilford Press.

Relevant Websites http://www.statoek.wiso.uni goettingen.de/veranstaltungen/zeitreihen/ sommer03/ts r intro.pdf http://www.r project.org/ A free software environment for statistical computing and graphics that runs on a wide variety of UNIX platfoirms, Windows and MacOS. For time series analysis with R, see: http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/sttimser.html A general introduction to time series analysis, including ARIMA models and spectral analysis http://www.statistik.mathematik.uni wuerzburg.de/timeseries/ This is a first course on time series analysis with a solution of statistical procedures used in general practice, including the statistical software package SAS Statistical Analysis System. http://www.omatrix.com/stsa.html This is a time series analysis toolbox. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collection/cats/ This is an introduction to the Centre for the Analysis of time series at the London School of Economics.

Time-Space Diaries T. Schwanen, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Activity Episode A discrete activity participation characterized by a unique combination of activity dimensions for which information is collected. Memory Jogger A simple and small-sized form that diarists can take along during the recording period and on which they can scribble information which can later be used to fill out the actual diary. Reporting Fatigue The decline in the completeness and accuracy of the information during the recording period. Indicators of fatigue are lower numbers of reported activities or trips in later stages of the recording period and an increase over time in attrition or the tendency among respondents to quit the study. Representativeness The degree to which the respondents who completed and returned the time– space diary resemble the research population with respect to one or several characteristics. Response Rate The ratio of people who completed and returned the time–space diary to the number of people in the sample or originally approached. Time Geography An approach that seeks to understand how the physical world evolves developed by Torsten Ha¨gerstrand from the 1960s onwards as an alternative to the increasing fragmentation and specialization of (human) geography. Time–Space Path A concept from time geography that denotes the uninterrupted movement of a human body or any other physical entity through space and time.

Introduction Time–space diaries have long been used in various dis ciplines, including sociology, anthropology, urban plan ning, and geography. The earliest examples can be found in sociology, where they were first employed in the early twentieth century. Urban planners started using time– space diaries in the 1960s to better understand the functioning of urban systems. While there are some ex amples of time–space diaries in geography before 1970, their use expanded enormously after the introduction of Ha¨gerstrand’s time geography to Anglo American geography. Through concepts such as the space–time path and prism, time geography provided a conceptual apparatus for the analysis of, and could not do without, time–space diaries. Time–space diaries have played a

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role in geography ever since, but there has been an up surge in interest in this research method since the early 1990s. To a certain extent this reflects a shift in trans portation policies from a focus on supply to demand side measures, which required new and detailed information on travelers’ time–space trajectories. This revival was also due to advances in geographic information system (GIS) and computational capabilities that greatly facilitated the analysis of time–space diaries. Recently, cultural geog raphers have (re)discovered the time–space diary as a means for capturing the continuous flow of everyday practices. The most important reason for the enduring utiliza tion of time–space diaries is that they offer a window on everyday life. They provide information on what people do, where, and when, which can be used to derive indi cators of quality of life and social and economic well being and which constitutes basic input for forecasts of the use of facilities and services in transportation, retail, recreation, and other sectors. At least five specific uses of time–space diaries in human geography can be dis tinguished. At the aggregate level of city populations, time–space diaries provide essential information about temporal variations in the social geography and ecological structure of cities. Geographers have also utilized time–space diaries to explore the relations be tween individual behavior, accessibility, and the physical environment. For instance, time–space diaries provide invaluable information for policymakers’ attempts to curtail urban sprawl and reduce auto travel. More recently, geographers have turned to time–space diaries to investigate the ramifications of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) for everyday behavior. Additionally, time–space diaries enable the reciprocal relations between individual action and social structures to be explored. Some of the best examples of this use can be found in feminist geography, where time– space diaries have effectively revealed how gender regimes are bound up with the everyday lives of men and women in different localities. Finally, time–space diaries can be used to delegate power in the research process to respondents and to stimulate reflexivity in subsequent phases of a research project. Nonetheless, it is rather difficult to define what a time–space diary is, what it measures or should measure. This is because a wide variety of diaries have been de veloped and employed. The remainder of this article attempts to systematize this variety by outlining a series of design dimensions determining what and how

Time-Space Diaries

information on individuals’ paths through time and space is collected. In doing so, it will also discuss a series of issues pertinent to the use of existing sets of time–space diaries or the collection of new diaries.

Design Dimensions In general terms, a time–space diary is a document in which an individual has recorded a series of events and acts in which she has been involved and/or her impres sions thereof during a certain period of time. As this definition implies, only documents where respondents have actively recorded information are addressed in this article; fully researcher administered or computer generated records are not considered, in part because they have not been applied frequently in geographical inquiry. Self administered time–space diaries come in many variants, which can be classified on the basis of the following six interdependent dimensions: function, con tents, medium, format, respondents, and time frame. Researchers seeking to answer a set of research questions are encouraged to consider each of these dimensions when selecting an existing diary data for analysis or collecting their own diaries. Diary Function Two ideal typical approaches to time–space diaries, which to some extent function as the extremes of a continuum, can be distinguished on the basis of the function(s) diaries have. On the one hand, there is a more extensive approach underpinned by traditional research epistemology: time–space diaries constitute the main data collection instrument, although brief questionnaires or structured interviews are normally used to collect supplementary information; diaries are used to extract more or less objective representations of an external reality; contact between researcher and researched is relatively limited; the respondent has a more passive role because the researcher tends to control what and how information is recorded; and the information contained in the diaries is processed and analyzed with quantitative techniques (including GIS) to detect regularities and systematic relations between variables. On the other hand, there is a nascent, more intensive approach to time–space diaries, primarily associated with recent developments in cultural geography and rooted in feminist epistemologies and nonrepresentational ap proaches to ‘doing’ research. Here, the use of time–space diaries is embedded in a mixed methods endeavor and complemented with interviews or other methods relying on intensive contact between researcher and researched. The function of time–space diaries is also different: they are not so much used to extract objective representations to be generalized across respondents, but instead to

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emphasize the plurality and multiplicity of experiences of everyday life. Additionally, they function to trigger respondents’ reflexivity about less than conscious ex periences and feelings and so open up spaces for con templation and dialog to be explored and inhabited during subsequent phases in the research process. Time– space diaries also appeal to cultural geographers because they allow the role of researchers in what and how things are recorded and selected for further analysis to be minimized. Participants thus retain much more control over the research process, although the inter respondent comparability of the collected information tends to be rather low. It should be noted that the use of time–space diaries in cultural geography is still in its infancy; the conventional, more extensive approach to time–space diaries is more widespread in contemporary human geography. However, the use of diaries in cultural geography is expected to grow in the near future, as this method affords a closeness between actual practices and experiences and their recording that interviews alone do not allow. The distinction between these two approaches should not be considered absolute. There are some examples of hybrid approaches in the literature, whereby traditional researcher directed diaries are combined with, and used as input for, interviews to provide thicker descriptions of the conduct and meanings of everyday practices.

Diary Contents The question of what information should be collected through diaries has attracted most attention among re searchers associated with extensive approach identified above and more specifically in the transportation and time use research literature. A first important distinction drawn there is that between the trip diary and the activity diary. In the former, a trip or movement between two spatial locations is the basic event for which information is recorded. Such characteristics of trip as their purpose, origins and destinations, departure and arrival times, and transportation mode(s) used are collected, but no de tailed information about the activities people engage in on specific locations is recorded. In contrast, activity diaries gather information about activity episodes. While they continue to be used widely in transportation ana lysis, trip diaries have increasingly been displaced by activity diaries, in part because the latter are more suc cessful in capturing short, non home based trips. This article therefore concentrates on activity diaries. At a minimum, activity diaries collect information on the following dimensions: 1. what: the activity content; 2. when: the clock time(s) that an activity episode starts (and ends);

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3. where: the spatial location where the activity takes place; and 4. Technology use: this usually concerns the transpor tation mode(s) used to access the place where the activity occurs. More recently the use of ICTs to perform an activity episode is also being recorded more frequently. There are several additional dimensions for which in formation is often or sometimes collected: 1. with whom: the person(s) involved in the event; 2. the amount of money spent during the activity episode; 3. space–time flexibility: the extent to which the episode could have been conducted at other times and places; 4. the degree to which activities are planned or not; and 5. the respondent’s feelings and emotions during epi sodes, such as the levels of enjoyment or stress experienced. Of these dimensions, activity content has racked the brains of researchers most intensely. Many different classification schemes for activity content exist, but al most all are based on assumptions about the goals people will attain through completing a set of acts that together make up an activity. Geographers and transportation analysts frequently adopt very general activity categories like paid labor, shopping, childcare, and social visits and have often failed to differentiate between activities con ducted within the home. In contrast, time use researchers have employed a much more detailed, harmonized clas sification scheme since Szalai’s multinational time use study in the 1960s that, in updated form, continues to be used in contemporary studies throughout the world. This scheme comprises 41 aggregated activity types, 31 of which are differentiated into 176 more detailed codes. Time use analysis is also useful because it draws atten tion to polychronicity (multitasking) and asks not only about the primary activity type but also about secondary and sometimes tertiary time use. Nevertheless, the use fulness of most time use data for geographical analysis is limited, because only information about generic locations (home, workplace, etc.) tends to be collected. So far only very few diary time use studies have collected infor mation about street addresses. Diary Medium Self administered time–space diaries traditionally in volve paper and pencil documents. However, the ways these documents are transferred between researcher and the researched have always varied (Table 1). A com pletely mail out/mail back procedure (with written in structions) involves the least resources and yields high levels of inter respondent comparability but often also (very) low response rates, low levels of accuracy and

completeness, and rather stringent limitations on the complexity of the questions that can be asked. This complexity and also response rates can be (somewhat) larger if respondents are provided with verbal in structions and motivations via telephone and especially via face to face contact with researchers prior to (and during) the period for which respondents have to record information. Even more preferable from the perspective of response rate, complexity of questions, and accuracy and completeness of the provided information is a pro cedure whereby the paper and pencil diaries are directly collected after the recording period by the researcher, who can check, correct, and/or complete them during a conversation with the respondent. Another procedure involving fewer resources is to let respondents return the diary by surface mail and then have research assistants verify the information in a telephone call. However, be cause of the different social relations between researcher and researched in situations of physical co presence and communication at a distance, the commitment to (de tailed) completion of the diary on the part of respondent is likely to be lower when there is only telephone contact. In recent years, digital media have become increas ingly important for the construction of time–space diaries. First, web based diaries for logging everyday activities are becoming more popular. Some of these strongly resemble traditional paper and pencil diaries; others exploit the flexibility web based procedures offered for collecting detailed information about the activity scheduling process underlying time–space paths. The Computerized Household Activity Scheduling (CHASE) software developed by Sean Doherty and others is the most well known example of this approach. Second, wired and wireless technologies are employed more and more to construct virtual and physical time– space paths. Researchers increasingly utilize log files of websites visited and phone calls made to create repre sentations of people’s communication patterns. Ad ditionally, such technologies as Global Positioning Sys tem (GPS) and Global System for Mobile Communi cation (GSM) are applied to automatically trace participants’ geographical position in the physical world at specified intervals. Respondents just have to carry a mobile device – their own mobile phone or personal digital assistant (PDA) or one provided by the re searcher(s) – and are normally requested to add sup plementary information about activity episodes at a later stage. Research indicates that automatically traced in formation tends to be more accurate and complete and can be obtained with fewer resources than paper and pencil diaries (Table 1). However, this mode of con structing time–space diaries requires a certain level of computer and mobile phone literacy on the part of re spondents, making automatic tracing especially attractive in studies of younger people. Because the technology can

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Automatic tracing of positions in physical world

– –

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þ n.a.

Photo/ video diary

þ/ –

þþþ

þþþ

þþ –

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–

þ n.a.

Flexible diary with minimum requirements (cultural geography)

Not all criteria are equally applicable or appropriate to every study This depends on the nature of the research question(s) and one s epistemological premises — through þ þ þ represent an ordinal scale — ¼ very unfavorable and þ þ þ ¼ very favorable n a ¼ not applicable Adapted and extended from Ettema D Timmermans H and Van Veghel L (1996) Effects of Data Collection Methods in Travel and Activity Research Eindhoven E RASS

–

— –

Logging websites & phone calls

Webbased diary

Phone/face-to-face contact prior to & upon recording

Phone/face-toface contact upon recording

Fully mailout/mailback diary

Phone/face-toface contact prior to recording

Digital diary

(Traditional) paper-and-pencil diary

Qua tat ve assessment of t me–space d ary var ants on se ected cr ter a

Response rate Comp ex ty of quest ons to be asked Comp eteness & accuracy of co ected nformat on Pr vacy & confident a ty ssues Respondent burden nter-respondent comparab ty Su tab ty for record ng un que or persona exper ences Power & contro n hands of the respondent Techno ogy teracy Resources per record (t me, staff, costs)

Table 1

Time-Space Diaries 297

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trace each and every place visited (provided that tele communication networks function properly), the privacy of respondents constitutes an important matter of con cern. The literature therefore recommends that re spondents are offered the possibility to switch off recording devices or delete certain information from generated records after the collection period. Third, the proliferation of digital (and disposable) cameras allows for time–space diaries that do not (only) rely on text and language but (also) foreground alter native experiences of places that may be difficult to ex press in words. They also enable a redistribution of power in the research process, promoting the participation and empowerment of the respondent relative to the re searcher. However, potential disadvantages of self directed photography/video include less precise accounts of the continuity of time–space paths, lower levels of inter respondent comparability, and exclusion of people who cannot operate cameras. For these reasons, (audio)visual diaries have been used in combination with other methods. Diary Format This design dimension embodies two related aspects: whether the diary has open or closed questions, and issues involving the layout of the diary. Both aspects are, however, most relevant to the more traditional, extensive approach; cultural geographers tend to restrict diary in structions to a minimum to allow respondents maximum freedom to express their own views and experiences. Cultural geographers’ minimal use of instructions bears nonetheless some resemblance to the discussion of adopting open or closed questions among transportation geographers and others. This is because the main reason for using an open question format lies in the enhanced opportunities for letting respondents describe what they are doing in their own words. This tends to reduce the complexity of questions and respondent burden. In con trast, the advantage of using a pre coded scheme for re porting information on activity episodes is that it allows for quicker processing of the diaries by the researcher. Some researchers have, therefore, combined these pro cedures, employing a classification into general categories (e.g., leisure for activity content) and then asking diarists to specify the chosen category using their own words (e.g., watching a movie or exercise in the park). The closed/open distinction also matters to the re cording of activity times. Time use studies in particular use fixed intervals of 5, 10, or 15 minutes for which re spondents have to write down information on other ac tivity dimensions. An important advantage of using fixed time slices is that the continuity of the record is guar anteed; there will be no time gaps in the diary. Un fortunately, very short activity episodes – many of which

belong to the realm of care work – tend to get under reported. Fixed time intervals also make it difficult to differentiate true multitasking (e.g., phoning when driv ing a car) from short consecutive activity episodes (as, e.g., with leisure outings with small children), which may impede the researcher’s understanding of the impli cations of ICTs or the gendered nature of caregiving. With regard to diary layout, various issues can be identified, including the sequencing and phrasing of questions in the diary, as well as the use of fonts, style, color, and symbols. Few general rules can be given other than that the layout should make keeping the diary as easy, clear, and unambiguous as possible for participants. Extensive pilot studies and discussions with test phase participants before actually implementing the diary are, therefore, strongly recommended. For a paper and pen cil diary, researchers can also choose between regular or larger sized paper sheets versus a booklet that can be put in a pocket or purse. The advantage of using booklets is that respondents can easily record activities and experi ences on the move, thereby minimizing the time lag between actual experience and reporting and thus the impact of memory retention. There is some evidence available that the use of such booklets indeed results in more activity reporting. Researchers advocating larger sized sheets have sometimes used memory joggers to assist in the completion of the actual diary at a later stage.

Respondents Decisions about whom and how many respondents should be recruited depend on one’s research questions and epistemological premises. In particular, for those working within mainstream epistemological frameworks, representativeness of the respondents of a larger popu lation is a major issue. These issues have been discussed most extensively in the transportation and time use lit erature; at least three topics can be distinguished. The first of these concerns the number of respondents. There is some consensus in the time use literature that about 2000 randomly selected respondents are required to ob tain outcomes that are at least to some extent represen tative of the larger population. Second, there is some discussion as to which householders should participate in the study. It is now widely accepted that participation of all household members capable of keeping a diary should be targeted so that within household interactions in time–space paths can be investigated. An age based cri terion is often used to determine who is requested to record activities, whereby the minimum ages of 12, 15, and 18 years old seem to have been adopted most fre quently. The drawback of asking all rather than one householder to participate is that respondent burden increases and response rates may drop.

Time-Space Diaries

The third issue pertains to the selectivity of the re cruited respondents. The most and the least mobile persons or households are usually under represented in time–space diary data. Various strategies to induce very mobile and time pressured individuals to participate are discussed in the literature, including the establishment of a personal bond between researcher and the researched; the use of prompting; (financial) incentives; and sample stratification. One example of the last strategy is to seg ment on the basis of residential location and then over sample neighborhoods known to house many people with socioeconomic characteristics that correlate positively with mobility (e.g., high average income or many dual earner households). Inducing the least mobile to par ticipate in a time–space diary study seems to be even more difficult; few strategies appear very successful in this respect. Time Frame Various time related issues have concerned researchers working with time–space diaries. In addition to the open/ closed time interval, these include the collection about information about yesterday or tomorrow, recall period, and the time of year. As the discussion so far has already suggested, the ‘tomorrow approach’ whereby diaries are given or sent to respondents prior to the day(s) for which information is recorded and the minimization of the re call period are strongly preferred to approaches asking respondents what they have done or experienced some time ago. With regard to time of year, time use re searchers have recommended the collection of diaries throughout the year; if that is not possible, recording in October–November (outside holiday season) is preferred because time use in these periods corresponds closely to annual averages. However, the time aspect discussed most extensively in the literature is the time frame or the duration of the recording period, as this is intimately linked to re spondent burden. Although time use researchers often select the week as recording period, geographers and transportation analysts tend to adopt one or two days as the basic time frame, thereby implicitly assuming that this day or these days render(s) an accurate represen tation of persons’ overall time–space paths. This as sumption has been criticized by Hanson and colleagues using seven week time–space diary data from Uppsala, Sweden collected in the early 1970s and recently by Axhausen and colleagues with German data (Mobidrive). Both have contended that respondent fatigue effects can be overcome when a personal bond between researcher and the researched exists. While the use of long duration studies enables more detailed insights into the variability and rhythms of everyday life, breadth is traded for depth, as the number of participants is much smaller and the

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burden placed on respondents considerably larger than in more conventional time–space diary studies. These fac tors also contribute to the increasing use of GPS and other ICTs in multi day studies, which is likely to grow further in the near future. These technologies may not only reduce respondent burden and resources required for longer duration studies, but may also be used to ex tend recording periods.

Some Salient Issues In the preceding discussion, several issues pertinent to the collection and usage of time–space diaries have been identified and discussed. These include concerns about the representativeness of a larger population; complete ness and accuracy of the information; the resources needed to collect, process, and analyze time–space diaries; the trade off between universality and inter personal comparability on the one hand and particularity and suitability for recording personal experiences on the other; the distribution of power and control over re cording and selecting information between researcher and the researched; and ethical issues with respect to privacy and confidentiality in general and automatic tracing in particular. In various ways, there appears to be a shift toward more intensive approaches of using time– space diaries. This is evidenced not only in the (re) discovery of such diaries by cultural geographers but also in the use of researcher directed diaries collecting information on more dimensions of everyday life and increasing popularity of longer duration diaries. Con sequently, difficult issues of respondent burden and ethical dilemmas about obtrusiveness, confidentiality, and privacy are likely to become even more important than nowadays. In light of the issues above, researchers seeking to answer a specific set of research questions might want to consider the use of existing diary data as an alternative to new data. The collection of new time–space diaries specifically tailored to their research questions is likely to be the most preferred strategy for those researchers with a particular interest in the multiplicity and particularity of people’s experiences of everyday life and/or those keen on giving participants as much control over the research process as possible. The same is probably true of those with ample resources and those wanting to address issues for which existing data do not suffice. In other cases, however, researchers may well be able to answer their questions with existing data. Fortunately, previously collected datasets are increasingly made available to the research community. The number of websites bringing together information about various datasets available is growing (some examples are provided below). Alter natively, one can easily contact those who originally

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collected a dataset to get access to the data. It is antici pated that the exchange of data and the experiences of working with them will advance the state of the art in the collection and design of time–space diaries. See also: Diaries (Video, Audio or Written); Feminist Methodologies; Intensive/Extensive Research; Mixed and Multiple Methods; Mobility; Performance, Research as; Quantitative Data; Quantitative Methodologies; Time Geography.

Further Reading Alaszewski, A. (2006). Using Diaries for Social Research. London: Sage Publications. Axhausen, K. W. (1995). Travel Diaries: An Annotated Catalogue (2nd edn.). Innsbruck: Institut fur Strassenbau und Verkehrsplanung, Leopold Franzens Universitat. Axhausen, K. W., Lochl, M., Slich, R., Buhl, T. and Widmer, P. (2007). Fatigue in long duration travel diaries. Transportation 34, 143 160. Doherty, S. T. and Miller, E. J. (2000). A computerized household activity scheduling survey. Transportation 27, 75 97. Ettema, D., Timmermans, H. and Van Veghel, L. (1996). Effects of Data Collection Methods in Travel and Activity Research. Eindhoven: EIRASS. Gershuny, J. and Sullivan, O. (1998). The sociological uses of time use diary analysis. European Sociological Review 14, 69 85. Hanson, S. and Hanson, P. (1993). The geography of everyday life. In Garling, T. & Golledge, R. G. (eds.) Behavior and Environment: Psychological and Geographical Approaches, pp 249 269. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers B.V.

Hanson, S. and Huff, J. O. (1988). Systematic variability in repetitious travel. Transportation 15, 111 135. Kenyon, S. (2006). The ‘accessibility diary’: Discussing a new methodological approach to understand the impact of Internet use upon personal travel and activity participation. Journal of Transport Geography 14, 123 134. Kwan, M. P. (1999). Gender, the home work link and space time patterns of nonemployment activities. Economic Geography 76, 370 394. Kwan, M. P. (2000). Human extensibility and individual hybrid accessibility in space time: A multi scale representation using GIS. In Janelle, D. G. & Hodge, D. C. (eds.) Information, Place, and Cyberspace: Issues in Accessibility, pp 241 256. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Latham, A. (2003). Research, performance, and doing human geography: Some reflections on the diary photograph, diary interview method. Environment and Planning A 35, 1993 2017. Stopher, P. and Jones, P. (eds.) (2003). Transport Survey Quality and Innovation. Oxford: Elsevier Science Ltd.

Relevant Websites http://www.timeuse.org Centre for Time Use Research, University of Oxford. http://www.surveyarchive.org Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive, University of Minnesota. http://www.ivt.ethz.ch Mobidrive survey, Institute for Transport Planning and Systems, ETH Zurich. http://www.stmarys.ca Time Use Research Program, Saint Mary’s University, Canada. http://www.travelsurveymethods.org US Transportation Research Board, ABJ40 Travel Survey Methods Committee.

Tourism T. Edensor, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Overview of History of Tourism Tourism is often cited as constituting the largest industry in the world, and there can be no doubt of its expansion throughout the twentieth century to the point where it is a major constituent of global flows of people. The venues for tourist related activities have expanded to encompass a vast range of attractions, sites, landscapes, and routes, and the scale at which tourism is practiced by most people ranges from the local to global, and temporally, it encompasses both the everyday and the festive. Similarly, activities understood as touristic have proliferated so that tourism cannot be understood as one kind of practice but incorporates a host of leisure based endeavors emerging out of market segmentation, speciality holidays, and identity based pursuits. The Grand Tour, the Romantic Gaze, and Colonial Travel While there is little doubt that tourism is a largely modern phenomenon, there are antecedents from the ancient world – for instance in the travels undertaken throughout the Roman Empire – which should con textualize the widespread urge to tour other unfamiliar places. Nevertheless, the forms of mass tourism which continue to characterize much contemporary practice emerged with the rise of rail and later, air travel, making cheaper travel available to an ever growing numbers of people. Prior to this expansion, early modern travel primarily centered around the ‘Grand Tour’, through which the offspring of the affluent undertook prolonged periods of travel around the vestiges of the European classical world, notably in Italy, informed them about the values of the Enlightenment and Renaissance which led to them valuing the art, architecture, and philosophy of these earlier times. The destinations of these middle class European tra velers were extended by the rise of eighteenth century Romantic ideas and tastes which emerged from the recontextualization of certain forms of rural landscape as ‘sublime’ and ‘picturesque’. Such notions emerged out of the popular and influential work of romantic poets, such as William Wordsworth, and expanded to encompass artists and art theorists who foregrounded the com position of ideal ‘natural’ views, ideas which found a ready audience in the residents of the growing industrial towns and cities of Britain and their nostalgia for a

largely imaginary preindustrial rurality. Soon enough commercial excursions were developed, and through the growth of rail travel and tourist infrastructures, it became possible for those in search of romantic and sublime scenes in previously disregarded areas such as the Lake District, popularized by Wordsworth, to satiate their desires by walking, painting, and gazing. This longing for the romantic expanded to incorporate ‘wild’ attractions in Europe and beyond, and it maintains a persistent hold on tourist motivation and marketing. The organization of these further flung tours were the prelude to, and ac companied the rise of mass commercial travel, organized by travel companies, notably Thomas Cook, who made travel available to a much wider clientele, including working class people. In addition to this mass tourism, earlier forms of tourism may also be noted in colonialism. Along with the anthropological, geographical, and historical accounts of the colonizing powers, which ‘expertly’ classified, de coded, and exhibited the natural histories and cultures of the colonized, tourism provided numerous accounts where Western travelers authoritatively reported their experiences whilst traveling through colonized space. These travel accounts and the foci of their interest are, in many cases, strikingly similar to the narratives found in contemporary, postcolonial guidebooks where tourists are advised to look at particular spectacles or ‘exoticisms’. Thus the representation of the non Western ‘other’ in contemporary tourism appears to be informed by these traditions of colonial depiction which continue to re produce colonial assumptions about cultural backward ness and unassimilable difference as well as fear and desire for an imagined alterity. Others point to other resonances between the present and the colonial era in the iniquitous social and economic relations that persist between the West and the rest. Industrialization and Mass Tourism The emergence of working class excursions to the British seaside was typically part of this growth of mass tourism. During their still limited but longer holiday periods, towards the end of the nineteenth century large numbers of laboring classes from the north and midland industrial heartlands of the United Kingdom traveled in huge numbers to seaside resorts including Blackpool, More cambe, and Scarborough and those from the Southeast headed for Brighton and Bournemouth, with smaller

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resorts also being established wherever sand and sea were found. Whereas these venues had typically served a middle class clientele with bathing facilities, promenades, parks, and other pursuits that centered upon healthy recreation and the virtues of taking sea air, they quickly transformed in providing cheap accommodation facilities, large amusement parks, pleasure gardens, drinking venues, and all manners of cheap diversions and enter tainments. Thus ‘respectable’ forms of leisure promoted by the middle classes were squeezed out in favor of the cheap and cheerful pleasures favored by the working classes, as part of the massive development of an often vilified mass popular culture. This development, in turn, drove the middle classes to seek other destinations to maintain distinction, a still prevailing trend in tourism whereby the often maligned popularity of particular destinations produces desires by certain tourists to seek out new and ‘unspoilt’ locations. In the later half of the twentieth century, a similar phenomenon involving mass tourism arose at a different geographical scale, this time with the advent of cheap air travel which made contin ental tourism available to the poorer classes who had never before been afforded such opportunities. Con sequently, large numbers of Northern European tourists migrated to Mediterranean resorts in Spain and France and more recently, have been attracted to a widening range of beach locations across and beyond Europe, in search of sun, sea, sand, sex, and other hedonistic pleasures, pursuits, and places. Once more, these have been labeled as being of a lower status by middle class tourists in pursuit of distinction, in contradistinction to their own quest for the ‘unspoilt’, the more culturally refined, and different. These distinctly modern forms of mass tourism continue to attract large numbers of tourists on package holidays and excursions, yet they have been accompanied by the rise of an extraordinary variety of touristic places and practices at various scales and times, postmodern tourism which will now be discussed.

The Globalization of Tourism and the Increasing Diversity of the Tourist Product The Globalization of Tourism The range and breadth of tourist destinations have ex panded so that we may now appropriately address the subject at a global scale. The proliferation of travel agencies and other tourist retail outlets, much cheaper air travel and accommodation, the diversification of package tours, intensified place promotion and marketing, im proved standards of hospitality, standardization of facil ities and other technological developments in airport procedures, access to finance and telecommunications make international travel much easier. The time–space

compression involved in this growing interconnectedness brings distant spaces and cultures closer together, al though such proximity is always under threat by political volatility and economic instability through which des tinations may instantly lose their cachet. The expansion of tourism implicates not only the compression of space but also time, so that periods of tourist activity may occur at any time of the year without the conventional holiday temporal demarcations of Christmas, Easter, and summer, so that, for instance, short breaks and extended travel to a range of destinations are increasingly common. Nevertheless, the European share of the market remains by far the largest both in terms of flows of tourists to and from the continent. Certain countries predominate on the basis of well established patterns of travel, such as the French and Spanish Mediterranean hot spots, although these beach destin ations are being challenged by new attractions in coun tries such as Turkey and Egypt, and those more ‘exotic’ and luxurious venues requiring long haul travel such as the Maldives and Mauritius. Nevertheless, global flows of tourists are highly uneven, with certain areas of Africa, Asia, and South America characterized by relatively static visitor figures over recent decades. However, the huge expansion of tourists from non Western countries has also added to the volume of travel between and within a growing range of destination countries. The globalization of tourism must take account of the expansion of global travel companies and also the advent of the international regulation of tourism. Less developed countries are liable to be exploited by the operations of the transnational tourist corporations (TNCs) who invest and build an infrastructure but subsequently repatriate much of the profit accrued from their operations. On the other hand, tourism requires less investment than other industries and provides an option for development; moreover, state management may obviate some of the worst excesses of the TNCs. Indeed a recurrent problem in the literature has been the prevalence of assumptions that less developed forms of tourism always lead to ex ploitation and entirely disembed culture from its local context, a set of expectations which minimizes the agency of cultural interpreters and intermediaries, local busi nesses, and hybridizing cultural entrepreneurs and posit tourist practices and places as static rather than dynamic. Certain kinds of tourist venture, notably the preva lence of package tours at famous destinations in less developed countries, can act to freeze out smaller tourist operators. For instance, in Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, local wealthy operators and large transnational travel businesses form alliances which package tourist experi ence, confining it to specific attractions, forms of ac commodation, retail outlets, and dining facilities. The stranglehold on the mobility and expenditure of tourists means that the economic circuits through which tourist

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money flows are tightly controlled. Smaller traders, ho teliers, craft merchants, guides, and restaurateurs must struggle to attract custom, primarily from the in dependent tourists such as backpackers. With their ex panding income, the large concerns exert a powerful influence on tourist planning, continually jockeying to maximize their profit and isolate weaker competitors. Tourist sites, however, particularly those that are of considerable architectural, historical, or environmental renown, are liable to be caught up in global conservation process that extends beyond to enfold places into the ‘universalization’ of heritage. For instance, the World Heritage List drawn up by UNESCO is motivated by a mission to protect cultural and national heritage world wide, and accordingly identifies those sites it considers outstanding, a much desired designation by local and national tourist authorities that confers status on places. However, the monitoring of the appropriate measures of due care for such sites mean that they must also exert responsibility for their upkeep and management. The Increasing Diversity of Tourism It is certainly the case that very specific kinds of tourism and particular spaces of tourist destination have been discussed as if they are in some way synonymous with broader social and spatial configurations of tourism and the analytical perspectives that have emerged from such studies have been utilized to generalize about tourism per se. However, the global expansion of spaces and practices of tourism renders such approaches and subjects even less widely applicable than they were, for tourist attractions now seem almost innumerable, and there seems to be a venue, outlet, or activity available for every imaginable enthusiasm. For tourism has proved such a lucrative ex ercise, or at least the only economic strategy in areas of deindustrialisation and development, that numerous places have attempted to attract the tourist dollar. This is particularly noticeable in cities where, especially in the increasingly postindustrial West, strategies have been devised to attract the important groups of tourists, shoppers, middle class inhabitants, and investors. Here, the tourist product has become a key element utilized to mark difference in the construction of place images, where a unique characteristic, cultural form of practice, sporting or conference facility, shopping center, historical attraction, museum, landscape, or activity has been identified to create brand distinctiveness within a highly competitive market. For instance, the city I presently live in, Manchester, markets itself using a heady mix of dis tinctive features: an early industrial heritage; a trendy youth culture comprising music, clubbing, and fashion; a prominent gay community; the globally famous sporting institution of Manchester United; and a mix of shopping facilities, among other things. Needless to say, these

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resources are unequally existent, and it is easier for some cities than others to produce and market their uniqueness. One key element in these urban plans has been the marketing of all heritage in all manner of forms. A common statistic capturing the rise of British heritage has been the opening of a new museum every two weeks during the 1980s; a similar expansion may be noted in numerous other destination countries. Heritage thus may be offered because of the prominence of some specialized local industry and the remnants of its production sites, a famous event or historical figure ranging from scientist to military commander to entertainer, its architectural or artistic heritage, or simply because there are well pre served vestiges of lower class domestic dwellings. There are now a remarkable range of heritage walks and other tours, booklets, and guides; dramaturgical re enactments; and historical festivals, even where there is little physical evidence of the past. This emphasis on the past has been decried as obsessively nostalgic, and often, unduly se lective and politically conservative; because of the given requirement to produce easily consumable stories and reenactments, it merely recounts the reified histories of the powerful. On the other hand, there is no doubt that hitherto ignored events, lives, and processes have also been represented in recent attractions based upon slavery and racist oppression, and feminist and working class versions of history, and it may now be more appropriate to consider the ambiguities, contestations, and sophisti cation of the total mix of heritage provision in any one city or region. This intensified variety of attractions is also present in rural areas where there has been a sharp decline in agriculture, glaringly illustrated by the fact that in the United Kingdom, tourism is more or less twice as im portant as farming to the rural economy. In the post productivist countryside, tourist attractions have also proliferated. Country breaks and the expansion of the mix of accommodation, working farms, country trails, and footpaths of varying length, together with the growing popularity of a large variety of action sports at suitable rural locations, have meant that the countryside is increasingly and primarily a realm of leisure and tourism. This has led to growing contestation between diverse activities and particularly the aforementioned notion that the rural is a site for romantic gazing, so that for instance, the quest for tranquillity on a solitary walk might be disrupted by hang gliders or mountain bikers in pursuit of an adrenaline rush, or the calm pursuit of sailing is shattered by the power boat community. These claims on the countryside and the competition they in stigate testify to the social pressure upon rural space, and this is complemented by the deleterious effects of erosion and pollution. The proliferation of numerous attractions and itiner aries, and practices and forms of pleasure at a global level

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has entailed the diversification of tourist space wherein any space has the potential to become attractive to tourists. For instance, wine tours in Argentina and Aus tralia are growing in popularity, aficionados of modernist architecture visit East European housing estates from the communist era, The Bureau of Atomic Tourism pro motes sites of nuclear weapon development in the USA, and visitors to New York are drawn to the disaster site of Ground Zero. These multifarious forms of tourist activity and destination reveal that any simple categorization of tourism is defeated by its proliferation and diversity. Yet certain broad tendencies within tourism continue to produce distinctive forms of space – in some cases, forms of serial space. This is most evident in the kind of resort space reserved for generally upmarket package tourists that assumes a somewhat generic appearance and func tion worldwide. These international standard resorts and hotels, with their familiar, home from home environments and mix of themed spaces, spectacle, and shopping provide a sealed space within which disruptive sounds, tactilities and smells, as well as local people and scenes, are kept away. Local color is usually alluded to with carefully placed local paintings, textiles, and sculptures, and in displays and shows of folk dance and music shows, but the largely purified, rationalized space reduces design and function. Such enclavic spaces have been criticized as ‘placeless’, ‘nonplaces’, or ‘blandscapes’ which erase local cultural specificity and may appear to echo the wider production of functional differentiation and single purpose spaces in which specialized realms are assigned for play, work, and reproduction in accordance with the bureaucratic and commercial imperatives of the tourist industry. Despite these serialities, enclavic resort complexes such as those in Cancun, Mexico, offer an increasingly varied range of activities and excursions which permit tourists to tailor their vacations within more flexible limits. How ever, the delivery of predictable pleasures which induce relaxation and comfort have been overlooked and such vilification seems to reproduce much of the snobbery found among tourists themselves where notions of superficiality, lack of engagement with local people, and lack of authenticity persist. These criticisms of highly productive forms of cultural capital are often mobilized by what are often cited as the package tourists’ polar opposite, backpackers, whose touristic pursuits also pro duce distinctive forms of tourist space. Often outside the West, the destinations and itiner aries of backpackers satisfy a different series of motiv ations and tastes, and in general they are produced through different modes of spatial organization to pro duce more variegated, heterogeneous spaces in which tourist practices and facilities mix with local business, domestic, educational, leisure, and bureaucratic activities. The larger tourist spaces in which backpackers circulate

around cheap hotels, restaurants, and bars differ from the purified spaces identified earlier in their more contingent aesthetics, looser regulation, and multiple functions, and they generally ensure that backpacking tourists cannot remain inured to interaction with local people and in stitutions, along with the growing numbers of domestic tourists who pursue desires at variance to those of Western package tourists. Nevertheless, Western backpackers usually follow prescribed routes, and share ‘alternative’ values con cerning self development and the ‘authentic’ engagement with difference. They are drawn to backpacker ‘honey pots’ in which they may find cheap facilities, other backpackers, as well as identifiable, often conditional, forms of ‘otherness’; they are also focused on establishing cultural capital by moving towards more ‘exotic’ places off the beaten track where they might seek local culture, spiritual awareness, self development, and a fuller en counter with the ‘other’. Irrespective of their desires, the growing popularity of talking a gap year among Western students and the expansion of the itineraries and at tractions available to the backpacker are part of the wider commercial institutionalization of such tourism, with the consequence that it is becoming more difficult, but also for some, more important, to diverge from the track beaten by other backpackers.

Early Theoretical Explanations of Tourism Until the 1990s, tourism research tended to be locked into somewhat of an academic ghetto and seemed to be largely untouched by developments elsewhere in the social sciences and humanities. Early theories about tourism can be further criticized in a number of ways, not least for their tendency towards functionalist explanation, their overgeneralization in their lack of consideration for the varied forms of tourism besides sightseeing and cultural tourism, and above all, for their ethno centric assumptions that tourism is exclusively a Western European, Australian, and North American phenomenon. Accordingly, totalizing conceptions of tourists and tour ism emerged, although by and large, particular kinds of tourists were investigated as they engaged in specific kinds of holidays in particular kinds of places. However, certain theories from this era were highly influential in accounting for the social and cultural origins of modern tourism. Daniel Boorstin and the Spectacle In an early and rather dystopian, proto postmodernist account of tourism, Daniel Boorstin maintains that mass tourism is typified by the experience of the ‘pseudo event’, an occasion which gives the illusion that it is ‘real’ but is, in fact, a staged production put on for the benefit

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of tourists. Hence tourism cannot provide any oppor tunity for experiencing local culture and meeting local folk in unmediated fashion but, rather, isolates tourists from the world within an insulated environment, a tourist bubble within which inauthentic spectacles are con sumed. To be sure, there are numerous examples within tourism of simulated events and places and simulacra of existing buildings, environments, and people, most not ably in themed spaces such as Disneyland. Yet to con clude that tourists are passively duped into consuming such ersatz spectacles erases their agency and neglects the multiple ways in which they might interpret and experience such attractions. More obviously, such en deavors form only a small percentage of the huge di versity of activities that can be termed touristic. Victor Turner: Liminality The anthropological studies of Victor Turner developed an analysis that suggested that tourism was a specific occasion upon which the normal duties and constraints of everyday life were suspended for a period, providing a social safety valve through which people could throw off the ordinary shackles of home and work and engage in playful, transgressive behavior. Like the medieval carni val, that liminal occasion when the ordinary order of things was inverted and sense of communitas was tem porarily established, tourism similarly involves a move ment away from mundane discipline, though in a less threatening, less extreme, and more conventional fashion, which pertains to the carnivalesque but is pursued through rather more organized ways, and can thus be termed ‘liminoid’ rather than antistructural and liminal. The functional benefits of the holiday were thereby conceived as accommodating people to the stress and repetition of everyday industrial modernity by moving from the familiar context to the unfamiliar realm and then back again. It is possible to identify certain forms of tourism that veer towards the carnivalesque, for example, in Club 18–30 holidays and in certain forms of beach and rave tourism, yet to suggest that tourists are merely carrying out a social function to ensure the health and stability of the social organism again minimizes their agency and their myriad understandings and practices. Furthermore, the explanation draws too powerful a dis tinction between the everyday and the festive, for as we will see, in contemporary times in particular, the two realms overlap and fuse much of the time. Dean MacCannell: The Quest for Authenticity The most influential account of tourism within these earlier studies has been Dean MacCannell’s depiction of the tourist as a Western subject in a doomed search for authenticity. Dwelling in an alienated, superficial world of frenetic change and one in which social relations,

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everyday living, and media and popular culture seem far removed from the past and deeply inauthentic, the tourist is motivated by a quest for authenticity elsewhere. By implication, the tourist, like a pilgrim, is drawn to less developed parts of the world, where the ‘real’ continues to exist. Sadly however, such authentic experience is rarely satisfied for instead, it is packaged and sold in the mediated form of ‘staged authenticity’. Following Erving Goffman, MacCannell alleges that the craved for back stage ‘authenticity’ of everyday life is elusive, replaced by the contrived productions on the ‘frontstage’. The notion that tourism is motivated by a search for authenticity has provoked many accounts that have explored the various ways in which ‘authenticity’ might be experienced, manufactured, and contested. However, once more the notion that tourists may be defined by their quest for the authentic delimits the exploration of other kinds of tourism and makes assumptions about tourists’ motiv ations that are unsupported by any empirical research. While MacCannell’s theory is interesting, the most that can be said is that it applies to some tourists sometimes in certain contexts but as a generalization it proves to be of little use. For instance, it might be relevant for certain backpacking tourists who want to experience the ‘real’ India by getting off the ‘beaten track’ or are looking for spiritual enlightenment. Indeed, the notion that some practices and places are more ‘authentic’ than others is another means through which distinction and status can be, and are frequently, asserted, and provides a form of rhetoric through which backpackers distinguish them selves from package tourists. In critiquing MacCannell’s conception, Maxine Feifer argues that tourists – or what she terms ‘post tourists’ – may actually enjoy consuming inauthenticity, for they are self reflexive individuals in creasingly aware of the whole provision of tourist prod ucts, aware of the games that tourists must play, and the constructed nature of the itineraries, guide accounts, and attractions they experience.

Later Theoretical Explanations of Tourism Erik Cohen: Tourist Typologies Following MacCannell, Cohen insisted that rather than just a singular kind of tourist, there are a variety of dif ferent kinds of tourists and practices. Basing his explan ation on the degree of immersion in local culture and space, or conversely the inhabiting of the environmental bubble, Cohen distinguishes between ‘experiential’, ‘ex perimental’, and ‘existential’ tourist types in terms of the degree to which they are searching for authenticity, an idea that inspired other researchers to construct their own tourist typologies and investigate the specificities of distinctive modes of travel, motivation, and cultural

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practice. Again, however, although this typology provides a step beyond the singular versions of tourist theory, it nevertheless entrenches notions that a limited range of motivations and experiences characterize tourism and, moreover, suggests that distinctive kinds of tourists and tourism can be identified rather than conceiving tourism as constituted by a fluid and diverse series of sensations, practices, and desires. Valene Smith: Hosts and Guests Another approach that explored the effects of the global growth of tourism focused upon the social, economic, cultural, and ecological effects that contacts between visitors and residents (or hosts and guests) produce. In Smith’s edited collection, and in work that followed this volume’s publication, attention was drawn to the fre quently exploitative and unstable nature of labor con ditions, along with the frequent lack of financial benefit which devolved to the local economy because of the repatriation of most of the profits made by large, nonlocal travel, hotel, and tour companies. Also much discussed was the influence of wealthy Western tourists upon the local cultural context. This, it was argued, may result in ‘demonstration effects’ wherein locals try to emulate high status fashions and lifestyles of tourists through acculturation, producing conflict where local youth be comes the object of parental concern as ‘traditional’ values become threatened by their preoccupation with Western mores and tastes. In addition, the conspicuous display of tourists’ wealth has been argued to have brought an increase in crime, usually directed at tourists themselves. Alternatively, locals may react angrily towards the presence of relatively wealthy tourists in poor locales or what may be assessed as culturally of fensive behavior (for instance, nudity and alcohol or drug use in public spaces). In investigating factors which might minimize the potential for conflict, some have identified a few of the key cultural brokers or intermediaries, typi cally guides or acculturated locals, who mediate and translate between the two groups. A further strand of research has continued to explore the sexual relation ships that emerge between guests and hosts, including sex tourism and sex work, along with the kinds of often ambiguous and complex relationships that emerge out side economic exchanges. Part of the work on sex tourism has evolved from feminist perspectives and, among other topics, has con sidered the stereotypical representation of women as objects of the tourist gaze, where they are presented and consumed as exotic and erotic, devoid of agency and sophistication, mirroring many of the sexist assumptions that developed out of colonial representations. More broadly, feminist analyses identify the ways in which the sexual division of labor is reproduced by the restricted

range of employment opportunities for women which tend to be of low wage and seasonal, although others have pointed to the potential for female empowerment through the greater economic and cultural autonomy, where women may work outside the realm of con ventional employment but market their skills of domes ticity and care. Other avenues of research have contrasted the benefits of economic development with the crass commercial ization of valued cultural artefacts, heritage, rituals, and dress. With regard to this latter issue, it was contended that the products of cultural tourism, the ‘traditional’ music and dance shows delivered for tourists, the ethnic clothing worn by tourism workers, the handicrafts on sale, and visits to their fabrication units were responsible for diluting the meanings of local cultures, providing consumable forms and styles tailored for tourists which emptied out the rich meanings and diversity of local use. However, others have argued that tourism may actually give a boost to local culture and reinvigorate dying tra ditions, bringing back forgotten modes of skillful manu facture and performance. On the whole, despite their usefulness in identifying important social and cultural processes, these analyses suggest that both tourists and their hosts are somewhat homogeneous, lacking agency, and tend to conceive destinations, communities, and tour groups as culturally static entities rather than dynamic. Concerns about the unequal and potentially exploit ative relationships between hosts and guests have led to the rise of various forms of alternative tourism, most evidently, ‘ecotourism’ or sustainable tourism, where greater emphases are placed upon local economic con trol, small scale development, environmental conser vation and damage limitation, poverty alleviation, and a more equitable distribution of the economic rewards of tourism, female empowerment, and the fostering of more meaningful relationships between tourists and locals. If successful, however, such schemes may become liable to fall victim to the phenomenon of the ‘resort cycle’. The Resort Cycle The extraordinary global expansion of tourism, where whole nations, cities, and regions compete with each other on a global scale, with a corresponding volatility in the popularity of destinations has prompted scholars to point to the phenomenon of the ‘resort cycle’. The resort cycle is produced by the desire for many tourists to es cape the large scale tourist resorts, with their crowded beaches, diluted culture, and mass entertainment facil ities and head to somewhere ‘off the beaten track’. There are therefore, opportunities for unfamiliar venues lacking modern tourist infrastructure to become fashionable by virtue of their attributed ‘untouched’ nature, for they are sought out by more adventurous travelers on a quest for

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the ‘unspoilt’ and ‘untouristy’. As word spreads that there is an untarnished beach, trail, or city to visit, local entrepreneurs then identify the potential for tourist de velopment, there is investment in tourist infrastructure, more tourists arrive, and finally, the formerly quiet locale becomes a large tourist resort. However, the new scale of popularity subsequently threatens the resort’s reputation for it now lacks the very qualities that led to its emergent attractiveness in the first place, and it may be variously considered to be overcrowded, too expensive, in authentic, too modern, and too homogeneous. The resort cycle highlights the tenuous position of those currently fashionable tourist destinations, where development can herald their demise, not to mention any sign of instability or political violence. Nevertheless, venues can also regain a measure of former popularity by promoting festivals, developing ‘unique’ attractions, and simply because they may regain a vanished trendiness once more after time passes. John Urry: The Tourist Gaze A great breakthrough in sociocultural understandings about contemporary tourism arose with the publication of John Urry’s The Tourist Gaze in 1991, which developed the perspective that tourists are characterized above all, by their desire to gaze upon that which is different and unusual, and can be distinguished from the everyday. Moreover, they are collectors of sights, literally sight seers, as they travel around the realm of the ‘other’, gazing upon people, cultural shows, landscapes, and historic locations, as part of the broader sociocultural development of an intensified visual culture generated by the dense and proliferating flows of global signs which has apparently reinforced the dominance of the visual according to assessments of the importance of the senses in Western culture. In addition, Urry maintains that tourists are semioticians; that is, they interpret the sights they consume according to symbolic frameworks whereby the objects of their gaze come to stand for some other general quality. For instance, renowned spectacles such as the Eiffel Tower connote Paris, and smaller ‘typical’ sights, such as the city cafe or breadsticks, symbolize Frenchness. Typically, tourists are also con cerned with ‘capturing’ the scenes upon which they gaze through photography, and latterly, the video camera. This touristic disposition to gaze upon the unfamiliar largely derives from the aforementioned romantic desire to ex perience the visual pleasure associated with the sublime and is associated with predispositions to gaze in par ticular ways and via specific technologies. The more protean, expanded lust for gazing upon difference in contemporary tourism is similarly identified as the ‘ro mantic’ gaze, although Urry allows for other modes of gazing, including the ‘collective’ gaze where large crowds

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gaze upon popular spaces and each other. Whatever the form of gaze, however, the importance of considering the visual in contemporary tourism is reinforced by the massive increase in the number of places, people, at tractions, and landscapes upon which to gaze, from the mundane to the spectacular. This proliferation of objects available for the gaze of tourists is compounded by the enormous global expansion of flows of mediatized images of other sites that would previously have been considered unsuitable tourist venues. Despite the widespread influ ence of his contentions, Urry’s claim that tourism is preeminently concerned with visual consumption has been strongly challenged by writers who assert that such a focus neglects the numerous other ways in which other senses are foregrounded and mobilized in tourist ex perience. Other embodied sensations are most particu larly evident in the tactile, auditory, and gustatory pleasures implicated in other forms of tourism, as we will see. Ultimately, it must be questioned whether an ex planation of tourism which privileges visual experience as central is not also guilty of over generalizing about the motivations, experiences, and underlying generation of tourist experience, consumption, and production, espe cially in the absence of any empirical evidence.

The Recent Broadening of Theories about Tourism While much scholarly work on tourism in the major academic journals concerned with the subject remains fixated on notions of tourist motivation, relationships between hosts and guests, quantitative depictions of tourist flows, models for resort development, and mar keting and management strategies, many researchers have moved away from old conceptual models and the oretical preoccupations and developed approaches that are informed by some of the most influential new ideas emerging out of the social sciences. This article briefly summarizes these more recent approaches, focusing upon understanding tourism as constituted by accelerating and proliferating global mobility, as embodied, a form of performance, increasingly mediated, and part of everyday life. Tourism as an Effect of Enhanced Global Mobility The reconceptualization of places as continually re constituted by the processes which flow through and center upon them, especially in an increasingly mobile world through which places become intertwined with people, information, companies, technologies, and other places at a rate never before experienced implicates understandings of tourism. Tourism brings together building materials and architectural planes, company

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expansions, transport networks, images and brands, temporary and permanent workers, and multiple other elements in complex entanglements which contribute to the ongoing production of place. In such a conception, there is no essential characteristic of place, no authentic spirit of place, or heritage, despite the tendency of tourist marketing to suggest such fixity in the quest for identifiable, distinct place images. Rather, places are characterized by their contingency so that stability res ides in the propensity for tourist workers to reproduce regular narrative versions of place and expected stand ards of service for the tourist infrastructure to remain reliable, for tourists to continue to visit, and upon the repetitive interpretations and practices of tourists. Yet the fluid ‘ethnoscapes’, the global flows of people of which tourists form a large proportion, are part of a mobile world which brings together different kinds of people and spaces at accelerating rate, incorporating ever more places and landscapes into potentially volatile networks of movement through which a place might become temporarily stabilized but also threatened by chaos. Under conditions of volatile flow, elements of tourism are apt to escape from the networks within which they serve particular functions, and enter into other circulating flows to appear in other geographical contexts. For in stance, the woollen hats and sweaters popular among travelers to the Andes are now widely accessible in the retail outlets of Western cities. Embodied, Phenomenological, and More-ThanRepresentational Accounts of Tourism Growing social science research in phenomenology, the body and embodiment, and the senses have recently exerted a strong influence on theories of tourism. While early academic ideas suggested that tourists were some what disembodied subjects, Urry’s notion of the ‘tourist gaze’ discussed earlier developed the notion that tourists were embodied and that the senses were important in the practices of tourism. In recent times, however, scholars have pointed out that this is an excessively ocularcentric conception of tourism which privileges vision to the exclusion of the other senses. This is to be expected in Western enlightenment culture where vision has long been held to be the most important in hierarchical understandings of the senses. It is therefore important to identify the cultural specificity of such claims about senses and further note that the senses are culturally shaped and do not provide an unmediated access to the world as purely ‘natural’ tools. We perceive according to cultural values which prescribe what is sensually desir able and acceptable and we are trained to sense the world according to these values. Accordingly, new ways of theorizing the relationship between the body and tourism have evolved which focus attention upon ideas about

physical fitness and health, sensual connections and im mersion, sexuality, and visceral sporting experience. Most obviously, the rise of muscular tourism, the proliferating collection of adventurous pursuits based upon white water rafting, canoeing, mountain biking, surfing and skateboarding, snowboarding, bungee jump ing, hang gliding, and orienteering have supplemented the older activities of walking, skiing, swimming, and climbing, and have ramped up the values of risk, thrill, and competition. It is arguable whether any of these pursuits foreground the visual as the dominant sense. Conceptions of embodiment and tourism have also emerged because of the critique of binary constructions of nature and culture, where the body is conceived as separate from nature and that which is gazed upon. More than representational theory has instead asserted the idea that bodies, nature, and all other elements (for instance, within the systems of tourism) are inextricably connected, part of assemblages which draw together humans, technologies, information, souvenirs, minerals, vegetables, and animals to constitute (temporary) net works through which the elements are endowed with particular attributes that contribute to the system as a whole and connect specifically with other parts of the system. Tourism, bluntly, is not solely concerned with the cognitive understanding of places and with the con sumption of representations. Within this scheme of thought, bodies are always already involved with the world in precognitive fashion, constantly attuning to new environments, sensing stimuli, and acting in unreflexive ways towards the world. We apprehend the world in ways that accord with the qualities of place and the capacities of our bodies which go way beyond the semiotic decoding enacted by a solitary, gazing tourist. Moreover, the human body is not primarily a text itself but is immersed in changing and diverse sensations. Yet we should be wary of conceiving of tourism as solely a movement through unfamiliar realms for the embodied practices of tourists are more frequently in volved with habitual immersion in familiar spatial and social circumstances, where they experience regular, homely tactilities, smells, sounds, tastes, and textures. As such, tourist bodies develop practical dispositions through sensory experience, except where they are overwhelmed by social and sensory unfamiliarity. What becomes important to explore then, is the relationship between bodies and tourist space. The experience of an amusement park might foreground the sensation of rapid motion, giddiness, and disorientation as the body hurtles around a white knuckle ride. A stroll down an Indian bazaar in heterogeneous tourist space is likely to provoke strong resistance and attraction to a welter of sensations, varying in intensity and combination, as movement is impeded and obstacles avoided, delicious and atrocious aromas inhaled, sweet and jarring noises received, and

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curious and familiar sights beheld, composing a sensual experience that includes the auditory, tactile, visual, aromatic, and gustatory at once, and in succession. And while a coach tour may well prioritize the consumption of visual spectacle, there is always the prospect that other sensations will intrude upon the tourist gaze: the bus is too hot, travel sickness arises, hunger gnaws, and the seats are too cramped and uncomfortable. In addition to bodies, and informed by more than representational theories, tourism has also recently dir ected attention towards materiality, the objects of tour ism, which possesses an integral role in the ongoing constitution of tourism. Such nonhumans are part of the relationalities which produce the ordering of tourism in different ways and are crucially not separate from humans but inextricably bound up with them so as to produce human–object hybrids that foster the distinct qualities of tourist experience and practice. There are those objects which travel from place to place, the pass ports, suitcases, cameras, and items of clothing which tourists carry with them, the souvenirs which tourists bring back from their holiday destinations, and the technological objects of tourism itself, the vehicles, loudspeakers, and recording equipment that guide tour ists around heritage sites. Such objects possess particular affordances, qualities which enable and prevent action, provide pleasure, and facilitate interaction and move ment. Some functional traveling objects move between places without changing their meaning, but others, such as souvenirs, are removed from their place of origin and recontextualised in tourists’ home settings, often pro viding signs of status and identity, or prompts for nar ratives about holiday experiences. Tourism as Staged and Performed A particularly productive sociological approach has considered how tourism might be conceived as staged and a form of performance. Tourist stages are many and varied as are the kinds of performances enacted by tourist workers and participants in spectacles. Highly organized ceremonies such as royal and state pageants tend to be rigid and reproduce the distinction between actor and onlooker, because they are required to convey particular ideological messages and thus minimize ambiguity, for such contestations and failings must be continually held at bay. Alternatively, more carnivalesque festivals allow for more convivial, sensual, improvisational, and playful performances. The production of heritage dramas and reenactments tends to decenter the authority of historical experts and provide a more sensual, dramatic version of history than the dry accounts of the authoritative, an affective, ex periential experience that often require tourists to par ticipate in role playing as opposed to the improving

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acquisition of useful knowledge. There is also the on going proliferation of themed spaces in which stage managers attempt to produce a cultural and physical environment encoded with clear visual cues and codes through the use of scenography. Another line of dis cussion has investigated how tourist productions stage nature through safari parks, wildlife safaris, and sea life shows, foregrounding the spectacular, the anthropo morphic, and the attractive and eliding the uncomfort able, noncuddly denizens of the animal world. On the whole, we may discern a situation whereby intensified attempts to design and theme space coexist with the promiscuous proliferation of forms of tourist space. Most tourist stages depend for their stability and ef ficacy on the ability and disposition of workers to perform in ways that induce comfort, service, and predictability. Accordingly, such workers are trained to express defer ence, eagerness to please, and friendliness. In the case of Disneyland, such personnel are conceived as ‘cast members’, and as in other settings, required to wear outfits and expressions that harmonize with the theme environment. In addition, tour companies and hotels organize cultural displays of local dancing and music, and here, performers enact selective aspects which typically titillate tourists without alienating them by confronting them with complex cultural meanings. Not only do tourist workers directly serve tourists but also manage them, in a role comparable to choreography and stage management. For instance, tour guides provide scripted commentary and choreograph tourists’ movement along prescribed routes, reinforcing notions of what should be looked at and how tourists should behave. I have already inferred that patterns of tourist be havior partly emerge out of dispositions that evolve around class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, practices which are grounded in the specific habitus of tourists, their unreflexive ways of being. Moreover, tourists re produce shared conventions about what should be seen, done, and communicated. These understandings about what to do and how to be a tourist move between the self aware performance in front of other tourists and habitual dispositions which are rarely questioned. The apprentice tourist may well become inculcated in the procedures whereby performative competence in fol lowing recognizable conventions is attained in knowing what to photograph, how to exclaim upon witnessing the ‘exotic’, and how to record experience. Such conventions need to be continually enacted to retain their power, and the prescriptive conventions and values that are inherent in them are rarely disrupted if they are performed unreflexively. Yet where reflexive improvization and a critical disposition are mobilized, the resultant ambiguity can threaten a sense of well being, as can sudden immersion in stages that contain unfamiliar fixtures and people acting in ways that confound

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expectations and cultural values. Although the consent of tourists is required for the successful staging of events, guided tours, sightseeing, and other forms of con sumption, there are also those participants identified earlier as ‘post tourists’, who revel in the artificiality of the tourist product. Enacting cynical performances, they undermine the staging of ‘authenticity’, yet though they display their distance from the normative roles expected of them, they are ultimately unwilling to challenge the drama in which they are involved. There are also those who refuse to participate at all in the tourist product and strike off on their own into unfamiliar settings, where they might hope to self reflexively shed the normative roles they ordinarily inhabit, in search of spiritual en lightenment, drug induced experiences, extreme sports, and other forms of ‘limit experience’. Different tourist ventures are carried out upon par ticular stages – on beaches and mountains, in cities, heritage sites, museums, and theme parks. These settings are distinguished by their boundedness, whether physical or symbolic, and are often organized or stage managed to provide and sustain common sense understandings about what activities should take place. Indeed, the coherence of most tourist performances depends on their being performed in specific ‘theaters’. In such realms, tourist performance is socially and spatially regulated to varying extents. Indeed, the organization, materiality, and aes thetic and sensual qualities of tourist space influences the kinds of performances that tourists undertake, varying from the predictable collective enactments of package groups under supervision and surveillance to the im provisational performances of individuals moving through differently regulated, unfamiliar environments, from the predictable routines of those in serial, ‘enclavic’ space to those amidst heterogeneous tourist space. Yet the stability of any tourist stage depends upon the re petitive performance of familiar routines and procedures and where this is challenged or incompetent, the nor mative purpose and meaning of the space itself come under threat. However, rather than being fixed, performance is an interactive and contingent process which succeeds ac cording to the skill of the actors, the context within which it is performed, and the way in which it is inter preted by an audience. Even the most delineated social performance must be reenacted in different conditions and its reception may be unpredictable. Each perform ance can never be exactly reproduced and fixity of meaning must be continually achieved. Yet because tourism involves the process of accelerating mobilities through which people continually bump into forms of difference, the normative, habitual social performances which they ordinarily enact with groups of peers are made manifest, brought to the surface, and can therefore be challenged, inducing a self critical reflexivity about

the assumptions which underlie their behavior or a de fensive retreat into certainty. It is evident that at those venues where flows of people from different geographical and cultural locations meet and mingle, there are fre quent contestations about what constitutes proper tour istic dispositions, habits, and practices. At the Taj Mahal, for instance, Western package tourists often become ir ritated at the tourist performances of large parties of domestic tourists who quickly move around the sight, chatting noisily, failing to take photographs, and enact a romantic gaze towards the mausoleum, and otherwise displaying a lack of reverence. The Tourism and Media Nexus The expansion and intensification of global flows of im ages (via ‘mediascapes’) has encouraged some scholars to investigate the growing nexus between tourism and the media. Their arguments focus upon a number of issues. First, they highlight the ways in which tourist destin ations, and the people, sights, and cultures foregrounded in tourist marketing campaigns circulate through a var iety of global and national media forms, contributing to growing mobility between places, not through the actual movement of tourists but through virtual representations. Images of tourist places and landscapes feature in tele vision travel programs, advertisements in print and screen, on internet sites, and in books and newspapers, informing the tourist imagination and fuelling the an ticipation, expectations, and desires of those who will subsequently visit them. Crucially, these objects of the virtual tourist gaze tend to rely on familiar, repetitive images in much the same ways as colonial guidebooks and travel accounts have tended to reinforce the signifi cance of particular sites and landscapes, cultural habits, and exotic forms of ‘difference’, and tourist encounters with locals. For instance, travel programs have a tendency to rehash the notion that places outside the West are ‘timeless’, a denial of their modernity which testifies to the desire to escape to another place and time. The catalog of dancing girls, palm lined shores, and lined faces full of character is only new in its expansion. These television programs, combining advice, information, and imagery, also frequently rely on the individual travel accounts of celebrities. It has been a contention that the recycling of familiar tourist imagery is also generated by tourists’ own photographic reproduction of familiar images, as they position themselves within familiar scenes of the Statue of Liberty or Petra. These images may well be utilized in post holiday recollection but they are also increasingly apt to appear, together with tourists’ individual accounts, on internet websites and travel blogs. This addition to the flow of global tourist images testifies to a mediation which is democratizing the flow of information and

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opinion about tourist destinations, and in the case of backpacker travel, for instance, is part of the reflexive engagement which their journeys constitute and that forms a basis forum for intersubjective communication. In addition to the systematic siting of tourist places within global mediascapes, there are now a plethora of destinations which have become associated with medi ated imagery in film and television, with celebrities, particular cinematic scenes, and landscapes. Recently, fans of the Lord of the Rings film series have flocked to New Zealand to witness the scenery featured in the movies, and others visit Tunisia to behold the place where sections of the Star Wars movies were filmed or go in search of the seaside setting of the film, The Beach, filmed in Thailand. In some cases a strong association with film and television assists in the tourist promotion of an area, as in the case of Stirling, which has become labeled as Braveheart. Yet the connection between the virtual world of television and the phenomenological world encountered in situ is not a matter of simply wit nessing familiar scenes. For example, the welter of cinematic representations of Los Angeles may serve to assist recognition of that city’s space for a visiting tourist but might also clash with the unexpected sights of everyday life and squalor that are confronted, the unfilmed places of the city. The link with media is especially close in the case of the numerous themed spaces which actively seek to combine space with image and celebrity. The most famous of these sites is, of course, Disneyland, which continually updates its attractions to keep pace with modish and popular films and celebrities. Familiar car toon, film, and television programs have similarly at tracted large numbers of tourists to Universal Studios in Los Angeles, the Asterix theme park in France, and the now defunct Granada Studios tour in Manchester, as well as a host of attractions in theme parks, shopping centers, and festival marketplaces. Moreover, the tourist experience and the presentation of place is itself increasingly mediated through the ap plication of audiovisual technology. This tendency seems particularly prevalent at heritage attractions where slide shows, short videos, son et lumiere displays, and anima tronic figures engage the tourist audience. This provides a usually melodramatic narrative where little actual vestige of historical import exists such as at Bannockburn Heritage Site in Scotland, where disappointment at the dearth of any trace of the medieval battle between Scottish and English armies is assuaged by the mediated spectacle of an animated video of the event. Tourism as Everyday and Mundane Part of the discomfort with the conception of tourism as an extraordinary period has recently been addressed by

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accounts which consider that the division between the everyday and the festive has become blurred. First, as already mentioned, tourism is replete with unreflexive, mundane, and rigid conventions, with culturally coded habits and routines which shape the particular practices and experiences of tourists and embody common sense understandings of how to be a tourist. And though suf fused with notions of escape from normativity, tourists carry quotidian habits and responses with them along with their luggage and such habits are accommodated and understood in the tourist spaces they come to occupy. Part of the reason for notions that tourism is extra ordinary has persisted is because tourists have been so frequently misconceived in general terms as Western solitary travelers amidst realms of otherness. This neg lects the social nature of tourism, whether this includes the duties that are carried along when families travel together or the obligations that are performed when visiting old friends or hosts in familiar places. Second, because tourism now extends across an in creasing vast range of times and places, it has become part of the everyday apprehension of the world, with normative technologies and aesthetic dispositions. In a spectacular society, bombarded by signs that saturate everyday worlds, we can be tourists in our everyday travels, whether actual or virtual. For instance, the re generation of Western urban economies involves the production of proliferating shopping ‘experiences’ with themed pubs and restaurants, festival marketplaces, amusement parks, museums, heritage attractions, art spaces, cultural quarters, spectacles, and signature buildings – all spaces in which the highlighting of se lective cultural and historical attributes has become routine. While primarily intended to attract outsiders, for the workers, inhabitants, and shoppers of cities, such sights become mundane. Moreover, because of the pace through which global cultural flows promiscuously expand, a previously ob scure otherness is ubiquitous in commodities ranging from music, food, and fashion from around the world, and those people and cultures formerly considered ‘exotic’ and worthy of a visit are commonly confronted as part of daily life in multicultural, multiethnic cities as part of a sort of mundane cosmopolitanism, not to mention the numerous virtual travel we engage in on the internet, television, and cinema. As cities utilize festivals, cultural events, demonstrations, and exhibitions to prove their cosmopolitanism, the penetration of the exotic into everyday lives and banal urban spaces renders it mun dane, diluting its power to confound normativity. Ac cordingly, tourism has lost much of its power as a practice through which the everyday might be transcended via a confrontation with otherness. Third, the capacity of the conventional scheduling of tourism to provide occasions for confronting and

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consuming otherness is further diluted by the sheer proliferation of occasions for leisure that are now avail able to increasing numbers of people. As work routines for many become more variegated and flexible, there are growing occasions when we may take afternoons off work or ‘long weekend’ breaks, and numerous leisure oppor tunities available at night and the weekend. The diverse availability of holidays offered throughout the year simi larly blurs notions that certain times are appropriate for a holiday and other periods should be spent working. The specialness of the holiday in contradistinction to ‘ordinary’ life, and the swelling sense of release following a sustained period of consistent work without a significant leisure break, is becoming less common, although the distribution of leisure opportunities remains highly unequal. These notions that tourism is the opposite of the quotidian say much about how the everyday is conceived, as a realm of repetition, duty, boredom, and habit. In fact, while the bureaucratization of the life world and indus trial rhythms may have produced such mundane ex periences, such understandings neglect the potential of the everyday in its temporal fluidity to also provide op portunities for dreams and fantasies, moments of cre ativity, and unexpected happenings. See also: Ecotourism; Tourism, Rural; Tourism, Urban; Travel and Travel-Writing.

Further Reading Baerenholdt, J., Haldrup, M., Larsen, J. and Urry, J. (2004). Performing Tourist Places. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Boorstin, D. (1964). The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America. New York: Harper. Britton, S. (1991). Tourism, capital and place: Towards a critical geography of tourism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9, 452 478. Cohen, E. (1988). Traditions in the qualitative sociology of tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 15, 29 46. Crick, M. (1989). Representations of international tourism in the social sciences: Sun, sea, sights, sex and servility. Annual Review of Anthropology 18, 393 444. Crouch, D., Jackson, R. and Thompson, F. (2005). Tourism and the Media Imagination: Converging Cultures. London: Routledge. Desmond, J. (1999). Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Seaworld. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edensor, T. (1998). Tourists at the Taj. London: Routledge. Enloe, C. (1990). Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Feifer, W. (1985). Going Places. London: MacMillan. Franklin, A. (2003). Tourism: An Introduction. London: Sage. Hall, C. and Tucker, H. (eds.) (2004). Tourism and Postcolonialism: Contested Discourses, Identities and Representations. London: Routledge. MacCannell, D. (1976). The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken. Meetham, K. (2001). Tourism in Global Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Minca, C. and Oakes, T. (eds.) (2006). Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (eds.) (2004). Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play. London: Routledge. Smith, V. (ed.) (1989). Hosts and Guests. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Smith, M. (2003). Issues in Cultural Tourism Studies. London: Routledge. Turner, V. and Turner, E. (1978). Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Urry, J. (2002). The Tourist Gaze (2nd edn.). London: Sage. Wood, R. (1998). Tourist ethnicity: A brief itinerary. Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, 218 241.

Tourism, Rural M. Cawley, National University of Ireland, Galway, Republic of Ireland & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Commodification A process whereby objects take on an exchange value over and above their use value and may be traded. Gaeltacht Legally defined areas in the Republic of Ireland, located for the most part in the west, northwest, and southwest, where the Irish language is the first language of the majority of the bilingual population. Partnership A collaborative agreement between two or more interest groups from the state, private, and voluntary sectors for the purpose of achieving a defined aim. Tourist Gaze A term coined by sociologist John Urry, to describe the process of consuming tourism experiences which differ from the everyday.

Defining Rural Tourism Reference to rural tourism inevitably raises issues re lating to the rationale, if any, for distinguishing between tourism and recreation and between urban and rural destinations. Any definitions that are used are subject to discussion. Furthermore, although the countryside is a major resource for recreation internationally and tourism is advocated as a method of supplementing declining rural incomes, many countries do not provide statistics for rural tourism as distinct from rural recreation. A number of criteria are, however, widely recognized that may be used to frame a discussion of rural tourism ac cording to associated features, theory, impacts, and policy. Tourism and the Rural For purposes of international statistical comparison, tourism is usually defined according to the World Tourism Organization criterion as involving a stay of at least 24 h away from home, with recreation involving more regular shorter sojourns. Tourism and recreation share many similarities, however, in terms of the activities undertaken and their use of the resource base. Thus boating, golfing, horse riding, and walking may be prac ticed as regular recreational leisure activities or during a longer holiday and may not differ appreciably in their resource demands and environmental impacts. It may be difficult to distinguish between a day visit to a heritage site by a local family and that of a tourist family on holiday. The similarities in the use of the resource base

by recreationists and tourists are recognized in this dis cussion and features of tourism more specifically such as accommodation and development policies are high lighted as pertinent. The definition of the rural per se is also contested, as reflected in an extensive literature, and many tourists divide their holiday between urban and rural locations. However, rural tourism is usually dis tinguished from urban tourism by a number of features including the type of experience anticipated by the vis itor, the scale of infrastructural development, the use of local natural resources, and the involvement of local people. To some extent it may be more appropriate to refer to tourism and recreation that take place in the countryside while recognizing that the countryside may include small towns and villages, as well as cultivated, uncultivated, and forested landscapes and areas of water. A distinction that is long established within rural tourism is that between truly remote wilderness landscapes, as in northern Scandinavia and Canada, and locales that are less isolated. The United States of America Wilderness Act 1964 defines wilderness in terms of an absence of other than a transitory human presence and retention of a primeval character and influence. In more accessible locations rural tourism experiences often include contact with both nature and culture through passive and active recreation, cultural presentations, and artifacts relating to country lifestyles and heritage. Rural tourism is recog nized by the European Union (EU) as providing devel opment opportunities for declining economies. Tourists and Recreational Activities Surveys in many countries reveal that demand for rural recreational opportunities has grown during recent dec ades. This growth has been associated with increased leisure time in industrialized states; concerns relating to health, physical, and mental well being; antipathy to the standardization characteristic of mass tourism destin ations and awareness of the pressures imposed on their environmental resources; and a postmodernist quest for contact with older cultures and ways of life as an antidote to the anomie of contemporary urban society. Changing value systems and associated change in the experiences or gaze sought by tourists, as described by John Urry, involve a transition to more environmentally sympathetic forms of soft, green and ecotourism but can also include physically demanding adventure sports such as hang gliding, surfing, and white water rafting. Traditional foods, drinks, craft products, and cultural practices form part of the experience sought and provide commercial

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opportunities for local producers. The search for the (increasingly elusive) non Westernized and exotic is re flected in the growth of ecotourism among backpackers and organized groups to rural locales in developing areas of Africa, Asia and South America, the Arctic, and Antarctica. In addition to domestic and international visitors, returning emigrants or their descendants form an im portant stream of, sometimes repeat, visitors who have affinities with reception areas in parts of France, Ger many, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, and Spain, for example. Some of these visitors may be second home owners. Second home ownership may be a con tentious form of tourism, however, if it contributes to inflating house prices for locals. When ownership is associated with weak local ties among national or inter national immigrant owners it may in extreme circum stances lead to open antipathy and the destruction of property, as occurred in Wales during the 1970s and the 1980s.

was attributed to a concern with practice arising, in part, from a reliance on funding by government and other agencies and, in part, from an excessive concern with case studies. Harvey Perkins’s use of structuration theory to conceptualize the rural leisure locale as a human inter action space, which derives meaning from the amounts of time devoted to it, is sometimes cited as an exception from the 1990s. A number of key theoretical concepts are increasingly being invoked by geographers to analyze the construction of rural tourism and its experience by tourists and recreationists, some of which have been applied more extensively than others. These relate to: (1) the commodification of the countryside for con sumption; (2) tourism as performance by and for tourists and embodiment as a method of analyzing active en gagement with nature in place of passively gazing upon nature; and (3) issues of power associated with contacts between tourism, tourists, local residents, and the re sources on which tourism and recreation depend.

Rural Accommodation and Farm Tourism

Commodification

Many types of accommodation formerly associated with the countryside (even camping) are now found as niche products in towns and cities. Nevertheless, rural ac commodation continues to be characterized as being small in scale and dominated by provision in private homes, small hotels, guesthouses, camping and caravan sites, and self catering in vernacular buildings (best represented, perhaps, by the French gıˆte which began to be marketed as a distinctive form of rural accommodation in the early 1950s). In some countries, farm accom modation in isolation or in combination with recreational activities is marketed under a specific label; for example, ‘Farm Holidays’ in Austria (Urlaub am Bauernhof) and ‘Staying on a Farm’ (Bo pa˚ Lantga˚rd) in Sweden. Even when not marketed jointly farm holidays often form a clearly defined product. Opportunities for involvement in agricultural tasks may be provided, as well as an in creasingly diverse range of outdoor activities and on farm shopping for local foods and crafts. Rural accom modation has expanded also to include spas, religious and spiritual retreats to appeal to emerging tourist tastes. The sauna is an integral part of a rural stay in Scandinavia. The state, at levels from the international to the local, has promoted the introduction of on farm tourism as a form of income supplement, since the late 1980s, following agricultural restructuring in Australia, Canada, the EU, New Zealand, and the USA.

The commodification of the countryside forms part of the transition from high input high output productivist agriculture to its postproductivist opposite that has taken place to varying degrees in different locations since the early 1990s. Farm labor, investment, buildings, and land have attained a new exchange value in being allocated to tourism in response to growing consumer demand. Rural landscapes and particular features have been commodi fied through their incorporation into promotional media and products sold as souvenirs to visitors. Thus, Uluru (Ayers Rock) has become an iconic symbol that attracts large numbers of visitors annually to the desert interior of Australia. Regionally labeled foods and drinks are the basis for specialist tours and trails. Associations with the constituents, conditions, and locale of production which form the basis for Appellation d’Origine Controˆle´e (AOC) labeling of wines and cheeses in France, and its equivalent in several other European countries, have been adapted to a wider range of food and drink products in EU Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) and Pro tected Geographical Designation (PGD) labels. The re gional imagery used to promote places and as a basis for festivals and workshops may include associations with writers or fictional characters (Hardy Country in Eng land, Anne of Green Gables on Prince Edward Island), film and soap operas (the Wizard of Oz which the small town of Sedan, Kansas, evokes in its yellow brick road, Heartbeat which attracts tourists to rural north York shire), artists (Pont Aven in Lower Brittany), and even outlaws (Glenrowan, New South Wales where the no torious Ned Kelly was captured is the center of Kelly Country). Commodification and regional labeling are being funded through the EU Liaison entre Actions de

Theoretical Considerations Rural tourism and recreation research have been criti cized in the past as having a weak theoretical base which

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De´veloppement de l’Economie Rurale (Leader) rural development program as a form of cultural economy whereby economic value is allocated to cultural re sources. Labels may be regulated to ensure quality. Performance and Performativity Another area of theory that is increasingly invoked in studies of rural tourism experiences relates to perform ance and performativity for and by visitors. Tourist lo cales may become stages where actors in traditional dress act out domestic chores and conduct agricultural or in dustrial tasks in open air or indoor museum settings. Many heritage and historical sites which are recreated and performed for visitors are in rural settings, for ex ample, Valley Forge in Pennsylvania where the Contin ental Army’s winter stay of 1777–78 is commemorated. Analysis of performance for and by tourists also involves issues relating to the authenticity associated with the act of seeing. Studies among native peoples in Australia, Hawaii, and New Zealand reveal back spaces which local residents reserve from the tourist in an attempt at self protection and front spaces where encounters take place and which may be staged to meet tourist expectations; hence giving rise to the concept of staged authenticity. More generally the tourist becomes a performer when on holiday in adopting out of the ordinary behavior, dress, and methods of observing. Performativity represents a move beyond John Urry’s tourist gaze, focusing instead on embodied (and often nonrepresentational) aspects of tourism, for example, in adventure tourism. Thus, recreationists may co construct places with animals, as illustrated by Paul Cloke and Harvey Perkins’s study of cetacean performance and tourism in Kaikoura off the South Island of New Zealand, which uses concepts re lating to actor networks and relational agency to analyze embodied performances associated with whale watching and swimming with dolphins. Power Relationships Rural tourism incorporates a wide range of stakeholders including tourists and recreationists, tour operators, businesses, policy institutions, resource providers, and local residents among whom power relationships exist to varying degrees relating to both public and private re sources. Access to land for hiking can be contentious, as illustrated in the United Kingdom during the 1990s prior to the introduction of new legislation relating to the right to roam in the countryside. There is a tradition of access to the uncultivated countryside in Scandinavia and Germany, for example, whereas in the Republic of Ire land few rights of way exist and private property rights are defended actively. In 2007, a recommendation by a group of legal experts that access might be provided to the countryside for recreation, under stipulated

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provisions, was met by vigorous opposition by farm representative groups. Underexplored scope exists to invoke theories of power, following Michel Foucault and others, to conceptualize the relationships present be tween different rural tourism actors. In developing countries, postcolonial and feminist critiques are some times applied to analyze unequal relationships between international capital, tourists, and local providers.

Tourism Impacts and Implications for Sustainable Rural Systems The impacts of tourism and recreation in the countryside are generally conceived as being interrelated and three fold: economic, sociocultural, and environmental. Economic Impacts Economic benefits arise from tourism but also disbenefits because at least some of the economic returns may accrue outside the area which the tourists and recreationists visit (and many of the sociocultural and environmental dis benefits may occur within the area). Visitors who stay in urban centers and tour by car or coach may contribute to congestion on roads and crowding at honey pot sites but expend little locally. If rural accommodation is externally owned, leakage of expenditure takes place from the local area. Coach tour companies are often based in major cities and, increasingly, large European tour operators use their own coaches for international touring in Europe thereby retaining greater shares of profits. Tourists who travel in camper vans and caravans often bring supplies of food, drink, and alcohol and make limited purchases in the locales visited. The returns to the rural economy are likely to be greatest when the accommodation, food, and other products used, and the recreational activities en gaged in, are owned and produced locally. Hence, the increased attention being given to the refurbishment of underutilized rural buildings for accommodation, the promotion of speciality foods, and the development of food, drink, and historical trails. The Camino de Santiago which follows an historical pilgrim route from France across the Pyrenees through northern Spain, to the supposed tomb of St. James, the apostle, at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, illustrates the way in which heritage can provide an opportunity to attract and dis perse large numbers of hikers into quite remote rural areas and thereby support local economies. Studies of farm tourism in many countries reveal that tourism is usually a supplementary rather than a main source of income. Nevertheless, the aggregate contribution to the wider rural economy can be substantial, as the loss of income arising from restriction of access to the coun tryside during the foot and mouth crisis in the UK in spring and early summer 2001 illustrated.

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Sociocultural Impacts Tourism and recreational provision are sources of re placement and new employment in areas experiencing economic restructuring. Seasonality and the limited career opportunities that arise for locals are well known weakness of rural tourism employment. Winter ski resorts can benefit from summer tourism but many summer destinations are dependent on occasional festival celebrations to attract low season visitors. When present, full time employment may be held by immigrant managers rather than local people. In the absence of alternatives, seasonal employment is usually valued by local students and underemployed people. However, new farm accommodation providers often re ceive relatively low returns to their labor and capital inputs initially when demand is limited. In developing areas of the world where wage rates have been traditionally low, local labor may be subject to exploitative relationships. Tourists’ visits are often reported as engendering a sense of pride and self worth in rural societies. However, tourism may be socially disruptive. The apparent affluence of visitors can lead to feelings of inadequacy among local residents and especially among teenagers. Teenage dress and sexual mores may change under the influence of nontraditional norms and alcohol consumption often in creases. Major interruption of settlement patterns have been reported in developing areas: of both permanent and temporary settlement in Nepal, to meet the growing de mand for accommodation in the environs of Mount Everest, and the displacement of whole communities in Botswana to make way for tourism infrastructure. The cultural impacts of tourism in rural areas, like the economic and social impacts, are often mixed. Visitor interest in local cultures may lead to a revitalization of traditional music and dance, as among some Aboriginal communities in Australia and New Zealand, although concerns have been expressed about cultural degredation. The annual arrival of large numbers of second level stu dents to spend a 3 week period of language study in the Irish Gaeltacht, during the summer vacation, contributes to the increased use of the Irish language. Vernacular struc tures have been refurbished as tourist accommodation in many parts of France, Italy, and Spain. Threats to local cultures may, however, arise in association with tourism development. Thus the familial links encoded in local dress in Sa´mi cultural areas in northern Finland are said to be ignored in the generic costumes introduced through commercialization of tourism. In some cases the type of tourism developed lacks any link with the traditional cul ture or scale of settlement, as the gaming casinos favored in Indian reservations in the USA illustrate. Environmental Impacts Discussion of tourism and recreational impacts in the countryside is closely implicated with discourses relating

to environmental conservation and sustainability. Growth in visitor numbers and motorized vehicles on land and water, expansion of infrastructure and associated waste disposal, all pose threats to the physical environment. Most countries have had experience of surface erosion of popular mountain pathways and interruption or de struction of wildlife habitats as numbers of hikers have grown. Even less visually intrusive activities can have unforeseen consequences for ecological systems. Food left by tourists in the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland was identified during the 1990s as having attracted foxes which preyed on the indigenous ptarmigan and grouse. The single cell organism giardia, which causes gastro intestinal illness in humans and animals, has spread to remote areas in western USA, the Australian Alps, and New Zealand, apparently through unhygienic toilet practices among hikers. Examples such as these illustrate the need for principles of good practice to be followed by countryside visitors, such as those advocated by the Leave No Trace program in the USA.

Policy Concerns Rural tourism and recreation rely heavily on the physical landscape and on built archaeological and historical structures, as well as on local people and cultures. In stitutional policies and structures have been developed to promote tourism and to manage the use of the coun tryside and its resources for tourism and recreation. The State as Tourism Resource Provider and Manager In most countries, the state controls key resources used for recreation and tourism through its ownership of ex tensive areas of conserved landscapes (national parks in the USA and Canada, for example), the coastline and inland waterways, historical sites, buildings and museums, its investment in transport infrastructure and other public services, and through its grant aiding of entre preneurial activities. The use of both the public and private resource base is regulated through state legisla tion, land use, and physical planning provisions. The state at international level also designates areas for protection which have potential tourism and recreational uses: for example, EU Natura 2000 sites, Ramsar Wetland sites (arising from the convention signed at Ramsar in Iran in 1971), UNESCO World Heritage sites. Local com munities are being represented increasingly in manage ment structures for protected areas, as recommended by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Local Agenda 21, which arises from the 1987 United Nations Commission on Development, provides for community consultation in local government programs

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which potentially include rural tourism. In Australia, native title rights are recognized over traditional land areas in Crown lands and national parks and Aboriginal Tourism Australia has responsibility for indigenous tourism more generally. State Support The Organization for Economic Co operation and Development (OECD), the EU, and national govern ments have all promoted tourism as an alternative source of income in rural areas of developed countries under going economic restructuring since the late 1980s, as has the World Bank and national governments in developing countries. The former command economies of Central and Eastern Europe have identified rural tourism as a sector with particular economic potential. Assistance in the form of grant payments, training, and skills is usually available from the state in recognition of the difficulties inherent in adapting from primary activity to service provision. Private sector banks and other financial insti tutions may also provide special supports. Because of the small size of many rural tourism businesses, their dispersed nature, and a weak tradition of entrepreneur ship, partnership formation has been advocated as a method of developing and promoting assemblages of local tourism products, as part of the EU Leader pro gram, for example. Integrated Rural Tourism Recent research findings suggest that a more integrated approach to rural tourism development and management is required in both developed and developing countries to take greater account of the links between tourism, the resource base, other economic sectors, and the com plexity of actors implicated in producing, exchanging, and consuming tourism and recreational experiences. Partnerships and networking are central to this approach but a process of ongoing negotiation is required between the multiplicity of interests involved to ensure that multidimensional sustainability is achieved. See also: Cloke, P.; Cultural Economy; Economic Development, Rural; Ecotourism; Feminism/Feminist Geography; Heritage and Economy; Leisure; National Parks; Natures, Postcolonial; Non-Representational Theory/Non-Representational Geographies; Performativity; Postmodern City; Postmodernism/ Postmodern Geography; Post-Productivist and

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Multifunctional Agriculture; Resource Management, Rural; Second Homes; Structuration Theory; Sustainability; Tourism.

Further Reading Baerenholdt, J., Haldrup, M., Larsen, J. and Urry, J. (2004). Performing Tourist Places. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bramwell, B. and Lane, B. (eds.) (2000). Tourism Collaboration and Partnerships. Clevedon: Channel View Publications. Church, A. and Coles, T. (2006). Tourism, Power and Space. London: Routledge. Cloke, P. and Perkins, H. C. (2005). Cetacean performance and tourism in Kaikoura, New Zealand. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23, 903 924. Crouch, D. (2006). Tourism, consumption and rurality. In Cloke, P., Marsden, T. & Mooney, P. (eds.) Handbook of Rural Studies, pp 355 364. London: Sage. Hall, C. M. and Boyd, S. (eds.) (2005). Nature Based Tourism in Peripheral Areas: Development or Disaster? Clevedon: Channel View Publications. Hall, C. M. and Page, S. J. (2006). Rural recreation and tourism. In Hall, C. M. & Page, S. J. (eds.) The Geography of Tourism and Recreation (3rd edn.), pp 223 252. London: Routledge. Hall, D., Kirkpatrick, I. and Mitchell, M. (eds.) (2005). Rural Tourism and Sustainable Business. Clevedon: Channel View Publications. Hall, D., Roberts, L. and Mitchell, M. (eds.) (2003). New Directions in Rural Tourism. Aldershot: Ashgate. Perkins, H. (1993). Human geography, recreation and leisure. In Perkins, H. & Cushman, G. (eds.) Leisure, Recreation and Tourism, pp 116 129. Auckland: Longman Paul. Pigram, J. J. and Jenkins, J. M. (2006). Outdoor Recreation Management (2nd edn.). London: Routledge. Sharpley, R. and Telfer, D. (2007). Tourism and Development. London: Routledge. Shaw, G. and Williams, A. M. (2002). Critical Issues in Tourism: A Geographical Perspective (2nd edn.). Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, M. K. and Robinson, M. (eds.) (2006). Cultural Tourism in a Changing World. Clevedon: Channel View Publications. Urry, J. (2002). The Tourist Gaze (2nd edn.). London: Sage.

Relevant Websites http://www.iucn.org International Union for the Conservation of Nature. http://www.ec.europa.eu/agriculture/ruraldev Leaderplus Provides Examples of Rural Tourism in Practice, EU LEADER Program. http://www.lnt.org Leave No Trace Program. http://www.oecd.org OECD: Has Useful Publications Relating to Rural Tourism. http://www.ramsar.org Ramsar Convention on Wetland Sites. http://www.unesco.org UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserves; UNESCO World Heritage List. http://www.world tourism.org UN World Tourism Organization.

Tourism, Urban T. Hall, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction Reviewing the literature on urban tourism leads to the conclusion that it is a somewhat peripheral concern within human geography. It is relatively rare, although not un known, for human geographers to write exclusively about urban tourism, but urban tourism is often acknowledged as an important element within broader discussions of con temporary urban change and development, particularly where these focus on urban regeneration. However, in being subsumed within these broader discussions, urban tourism remains somewhat underexplored and theorized within the context of human geography. This mirrors, to an extent, a neglect of urban tourism in disciplines such as tourism studies and urban studies, as noted by Gregory Ashworth in his two seminal reviews of the subject. Ash worth noted a failure by tourism researchers to acknow ledge the contexts within which tourism occurs and by urban studies researchers who have consistently failed to recognize the significance of tourism to the economies, not to mention the cultures and landscapes, of towns and cities. The relative invisibility of urban tourism has long been a weakness of these disciplines, but is particularly so in the context of the postindustrial economy where such a volume of diverse tourist activities now take place in urban areas and where tourism is emerging as an increasingly significant driver of urban development in a growing range of urban areas. Having said this, since the early 1990s, there has been a growth in the literature on urban tourism. However, this literature has been somewhat diffused in disciplinary terms and only serves to confirm that urban tourism has not emerged as a distinctive research focus within human geography in its own right. It is instructive to note, for example, that urban tourism has no dedicated inter national journal. Of the literature that has emerged we can recognize three prevailing themes. First is a focus on the nature, characteristics, and diversity of urban tourism destinations, which typically recognize the diversity of groups who use them. Second is a consideration of the interrelationships between the supply of tourist facilities, the demands of tourists, and urban tourism policies. Fi nally, urban tourism has been seen as a characteristic of the postindustrial economy and examined in the contexts of structural changes in late capitalism, a shift toward entrepreneurialism in city governance, and the emer gence of postmodern processes of urbanization. The last of these is of most interest from the perspective of critical

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human geography, but does tend to again subsume urban tourism within wider discussions of urban change. While this can be seen as appropriate, in that it seeks to con textualize urban tourism and make links to other aspects of urban development, it has tended to compound the failure of urban tourism to emerge as a distinctive focus of research both within human geography and cognate disciplines. This article concludes by discussing three growing areas of urban tourism research of particular interest to human geography and in which human geographers are well placed to contribute both empiric ally and in terms of the methodology and theoretical development or urban tourism research.

Historical and Contemporary Patterns Urban tourism, defined as visits to settlements not linked to their service functions or for military reasons, can be traced back to the Middle Ages to the practice of re ligious pilgrimage. The development of cities such as Canterbury in England or Santiago de Compostella in Spain reflects this historical function. Although pilgrims would not have recognized themselves as tourists, their journeys share sufficient characteristics with modern definitions of tourism for them to be classified thus. Pil grimage remains a significant form of urban tourism to a range of destinations such as Lourdes in France, and Mecca. The eighteenth century was also a significant period in the history of urban tourism that saw the emergence of a range of tourist practices, all largely confined to the wealthy, which were predominantly centered on urban areas. These included travel to spa towns such as Cheltenham and Bath in the southwest of England for health and medical reasons, travel to capital cities for cultural entertainment and social engagements during the so called ‘season’, and the grand tours undertaken around European cultural centers by young aristocrats. Travel motivations began to diversify in the mid nineteenth century and early forms of business and events tourism emerged in the form of large exhibitions of arts, crafts, industry, and technology held in large cities. The first of these was held at Crystal Palace in 1851. Later examples included those held in Paris in 1855 and 1889 and Barcelona in 1888 and 1929. These were often significant vehicles both in the promotion and de velopment of the cities in which they were held. They also heralded the ongoing importance of events of

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various kinds in the histories of urban tourism and urban development. Business travel, more generally, expanded over through the twentieth century with the growth of international trade and the globalization of business. The industrialization of Europe and beyond from the mid nineteen century is significant because it saw the formal recognition of leisure time, as distinct from that of work, and the emergence of set periods within the cal endar which were deemed holiday time. A consequence of this was the development of mass tourism centered predominantly in seaside resorts such as Blackpool in the north of England which were accessed by an expanding railway network from nearby industrial metropolises. The late twentieth century has seen the continued evo lution of mass tourism alongside the emergence of a variety of niche tourist markets. The growth in people’s leisure time and increasingly flexible patterns of working has seen people take more frequent holidays, often of shorter duration, accessing a greater diversity of destin ations. Many of these niche markets are centered on some form of urban tourism; the growing popularity of ‘city breaks’ in the early twenty first century has been evi dence of this.

Classifying Urban Tourism Attempts to define and classify urban tourism reflect the complexity of the process. Classifications of urban tour ism destinations have sought to reflect a diversity of elements including the range of tourist facilities they possess, the origins of visitors, the popularity of destin ations, the processes of tourist development, and the nature of places. They have typically sought to either categorize the supply side of urban tourism (destinations and their facilities) or the demand side (tourists). Judd and Fainstein, for example, recognize a threefold classification which distinguishes between tourism ur banization (planned or unplanned specialized resorts), tourism historic cities/ancient cities and converted cities while Jansen Verbeke has classified the facilities within tourist destinations recognizing a distinction between primary elements, secondary elements, and additional elements (Table 1). Burtenshaw et al. offer a rare ex ample that has sought to combine both the demand and the supply side within a single model (Figure 1).

Table 1

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The elements of tourisma

Primary elements Activity place

Leisure setting

Cultural facilities Concert halls

Physical characteristics Ancient monuments and statues Ecclesiastical buildings Harbors Historical street pattern Interesting buildings Parks and green areas Water, canals, and river fronts

Cinemas Exhibitions Museums and art galleries Theatres Sports facilities Indoor and outdoor Amusement facilities Bingo halls Casinos Festivities Night clubs Organized events Secondary elements Hotel and catering facilities Markets Shopping facilities

Socio-cultural features Folklore Friendliness Language Liveliness and ambience of the place Local customs and costumes Security Additional elements Accessibility and parking facilities Tourist facilities: information offices, signposts, guides, maps, and leaflets

a Based on Jansen Verbeke, M. (1986). Inner city tourism: Resources, tourists, and promoters. Annals of Tourism Research 13(1), 79 100.

urban tourism. The urban tourism data that does exist is either produced by a range of national and regional tourism organizations, local authorities, commercial or ganizations, or academics, or is derived indirectly from WTO and OECD data. The former sources raise po tential issues of comparability related to the different methods through which data is collected and the cat egories used to collect and organize data. While statistics from these sources cover many aspects of urban tourism including numbers of arrivals, volumes of trips, origins of visitors, types of tourism and tourist motivations, trip duration, tourist activities, use of services, and expend iture, currently there are no standard international data sources for urban tourism that allow systematic, com parative analyses of tourism between different cities.

Tourism and Urban Development Urban Tourism Data One thing that has bedevilled urban tourism research has been the lack of international statistical data to allow comparative analysis. The major sources of international tourism data, the World Tourism Organization (WTO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) do not collect data specifically on

Prior to the 1980s it was rare for policy makers, local authorities, or commercial interests in urban areas, apart from specially developed tourist resorts or those with long traditions of tourism, to recognize tourism as a significant economic activity, either actual or potential. However, the coincidence of widespread de industrial ization of urban economies in the older industrialized

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Tourism, Urban Users (tourists, residents, day-trippers)

Linkages between users and resources

The resident and the local visitor

Resources

Regions of activity (i.e., city type)

Monuments Museums/ visitor attractions/ art galleries Cinemas/ concert venues/ theaters

Holidaymaker

Nightclubs/ bars/brothels/ prostitution

Business/ conference delegate

Cafés/bars/ restaurants/ hospitality activities Shops and consumptive activites Offices/work premises

City worker

Sport stadiums/ events Historic city

Nightlife city

Cultural city (i.e., cultural industries)

Leisure shopping city

Business city

Tourist city

Sport city

Figure 1 Functional areas in the tourist city.

countries and the steady growth of world tourism saw an increasing range of urban areas exploring the potential of tourism as a way to address the interrelated problems of economy, image, and environment. The model of tourism based on urban regeneration pioneered by Baltimore in the USA, who in the late 1970s redeveloped an extensive area of its derelict Inner Harbor by creating a number of leisure attractions, museums, a convention center, hotels, a festival shopping center, and later sports stadiums, be came a blueprint adopted by many cities internationally. Typically the resultant developments were mixed use (to cater for leisure, retail, cultural, and business tourists), were often anchored around one or more major ‘flagship’ regeneration projects, combined new developments with the reuse of historic urban fabric, were often based around derelict waterfronts, received extensive public funding, and were accompanied by programs of place promotion designed to address often negatively perceived urban images. Increasingly cities also competed for temporary events or festivals such as Olympic Games or

European ‘City of Culture’ celebrations, or developed their own events, and used these as catalysts for re generation. This emphasis on tourism based programs of economic development has been recognized as symp tomatic of a shift toward an entrepreneurial city politics in which cities have become more innovative, risk taking, speculative, and competitive than had been the case in the past. Commentators have recognized that the prior ities of city governments have shifted from a managerial concern with social welfare achieved through the distri bution of resources among urban populations toward an entrepreneurial concern with capturing external sources of investment, tourists and their spending key among them. Two cities that exemplify the increasing importance of urban tourism are Birmingham in the UK and Bar celona in northern Spain. Birmingham’s regeneration, initiated in the mid 1980s, included the building of a convention center, opened in 1991 at the cost of d180 million, largely financed through public funding, and

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associated hotel developments, extensive redevelopment of its central area, and subsequently a major retail re development. These were a response to the de indus trialization of its predominantly manufacturing economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which saw over 300 000 jobs lost in the city between 1980 and 1982. Associated problems that regeneration sought to address included derelict industrial capital adjacent to the city center, an unpopular post war redevelopment of the city center, and a poorly regarded external image. The regeneration of the city has led to a significant increase in tourist spending within Birmingham. For example, it has been estimated that the 1998 International Rotary Meeting held at the International Convention Center attracted 23 000 delegates resulting in spending of almost d20 million in the city during the meeting, much of which remained in the local market. There is also evidence of economic diversification within the city’s economy as sociated with its growing tourist economy as well as less tangible positive impacts on civic pride and the city’s image. Despite this some critics have argued that this has done little, if anything, to improve levels of social welfare among the city’s most deprived populations or reduce social exclusion. While apparently sharing many similarities with Bir mingham, in that it has targeted cultural and business tourists through flagship developments, Barcelona has adopted a somewhat different approach to the develop ment of its urban tourist economy. Some critics have accused Birmingham of what Greg Richards (1996) called ‘‘a tendency for culture to be produced for tourist consumption’’. Diane Dodd has argued that Barcelona, by contrast, pursued tourist development both as a way of promoting economic development and as a platform for the re invigoration of its regional culture and identity. The pursuit of cultural, and to a lesser extent business, tourism was in part a reaction to the negative impacts of mass beach tourism in surrounding resorts, in part a way of addressing the economic problems stemming from the city’s de industrialization, and a recognition of the growing significance of these sectors of the world tourism market. The conscious positioning of local culture alongside urban regeneration was crucial in gaining public support for the catalyst event, the hosting of the 1992 Olympic Games in the city. This, and subsequent initiatives, saw massive infrastructural improvements throughout the city, numerous major landscaping pro jects, and the provision of a number of new cultural fa cilities such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona. Barcelona is widely regarded as a model of successful tourist based urban regeneration. There is no denying the impacts on the physical and cultural infra structure of the city and its tourist economy. However, some critics have voiced concern over the impacts of gentrification associated with the development of cultural

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facilities in marginal neighborhoods and overinvestment in the hard infrastructure of cultural provision rather than the creative process, citing the lack of funding for local and community arts groups, for example. Finally, the rapid growth in stag and hen party tourism in the early twenty first century, and the popularity of Barce lona as a destination, is threatening to taint the experi ence of those tourists who travel to the city for more refined cultural activities. These examples illustrate the heightened recognition among local officials and policy makers of the signifi cance of tourism to urban development. It is common for the media to talk about both of these cities in terms of an apparent transformation since the mid 1980s. While one might dispute the substance of such journalistic claims, it is impossible to deny the role of tourism in fueling the changes that have occurred within both cities.

Issues There are a number of issues within urban tourism where a paucity of research has been identified or which are areas of current interest across a range of cognate dis ciplines. Three are identified and discussed below. These are all areas with which human geographers have en gaged or are currently undertaking research within. These constitute a research agenda into which human geographers could contribute and through which cross disciplinary dialogs might profitably develop. The Urban Tourism Experience Studies of the urban tourism experience include exam inations of tourists within the tourist environment. They might encompass studies of the relationships between a number of elements including: the motivations of tourists and the importance of their prior knowledge of en vironments, tourists’ perceptions and cognition of the environment, the values or importance that tourists at tach to different elements of the environment, and the behavior and activities of tourists. Despite well developed traditions in both social psychology and behavioral geography of researching people’s perceptions of the environment, there have been relatively few studies of the ways in which tourists make sense of the environments of tourist destinations. This is surprising given the obvious value of such research to the planning, development, policy, and management of urban tourism destinations and, indeed, to all types of tourist destinations. A pioneering study of the urban tourism experience was that conducted by Jensen Verbeke comparing the values that tourists and residents attached to different elements of city center environments finding both dif ferences in the motivations underlying their visits and

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similarities in the elements of the environment they valued. Despite the value of Jensen Verbeke’s contri butions, a number of changes that have occurred since the original research was conducted make it timely to revisit and update the study. Since Jensen Verbeke undertook his study many city centers have seen con siderable increases in their residential populations and considerable growth and diversification of their tourist economies. It would be instructive, for example, to con sider the impacts of the re imagination of urban areas in the West as sites and landscapes of leisure and the in creasing promotion of city center lifestyles through touristic rhetoric and discourses. Rather than simply re running Jensen Verbeke’s study it might be profitably expanded to compare the values and attitudes of different groups of tourists, for example, leisure and business tourists, new populations of wealthy city center resi dents, established residents of less affluent inner city areas, and outer city residents. This is one of many areas where human geographers might contribute to studies of the urban tourist experience. The Impacts of Urban Tourism Tourists have a number of impacts on destinations; often of the most concern to destinations are the economic impacts associated with expenditure on travel, accom modation, food, and entertainment. Tourist spending has a multiplier effect through local economies. Tourists spend money directly, for example, on travel, hotels, food, and drink. This in turn generates indirect expenditure as tourist facilities pay staff salaries, bills, and taxes, and buy supplies. Finally induced expenditure refers to the spending of those employed in the tourist industry. However, there is also a leakage effect as money leaves the local economy through taxation, purchases from external suppliers, or as profits to external companies who own and operate tourist facilities within destinations. Generally speaking, the larger the spatial scale under consideration, the greater the potential for self sufficiency and hence the greater the chance that tourist expenditure will circulate throughout the local economy rather than leak out of it. In addition to the positive economic impacts of tourism, there are potential economic costs. Successful tourist developments can have inflationary pressures, for example, on the cost of land. This can have negative impacts on local populations who might be displaced by tourist led gentrification of residential areas. Tourism can also bring with it additional costs associated with mar keting and the maintenance of facilities. Tourism is also a very vulnerable and potentially unstable industry in a number of ways. External threats to tourist destinations include competition from other destinations and new developments, shifts in patterns of tourist activity and changes in taste, reductions in the numbers of

international travelers, and concerns over the perceived safety of specific destinations stemming from media re ports of crime or from terrorist attacks, currency ex change rates making certain destinations relatively expensive, and events such as natural disasters. In the longer term, tourist destinations have been recognized as possessing a life cycle. This is characterized by phases of growth and maturity, with rising and then steadying visitor numbers, followed by a period of de cline as tastes change or technology and price changes make other destinations more attractive. The rise and subsequent decline of many ‘traditional’ British seaside resorts fit this model well. The costs of bucking these life cycle trends and the risks of these inherently speculative ventures are very high. Another potentially negative aspect of tourism is the criticism that many jobs in the tourist industry are low paid and low skilled. Many destinations also have a distinctive ‘season’ during which tourists visit. The problems of lack of tourist income out of season are obvious as are the prob lems associated with quality of life for residents of tourist destinations when the majority of facilities are closed down. Finally, some critics have recognized the potential conflicts between tourists and residents, for example, as sociated with congestion at peak visitor times and sites. Tourism also has social and cultural impacts on its host communities. A number of studies have attempted to devise indexes or matrixes that capture the attitudes of local residents to tourism or their relationship with them. These include Doxey’s Index of Tourist Irritation (Irri dex). Doxey argued that host communities pass through four stages in terms of their attitude toward tourists (euphoria, apathy, annoyance, and antagonism). Such devises offer useful frameworks within which to think about the social and cultural relationships between hosts and tourists but they are not subtle enough to capture the truly complex nature of these relationships. Within any one city there is likely to be a wide range of feelings toward tourism and, indeed, individuals may hold a range of attitudes toward tourism. For example, while certain residents might welcome cultural or business tourists, and the investment in and development of associated cultural and business facilities, they might feel less wel coming toward sports tourists and weekend tourists as sociated with stag and hen parties or they might express moral concerns over gambling tourism. Again recognition of the complexities of attitudes and behavior and the diversity of the tourist economies of towns and cities is important to appreciate the nature of the social and cultural impacts of urban tourism. Tourism and the Postmodern City Urban geographers since the 1980s have argued that we have been witnessing the emergence of the new urban

Tourism, Urban

forms that they have characterized as postmodern cities. They agree that these new cities are more fragmentary in their form, more chaotic in structure, and are generated by different processes of urbanization than earlier cities. Rather than being a single coherent entity, postmodern cities are typically described as consisting of a number of large, spectacular, residential and commercial develop ments with large environmentally and economically de graded spaces in between. They are said to resemble a pattern of stars floating in space rather than the unitary metropolitan development growing steadily outward from a single center. Another element of the post modernization of cities has been the increasing in corporation of fantasy and hyperreality into urban landscapes. This is perhaps most developed in certain specialist tourist resorts such as Las Vegas or the Disney resorts. The case of urban tourism highlights limitations in debates about the postmodern city. While tourism has been recognized as a characteristic of the postmodern city there has been little discussion of the role of tourism per se in the development of postmodern city forms and urban landscapes, save some discussions of the fantasy landscapes of specialist destinations such as Las Vegas. This is less a reflection of the significance of tourism to the postmodernization of cities, more a reflection of the limited empirical foundations upon which debates rest. Tourism is a significant aspect of the economies of cities such as Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo. It is not, however, a significant driver of the postmodernization of these cities relative to other elements of their economies such as concentrations of corporate headquarters or their roles as international financial markets. By contrast though, as one moves down the urban hierarchy to major provincial cities the centrality of tourism to the processes of their postmodern urban ization become much more apparent. These cities have tended to lack the sorts of links to the global economy that have driven the recent development of cities such as Los Angeles and Tokyo. Rather cities such as Birming ham, Glasgow, and Barcelona have had to forge new links to international circuits of capital. It is an almost ubi quitous response of cities of this kind to do so through the development of their tourism economies. Post modernism as a process of urban development has been written into the landscapes of a growing number of major provisional cities, and it is done so, to a significant degree in these cities through major tourist developments such as Birmingham’s International Convention Center or Bilbao’s Guggenhiem Museum, or events such as ‘City of Culture’ celebrations, or the hosting of Olympic Games. Studies of urban tourism highlight both the limitations characteristic of discussions about postmodernism in cities and the failure to situate discussions of urban

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tourism in wider theoretical debates. Human geographers are ideally placed to expand discussions about the post modern city beyond the currently limited range of ex amples. In doing so they should aim to highlight the broader significance of urban tourism to ongoing pro cesses of urbanization. See also: Heritage and Economy; Postmodern City; Regeneration to Renaissance.

Further Reading Ashworth, G. J. (1989). Urban tourism: An imbalance in attention. In Cooper, C. P. (ed.) Progress in Tourism, Recreation, and Hospitality Management, vol. 1, pp 33 54. London: Belhaven Press. Ashworth, G. J. (1989). Urban tourism: Still an imbalance in attention. In Cooper, C. P. (ed.) Classic Reviews in Tourism, pp 143 163. Channel View: Clevedon. Burtenshaw, D., Bateman, M. and Ashworth, G. J. (1991). The City in Western Europe (2nd edn.). Chichester: Wiley. Dodd, D. (2003). Barcelona: The making of a cultural city. In Miles, M., Hall, T. & Borden, I. (eds.) The City Cultures Reader, pp 177 182. London: Routledge. Doxey, G. V. (1975). A causation theory of visitor resident irritants: Methodology and research inferences. pp 195 198, Proceedings of the Travel Research Association Sixth Annual Conference, San Diego, CA: Travel Research Association. Hall, C. M. and Page, S. J. (2006). The Geography of Tourism and Recreation (3rd edn.). Abingdon: Routledge. Jansen Verbeke, M. (1986). Inner city tourism: Resources, tourists, and promoters. Annals of Tourism Research 13(1), 79 100. Jansen Verbeke, M. (1988). Leisure, Recreation and Tourism in Inner Cities. Explorative Case Studies, Netherlands Geographical Case Studies 58, Amsterdam: Koninklijk Nederlands Aardrijk skundig Genootschap. Judd, D. and Fainstein, S. (1999). The Tourist City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kotler, P., Asplund, C., Rein, I. and Haider, D. H. (1999). Marketing Places Europe: How to Attract Investments, Industries, Residents, and Visitors to Cities, Communities, Regions, and Nations in Europe. London: Pearson. Law, C. M. (2002). Urban Tourism: The Visitor Economy and the Growth of Large Cities. London: Continumm. Page, S. (1995). Urban Tourism. London: Routledge. Richards, G. (1996). Cultural Tourism in Europe. Walingford: CABI. Shaw, G. and Williams, A. M. (1994). Critical Issues in Tourism: A Geographical Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell.

Relevant Websites http://www.tourisminbarcelona.com Barcelona. http://www.visitbirmingham.com Birmingham. http://www.sogaer.ex.ac.uk/geography/tourism/gltrg/welcome.html Geography of Leisure and Tourism Research Group. http://www.tourismconcern.org.uk Tourism Concern. http://www.ratztamara.com/tourism.html Tourism Research. http://www.world tourism.org World Tourism Authority.

Trade Blocs J. P. H. Poon, University at Buffalo-SUNY, Buffalo, NY, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Bilateralism Trade or political relations between two states. Comparative Advantage The ability of a country to produce a good at a lower opportunity cost compared to another country. Free Trade Area When two or more countries agree to eliminate trade barriers between themselves while keeping national trade barriers against nonparticipating countries. Friction of Distance A term to describe the negative effect of distance between places. Multilateralism When two or more states coordinate national policies and relations among themselves according to some principle.

Introduction The role of international commerce and trade has long been of interest to human geographers. One of the earliest publications on the topic may be found in Chisholm’s 1889 Handbook of Commercial Geography which became an important guide book for British merchants and traders. For contemporary human geographers, international commerce and trade constitutes an im portant inquiry because of the inherent spatiality of trade flows, particularly the influence of distance on the level of trade between countries. In general, trade is highest between geographically proximate countries, for in stance, one of the world’s largest bilateral trade flows occurs between the United States and Canada. This positive relationship between trade interactions and geographical proximity has spurred countries to enhance economic interactions through regional arrangements such as the 1994 North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), the 1965 European Economic Community, now the European Union (EU), and the 1992 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Free Trade Area (AFTA). As of 2005, countries of the EU consist of the original European Economic Community (EEC) coun tries including Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Austria, Finland, and Sweden joined the EU in 1995 and ten more countries were added since 2004, that is, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia, bringing the total number to 25. Members of

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AFTA comprise the ten Southeast Asian countries of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The benefits of regional trade arrangements, however, have been hotly debated because of the fear that such regional arrangements will assume bloc like characteristics that exclude the participation of nonmembers. The term ‘trade blocs’ has thus evoked not only positive and negative arguments in the academic community but its realization is also contested among civic groups including labor and environmental groups.

Trade Blocs: Pros and Cons Broadly speaking, the benefits and disbenefits of a trade bloc may be evaluated in terms of two schools of thought. The first school led by liberal economists and inter national relations scholars argues that trade blocs are a suboptimal solution to govern economic interactions and relations compared to free trade and multilateralism. Both free trade and multilateral principles are based largely on the logic of comparative advantage that state that a country is better off specializing in the production of a good that it does best than producing all of its own goods. This nation should then trade for another good that it does not produce even if it possesses absolute advantage in the production of both goods. The main idea here pertains to that of the country’s relative ad vantage and the benefits of specialization arising from such advantage. Noncoercive trade between countries in turn is more likely to create multilateral economic exchanges. In international relations, multilateralism facilitates the coordination of policies among groups of countries. Under the multilateral principle of international trade, trade relations are organized around the principle of non discrimination, namely the most favored nation (MFN) treatment that is embodied originally in the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the latter of which has since been subsumed by the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. Regional blocs, on the other hand, are thought to be discriminatory since they involve some form of preferential treatment to members of the arrangement. Under GATT, provisions for regional trade agreements (RTAs) that underscore trade blocs are speltled out in Article XXIV. These pro visions enable countries to form free trade agreements (FTAs) under certain conditions such as the facilitation of trade between FTA members such that they do not raise

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barriers to the trade of other contracting parties. With the creation of the WTO, a Committee on Regional Trade Agreements (CRTA) has been formed to provide a means for reconciling regional trade initiatives to the organiza tion’s multilateral trading principle. However, advocates of multilateralism consider regional arrangements to be a less desirable spatial vehicle for organizing international trade, since they potentially compartmentalize trade interactions into closed intrablocs and discourage infor mation flows between regions thereby increasing the possibility for interbloc conflicts. Indeed for political analysts, the strongest argument for multilateralism and free trade is that they provide the basis for international growth and political stability. According to the GATT/WTO, there are close to 150 regional trading agreements as notified by its members, and another 100 in force since 1948. Most WTO mem bers are participants of at least one of such agreements though the share is much higher for European (60%) than developing countries (15%). The proliferation of RTAs suggests that despite strong arguments for non discriminatory multilateral trade, regional governance remains a popular mode of geographical coordination. This may be due to the perceived difficulties of achieving free trade among a large number of countries, for ex ample, the demands of environmental and labor stand ards by industrialized countries in international trade practices which are viewed to be a form of disguised protectionism by developing countries. More recently, long standing trade deficits between the US, as well as Europe, and Japan, and growing trade deficits with newcomers like China, have led to demands for fairer trade. These demands reflect a concern that mercantilist countries in Asia are not driven by static comparative advantages so that economic solutions need to be sought at the regional than global level. Growing support for trade arrangements in the form of geographical blocs has in turn generated new arguments for regional than multilateral cooperation and thereby the relevance of bloc making. The possibility of trade blocs as an efficient spatial mechanism to manage and regulate economic and political spaces underscores the second school of thought which is elaborated further below. First, there is the argument that geographically proximate trade is efficient while small is beautiful. Krugman has shown that countries trade more with their neighbors than with distant countries arising from lower transport and transaction costs. Countries that form trade blocs on the basis of ‘natural’ geography are thus likely to benefit from such an arrangement. On the other hand, when non natural blocs drive trade arrangements, this is less beneficial since such blocs are more likely to create trade diversion from nonmembers. In other words, non natural blocs are negatively regarded in economic orthodoxy because of their welfare reducing

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implications. Second, a larger number of countries also increase the complexity of the nature of economic interactions so that regulatory frameworks are much more difficult to formulate. An increasingly popular re sponse in the regulation of cross country trade in the context of large number problems has been the down sizing of international economic relations to minilateral relations. Large number problems may be illustrated by the number of countries that are members of the WTO, that is, 149 from less than 30 when GATT was formed in 1948. Tariff reductions under GATT occurred in a series of trade rounds, the last of which was associated with the Uruguay Rounds (1986–94). That the trade rounds were contentious, protracted, and often difficult, and that they did not result in reductions in barriers on trade in agri culture or services have led to the belief that trade ne gotiations could be more effective when applied to a smaller number of countries. In turn, the world trading system could be more effectively managed under a sys tem of regional blocs where trade liberalization goals are more modest so that the overall outcome is that of minilateralism than multilateralism. Other economic arguments for minilateral blocs may be found in the new or strategic trade theory. The new trade theory suggests that contrary to conventional wis dom, comparative advantage is arbitrary. States that intervene strategically, particularly in certain technolo gical industries, could exploit regional spillovers from economies of scale, thereby creating comparative ad vantage in these nations. The new protectionist impli cations of the strategic trade theory saw a shift in the United States away from its post war free trade policies in the late 1980s. Geographer Richard Grant notes that domestic institutional changes through interactions be tween international and national politics determine US trade policies. Hence while US hegemony was strengthe ned by free trade policies in the post war years, under pressures from increased competition from Japan and Germany, regionalism became an increasingly popular foreign policy tool in the 1980s. The Clinton adminis tration, for instance, was much more persuaded by ar guments of the nonbenefits of free trade and the advantages of strategic trade policies. To some com mentators, US departure from its post war policy of trade liberalization and free trade unleashed a domino effect as other countries began to convert to a more regional mode of economic operation in trade. In addition, from a political and international relations point of view, trade that is conducted between members of a regional institution (e.g., preferential trade agree ment) can help to reduce the likelihood of military conflicts. Similar to the argument of minilateralism, some political economic analysts believe that multilateral in stitutions are best achieved at a smaller geographical

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scale, and international stability is more attainable through the pursuit of peaceful regional neighborhoods. Regional trade agreements facilitate the lowering of transaction costs through the increase in informational flows and institutional linkages. This in turn fosters greater economic interdependencies that are conducive for resolving collaboration problems between countries. John Maynard Keynes, for example, anticipated such a positive relationship for Europe, as well as Turkey, Egypt, and India in the 1950s with his proposal for a free trade union among these countries.

important explanatory variable in Asia’s growing intrar egional trade and investment among overseas Chinese firms which have established dense interfirm trade net works through advantages of language and ethnic knowledge and interrelations. This has led to calls to coordinate the increase in density of interstate trade interactions through regional arrangements. However, for reasons that are elaborated below, bloc production has progressed only very slowly in the Asia Pacific.

Trade Blocs and Developing Countries The Geography of Trade Blocs From a human geography perspective, regional trade blocs more closely approximate Krugman’s natural blocs. In her study of world trade flows, Poon found that most intercountry trade interactions are organized along continental lines and that such regionalization has strengthened over time from 1980 to 2000. Similarly, O’ Loughlin and Anselin found evidence of bloc stability around the three cores of the United States, Germany, and Japan from 1968 to 1992. This is because inter national trade is influenced by the friction of distance, that is, both absolute and relative distance. This reflects the costs of economic exchanges across space. However, whereas economic analysis tends to examine geo graphical costs typically in terms of absolute costs (e.g., higher transport costs with greater physical distance) through gravity like model formulations, human geog raphers are just as interested in relative costs that are associated with cultural and political factors. The US–Israel FTA as well as Korea’s FTA with Chile illustrate the expansion and integration of economic space that is based not so much on lower physical costs from natural geography as in political factors: the US displays a strong geostrategic interest in Israel, while political opposition from Korea’s farmers and historical sensitivities associated with neighboring Japan have forced the Korean government to establish a trade agreement with a distant than nearby country. Political economic factors also help to explain the continental economic integration of Canada and US that sub sequently developed into the present NAFTA. Despite attempts by Canada to reduce its dependence on the US market for its staples and resources, including the control of foreign direct investment, continental regionalism proceeded because of the possibility of a regulatory framework for resolving long standing trade disputes (e.g., U.S. protectionist tendencies toward Canada’s lum ber industry) through the establishment of dispute mechanisms. Similarly, cultural factors can also play a role in motivating bloc production. Cultural factors are an

Among developing countries, trade blocs are formed even when intraregional trade levels are low. AFTA’s share of intraregional trade is less than 20% suggesting that most countries in Southeast Asia are trading with non Southeast Asian countries. Moreover, intraregional trade is dominated by bilateral flows between Singapore and Malaysia, and Singapore and Indonesia. Similarly, intraregional trade among the MERCOSUR countries of Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina is only about 15%. In contrast, over 60% of trade in the EU is intraregional suggesting that a majority of its members are trading with one another. One explanation for the difference in trade patterns between blocs from de veloping countries and those of industrialized countries is that developing countries associate bloc making with a potential loss of political sovereignty in the former. In the Asia Pacific, scholars have pointed to the dearth of regional institutions despite rising levels of intra regional trade and investment, and the articulation of a localized economic space. Intraregional trade is pre dominantly driven by two sources: the outward direct investment of Japanese firms in Asia and the latter’s concomitant positive effect on increased intrafirm trade, and the economic activities of overseas Chinese firms. Economic regionalism is particularly strong among the more industrialized countries of Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Southern China. In addition to the activities of overseas Chinese firms, Yeung also points to the integrative forces arising from the regional net works of transnational corporations. Despite these posi tive integrative trends, East Asia remains one of the least regionalized areas in terms of formal institutional gov ernance: there is no sign of an East Asian free trade area being formed anytime soon, for example. Meanwhile, AFTA took nearly 30 years to form and its tariff elim ination schedule was moved forward to 2003 from 2008 in order to compete for foreign direct investment that is increasingly being directed to China. The most common explanation for the apparent lack of bloc production in the Asia Pacific is associated with the sovereignty sensitivities of the nations here. Regional institutions require a set of rules that govern economic exchanges,

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but countries here are averse to power delegation at a supraregional scale. Historical difficulties associated with Japan’s World War II activities hinder the most indus trialized core in the region from organizing Asian countries in the same manner that the US is organizing Latin America in the proposed free trade area of the Americas. China is an emerging and potential core in the future but its role is being contested by the United States which has remained lukewarm in regional initiatives by Asian countries. Suspicions regarding supraregionalism are also manifested in narratives of Asian cultural values that suggest that legalization and formal regulation accom panying Western forms of institutional organization are irrelevant to Asian regionalism because the latter is characterized by more informal forms of negotiations and political convergence around mutual consensus than formal rules. These suspicions have meant that insti tutional linkages have been slow to form. ASEAN, for instance, was largely under institutionalized until the recent implementation of its free trade agreement. Similarly trade liberalization is voluntary than man datory among member countries of the pan Pacific Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). Instead more formal regional trade relations are being proposed or formed on the basis of bilateralism, for example, the free trade agreements between Singapore and the US, Singapore and Australia, and Thailand and Australia. Critics see the proliferation of bilateral trade agreements in Asia as a reflection of the difficulties of larger regional deals associated with political sensitivities. Gunning too notes the difficulties of implementing regional trade blocs in Africa. Like many Asian countries, intraregional trade is low so that ‘‘free trade within the bloc would generate no trade.’’ Yet Africa has pursued several regional arrangements (e.g., the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa or COMESA, and the South Africa Zimbabwe FTA) under the assumption that this would enable the exploitation of economies of scale with increased competition and enlarged markets. While the progress and economic performance of these blocs have been dismal, noneconomic objectives such as im proved security in the context of Southern African De velopment Community (SADC) appear to have fared better. Gunning further concludes that bloc production in sub Saharan Africa may do better to emphasize in frastructural improvements than trade liberalization, since many countries here suffer from high transport costs and thereby investment diversion arising from poor locational incentives. While the discussion above suggests that bloc for mation is driven by rather different motivations among developing countries, it has also become apparent that trade blocs are being formed between countries from both developed and developing countries. NAFTA is a

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good example of this and there is a possibility of ex panding NAFTA to the rest of South America in the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas. Meanwhile, regional enlargement is also being contemplated in the EU with its eastward and southward drift. Part of such increased north–south integration may be explained by the new logics of geographies in bloc formation. De veloping countries in the 1960s, for instance, were much more inclined to form trade blocs on the assumption that this would enlarge a large domestic market that would promote local infant industries and force an industrial ization process away from historical core–periphery de pendency on the West. These undertakings did not turn out to be successful in part because the lessons of import substitution indicated a loss in international com petitiveness arising from rent seeking. As export pro motion became increasingly popular in the 1990s, led by several East Asian countries, reintegration of developing countries to the North came to center on the search for export markets in industrialized countries, and new comparative advantages or complementarities.

Conclusion This article has examined the interrelationship bet ween trade blocs and geography. A central theme is that most trade blocs are regional in nature because of the advantages of geographical proximity including lower transport costs. However, not all trade blocs are motiv ated by considerations of absolute costs and natural geography. Several regional FTAs, for example, consist of countries that are non neighbors and are motivated by noneconomic factors such as cultural or political rela tionships. This suggests the possibility of multiple scales of economic and potentially political and institutional governance as nations confront the increasingly global scale of economic activities including financial inte gration and social movements (e.g., environmental and labor), not just trade and investment. On one end of the spatial spectrum, the most common regional arrangement occurs at the bilateral level, and earlier paragraphs point to this scale as becoming increasingly privileged in contemporary international regionalism. At the other end of the spectrum lies the continental scale of integration as has been attempted in Europe or the pan Pacific APEC. Globalization also leads to new geographies in the form of hub and spoke regional arrangements such as the FTAs being proposed for ASEAN and China, ASEAN and Korea, ASEAN and India, EC and South Africa, EC and Chile, etc. One way to interpret the multiple scales of regional arrangements is to see bloc making as not being solely constituted from interstate trade relations but an ex panded recipe of regional civic relations arising from

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concerns surrounding security, social, environmental, and human rights problems. Trade as a leading indicator of internationalization may have been a handmaiden for spatial testing grounds regarding interstate regulation and supranational forms of governance. However, such spatial experiments have also created more socially constitutive forms of regional institutional building tying local, national, and regional groups across multiple scales of operation. The political economic space of the EU, for instance, is characterized by a bottom up process. Dis cursive political analyses of EU regionalism point to the importance of a myriad of both local and transnationally oriented business and civic groups actively constructing EU regional policies. In other words, internationalization through trade and investment engenders qualitative changes in economic and political processes through transformation of state and territorial capacities, so that such qualitative changes also create the need for forms of governance or coordination beyond that of international trade issues. Finally while regional trade blocs may have become popular in the organization of international trade, their implementation remains a difficult task. Both France and the Netherlands recently rejected the EU Constitution which sets out EU’s values and political objectives, and that paves the way for deeper European integration. Regional projects are increasingly complex reflecting the expansion of agendas beyond the economics; regional arrangements are also becoming multiscalar. Taken together, they are transforming economic and social re lations at the local, regional, and global levels. Human geography provides a lens with which to study the spatial constitution of these relationships. See also: Export Processing Zones; Foreign Direct Investment; Trade, International; Trade, Transport and Communications, Historical Geographies of.

Further Reading Abraham, F. and Van Hove, J. (2005). The rise of China: Prospects of regional trade policy. Review of World Economics 141, 486 509. Checkel, J. (2003). ‘Going native in Europe’? Theorizing social interactions in European institutions. Comparative Political Studies 36, 209 231. Dicken, P. (1994). The roepke lecture in economic geography: Global local tensions firms and states in the global space economy. Economic Geography 70, 101 128. Dicken, P. and Yeung, H. (2001). Investing in the future: East and Southeast Asian firms in the global economy. In Olds, K. (ed.)

Globalization and the Asia Pacific: Contested territories, pp 107 128. London: Routledge. Frankel, J., Stein, E. and Wei, S. J. (1995). Trading blocs and the America: The natural, the unnatural and the supernatural. Journal of Development Economics 47, 61 95. Grant, R. (1993). Trading blocs or trading blows: The macroeconomic geography of United States and Japanese trade policies. Environment and Planning A 25, 273 291. Gunning, J. W. (2002). Trade blocs: Relevant for Africa? Journal of African Economies 10, 311 335. Hayter, R. and Holmes, J. (2000). Continentalism in an era of globalisation: A perspective from Canada’s resource periphery. In Barnes, T. & Gertler, M. (eds.) New Industrial Geography: Regions, Regulations and Institutions, pp 176 201. London: Routledge. Hudson, R. (2000). One Europe or many? Reflections on becoming European. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 25, 409 426. Jones, E. M. and Smith, M. L. R. (2002). ASEAN’s imitation community. Orbis 93 109. Kahler, M. (2000). Legalization as strategy: The Asia Pacific case. International Organization 54, 549 565. Krugman, P. (1991). The move towards free trade zones. Symposium on Policy Implications of Trade and Currency Zones, pp. 7 42. Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Mansfield, E. D. and Pevehouse, J. C. (2000). Trade blocs, trade flows and international conflict. International Organization 54, 775 808. Mansfield, E. D. and Synder, J. (1995). Democratization and the danger of war. International Security 20, 5 38. McConnell, J. E. (1986). Geography of international trade. Progress in Human Geography 10, 471 483. O’hUallachain, D. and Wasserman, D. (1999). Vertical integration in a lean supply chain: Brazilian automobile component parts. Economic Geography 75, 21 42. O’ Loughlin, J. and Anselin, L. (1996). Geo economic competition and trade bloc formation: United States, German and Japanese exports 1968 1992. Economic Geography 72, 131 160. Oyejide, A., Elbadawi, I. and Collier, P. (eds.) (1997). Regional integration and trade liberalization in sub Saharan Africa. Volume 1: Framework, issues and methodological perspectives. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Poon, J. P. H. (2001). Regionalism in the Asia Pacific: Is geography destiny? AREA 33, 252 260. Poon, J. P. H., Thompson, E. R. and Kelly, P. F. (2000). Myth of the triad? Geography of trade and investment blocs. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 25, 427 444. Poon, J. P. H. (1997). The cosmopolitanization of trade regions: Global trends and implications. Economic Geography 73, 288 302. Ravenhill, J. (2003). The new bilateralism in Asia Pacific. Third World Quarterly 24, 299 317. Ruggie, G. (1995). The false premise of realism. International Security 20, 62 70. Yeung, H. (2001). Organizing regional production networks in Southeast Asia: Implications for production fragmentation, trade and rules of origin. Journal of Economic Geography 1, 299 321.

Relevant Websites http://www.wto.org World Trade Organization.

Trade, International R. Grant, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Comparative Advantage Theory of free trade and perfect markets whereby differences between places should be exploited to the maximum through specialization to achieve economic development. Global Value Chains (GVCs) Activities that are divided among multiple firms and spread over geographical space; each activity accounts for differing values in terms of trade rewards. Gravity Model Model that predicts trade flows according to the economic size and distance between two countries or units. Intrafirm Trade Trade that takes place within a firm (buyer is an affiliate of the firm and not an individual). Intraindustry Trade Trade that takes place within an industry (buyer is another firm and not an individual). New Trade Theory Geographical economics theory contending that in a world of imperfect competition, international trade is driven as much by increasing returns and external economies as by comparative advantage. Off-Shoring Arm’s length international trade that can entail international sourcing from unrelated suppliers and/or migration abroad of some of the activities conducted within a multinational company (MNC). Regional Trading Agreements (RTAs). Free trade agreements among regional member countries. Trade Barriers Tariff and non-tariff barriers (NTBs) impede the free flow of international trade. World Trade Organization (WTO) Multilateral organization that superseded the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1995. The WTO regulates international trade and aims to ensure that trade is free and fair.

Introduction: The Theory of Comparative Advantage International trade is a key driver of spatial extent of the world economy. Significant trade expansion took place from the 1400 s onward after Europe expanded overseas and a modern trade system emerged. The study of pat terns of trade and specialization is most widely associated with the formulation of comparative advantage, which itself is based on neoclassical assumptions of free trade and perfect markets. David Ricardo is credited with systemizing the study of international trade with the

theory of comparative advantage in his 1817 book The principles of political economy and taxation. He formulated his theory using an example involving the exchange of one good for another between England and Portugal. While it was cheaper to produce cloth in Portugal than in England, it was economically beneficial for Lisbon to produce surplus wine and to export it to London and in turn to import English cloth. In Ricardo’s time, goods were produced in a single location because fragmentation of production was uneconomic: the co ordination of production in remote locations was virtu ally impossible. Patterns of trade and specialization are linked in comparative advantage at all geographical scales and connect places together economically. Layers of trade geographies are thus created at a variety of spatial scales: global, world regional, national, and subregional. Although the theory of comparative advantage has provided a framework for understanding trade patterns and specializations, it has limitations. The low priority given to the geographical components means that in practice it is an aspatial approach, emphasizing static notions of location and distance. Other important con cerns relate to core assumptions that capital is immobile and that competition is absolutely perfect, assumptions less meaningful since the 1970s. Almost two centuries after the development of comparative advantage theory, the core of international trade theory continues to be dominated by production and exchange of complete goods. However, revolutionary change in communi cations and information technologies has enabled a his toric (and ongoing) breakup of the production process. Countries such as England and Portugal still produce some goods from start to finish, but increasingly they participate in global supply chains in which the many tasks required to manufacture goods are performed in several different geographical locations. Although there are many practical reasons for trade theorists and governments to continue to adhere to free trade theory, there is also growing opposition to free trade assumptions and the promises of free market trade pol icies that never materialize in virtually all parts of the world. Antiglobalization movements, the development community, and the tilt to the left in Latin American governments are good examples. It is widely accepted that the current system of global trade bears little re semblance to the neoclassical ideal. Free trade pro ponents even acknowledge that as much as 40% of global trade is not free.

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Gravity Model The gravity model has been put forward as a corrective to the aspatial bias in comparative advantage and repre sents a particular geographic view of trade. It shows that the elasticity of trade with respect to distance is in the range of 0.9 to 1.5; this means that a 8000 km dis tance chokes off over 90% of trade that could take place within a 1000 km distance. The gravity model has been an empirical success in estimating macro patterns in international trade. Variables such as language, tariffs, contiguity, and colonial history have been added to refine the basic model and enhance its predictions. However, many of the model’s relationships are not predicted by the theory of comparative advantage. For instance, com parative advantage theory fails to explain fully two salient spatial patterns: (1) the three axes of international trade (North American–EU, Japan–EU, and Japan–North American) that involve countries with similar levels of income trading more with each other and often trading similar goods (i.e., one country sell autos to another country from which it also imports different models of autos); and (2) the spatial clustering of rich and poor countries in international trade.

New Trade Theory The core free trade theory of international trade treats countries as points with no spatial structure either be tween them or within them. New trade theory emerged in the 1980s to explain differences between free trade theory and real world patterns. Because there is no widely accepted alternative conception of international trade, many seek to improve comparative advantage theory with better understandings of economic geog raphy. Paul Krugman’s work in particular has been influential in assigning key importance to the role of domestic economic geography in determining the trading performance of a state’s industries. Furthermore, external economies are more likely to be realized at the local and regional scales than at the international level. Accordingly, international trade can be improved by understanding the processes leading to the local and regional concentration of production. Krugman draws on a range of industrial geographic ideas such as agglomeration economies, location theory, cumulative causation, and regional specialization. Within the dis cipline of geography, attention has also focused on what changes take place in the internal economic geographies of two countries once trade develops between them. In dustrial geographers have welcomed the turn toward geographical economics, but many argue that the legacy of comparative advantage, the treatment of technological externalities, and the empirical bias toward the US and

Europe to illustrate trends limit new trade theory. Other critics argue that new trade theory is no more than ‘old wine in new bottles’.

Challenges to Understanding Contemporary International Trade The complexity of the geography of international trade has led researchers to specialize in aspects of the trade system (e.g., country, commodity, and regional studies), and few researchers (some new trade theorists and global value chain (GVC) researchers are exceptions) synthesize or integrate their findings. There are four challenges in accounting for trade patterns that conventional trade theory cannot explain. The first set of challenges involves explaining the sectoral composition of international trade and the shifts in types of trade that predominate in the international system. Different trade concentrations and individual countries’ particularities require different explanations. For instance, trade in primary commodities, such as petroleum, responds to very different conditions than trade in manufacturing goods or trade in services. Fur thermore, the spatial organization of trade is no longer solely on a horizontal country–country trade of finished commodities (whereby countries fully produce and trade final goods). Instead, vertical specialization (whereby countries specialize and trade in one stage of the pro duction process) is spatially reorganizing trade, ac counting for 20–25% of total trade. Accounting for the shifting terrain of barriers is the second set of challenges for trade theory. At the establishment of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947 free trade primarily referred to exports and imports of goods and restrictions to trade were mainly in the form of tariff barriers at the borders. This conception of trade barriers no longer suffices. Trade policies have grown to include NTBs, which are much more difficult to measure and quantify. The third set of challenges involves incorporating evidence from industrial geographic research into para digms about the shifting contours of international trade. Incorporating the specifics about the fragmentation of production, as well as about the particular niches within various value chains of production better captures the dynamic nature of international trade. Fully accounting for the tilt toward regionalism in international trade constitutes the fourth set of challenges. Various positions are taken on impacts of widespread trade bloc formations, ranging from conceptualizing them as building blocs to seeing them as stumbling blocs in the organization of international trade. Some even suggest that regionalism has emerged as an alternative form of trade to counter the more aggressive stance of free trade espoused

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by the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO is supposed to vet blocs for conformity with multilateral rules, but regional groupings consider it is in their best interest to keep bloc criteria and procedures vague. Re gardless of the position taken, 42% of trade now takes place within regional trade agreements (RTAs).

High-technology manufactures

Changing Sectoral Composition and International Trade The volume, value, and structure of trade have under gone fundamental changes over time, particularly in the past two decades. Economic value and the dominant types of trade accounting for most of the value added in cross border trade have proceeded through distinctive eras, with technology as the driving force. In the first phase of trade expansion (1450 onward), primary com modities (i.e., raw materials, minerals, and food products) dominated, and economies were organized spatially for local needs. In the second phase (1840–present), manufacturing goods in standardized ways accounted for the largest share of international trade and became the most innovative sector of trade. Manufacturing trade was organized regionally and internationally. For instance, colonial policies ensured that territories did not compete with colonial home countries but instead became sites for importing manufacturing commodities. In the third phase (1970–present), services became global commod ities, accounting for a growing share of cross border trade, and these became differentiated from trade in manufacturing goods because they emphasize trade in customized commodities. The globalization of markets has meant that there are fewer geographical limits to the spatial organization of international trade. As far as the leading sector in the next trade era is concerned, some analysts envision a new energy source substituting petroleum and driving trade shares for a short but ac celerated time period. Others envision the next com petitive battleground beyond the services trade will be in staging and trading experiences (e.g., virtual travel), predicting that commodity trade will be further up graded and that the more lucrative rewards from trade will involve the selling of lifelike interactive or virtual reality experiences globally. In 1980 the largest components of international trade were primary products and medium technology manu factures (Figure 1) By 2000, primary products accounted for the smallest component of international trade, being superseded dramatically by exports of high technology products. In high technology industries, knowledge is a prime source of competitive advantage, there is above average spending on R&D and employment is dominated by scientists and engineers. Good examples include the aircraft, electronics, and pharmaceutical industries. The

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Mediumtechnology manufactures

Low-technology manufactures

Resource-based manufactures

Primary products

2000

1980

Figure 1 Sectoral composition of international trade, 1980 and 2000. From WTO (2005) International Trade Statistics. http://www.wto.org/english/res e/statis e/statis e.htm.

share of high technology goods in the world trade rose from 10% in 1980 to 25% in 2000. Concentration in high technology trade is also highly correlated with export growth shares. Thus, the highest export growth rates are recorded in the high technology category, and the lowest overall growth rates are in primary products. In Latin America, for example, primary product exports grew 5% between 1980 and 2000 while high technology manufactures expanded by 21%. There are important macroeconomic geography implications to this trend. The most dynamic traders with the highest export growth rates occurred in countries that concentrated in medium and high tech manu facturing. A select group of traders (China, Mexico, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan) registered export growth rates of more than 10% between 1980 and 2000, which were more than double those of the US and EU. The China factor has become significant in trade: China is the fourth largest international trader (counting the EU

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as a single unit), and its exports in 2005 exceeded the combined exports of Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The recent globalization of production also has altered the types of commodities that are traded and the way the trade is being conducted. Firms influence the economic geography of trade through both intra industry and intracorporate trade. Combined, these types of trades account for 30–50% of Organisation for Economic Co operation and Development (OECD) trade. They exhibit complex interconnections, often operate under con ditions of imperfect competition, and shape new trade geographies. First, a distinguishing feature of intra in dustry trade is that the buyers are other firms rather than individuals; thus, items meet firms’ quality, durability, and serviceability needs rather than individual consumer tastes and/or fashion. Second, an increasing proportion of international trade is intracorporate trade (with multi national corporations (MNCs)) rather than interstate. Intracorporate trade is less controlled by ‘arms’ length’ price/cost determinants of regular trade; transactions between affiliates are least likely to be market deter mined; and they are sensitive to international decisions of MNCs. This type of trade also responds differently to changes in economic conditions compared to trade be tween unrelated parties. Because of the changing role of firms in international trade, a significant portion of trade involves component parts rather than finished goods. Vertical specialization is becoming more common and takes place when countries acquire expertise in particular stages of the production process: a country may import a good from another country to use it for the production of its own good and then export that good to the next country. The sequence only ends when the final product reaches its destination. The geographical value of the production of an ‘Ameri can’ car, for example, is apportioned as follows: 37% of the value of production is generated in the US, 30% goes to Korea for assembly, 17.5% to Japan for components and advanced technology, 7.5% to Germany for design, 4% to Taiwan and Singapore for minor parts, 2.5% to the UK for advertising and marketing services, and 1.5% to Ireland and Barbados for data processing.

Changing Policy Terrains and New Barrier Architecture Trade liberalization has been consistently promoted under the GATT/WTO framework. Average industrial tariff rates in 1947 were 40%, and they were 3.8% in 2003. Reductions of tariffs have fostered growth in all types of trade, especially vertical trade because it in volves multiple border crossings. Beyond industry, mar ket access is very much an unfinished business: only 55%

of imports enter markets duty free. One basic computa tional problem in quantifying barriers and comparing across countries is the variance in the ways that countries utilize tariff lines (a single item as defined in a country’s tariff schedule): most countries apply 5000–8000 tariff lines but Turkey, Malaysia, Brazil, and Mexico use more than 10 000 lines. Four sectors – textiles and clothing; leather, rubber, footwear, and travel goods; transport equipment; fish and fish products – receive special treatment and account for the highest tariff rates. The proliferation of NTBs since the 1970s represents a counterliberalizing trend in most countries and for most sectors; in 1986, 50% of all products traded were subject to NTBs in some form. NTBs are discretionary barriers applied often to specific commodities but are not limited to a form of technical measure, custom rules and procedures, competition related restrictions to market access, or quantitative import restrictions. Compared to tariffs, for which there are quantitative databases that make it possible to measure, analyze, and monitor, NTBs are more difficult to identify because of national no menclatures and varying degrees of transparency. NTBs display significant geographical variation by country and by commodity. For example, one third of countries pro hibit certain types of trade in used products: China and Latin American countries have banned imports of used car parts for safety reasons, whereas Argentina has enacted a more comprehensive ban on imports of used tires, car parts, clothing, and medical equipment. Given the fungibility of NTBs, more efforts are required to investigate how health, safety, and environmental regu lations and standards affect international trade.

Shifting Geographies of Production Besides diverting trade via barriers, governments have become more active in creating trade over and beyond what is typically considered in comparative advantage. Governments influence the geography of production’s organization by joining RTAs and by emphasizing strategic trade policies. Governmental intervention (and ultimate influence on comparative advantage) ranges from specific export promotion and import prohibition to broadly drawn infrastructural policies, R&D, targeting of particular industries for special attention (e.g., the aircraft industries in Europe) and fostering clusters in technology and industrial specialized districts. Government nonac tion can also be used to support particular sectors and specialized districts, for example, tolerating clandestine workforces. Governments and the private sector in the developing world are attempting to forge partnerships and promote niche export processing zones that spe cialize in one or two sectors, such as information tech nology and global offshoring. Over the last decade,

offshoring activities have increased at a rapid rate as the cost of international transactions continues to decline as entrepreneurs in low wage countries learn how to pro duce to global standards and the tasks formerly under taken in one country are now being performed abroad. The variety of services offshored has grown in com plexity over time and now involves customer service calls, X ray readings, tax preparation, and heart surgery. GVC research is a newer approach that studies the spatial organizational aspects of international trade and within a context that goes beyond trade alone; it includes the entire range of activities from primary production to final consumption to linkages binding them. The activ ities that constitute a value chain can be contained within a single firm or more typically divided among different firms. Value chains can be contained within a single geographical location, but more commonly they are spread internationally. GVC research examines how lead firms build, coordinate, and control the linkages and flows of products between raw material suppliers, processors, primary traders, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers. The advantage of GVC is that it unpacks trade by

identifying clusters and showing who is benefiting the most and where, particularly with upstream activities that reap most of the rewards from international trade. The global landscape of manufacturing trade is marked by enormous diversity from place to place and across industries. Nonetheless many sectors of this trade are organized in important ways around the great ag glomerations that constitute the main spatial anchors. Agglomeration and trade are mutually reinforcing phe nomena. The classical example of a leading industrial district is the clothing industry in northern Italy, where there are dense concentrations of independent small and medium sized companies connected to auxiliary indus tries and knowledge services (e.g., fashion related pub lishing and design centered on Milan). Some centers of production (e.g., clothing, footwear, and furniture) exhibit a tendency toward more and more spatial concentration of production. International trade among centers of clothing, footwear, and furniture shows three broad types of flows: (1) direct exports of high quality final products among advanced economies; (2) intrafirm trade from low wage plants in the developing world to North America,

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Chile EU-ACP EPAs negotiations

Mexico

Singapore

CEMAC Iceland

Canada

ECOWAS Mauritania East and Southern Africa

Korea

SADC

Thailand

CARIFORUM South Africa

PACIFIC

MERCOSUR

SACU

GCC

OCT

Signed/in force Under negotiation Under consideration

Figure 3 European RTA network. Adapted from Crawford, J. A. and Fiorentino, R. (2005). The changing landscape of regional trade agreements. WTO Discussion Paper no. 8. http://www.wto.org/english/res e/booksp e/discussion papers8 e.pdf (accessed Sep. 2007) (2005:9).

Western Europe, and Japan; and (3) outsourcing rela tionships from high wage countries to independent firms in low wage countries. These three features combine to create an international mosaic of trade flows and pro duction sharing arrangements. However, the spatial or ganization of industrial production is always in flux. For instance, the termination of the Multifibre Arrangement on 1 January 2005 means that the global apparel industry is undergoing a transition from one regime to another; subsequently China and India have been emerging as major low cost producers.

Regional Trade Agreements RTAs are a major part of and perhaps an irreversible trend in international trade. Both the number of RTAs, as well as the amount of trade conducted within regional trade associations have steadily increased. Forty two percent of international trade is affected by preferential agreements. Some 312 RTAs have been notified to the GATT/WTO between 1947 and 2005: in force currently

are 170 RTAs; many of the original agreements were modified and superseded by other agreements over time. The trend will intensify as countries across the world are making RTAs the centerpiece of commercial policies: 20 RTAs are pending ratification and another 70 RTAs are in a proposal/negotiations stage of formation. RTAs can be viewed as the clash of liberalizations: regional liber alization as opposed to global liberalization. RTA activities have intensified across all geographical regions of the world, and especially in the Western Hemisphere and Asia Pacific Region. Figure 2 shows the establishment of the main international regional trading blocs. Some RTAs are much more important than others: at the country level the proportion of international trade covered by an RTA is more important than the total number of RTAs in which a country participates. There is considerable range in the scope of activities covered by RTAs, from extensive to more narrow coverage, but the trend is toward increasing complexity. There are also RTAs (e.g., EU–South Africa and US–MERCOSUR) that cover the so called ‘Singapore issues’ (investment, gov ernment procurement, and competition), a set of issues

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South Africa

Signed/in force Under negotiation Under consideration

Figure 4 Asia-Pacific RTA network. Adapted from Crawford, J. A. and Fiorentino, R. (2005). The changing landscape of regional trade agreements. WTO Discussion Paper no. 8. http://www.wto.org/english/res e/booksp e/discussion papers8 e.pdf (accessed Sep. 2007) (2005:12).

that did not secure final WTO approval. Traditionally, RTA formation has occurred between proximate trading partners, most often contiguous countries with well established trading patterns. The EU and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) countries provide good examples. Indeed most countries sign their first trade agreement with one or several neighboring countries (Figure 2). Most regional blocs have a strongly defensive char acter: they represent an attempt to gain size advantage by creating larger markets for their products and by pro tecting them, at least in part, from outside competition. Consequently, the largest trade blocs have considerable influence on international trade. Regional trade blocs affect the geography of trade by diverting trade (most countries within a bloc import goods from each other rather than from nonmember countries, as done previ ously) and by increasing the level of intraregional trade. These blocs boost intraregional trade at least by half (e.g., the EU) and at maximum by fivefold (e.g., Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)). In the process they reduce trade with the rest of the world.

Complex geographies of RTAs are emerging with the spatial configuration of trade agreements becoming more complicated with overlapping RTAs and networks, as well as a pending wave of RTAs that will span across world regions (see Figures 3–5). RTAs are increasingly being concluded among non contiguous countries. New spatial patterning is linking various countries around the globe in cross regional preferential agreements. A new development, anticipated by 2011, is the emergence of a new spatial category of agreement, namely supra RTAs: each of the parties is a distinct RTA itself and consolidation takes place among larger spatial units. Examples include the EU–GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) in Europe (Figure 3); India– PICTA (Pacific Island Countries Trade Agreement) in Asia (Figure 4); and CARICOM (Caribbean Community and Common Market)–EU in the Western Hemisphere (Figure 5). Because members of each RTA trade more with each other than they do with nonmember countries, trade is becoming more geographically concentrated. RTA pro liferation is undermining transparency and predictability

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Signed/in force Under negotiation Under consideration

Figure 5 Western Hemisphere RTA network. Adapted from Crawford, J. A. and Fiorentino, R. (2005). The changing landscape of regional trade agreements. WTO Discussion Paper no. 8. http://www.wto.org/english/res e/booksp e/discussion papers8 e.pdf (accessed Sep. 2007) (2005:11).

in international trade. RTAs appear to have an adverse effect on the multilateral trade system. The inability of the WTO to solve current trade issues, evident in the limited outcome of the Doha Round, seems to be en couraging countries to look for regional solutions. This new trend of cross regional RTAs will create another spatial layering of international trade.

other than countries (e.g., firms, networks, regions) and emphasize local and regional variations (as opposed to national) and niches within value chains, in contrast to the earlier aspatial neoclassical approach. See also: Foreign Direct Investment; Global Production Networks; Globalization and Transnational Corporations; Trade Blocs.

Issues Trade is not wine for cloth anymore. The theory of comparative advantage is still the most widely employed framework to explain and understand trade, despite its limitations and critics. New trade theory, gravity models, GVCs, and RTAs offer alternative frameworks to understand how trade works in the twenty first century. Although the insights offered by each of these approaches are valuable, none has thus far been capable of organizing findings into a comprehensive international trade theory with significant explanatory power. These alternative frameworks do shift the ground in the social sciences to some degree toward collecting trade data based on units

Further Reading Begg, B., Pickles, J. and Smith, A. (2003). Cutting it: European integration, trade regimes, and the reconfiguration of East Central European apparel production. Environment and Planning A 35, 2191 2207. Crawford, J. A. and Fiorentino, R. (2005). The changing landscape of regional trade agreements. WTO Discussion Paper no. 8. http:// www.wto.org/english/res e/booksp e/discussion papers8 e.pdf (accessed Sep. 2007). Gibb, R. and Michalak, W. (eds.) (1994). Continental trading blocs: The growth of regionalism in the world economy. New York: Wiley. Hanink, D. M. and Cromley, R. G. (2005). Geographic change with trade based on comparative advantage. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, 511 524.

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Grant, R. (2000). The economic geography of global trade. In Sheppard, E. & Barnes, T. (eds.) A companion to economic geography, pp 411 431. Malden: Blackwell. Krugman, P. (1992). Geography and trade. Cambridge: MIT Press. Martin, R. and Sunley, P. (1996). Paul Krugman’s geographical economics and its implications for regional development theory: A critical assessment. Economic Geography 72, 259 292. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (2005). Looking beyond tariffs: The role of non tariff barriers in world trade. Paris: OECD. Ricardo, D. (1817). The principles of political economy and taxation (Reprinted 1996. New York: Prometheus Books.) Scott, A. J. (2006). The changing global geography of low technology, labor intensive industry: Clothing, footwear, and furniture. World Development 34, 1517 1536. WTO (2005). International Trade Statistics.

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Relevant Websites http://www.aseansec.org AFTA and FTAs, Association of Southeast Asian Nations. http://europa.eu External Trade, Europa The European Union On Line. http://www.globalvaluechains.org Global Value Chain Initiative Duke University. http://www.ustr.gov North American Free Trade Agreement, Office of the United States Trade Representative. http://www.wto.org World Trade Organization (WTO).

Trade, Transport and Communications, Historical Geographies of P. J. Hugill, Texas A & M University, College Station, TX, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Geopolitics The attempt by states to control earth space for the resources it contains or the strategic military advantage it confers over other states.

The historical geographies of trade, transportation, and communication are intimately interlinked, both with each other and in relation to geopolitics and to the his torical geographies of warfare, production, and urban development. There are two links to geopolitics, one in the traditional sense, one with regard to the literature on the difference between trading and territorial states and polities. As late as the 1890s authors such as Mahan ar gued that sea power was the key to history. Sea power had rebalanced global geopolitics in favor of the seaborne trading polities of Western Europe from AD 1431 onward which gives much of this account an unavoidably Euro centric flavor. However, in 1904 Mackinder pronounced the ‘Columbian epoch’ over and saw the world returning to a land based geopolitical system, now based on the ability of railroads and telegraphs to integrate contin ental sized territorial polities, he believed able militarily to dominate first the world island (Eurasia and Africa), then the world. In 1919 Mackinder identified two polities within the German state, one seeking territory to the east, the other trading opportunities to the west. The internal competition between the two polities was acute and, eventually, tore Germany apart, with the result that it lost its hegemonic struggle with Britain, a highly fo cused trading state. However, in 1919, because the naval power of the trading states could not penetrate far into the continental interiors, the future seemed likely to lie with the territorial and against the trading states. By the early 2000s, however, it has become clear that extremely accurate air power capable of penetrating well into the continental interiors has become the cynosure of military strength, returning the global balance of power to the trading polities who are more interested in controlling flows and nodes than territory. Before the European seaborne expansions Eurasia was often dominated by nomadic cultures pulsing out of central Eurasia. Only two areas resisted: a Chinese polity that signified successful invaders, defeating them cul turally; and European polities that, from about AD 800 onward developed superior military technologies. The link to the geographies of warfare and production is through the military technologies that allow a given polity or set of polities to dominate certain Earth spaces

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and, on occasion, that create the possibility of a new geopolitics. The link to the geography of production is that military technologies have become increasingly ex pensive over time, thus requiring more and more tech nologically sophisticated production facilities.

Early Webs of Interaction It makes sense to think of the historical geographies of trade and transport as land, sea, and air based systems and of communications as either systems based on the physical movement of information or systems based on electronic movement. Neolithic agriculture developed in a few favored riverine areas of Eurasia (Tigris–Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Huang Ho). Agriculture allowed popu lation increase, cities, and the formation of simple states. Communications became vital because of the need to manage increasingly complex economies, polities, bur eaucracies, social systems, religions, and military struc tures. As the McNeills note, this was the first major human web of interaction, a concept applicable through the present, human webs constantly expanding spatially as transport improved and thickening through better communications. The formation of simple states in these earliest human civilizations was greatly facilitated by river transport, and state management by the ability to trade agricultural surplus up or downstream to regions in need. The critical symbiosis between land and water based transport systems was born. However, as states expanded geographically they encountered different peoples and more complex polities were born to manage different human cultures, usually within a single imperial system. Also, from 1700 BC onward, formal military structures arose in organized response to attacks on the productive riverine economies of settled agriculturalists by predatory charioteers.

The Rise and Decline of Islam The development of coastwise navigation in the Bronze Age extended the range of this early transport, trade, and communications web to multiple human cultures across the entire Mediterranean Basin, an almost entirely geo graphically closed sea. The Roman Empire came to epit omize the most successful phase of this, using sea based communication and transport to bring under its long term political control the entire Mediterranean Basin and even on into the North Sea to Britain and the Rhine Valley.

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Figure 1 Trade regions before the Columbian expansions (by the author, after Abu-Lughod).

Polities east of the Mediterranean enjoyed important bouts of expansion, but lacked effective sea based trans port systems to hold them together. Three forces brought change to the region. First, around the time of Christ traders discovered that highly reliable monsoon winds blew ships east to India at one time of year and back at another. Second, traders made increasing use of camels as pack animals to push trade inland, at least for pre ciosities, in regions of oasis agriculture. Third, the region became united ideologically by the rise of an aggressive and highly successful traders’ religion, Islam. Islamic traders and raiders then pushed out of the Middle East converting as they went, contesting Christian control of the Mediterranean sea trade to the east and Gujarati and even Chinese strength in the Indian Ocean to the west. By the mid 1400 Islam stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a broad band across North Africa, through the Middle East and India, on through the Indonesian archipelago and into the Pacific at the Philippines. Only China and Europe held out against this relentless ex pansion (Figure 1). One fatal flaw for Islam was, however, its failure to develop a productive local farm economy of the sort developing in China and Europe. By AD 610 China was using the Grand Canal to unite its northern wheat region with its southern rice region and integrate a single, large,

territorial polity. A complex network of local canals completed a job not begun in Europe for another 1000 years. Europe was a ‘peninsula of peninsulas’, and Roman style coastwise navigation improved incre mentally but steadily after Roman withdrawal. From about AD 1200 on, and in the absence of any single central political authority such as existed in China, self defending trading ships of the Hanseatic League moved goods between the relatively independent feudal cities of the North Sea, the Baltic, and the Atlantic coast, con tributing mightily to the explosion of European blue water navigation after AD 1431. The hardening of formal states in the region post 1400, in particular an increas ingly powerful France and England, reduced the power of the cities embedded in those states, encouraged mer chants to demand formal, state funded navies to protect trade, and ended the power of the Hanse around AD 1441.

The European Trading Polity Thus was the scene set for the European expansions. New techniques of blue water navigation, developed in Portugal and Spain but improved on in Holland, Eng land, and France, and new ships designed to cope year

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round with the harsh seas of the Atlantic and to fight their way out of any trouble they could get into, allowed Europeans to begin a seaborne expansion around the world island in AD 1431. Their goal was to reach China and the Spice Islands (Indonesia) direct, thus reducing the substantial transfer costs (doubling at each boundary) imposed upon long distance trade across the world is land by the eight circuits of trade described by Abu Lughod. In AD 1486 the Portuguese navigator Bartolo meo Diaz circumnavigated Africa and entered the Indian Ocean, proving a sea route east to the Indies possible. The Spanish, seeking an alternate route around the world island to the west, encountered the Americas. Two ‘new worlds’ came into existence: one, the newly en countered lands of the Americas; the other, a world made whole, as Agnew has shown, at least in the European imagination, by the expansion. Previously unstoppable, Islam collapsed quickly for three reasons and Europe rose for a fourth. First, much of Islam’s wealth came from transfer costs imposed at trade circuit boundaries, six of which were wholly or almost wholly controlled by Islam. Second, Islamic local agri culture was nowhere near so productive as that of Western Europe or China, and could not support either large manufacturing cities or social spending on ships and navies. Third, Islamic societies failed to adopt European shipping technologies, staying with oared warships and naval warfare based on boarding when Europeans had moved on, creating fast, maneuverable, cannon armed ships that could both kill at a distance and carry a profitable cargo. Fourth, Europeans sought to control flows of trade and the crucial nodes or choke points through which such trade had to pass rather than territory because the chief concern of their maritime trading polities was to generate taxes through trade, not through control of territory. For nearly 400 years after the Portuguese pioneered blue water expansion in AD 1431 the Europeans, con stantly competing to develop better seaborne technolo gies and better ways of killing each other, applied those technologies to dominate a world they saw united rather than divided by the oceans. In the early 1800s, however, two new transport technologies were developed, steam boats and railroads. These allowed movement of bulk goods through the continental interiors and thus the promise of powerful territorial polities, the first of which was America.

Inland Transport and the Territorial State In 1815 Shreve developed steam boats powerful enough to push up the fast flowing rivers that drained the American South into the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mex ico, opening vast new lands. With a viable crop and

enough slaves, ‘King Cotton’ created the world’s first genuinely global production system. The South displaced all previous competitors, shipping cotton to mills around Manchester, England, to be spun and woven into cheap textiles, then marketed globally. Manchester developed as a ‘new’ style of city, one based on massive technical innovation and a totally new industry. However, as Hall notes, such cities have a brief ‘life’. Technologies diffuse, competitors emerge, and overconcentration ensures that when the industry declines, the city declines too. The second inland transport technology, developed in England, but with its most serious impact in America, was the railroad. Canals needed an absence of rugged topography and much water and capital. By the late 1840s powerful 4 4 0 ‘American’ class steam locomotives could climb substantial grades: a sophisticated suspension allowed cheaply laid track. By the 1850s the Appalachian barrier to movement inland from the Atlantic coast had been conquered, and by the 1860s railroads united the Atlantic and Pacific. Alongside the railroads marched the electric telegraph. Telegraphs allowed single track working over long distances, keeping capital inputs to the new railroads low, and informed farmers and brokers of prices in different markets. In America cities such as Chicago created inland empires based on rail nets thrust aggressively into their hinterlands, though, as Cronon has shown, Chicago’s brilliant innovation of the futures market for trade in commodities ensured its long term rise to primacy within America’s heartland.

The First Global Web and Its Problems Coincident with this creation of a new territorial state and economy in America’s continental interior was a renewed explosion of European seaborne expansion, also driven by steam and electrical telegraphy. The first steamships crossed the Atlantic in the late 1840s but were at the limits of their range, expensive, and attracted only well heeled passengers. By the 1870s, however, the triple expansion engined steamship had been developed. This was much cheaper to run, hauled cargo as profitably as passengers, and made Glasgow, where such ships ori ginated, the world’s next great city based on technolo gical innovation. Alongside the global network of submarine telegraph cables installed by British capital after the success of the transatlantic cable in 1866, such steamships reinforced Britain’s centrality to the increas ingly global economy of the late Victorian era and made London, by 1900 the world’s first global ‘capital’, the first ‘information economy’ city. Certainly, by 1900 the first truly global ‘web’ had formed, its trade moving almost entirely on British steamships fueled by British coal from a network of British coaling stations around the globe and

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Figure 2 Global telecommunications, 1938 (by permissions, Cable & Wireless, London).

managed from London by British capital directed by British submarine cables connected to land based cable systems (Figure 2). Some land based systems were continental in scale and controlled by increasingly powerful cities, New York, in the American case. Although this system was global it was thin. Goods and people moved at the speed of steam or slower, and speeding things up was expensive. Railroads pushed un evenly into continental interiors, needing increasing amounts of capital to pay for heavier, more expensive track. Demands for higher speed and greater capacity brought forth larger, more powerful locomotives and ships, all of which cost more. Although telegraphy moved information at the speed of light, capacity was limited and range was subglobal, with repeater stations needed at some 2000 mile intervals with human operators rekeying messages onward. Telegraphy required a compact written language, communication could easily be garbled, espe cially when rekeyed by fallible humans, and the

important levels of meaning conveyed by spoken and visual communication were absent. Between the late 1800s and about 1920 all this shifted. Long distance telephony became possible, first using line loading, then electronic amplification of signals. Wireless allowed telegraphy and telephony to begin to break free of the tyranny of the fixed routes of the cable systems. More flexible, lower capital cost public transportation systems were developed to carry smaller numbers of people in the form of the electric streetcar and gas electric interurban. Bicycles, automobiles, and trucks also offered a break from the fixed and expensive route tyr anny of the railroads. However, they needed hard surfaced roads that turned out to be as expensive as railroad tracks: the difference was that roads could be funded out of a tax on fuel, thus opening a huge new source of capital for infrastructural development. Elec trification, then dieselization, of railroads offered the possibility of higher speeds on fixed routes on land

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without requiring more expensive trackage, and dieseli zation of shipping offered more reliable, more easily managed, more fuel efficient ships than those using tri ple compound engines. Finally, it was obviously going to be possible to take to the air, which offered both the potential for higher speed and freedom from the planet’s last crucial piece of geographic tyranny, the need for transfer points at land–sea interfaces, with their resultant costs.

New Technologies and Hegemonic Shifts Almost all these shifts between the late 1800s and 1920 either developed because of or were intensified by the wars of the period, and the wars of the period focused on the tectonic shifts in hegemony as transportation and communications technology showed their potential for very powerful territorial states and the power of the maritime trading states slipped. America, Imperial Ger many, Czarist Russia, and Imperial Japan began to rise. America, Germany, and Russia seemed like territorial states of the sort Mackinder predicted in 1904. Russia’s defeat by Japan in the Russo Japanese War of 1904–05 only seemed to reinforce the territorial nature of the awakening Russian giant. Japan developed initially as a maritime trading polity, actively emulating Britain, to which it was formally allied between 1902 and the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, when America de facto forced Britain to abandon the alliance. Japan’s territorial polity would not manifest itself until its invasion of China in the 1930s. America and Germany were mixed states, containing territorial and trading polities. In Germany, the Prussian Junkers seeking to push east for more ter ritory vied for control over the state apparatus with the Hamburg traders seeking to push out into the Atlantic. America was, at one level, more complex: from the Civil War on the protectionist and isolationist wing of the Republican Party vied for control of the Party with East Coast traders best represented through Teddy Roose velt’s imperialist, progressive impulses. At another level, America was much simpler: no neighboring power op posed its dominance of North America. In the late 1930s the American trading polity became resurgent, a position it retains to the present. The geopolitical problem was not, in any case, in America, but in Eurasia, where German and Russian polities vied for control of territory Mackinder saw as the key to world domination. Here, technological improvements in transport and communications that seemed beneficial to liberal Vic torians took a lethal turn. Steam turbines were first used in transatlantic passenger liners, but by 1914 packs of turbine engined dreadnought battleships roamed the seas armed with guns up to 15’’ caliber capable of delivering lethal punches to dreadnoughts 25 miles away. Marconi’s

first sale of wireless was to Lloyd’s of London, to ease the rescue of ships in distress at sea, such as Titanic in 1912. Two years later wireless proved its massive worth in causing distress to ships at sea, allowing fewer dread noughts to patrol more space and be quickly repositioned to address new threats, such as that posed by von Spee’s squadron, sunk by British battle cruisers in the first battle of the Falklands in 1914. Railroads allowed fast move ment over fixed lines of communication, but at the Western front in 1914 they turned lethal for millions of men. The heavy railroads that delivered millions of tons of artillery shells from the factories were vulnerable to opposing artillery, so had to be many miles from the front. Close to the front, shells had to be delivered on human powered tramways, which froze the front into a long line some 20 miles away from but parallel to the main line railroads. Coupled with innovations such as barbed wire and machine guns, war between industrial powers froze in space and became a matter mostly of defense. Generals trained for wars of mobility that favored the offence ensured appalling slaughter when they persisted in their offensives. By 1918 the automobile, its cousin the tractor, the tracked tractors that had been developed for soft soil conditions in California agriculture, and the military descendant of such tractors, the tank, offered a return to a war of mobility. Aircraft offered a new challenge. Wells argued in 1908 that air war would plunge the world into a new Dark Age. Although this failed to happen, in World War I airplanes developed from frail devices into powerful, heavily armed military machines designed to carry thousands of pounds of bombs hundreds of miles, ‘‘bloody paralysers’’ in the words of one British general. By late 1918 the British had created the doctrine that Germany would use to perfection against Poland in 1939 and call Blitzkrieg, a rapid advance by combined tank and air arms coordin ated by wireless telecommunications giving the advan tage back to the offensive. At the end of World War I the military forcing of new transport and communications technologies paid off in civilian life. Trucks and caterpillar tractors built for the war but never shipped to France were distributed free to every county in America to aid in the explosive growth of hard surfaced roads after 1920, on which would run ever larger numbers of trucks and automobiles. War surplus bombing aircraft everywhere were the foundation of primitive air services: such services quickly focused on mail, which could survive fiery crashes in fireproof compartments. The demands of proto Blitzkrieg had forced rapid development of wireless telephony in 1918, the training of huge numbers of wireless technicians, and mass production of vacuum tubes sold cheaply as war surplus, in short, all the necessary components for the immediate, rapid growth of radio entertainment after

Trade, Transport and Communications, Historical Geographies of

World War I, and the foundation for television and radar technologies in the 1930s. America entered the automobile age from about 1915 onward and Detroit became the next city to rise on the basis of manufacturing an exciting new technology. Streetcars, automobiles, trucks, and buses made new, spatially extensive city forms possible, initially and most spectacularly in Los Angeles, a city that also embraced an innovative communications technology, film. At their margins all American cities began to resemble Los Angeles: first streetcars, then buses, provided public transport, trucks brought goods from shop to house, and automobiles allowed individual commuting. Such local transport improvements allowed much more complex city forms in which people could live richer lives with access to many more goods, services, and experiences.

Communications, the Dominant Technology Although it was not obvious in 1914, between then and 1945 communications technology came to dominate both trade and warfare. Britain was able to read all cable traffic passing through London, coded or not, and ensured America’s entry into World War I with the notorious ‘Zimmerman telegram’. In the 1920s Britain’s need to communicate cheaply around its spatially extensive Empire and its even more extensive global trade routes led to massive innovation in shortwave wireless, which in the mid 1930s led the British to radar as a way of re sisting the renewed German threat of air attack. Ameri can innovations leading toward television as an entertainment medium were seized on quickly by Britain in the late 1930s as even more useful for the display of radar signals in night fighters. Britain’s code breakers continued their communications intelligence success by breaking Germany’s ‘enigma’ machine code. After World War I Britain and America entered a long struggle to dominate global communications, which America ‘won’ only in the 1970s. The first of many American submarine telephone cables crossed the Atlantic in 1956, and in the 1970s the global network of communications satellites run by Intelsat finally gave America a clear communi cations advantage.

The Rise of Air Power The second great inter war development was in air transport and warfare. In the mid 1930s all metal, twin engined air transports started to appear, in particular in America, which were profitable and safe carrying pas sengers as well as mail and used sophisticated radio communications to navigate after dark and in bad

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weather. By the late 1930s the great ocean barriers to commercial air transport were also falling. Such long range transports promised long range bombing of an opponent’s cities. Naval aviation using aircraft carriers developed alongside land based aviation. World War II developed as the world’s first real air war, two of its four ‘turnover’ battles, Britain and Midway, being totally de cided by air power. Of the other two, El Alamein and Stalingrad, only the latter resembled the battles of im mobility from World War I. What won the crucial war in the air was primacy in the struggle for supremacy in electronic communication that surged around radar. By 1941 Britain and America were slowly but surely gaining the upper hand in the technology, its application, and its mass production, easily against Japan, with difficulty against Germany. At the end of World War II Berlin was the first high technology city to be ‘removed from the map’, its pre war abilities in electronics ‘lost’ to its competitors, in particular London and Boston. Communications have dominated the period since World War II. American primacy was brief, satellites being rapidly overtaken in the 1980s by fiber optic cables, though they have remained vitally important as fixed reference points for the Global Positioning System (GPS). As they recovered from World War II the Euro pean countries and then Japan experienced a rapid rise in automobile ownership akin to that of America after 1915 and had to create new infrastructure and rebuild cities. Similar forces now seem at work in the rest of East Asia, especially China. Jet aircraft have radically altered the ability to move people and high value freight around the planet, many airlines being as much about freight as passengers. The web of human interaction is now both truly global and greatly thickened by the success of the Internet. The most profound change has, however, been in global geopolitics. The combination of GPS with air power, especially precision guided munitions (PGMs), has allowed the trading states to re exert the global au thority Mackinder believed they had lost to the territorial states early last century. GPS and PGMs allow control of flows and nodes even well inside opposing territorial states without the need to occupy territory, never the long suit of trading states with their dislike of expensive standing armies. Of course PGMs of a cruder sort are now deployed against the trading states and their allies, as the rise of suicide bombing and the events of 9/11 demonstrated. At a geopolitical level this does not seem like a struggle of the sort Mackinder feared, a struggle that ended with the collapse of the last serious territorial state at the end of the Cold War, merely an attempt by dissident groups to resist the return of the trading states to the position of global dominance their constant attention to control of flows and nodes, thus of trade, transportation, and communications, has given them.

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See also: Capitalism and Division of Labor; Migration, Historical Geographies of.

Further Reading Abu Lughod, J. L. (1989). Before European Hegemony: The World System A. D. 1250 1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Agnew, J. (2003). Geopolitics: Re visioning World Politics (2nd edn.). New York: Routledge. Boyne, W. J. (2003). The Influence of Air Power Upon History. Gretna, LA: Pelican. Cronon, W. (1991). Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton. Hall, P. (1998). Cities in Civilization. New York: Pantheon. Hall, P. and Preston, P. (1988). The Carrier Wave: New Information Technology and the Geography of Innovation, 1846 2003. London: Unwin Hyman. Hugill, P. J. (1993). World Trade since 1431: Geography, Technology, and Capitalism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins. Hugill, P. J. (1999). Global Communications since 1844: Geopolitics and Technology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins. Hugill, P. J. (2003). Technology, its innovation and diffusion as the motor of capitalism. Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 1, 89 113. Hugill, P. J. (2005). Trading states, territorial states, and technology: Mackinder’s unexplored contribution to the discourse on state types.

In Blouet, B. W. (ed.) Global Geostrategy: Mackinder and the Defence of the West, pp 108 125. London: Frank Cass. McNeill, W. H. and McNeill, J. R. (2003). The Human Web: A Bird’s eye View of World History. New York: Norton. Mackinder, H. J. (1904). The geographical pivot of history. The Geographical Journal 23, 421 444. Mackinder, H. J. (1919). (1941). Democratic Ideas and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction. New York: Henry Holt. Mahan, A. T. (1890). (1957). The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660 1783. New York: Hill & Wang. Meinig, D. W. (1986 2000). The Shaping of America, 4 vols. New Haven: Yale.

Relevant Websites http://www.nrm.org.uk British National Railway Museum & Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania. http://www.porthcurno.org.uk Cable & Wireless s historic site in SW England. http://www.infoage.org Excellent on history of wireless from a US perspective. http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil USAF museum site. Links to other major air power museums around the world (especially the Royal Air Force Museum & Canada Aviation Museum).

Transatlantic M. Sheller, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Transatlantic The contemporary field of transatlantic geographies rests on a translocal, postnational conception of regional or area studies. It has emerged out of recent developments in several disciplines, including colonial history, post colonial literature, cultural anthropology, cultural stud ies, postcolonial studies, sociology of race, and cultural geography. All emphasize the interconnectedness of metropole and colony and the importance of transoceanic networks in the making of a transnational and trans imperial Atlantic world. Postcolonial geographies have de centered Europe by showing its complex and intimate relation with the colonial world, disrupting the geo graphical imagination of nationally bounded units of analysis by bringing multifaceted transactions and re lations with the periphery into view. Transatlantic studies thus seek to connect and combine the various and hith erto artificially separated histories of Western Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean, and to dem onstrate how the most important processes of social, political, and economic change can be understood only through a transnational frame of reference. An emphasis on transatlantic travels, exchanges, networks, and cultures fundamentally challenges the traditions of Eurocentrism within national historiographies and the social sciences by showing how the very idea of Europe, and related ideas such as whiteness, the West, modernity, and free dom were constructed in relation to, and in interaction with, the wider Atlantic world, including its indigenous Native Caribbean, Native American, and enslaved and free African populations.

Crossing the Atlantic Transatlantic histories usually begin with Genoese ‘caravels’ finding their way through the straits of Gib raltar in 1277, and to the Canary Islands in the mid fourteenth century, opening up what had been until then a largely Mediterranean centered subsystem linked overland to the larger trade routes of Asia. This was followed by Portuguese voyages to the Madeiras, Azores, and Cape Verde Islands in the 1420s, 1440s, and 1460s, respectively. Settlements on these islands positioned the Portuguese to begin trading for gold on the West Coast of Africa, facilitated by the invention of the astrolabe in 1497 by Abraham Zacuto, a Jewish astronomer. In 1482 the Portuguese established the trading fort known as

Elmina on the edge of Akan country (in modern Ghana, now a major heritage tourism destination), first used to store gold and later to hold enslaved captives prior to transport across the Atlantic. With support from the rival rulers of Castile and Aragon, Isabella and Ferdinand, the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus famously set sail in 1492 in search of a western route to Asia, reaching the Bahamas 33 days after leaving the Canaries. He is now credited with the ‘discovery’ of the New World, although it is generally accepted that Viking ships reached North America in the late fourteenth century, and recent evidence (from chicken bones) surprisingly suggests that Polynesian ships may have reached the Pacific coast of South America even earlier. But it was only in the sixteenth century that a steady flow of ships and communication was established across the Atlantic, especially after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec (1519– 21) and Inca (1533–35) empires. This transoceanic connectivity initiated an era of exchange in which not only people made the Atlantic crossing, but also plants, animals, diseases, cultures, and technologies. Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to one half of the native population of Hispaniola in 1518– 19, with only 2000 natives left in 1542. Disease brought from Europe is also estimated to have caused Central Mexico’s population to decline from 5–10 million (1519) to 2.7 million (1568), and Peru’s from 9 million (1532) to 1.3 million (1570). Up to 90% of some groups of New England native peoples died in 1616–20. The natural world was reconfigured in other ways. As Alfred Crosby has shown, maize, the common bean, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, and sweet potatoes all moved by ship from the Americas to Europe, while wheat, rye, oats, and Old World vegetables, along with commercial crops such as sugar cane, coffee, rice, and oranges entered the New World. And, as Judith Carney stresses, Africans carried Guinea corn, yam vine, gourd vine, okra, black eyed peas, watermelons, and red husked rice into their American gardens. Domesticated animals such as goats and sheep were released on some islands to become feral populations, causing heavy damage to insular species, while several West Indian islands were rapidly deforested leading to soil erosion and dessication, and initiating European environmental consciousness according to Richard Grove. Human migration to the New World was also exten sive, with the largest component being the coerced mi gration of enslaved Africans. For example, from the

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British Isles approximately 380 000 people emigrated to the Americas in the seventeenth century, and 270 000 in the eighteenth century, with more than one half settling in the Caribbean. In comparison, coerced migration from Africa, according to David Eltis, totaled 607 000 from 1580 to 1640, 829 000 from 1640 to 1700, 2 846 000 from 1700 to 1760, 4 325 000 from 1760 to 1820, and 2 296 000 from 1820 to 1880, when slavery was finally abolished in Cuba and Brazil. In addition to the displacement of in digenous populations, the massive coerced migration of Africans, and the voluntary migrations of Europeans into the New World, other significant migration streams around the Atlantic world included the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century, the migration of indentured contract laborers from India and China into the Caribbean in the nineteenth century, the movements of people within and beyond the Caribbean in search of employment especially in the mid to late twentieth century, and the ongoing flow of migrants from Central America and Mexico into the United States today.

Transatlantic Historiography Human geographers approach these large scale processes of transatlantic change in conversation with several other disciplines. Transatlantic voyages were crucial to the history of cartography, and to the ongoing relation be tween maps and colonization. Study of the early Euro pean maps of the Atlantic and their comparison with earlier world maps has been a central theme in research on the geographical imagination and forms of geographic representation. The transatlantic provides one of the major foci for studies of migration, island development, colonialism, the formation of diasporas, race and racial formation, and geographies of food (see other entries in this work). However, the concept of the transatlantic ei ther as a region or as overlapping transoceanic networks has perhaps been best developed within the new Atlantic history. David Armitage describes three different ap proaches within recent Atlantic history: Circum Atlantic (transnational in scope), Transatlantic (comparative international or inter imperial studies), and Cis Atlantic (the study of specific localities as parts of the whole). Each of these is contributing to an emerging field of Transat lantic Studies in which there are now graduate programs, centers of study, and numerous international conferences. The term ‘Trans Atlantic’, however, has an older ge nealogy, having first come into use in the late eighteenth century among English writers referring to events taking place on the other side of the Atlantic, such as the American War of Independence. By the early nineteenth century a genre of self consciously transatlantic travel writing was emerging, with numerous writers, from Captain J. E. Alexander (1833) to Henry James (1875),

titling their works Transatlantic Sketches, encompassing journeys between Britain, the West Indies, the coastal regions of South and Central America, and North America. By the early twentieth century the Atlantic Ocean was understood as forming the heart of Western civilization, with a shared Judaeo Christian heritage (interpreted as European in origin) linking the ‘civilized’ (understood as ‘white’) peoples of Northern Europe and North America (Bonnett). This worldview influenced the historiography on the Age of Democratic Revolution, such as R. R. Palmer’s influential work of this title, which focused on the French and American revolutions in comparative perspective (problematically excluding the Haitian revolution from discussions of the origins of democracy and modernity). In the World War II era this idea of a democratic and civilized North Atlantic culture supported the notion of a ‘transatlantic partnership’ between Europe and the United States, which became formalized under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and shaped transatlantic geopolitical relations in the Cold War era. The legacies of this partnership can be seen today in the field of Trans atlantic Studies within International Relations (IR), insti tutionalized in bodies such as the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. Scholars and policy makers within this field are mainly concerned with the evolving relationship between the European Union and the United States, and what is sometimes referred to as the ‘transatlantic crisis’ and the future of ‘transatlantic cooperation’. The term is fre quently used in this sense by politicians and in the media.

The Black Atlantic and Beyond Yet this North Atlantic perspective excludes Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean as part of the Atlantic world. Thus, a second strand in the lineage of transatlantic geographies must be traced back to critical work on the African slave trade, including that of sociologist W. E. B. DuBois in the 1890s and gaining ground with the debates generated by Eric Williams’ thesis in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), which proposed that slave based econ omies in the Americas generated the capital underpin ning the industrial revolution in Europe. Based on earlier understandings of a ‘triangular trade’ between Europe, Africa, and the New World, studies of the transatlantic slave trade emphasize that from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century there was an interconnected trans oceanic economy connecting the markets for slaves from West Africa, plantation commodities such as sugar, rum, coffee, salt, and indigo from the West Indies, goods such as timber, salted cod, tobacco, and cotton from the North American colonies, and early industrial trade products

Transatlantic

such as guns, cloth, beads, and pottery from Britain and Northern Europe, as well as tools, furniture, woolen cloth, linens, and silk, once colonies were established. By the 1980s there was heated debate among historians concerning the significance of the economic growth as sociated with the transatlantic slave trade and the pos sible economic causes and consequences of its abolition. New data continue to be collected, and there are nu merous online resources concerning the transatlantic slave trade (see below). A transatlantic perspective has been crucial to the emergence of African Diaspora studies and the con ceptualization of the Black Atlantic as a dynamic zone of migration, communication, and cultural formation. Within cultural studies and postcolonial studies, theorists of the Atlantic world such as Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach insist on foregrounding the diasporic histories of Africa and the ‘genocidal’ history of indigenous peoples in North and South America and the Caribbean, as crucial aspects of the culture of modernity. A Black At lantic perspective offers a better understanding of the ship borne interconnections between African origin cultures in North and South America and the Caribbean, including shared heritages noted in styles of speech, music, dance, cuisine, play, and performance. It has also contributed to the theorization of creolization as the conflicted process of cultural interaction, resistance, ap propriation, and transformation through which African, European, and native indigenous people’s languages, material cultures, and cultural practices were remade and amalgamated in diverse ‘contact zones’ throughout the Atlantic world. Studies of the Black Atlantic have been crucial to generating new understandings of comparative formations of race and new transnational perspectives on histories of racism and antiracism. Transoceanic perspectives have also taken inspiration from Fernand Braudel’s landmark study, The Mediterra nean; indeed, the circuits of Atlantic exchange extended to Baltic and Mediterranean states, as well as the Levant. Spanish and Portuguese historians long recognized that their transatlantic expansion and colonization, in par ticular New World bullion imports, were inseparable from their modern political and economic development. A preponderance of work on the North Atlantic is now being balanced by new research on the Tropical Atlantic and the African Atlantic, as well as more interest in the Hispanic and Portuguese Atlantic among Anglophone scholars. There is even an awareness of transpacific connections, exchanges, and networks, which also may be incorporated into the transatlantic perspective. Historical and literary studies of European transatlantic cultures now include not only the British Atlantic, which has predominated until recently, but also a growing body of work on the Hispanic, French, Dutch, Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Atlantic. It also includes histories of the mobile

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and multiethnic working class and dispossessed of the Atlantic world – the sailors, pirates, apprentices, inden tured servants, slaves, domestics, proletarians, and vaga bonds brought to attention especially by the work of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. The Atlantic’s age of revolution, Rediker shows, mobilized these multi ethnic, multiracial, multicultural, and transnational masses in ways that arguably changed global politics in decisive, irreversible ways.

Transatlantic Cultural Geographies The initial emphasis on systems of production, com modity markets, and laboring classes has also expanded into a greater interest in systems of consumption, material cultures, and visual cultures of the Atlantic world. Studies of the circulation of specific food commodities such as sugar (Mintz) and rice (Carney), as well as new histories of colonial botany and plant collecting, have demon strated the extensive transatlantic networks through which plants, seeds, and knowledge of cultivation tech niques and botanical properties of specific plants have traveled, as well as recovering the crucial contributions of African and indigenous Americans to the production of such systems of knowledge and practical know how. Abolitionism was also a thoroughly transatlantic move ment that worked through transoceanic networks of antislavery print and communication, and religious af filiations such as Quakerism, while mobilizing consumers in England, France, and the United States to boycott products grown by slaves. Such movements for ethical consumption are the forerunners of more recent move ments for fair trade and debates over the sustainability of certain forms of agricultural production, tourism, and development that link together northern Atlantic con suming publics with poorer producers or service pro viders in the Caribbean and Central and South America. Geographies of food suggest how everyday forms of shopping, provisioning, and ingestion can be used to educate consumers about global food networks. The study of material culture and consumption in the Netherlands, Britain, and France has also highlighted the extent to which products produced in the Americas entered the domestic realm through everyday rituals such as taking tea or coffee with sugar, purchasing ma hogany furniture, using tobacco and rum, or making clothes from cheap slave grown cotton. Wealth from the West Indies transformed not only domestic life in Eur ope, but also civic culture, urban public space, and such iconic national spaces as country estates and their gar dens. Studies of the visual cultures of the Atlantic world are also beginning to examine how European art once viewed through a solely national and ethnocentric lens is thoroughly imbued with transatlantic themes such as

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slavery, racial difference, racial equality, the noble savage, and moral reflections on luxury goods. By tracing the movements of material objects around the Atlantic world, contemporary cultural geographies also emphasize how the movement of goods stitches together a transatlantic region, but does so in complex and uneven ways (Cook and Harrison). Transatlantic studies in their ‘cultural’ turn also en compass the making of transnational identities and forms of translocal belonging, shedding new light on current concerns with globalization, transnationalism, multisited ethnographies, and similar attempts to broaden the scope of anthropological and sociological inquiry. One entre´e into this is through the biographies of particular indi viduals who used transatlantic crossings to construct multilocal identities, ranging from Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Franklin, and Marcus Garvey, to Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, and C. L. R. James. Social historical approaches consider the wider formation of transatlantic diasporas, circuits of transmigration, and the recent phenomenon of transatlantic heritage tourism which builds tourist circuits around historical sites connected with the slave trade or with the vernacular histories of European migration. An analytical focus on the Atlantic region as an his torical field integrating Europe, Africa, and the Americas furthermore changes the way in which modernity (and hence postmodernity or late modernity) can be con ceptualized. Global modernity is now often viewed through the prismatic lens of ‘discrepant’ or ‘alternative’ modernities, plural, dispersed, and polyvalent. New his torical understandings of the Atlantic world can con tribute to resituating debates about contemporary globalization by showing how various regions have long been interconnected. The identification of the Atlantic as a special sphere of cultural, economic, and social re lations articulates with and depends integrally on par ticular ideas of the East, or the Orient, and thus connects to studies of Orientalism and colonial/imperial relations within Asia, as well as an emerging understanding of the idea of the West as generated from multiple locations, with different meanings in different periods (Bonnett). In contrast to the structural constraints of world sys tems theory or theories of dependency and under development that focus on economic relations and use national units of analysis, a transatlantic perspective opens up possibilities for an analytics of interdependencies and world relations that occur at a variety of scales and in both economic and noneconomic relations. Transcending dis ciplinary boundaries, conventional subcategories, and accepted periodizations, the transatlantic draws new connections between the local, intimate, bodily scale; the urban, regional, interlocal meso level; and the transna tional, macro level, global scale. Thus the analysis of formations of race, gender, class, and sexuality at the level

of intimate and day to day interbodily contact play a central part in unpacking transnational power relations and dynamics that occurred at a transoceanic scale.

Transatlantic Mobilities Transatlantic studies call attention, above all, to relations, transactions, networks, and mobilities. Rather than em phasizing a bounded region, it emphasizes the extended circuits of human, floral, faunal, capital, visual, and in formational movements that constitute transoceanic networks of production and consumption. Thus transat lantic geography intersects with recent theoretical de velopments within actor network theory and mobilities research by focusing on the interconnected ‘hybrid’ mobilities of people, commodities, texts, visual images, material cultures, and natures, as well as the infra structures of transport and communication that channel and enable such mobilities (and immobilities) of humans and nonhumans. These infrastructures have of course been massively transformed since the mid twentieth century by air travel, the laying of transatlantic cable, satellite communications, the internet, and high speed freight shipping. Cultures of travel have also been transformed by new forms of transmigration, border control, surveillance, and by uneven access to forms of mobility. Transatlantic mobilities are not only about physical travel and movement, but also about imaginary travel, imaginary worlds of connection, and imaginary geog raphies. What we might call the transatlantic imaginary not only informed the acts of exploration, mapping, colonization, migration, and botanizing that have oc curred over several centuries, but also flourished in the forms of travel writing, visual representation, and area studies that have come to define the transatlantic as a field of study. Thus, transatlantic geography also is con cerned with the invention of the idea of the transatlantic, what it has come to mean and to do in a performative sense, what role it has played in different eras and con texts, and how it operates as a particular system of knowledge and representation. The intersection of the physical geographies of transatlantic crossing and con nectivity and the ideational geographies of transatlantic representation and imagination, and how these have together changed over time, remain a rich and expanding field of geographical research. See also: Cartography, History of; Colonialism I; Colonialism II; Diaspora; Eurocentrism; Heritage; Island Development; Migration; Migration, Historical Geographies of; Modernity; Natures, Postcolonial; Postcolonialism/Postcolonial Geographies; Race; Transnationalism.

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Further Reading

Relevant Websites

Armitage, D. (2002). Three concepts of Atlantic history. In Armitage, D. & Braddick, M. (eds.) The British Atlantic World, 1500 1800, pp 11 30. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Bailyn, B. (2005). Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bonnett, A. (2004). The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carney, J. (2002). Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cook, I. and Harrison, M. (2003). Cross over food: Re materialising postcolonial geographies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28(3), 296 317. Crosby (1972). The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Cunliffe, B. (2001). Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC AD 1500. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Curtin, P. (1990). The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DuBois, W. E. B. (1896). The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638 1870. New York: Dodo Press. Eltis, D. (1987). Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Grove, R. (1995). Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600 1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klooster, W. and Padula, A. (eds.) (2005). The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration and Imagination. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. Linebaugh, P. and Rediker, M. (2000). The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. London: Verso. Mintz, S. (1985). Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking. Morrison, M. A. and Zook, M. S. (eds.) (2004). Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Quilley, G. and Kriz, K. D. (eds.) (2003). An Economy of Colour: Visual culture and the Atlantic World, 1660 1830. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Roach, J. (1996). Cities of the Dead: Circum Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Sheller, M. (2003). Consuming the Caribbean. New York: Routledge. Thornton, J. (1992). Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400 1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, E. (1964). Capitalism and Slavery. (first publ. 1944). London: Andre Deutsch.

http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu Exploring Cultural Landscapes, Digital Media Lab, University of Virginia: The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities). A collection of 1200 images from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. http://www.fas.harvard.edu Harvard University: The International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World was established at Harvard University in 1995 by Bernard Bailyn, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Members of the Seminar are drawn from the nations of Western Europe, Africa, and Latin America, joined by US and Canadian scholars who are also at an early stage of their careers, for presentation of work in progress, discussions of the theme of the Seminar, and exchange of views with senior scholars. The site includes Working Papers, syllabi, and bibliographic resources. http://www.h net.org H Net: H Atlantic is an international online discussion list for Atlantic World History from 1500 to 1800. This an interdisciplinary list for scholars who study colonial North America and the United States, Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, and South America in a transatlantic context. http://www.star.ac.uk The Star Project: Scotland’s Transatlantic Relations Project (STAR) provides a focus for international circumatlantic research with a Scottish dimension. Through a combination of seminars, conferences, publication ventures, and other collaborations, it fosters interchange and discussion; it also makes relevant information and resources available to a wider audience via this website. http://portal.unesco.org UNESCO: Slave Trade Archives. This website aims to outline the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade; to present the various archival funds and the document typology according to places where they are preserved; and to provide access to a database of digital archives relating to the transatlantic slave trade. http://www.ucalgary.ca University of Calgary: Peopling North America: Population Movements and Migration. This site offers an overview of migratory movements and diasporas within Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean from Europe, Asia, and Africa. http://www.umich.edu University of Michigan: The Atlantic Studies Initiative (ASI) focuses on the circum Atlantic flow of peoples, cultures, goods, and capital. It explores the interaction and interdependencies of Atlantic cultures from Africa to Europe and across the Americas and the Caribbean.

Transcripts (Coding and Analysis) M. Cope, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Axial Coding Coding along a predetermined axis that represents the interests of the researcher and informs the basis of the research questions. CAQDAS (Computer-Aided Qualitative Data Analysis Software) A generic name for a wide range of computer programs that aid in storing, organizing, coding, and analyzing qualitative data. Coding The process of identifying, assigning, and analyzing codes based on inductive review of transcripts and other data for the purpose of revealing commonalities and disjunctures, investigating patterns and themes, and producing new knowledge and insight. Coding is both a data reduction process and a recursive, fluid, powerful analytical technique. Different types of coding include in vivo, axial, and open coding; these represent a spectrum from descriptive to analytical. In Vivo Codes Codes originating from expressions, phrases, or terms used by research participants. Open Coding Coding without preidentified themes, goals, or categories; remaining open to what the data convey. Recursive Analysis The process of going back cyclically in multiple iterations to re-evaluate data and previous analysis in light of new insights. Transcription The operation of transferring audio- or video-taped material into verbatim text documents, which are usually then coded and analyzed. This involves typing up audio- or video-recorded interactions (focus groups, interviews, etc.), researchers’ fieldnotes, participants’ products (travel diaries, or other handwritten materials), or archival data for the purpose of digital data storage, data sharing, and analysis.

Introduction Transcripts are text documents that can originate from several sources in the process of research. Researchers commonly choose to transcribe the audio recorded (or video taped) verbal accounts, expressions, exchanges, and interactions that occur in research activities such as focus groups, interviews, and oral histories. In addition, scho lars working on archival data may transcribe text from materials and historical ephemera they are examining (e.g., handwritten diary entries, letters, signs, and text in photos) as a way to integrate them more seamlessly into digitally stored data. Finally, many researchers use

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transcription for their own fieldnotes, whether the notes were originally audio recorded or written in a shorthand style while in the ‘field’. The common element is that materials from various sources are ‘typed up’, that is, transformed into text, which can then more readily be systematically cataloged and analyzed. There are both challenges and strengths to the transformation of various materials into text documents. The challenges of transcription lie both in the practical and conceptual realms. First, the act of transcribing itself is often tedious (and/or expensive), though there are also benefits to doing it oneself, which are examined below. Second, transcripts cannot convey the same meanings, emotions, reactions, humor, or hesitations that can be heard, seen, and experienced in the real time, real life experience of, say, a focus group or interview. Even in serting comments for ‘laughter’ or ‘subject hesitates’ in brackets in the text is only a small representation of what could have been a significant moment in the research. Thus, transcripts are always acknowledged as a partial and imperfect data source, though there are ways to minimize errors. The primary strength of transcription is that our world is increasingly digital, including not only our data (text, maps, images, and numbers), but also the software that helps us search, code, and analyze text, such as computer aided qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS). A mixed methods research project may generate or collect data from multiple activities, such as interviews, participants’ travel journals, focus groups, the fieldnotes produced by one or more researchers, news paper accounts of local events, digitized maps, census or other secondary data, and informational documents produced by relevant social/cultural organizations. As scholars become increasingly strong users of electronic databases to manage their projects and data, this multi tude of data becomes easier to organize and analyze if fully digitized. New advances in CAQDAS also allow users to include nontext data such as photographs, audio and video files, and maps in the database, allowing richer processes of analysis (see Figure 1).

Practical Issues: Transcription in Research Projects Long before the transcription machine is hauled out, researchers planning on using verbal data collection methods should think ahead to the practicalities of transcription, both in terms of equipment and strategy.

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Figure 1 Screen capture of coding in Atlas.ti. Source: Author.

First, it is often startling to new qualitative researchers just how long it takes to arrange focus groups or inter views or other research involving real people, then to conduct these, and finally to transcribe the proceedings. Many grant proposals reflect this ignorance in overly ambitious research timelines. One of the most important insights for those engaging in qualitative research for the first time is that greater volume of data does not (ne cessarily) mean a better or more ‘rigorous’ project. Ra ther, a more realistic proposal that allows both the subjects and the researcher appropriate time to talk, lis ten, process, reflect upon, and analyze the discussions and observations will result in richer, more detailed, and ul timately more solidly grounded interpretations. Brief surveys can give a superficial sense of what a large number of people think about an issue, and they have a lot of value in that sense, but for deeper understandings of ‘context’ and ‘process’, a smaller number of in depth interviews (or life histories, or a similar other method) can be more valuable. However, these take a great deal of time, skill, and attention both to perform and to turn into usable ‘data’ through transcription.

The second common mistake is to assume that tran scription of recorded talk is a straightforward, mechanical (or electronic) process. The digital age has indeed im proved and smoothed transcription processes to some degree. Digital audio (and video) recorders can store hundreds of hours of material without the need for audio tapes (with their frailties and failures), and some re searchers are using MP 3 players to record and organize voice files. With a digital device, voice files can easily be transferred to a computer for data storage, backup pur poses, data sharing, and transcription. At this time, voice recognition software is still fairly rudimentary; there are some programs that translate voice files to text, but they require ‘training’ by the speaker to allow the software to understand that person’s intonations and pronunciations. This can be useful for certain applications, such as when a researcher records audio fieldnotes and wants them transcribed, but in other ‘talk’ situations where there are multiple speakers, cross talk, and so on, such software is of limited use. This means that someone still has to listen to verbal exchanges and type them up. Sometimes this is the

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researchers themselves, other times it is a process that is outsourced to a transcription service; each scenario has benefits and problems. The benefits to researchers doing their own transcription are several: (1) transcribing forces one to listen and review the talk based material, pro viding another round of reflection and analysis; (2) re searchers are likely to understand more of the verbal accounts because they have already heard it and because they are very familiar with the context, specific names, and acronyms that might be used; and (3) researchers will also recall (and hopefully have written notes on) more of the nonverbal elements of the recorded episode, such as a moment of humor or tension, someone entering or leav ing the room, facial expressions and body language, or other cues to emotion such as tears, nervous behavior, smiles, or frowns. All of these contribute to more accurate texts that are ‘thicker’ with description and supporting information. The primary drawback for researchers doing their own transcription lies in its heavy time commitment. These, conversely, are as the main drawbacks and benefits to having a transcription service perform the work – it can be more cost effective and time efficient for researchers to have transcription done, but the nuances and context are fewer, the accuracy is lower, and they miss out on the value of hearing and processing the in formation themselves. These differences (between doing transcription oneself and outsourcing) are reflected in the ‘rules of thumb’ for transcription time: doing it oneself likely will take up to 4 hours to transcribe 1 hour of material (less for fieldnotes, more for focus groups or interviews), while outsourcing usually takes approxi mately 2 hours per 1 hour of material. The time differ ence lies in the added value the researcher gives to the final product (richer, more accurate, and contextualized transcriptions) as well as the fact that researchers in evitably begin some of the coding and analysis process while transcribing, such as jotting down themes, pulling out interesting phrases, taking notes, identifying patterns, and so on.

Coding and the Rigorous Analysis of Transcripts The primary purpose of transcribing research materials into text is to be able to systematically examine and analyze them in order to produce new knowledge, which in turn should help answer the research questions ini tially posed in a project. One method for getting a rough sense of what is contained in the data is content analysis. Content analysis is essentially a quantitative analysis method involving counting the instances of a particular phrase or term in the body of the text. For example, in a series of interview transcripts, a researcher might want to explore how many different subjects raised a particular

topic, such as ‘the media’. Counting the incidence of phrases such as newspaper, radio, TV, internet, etc., and who used them more or less frequently will give a general sense of how often the topic of ‘media’ is raised. Content analysis is fairly simple and even keyword searches in a word processor can be used to find specific terms and how often they occur. However, content analysis is not nearly as powerful as ‘context analysis’, in which themes, patterns, correspondences, and inconsistencies are iden tified and built upon through careful reading, systematic coding, and recursive critical analysis. Coding refers, at its simplest, to a data reduction process of creating categories based either on inherent qualities of the data or on elements predetermined by the researchers to be of particular interest. These categories (codes) can then be used as shorthand to qualify sections of text, visual segments in a photograph or video, or other primary data. For example, a researcher might have an interest in people’s use of transportation; she could construct codes for different modes of transport, different ways people feel about those modes, common problems people encounter, benefits people see or experience in using transportation, and categories based on people’s locations and access to different modes. The process of coding is not complicated, but it does require attention and care, and a coding structure can quickly become complex. The first step is to go back to the research questions and identify any codes that are implicit in the topic, such as the above list regarding transportation. These are entered into a ‘codebook’, which literally was a book in the past, though it is gen erally a computerized list, spreadsheet, or set of entries in a CAQDAS format. The second step of coding is to begin reading through the transcripts slowly and thoughtfully. The information revealed by line by line analysis is very valuable, but so is the more general insight gained by reading through a whole paragraph, several pages, or an entire interview. Coding proceeds through the identification of codes of several types. The first is in vivo codes, which means words or phrases actually used by the subjects and ap pearing in the transcript. In the transportation example, we might discover the term ‘transfer’ used frequently among public transit users and notice from their accounts that discussion of transfers is often accompanied by ex pressions of hassle and stress. ‘Transfer’ would thus be come an in vivo code because the term came from within the words of the subjects, but it would also take on a contextual meaning in its frequent association with dif ficulty; when combined with demographic information, it might become apparent that transfers are especially dif ficult for older people, or perhaps for those living in a particular location (marked by race and class) whose transit connections are poorly scheduled and often result in long waiting periods.

Transcripts (Coding and Analysis)

A second type of coding is known as ‘open coding’. As its name implies, it is a process in which the researcher is open to whatever seems to pop out while reading the transcripts. It might be something that the researcher noticed during the interview (or focus group, archival review, etc.) stage – people kept mentioning a word, idea, or phenomenon – or it might be something that went unnoticed during the data collection phase but becomes obvious while working through transcripts. As with other types of codes, open codes do not necessarily have to be based on something that is widespread or occurs re peatedly; indeed, one might have a code for a fairly rare instance or an exception to the general findings in order to pursue commonalities between these rare instances. The third most common type of code is an ‘axial code’. This is the formal name for themes, patterns, or concepts that the researcher had identified early in the process and which may even be part of the research questions. Axial coding involves coding along a selected axis, for example, continuing with the transportation

Another teenage AfricanAmerican boy is flirting with a Latina girl right in front of me. She must be 13 or 14, very madeup, hair pulled back in ponytail, lots of gold jewelry. He is sort of leaning into her, teasing her verbally and physically at the same time. At one point he sort of grabs his crotch and sort of pumps his hips in her direction – not directly at her, but sort of implying it. It’s blatantly sexual, then I think he catches me looking, and sort of turns it into more of a dance by swinging his arms a bit and nodding his head. The girl is smiling slightly. I can’t tell too much from her expression. I wouldn’t say she’s pleased or annoyed – more enigmatic.

Race Gender Sexual innuendo Age

project, the researcher may have predetermined that s/he was interested in the challenges faced by the elderly, disabled, or people with small children using public transport. These challenges would form an axis along which the material would be coded. Any given code may emerge from several of these origins, and there is no particular need to keep the three types separate. For instance, ‘challenges in using public transit’ might have started as an axial code, but the subcode ‘transfers’ would be an in vivo code, having emerged from people’s comments. The process of open coding might reveal a common coping mechanism for dealing with the challenges of bus transfers. This dem onstrates the ways that codes are in fact fluid, overlap ping, inform each other, and sometimes bump into each other. Coding is often perceived to be a task of drudgery, but in fact it can be one of the most exciting moments in research because it is here that new correspondences, contradictions, ideas, concepts, and knowledge are pro duced (see Figure 2).

Teens are out of place’ here at this time of day, but few options for them are teens always and everywhere out of place’?

Physical appearance Speech act, teasing, comportment

Sex and pop culture saturate kids’ comments and actions

Comportment, sexual innuendo

ChUG effect

Observing the influence of our presence on kids

Teens aren’t supposed to be at the program until the evening – why were this boy and girl here? Cold outside? Where do teens go in the winter after school in harsh climates, anyway?

We’ve seen a lot of these expressions of sexual themes, even in younger preteens. Notice that many Latina and African-American girls wear make-up, jewelry, and revealing clothing, especially when they hit puberty, sometimes even before. Would the boy have reacted differently to an observer who was not a white male in his 30s? Think about power dynamics

Facial expression

Emotion

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Playing it cool? Perhaps masking her intimidation?

Figure 2 Sample of coding with text, codes, themes, and notes. Field observation by graduate student, Christopher Brehme; Children’s Urban Geographies Project, Nov. 29, 2004.

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Coding is also often mistaken to be a discrete process – one builds the codes, codes the transcripts, and then the analysis is complete. However, the practice of coding is usually much more contingent, slippery, and often messy. First, in building the coding structure, there is a tendency to create enormous numbers of codes as a way to capture every detail of the primary material. However, even in a large research project, if there are more than about 50 codes the codebook becomes unwieldy, some codes go unused or only used a handful of times, there is too fine a level of detail to serve the purpose of ‘data reduction’ through categorization, and researchers are unable to hold so many ideas in their heads at one time. Some ways to avoid this within a CAQDAS program are to use features like Atlas.ti’s ‘memo’ option; there may be a passage that is particularly interesting in the transcript and one wants to return to explore it more, but it does not necessarily fit existing codes. Rather than designing a new code (or sev eral) to capture the essence of this one passage, it may be better to assign a memo to it; this is basically a note to oneself about the interesting features of the passage and one’s thoughts on how it connects to other themes. Other useful features of CAQDAS programs include ways to group codes together (‘code family’ in Atlas.ti), have sub codes within a grander code, and define the relations be tween codes such as ‘is associated with’ or ‘co occurs with’. These allow researchers to use coding for very powerful analytical procedures and to get as much as possible out of the data they have so painstakingly collected. A second source of fluidity in the coding process is the fact that, to be rigorous and thorough, coding must be a recursive and iterative process. For example, one often identifies new themes in material that reflect back on already coded transcripts, requiring the re coding of the earlier documents. It is entirely possible for a theme to be revealed in the course of coding the very last transcript that the researcher realizes is actually present through most of the others; s/he would need to go back and re read the earlier material with the new theme (and associated codes) in mind. Conceptually and methodo logically, the fluidity and ‘messiness’ of coding can, therefore, actually serve as the strengths of the process.

Final Thoughts Because much of the work done by geographers involves multiple processes (social, economic, political, and en vironmental) as well as multiple positions and identities of subjects (race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, re ligion, and so on), it can be challenging to juggle so many balls at once. However, rather than further complicating

this multiplicity, coding should allow us to generate new insights and knowledge by helping us construct well grounded themes, categories, and analysis. This is the heart of ‘grounded theory’: new theoretical devel opments are solidly grounded in rigorous inductive re search. By transcribing primary data materials carefully and embracing the fluidity and contingencies of the coding process for their potential power, geographers can not only use these methods to create new understanding in geography, but can also help inform research in other disciplines through the unique contributions of the spa tial perspective. See also: Focus Groups; Grounded Theory; Interviews: In-Depth, Semi-Structured.

Further Reading Conradson, D. (2005). Focus groups. In Flowerdew, R. & Martin, D. (eds.) Methods in Human Geography: A Guide for Students Doing a Research Project, pp 128 143. New York: Pearson Prentice Hall. Cope, M. (2003). Coding transcripts and diaries. In Clifford, N. & Valentine, G. (eds.) Key Methods in Geography, pp 445 459. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Cope, M. (2005). Coding qualitative data. In Hay, I. (ed.) Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography, pp 223 233. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Crang, M. (2001). Filed work: Making sense of group interviews. In Limb, M. & Dwyer, C. (eds.) Qualitative Methodologies for Geographers: Issues and Debates, pp 215 233. New York: Oxford University Press. Crang, M. (2005). Analysing qualitative materials. In Flowerdew, R. & Martin, D. (eds.) Methods in Human Geography: A Guide for Students Doing a Research Project, pp 218 232. New York: Pearson Prentice Hall. Jackson, P. (2001). Making sense of qualitative data. In Limb, M. & Dwyer, C. (eds.) Qualitative Methodologies for Geographers: Issues and Debates, pp 199 214. New York: Oxford University Press. Peace, R. and van Hoven, B. (2005). Computers, qualitative data, and geographic research. In Hay, I. (ed.) Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography, pp 234 247. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Silverman, D. (2000). Doing Qualitative Research: A Practical Handbook. London: Sage. Van Hoven, B. (2003). Using CAQDAS in qualitative research. In Clifford, N. & Valentine, G. (eds.) Key Methods in Geography, pp 461 476. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Relevant Websites http://www.qualitative research.net/ General qualitative research site (international). http://online.hud.ac.uk/Intro QDA/preparing data.php Qualitative Data Analysis site. http://www.uvm.edu/Bmcope/QRSG/index.html Qualitative Research Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers site.

Transitional Economies J. Round, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Command Economy Economic system developed in the Soviet Union through which the state controlled all aspects of the economy. Post-Socialist Countries/Regions Refer to the areas that were under the influence of the Soviet Union but were not within its borders. Post-Soviet Countries Countries which gained independence from the Soviet Union when it collapsed in 1991. Privatization Within structural adjustment programs, this refers to the selling off of state enterprises. Shock Therapy The simultaneous unleashing of market reforms. Structural Adjustment Programs Originally referred to the movement away from a state-led economy but came to refer to the conditions imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on reforming countries in return for continuing assistance. Washington Consensus The term given to policy advice given by Washington, DC-based institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF.

Introduction Transitional economies are considered to be countries which are undertaking macroeconomic reforms in an attempt to alter the ways in which their economies are managed. Traditionally it implies that the country is making a structural adjustment from a state run economy toward a more market led system. The use of the term transition suggests that there is a start and endpoint to the reforms and that there is a set of policies that can be followed to achieve this. The term came into popular usage when South American countries, such as Argentina and Brazil, moved from military dictatorships toward democratic governance in the 1980s. Under military rule their economies were tightly governed by those in power, with little integration into global markets, and were often extremely inefficient. Therefore, economic problems, such as inflation and unemployment, often contributed to a regime’s downfall, meaning that democratically elected leaders were faced with immediate economic crisis. Forced to look for outside assistance, states typically turned to institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These groups offered loans to enable a country to avert economic

collapse, and technical advice on how to implement economic reform. In order to qualify for financial as sistance governments had to agree to undertake the policy advice and further installments were conditional on their continuous implementation. This advice evolved to become a ‘recipe’ for transitional economies to follow and as the headquarters of the World Bank and the IMF are in Washington, DC, the process became known as the ‘Washington Consensus’. At approximately the same time as the bestowing of this sobriquet the countries of Eastern Europe were be ginning to break free from communist rule. The econ omies of these countries were dictated to by Moscow with almost every aspect centrally planned. The type and number of goods produced, their price, and location of sale were, for example, controlled by the state. The poor performance of the economy and the lack of consumer goods were some of the reasons why people wanted re form, therefore it was no surprise that the new leaders wished to develop market economies. Given their ex perience of effecting economic change it was logical that these states turned for assistance to the policy experts who had worked in South America. The policy pre scriptions of the Washington Consensus were quickly adopted. Soon after these events the Soviet Union col lapsed and the newly independent states turned to the same sources for advice and financial assistance. It was now this region of the world which became synonymous with transitional economies, though Southeast Asian states were also following similar advice to liberalize their economies. Such polices, and the term itself, are not un problematic. Given the very high social costs and the persistent poverty that former Soviet states have endured since embarking on this reform path, many have ques tioned the thinking behind the advice. The main criti cism is that a transition policy ‘recipe’ ignores the geographical legacies of the regions undertaking them, and that too much emphasis is placed on withdrawing the state from the economy at the expense of institutional reform. Such debates challenge traditional econometric viewpoints for planning/researching economic change, as geographical approaches highlight how reform is medi ated differently across regions. Therefore, a single policy recipe of economic transition in order to create a market economy, and the belief that subsequent growth will lead to increases in prosperity for the population overall, must be questioned. In other words, when examining structural economic reform geography matters. Such debates have

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vast importance for how governments/international or ganizations construct development policies and whether importance is placed on macro or micro processes. Through a case study of Russia, the discussions below demonstrate how such debates led to the development of a ‘post Washington Consensus’, and the idea that econ omies, rather than undergoing transition, are in fact in transformation.

The Washington Consensus The theory of neoliberal macroeconomic reform, which came to be termed the ‘Washington Consensus’, origin ated from the World Bank’s and IMF’s responses to the economic crises faced by Latin American countries in the 1980s. The resultant development paradigm was one of a withdrawal of the state: fiscal discipline and liberalization bound up in the structural adjustment programs that came attached to financial aid supplied by the World Bank/IMF. The consensus suggested that economically struggling countries needed to follow a set of ‘rules’ in order to promote stable, sustainable growth. By following these rules the country would be able to progress toward a market economy and experience long term economic growth. These rules became known as the ‘four pillars of transition’ as countries had to liberalize, stabilize, pri vatize, and internationalize their economies. Within each category the following was to be achieved; Liberalization The freeing of the economy from state control and • political influence. The state can no longer dictate

• • •

what, where, and how much is produced, or where it can be sold. Prices are to be determined by the laws of supply and demand. Subsidies on goods must be removed and prices for services must be brought into line with world levels. Regional subsidies must be curtailed. The use of barter between enterprises should be eliminated.

Stabilization As the state withdraws from the economy, it must also • curb its expenditure. This entails a reduction in the

• •

size of the state apparatus and a decrease in spending on social safety nets. The state should avoid excessive borrowing and living beyond its means. It should implement a strict monetary policy to con trol inflation and create a stable currency.

of laws is implemented for the whole system • toA myriad work, making it an extremely complex and time consuming process. Privatization state must divest itself of ownership of the means • ofTheproduction. This is to be achieved through privat

• • •

ization schemes, open to both foreign and internal competition. The state should create conditions for the formation of new private enterprises. It is preferable that employees have the opportunity to become stakeholders in their enterprises through voucher privatization schemes. Monopolies are to be dismantled.

Internationalization The domestic economy must be opened up to inter • national competition. Conditions must be created to encourage foreign in • vestment, such as legal norms, property rights, and a

• •

‘trust’ culture. International standards for accounting, custom duties, and tax to be developed. A stable, convertible currency is to be introduced.

Furthermore, these reforms had to be implemented simultaneously, in what became known as a ‘big bang’, in order for them to work effectively. Therefore, for ex ample, a country could not liberalize prices and maintain state monopolies on production. This process is also known as ‘shock therapy’, as the initial reforms are so far reaching the market are shocked into action. This is why China, which has undertaken some of the above, is not referred to as a transition economy as the reform process was introduced gradually and the state retains some control. Fundamental to the theory of transition is the notion that the ‘market knows best’ and that government interference stymies economic development. Thus the Chinese model of reform was not seen as a viable al ternative reform path for post socialist states as the state remained too prominent an influence. The geopolitical aspects of these reforms must also be considered. By implementing such wide ranging reforms in a very short space of time, a very decisive break with the past has been made. For example, if a market econ omy is implemented and its subsequent growth leads to increased prosperity for the general public it is much harder for a military led government to regain power. Similarly, if a command economy is dismantled it be comes almost impossible for communists to return. As Fukuyama famously stated, the collapse of the com munist system signaled the ‘end of history’, as it dem onstrated the superiority of the Western neoliberal

Transitional Economies

economic model and therefore, signaled the end of the Cold War. Jeffery Sachs, a leading advisor to many for mer Soviet countries, stated that ‘‘The thinking of the day was that ‘we’ had a once in a lifetime window of op portunity to effect change.’’ This suggests that the set of policy reforms was concerned with far more than just the economic. This is not to suggest that political change was not desirable in the countries undergoing such reforms but it highlights how the reforms were, at least partially, an ideological construct. Furthermore, the opening up of these states had economic benefits to Western countries as it provided access to new markets, cheaper labor, and natural resources.

Transition in the Former Soviet Union Using Russia as an example it is clear that while the above reforms seem relatively straightforward on paper they were incredibly difficult to implement in practice. The first major obstacle was the complexity of the re forms and the context in which they were taking place. At the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, every single aspect of the Russian economy had to be reformed. Given that the country was also moving from a one party system to a democracy and was contending with the loss of its empire it is unsurprising that a sense of uncertainty prevailed. With the assistance of foreign experts it was decided that shock therapy was the correct path for Russia to take. However, the ‘big bang’ was not ignited, as debilitating political turmoil ensured that price liberal ization was, initially, the only reform the federal gov ernment could introduce effectively. Even this process could only be partially executed as some regional ad ministrations retained control of local prices, and basic goods and services remained subsidized across the country. Privatization – the largest and, in theory, ir reversible step to the market – began in early 1992. By 1993 over 60 000 enterprises were privately owned, compared to only 70 in 1991. By the end of 1993, two thirds of all state assets had been transferred to private enterprises. However, this did not lead to significant in creases in efficiency. The government, more concerned with transferring ownership to private hands in case it lost power, did not concern itself with who it was selling to or that it was receiving only a fraction of the market value for its assets. Liberalization occurred without sta bilization, at both macro and micro levels, resulting in inflation levels reaching over 2500% in 1992, as the monetary overhang, accrued during the Soviet period, entered the economy. Attempts at macro stabilization were flawed, with money supply constricted simply by not paying state employees, suppliers, or pensions, with the failure to enforce hard budget constraints allowing bankrupt enterprises to continue operating. Two years

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after the process began foreign trade remained heavily regulated, any benefits of foreign aid were negated by the financing of imports by export credits, and foreign in vestment regulations were at best opaque. The increasing unpopularity of the transition project, due to its ever growing social costs, led to the previously compliant communist politicians, sensing that they might be able to regain power, withdrawing their support for the process, plunging the government into crisis. Several prominent reformers were dismissed and by the end of the first year it appeared that the reform process would grind to a halt. It was only revived when Yeltsin won a nationwide referendum on his position and policies in 1993, though gaining only 53% support for the reform process. Despite this, gross domestic product (GDP) still continued to fall, leading the government to near bank ruptcy. The Russian government, facing a crippling budget deficit, was offered loans by Russian entre preneurs in return for letting the lender ‘manage’ the enterprises exploiting the country’s resources. If the government was unable to repay the loan then it would be converted into shares, passing control to the lender. As the government could not repay the loans entrepreneurs were able to take control of key enterprises for a fraction of their true worth and an oligarch class emerged. Despite such problems, institutions such as the Euro pean Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the European Union (EU), and many economists, believe that Russia has completed its transition to a market economy as it has privatized production, stabilized the economy as inflation has fallen, the lack of price controls means it is liberalized, and foreign firms can operate in the region. However, many believe that the form of economy that has developed is far removed from that envisaged by the reformers. Rather than the growth of a neoliberal market, it is argued that systems of ‘economic involution’, ‘chaotic capitalism’, or a ‘virtual economy’ have developed instead. This, coupled with the social costs of transition detailed below, led many to question the validity of the whole transition process and the Washington Consensus.

The Social Costs of Transition Even the most enthusiastic free market reformers ac knowledged that the social costs arising from transition would be high. Each of the four pillars has a negative impact on the general population. As shown above lib eralization leads to very high levels of inflation. This means that savings are wiped out overnight and the real worth of wages cannot keep pace with price rises. Pri vatization leads to unemployment as enterprises seek to increase efficiencies and those that cannot compete go into bankruptcy. As governments attempt to stabilize

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their economies, state workers often go unpaid, or the real worth of their wages falls dramatically, pension and unemployment benefits fall to match the cost of living, and other social support packages are withdrawn. Many economists note that the burdens of transition are dis proportionately felt by the poorest members of society. Furthermore, some see increasing social dislocation as an indicator that the reforms are working. What was not envisaged in the former Soviet Union is the depth and longevity of these social costs. Reformers assumed that managers and workers, now free of the constraints of the command economy, would become aware of the new market opportunities and transmute into rational actors in the new flexible labor market. This would mean, in theory, that for the majority the pain caused by the transition would be brief and beneficial as they now had the opportunities to fulfill their potential. Thus it was expected that as macroeconomic growth occurred after the initial expected collapse, wealth would trickle down to the advantage of the majority. Very few reformers gave much attention to how this was going to happen; it was just expected. By the end of 1992, 65% of Russians were considered to be living on incomes below subsistence levels and by 1995 real incomes had declined by over two thirds. While there is much debate over the causes, Russia has also seen its population decline by approximately 7 million people and male life expectancy is around 59 years. This figure is the lowest in the Northern world, and is a full 14 years below female life expectancy. In 2007 it is estimated that 20% of the population, around 30 million people, received incomes below the subsistence minimum. While this figure is a lot lower than that in 1992, it does not reveal the full story. For many more people everyday life is extremely un certain as employment is often insecure and low pay means that saving for retirement is difficult. As the sub sistence minimum figure does not reveal the true costs of everyday life, for example, it only allows for one pair of shoes every 5 years, many people know they will not be able to retire as pensions are so low. In response to this many people have developed informal practices to gen erate extra income, such as undertaking extra work, growing food for sale and domestic consumption, or setting up micro enterprises. While this provides a cer tain standard of living they do not provide long term security. Social safety nets offer little protection. Pensions, as noted above, are low and unemployment benefits are very hard to obtain. Therefore, while unemployment rates remain relatively low, and are used to show that the re forms are working, they underestimate nonemployment. At the turn of the century it was estimated that the true level of unemployment was more than double the official 11% level. Senior citizens are entitled to free medicines. However, as the pay for government workers is so low

medical staff often ask for a bribe before they issue or honor prescriptions. Corruption has become endemic in many countries that underwent transition. A 2006 report suggested that over 70% of Ukrainians have had, in the past year, to pay a bribe to access goods or services they were entitled to. Corruption has become so prevalent in these regions not just because of low wages, but due to the lack of institutional development, such as robust legal systems, during the initial reform period.

Institutions and Geographies Matter As it became clear that the long term consequences of the shock therapy approach were far worse than ex pected, the rationales behind the Washington Consensus came under scrutiny. The World Bank began to publish reports with titles such as ‘Institutions matter’, and it was acknowledged that it had been too simplistic to expect fully functioning market economies to form without state guidance. As Joseph Stiglitz, then the World Bank’s chief economist, stated in 1998, The policies advanced by the Washington Consensus are not complete, and they are sometimes misguided. Mak ing markets work requires more than just low inflation; it requires sound financial regulation, competition policy, and policies to facilitate the transfer of technology and to encourage transparency. States can improve their cap abilities by reinvigorating their institutions. This means not only building administrative or technical capacity but instituting rules and norms that provide officials with incentives to act in the collective interest while re straining arbitrary action and corruption. (Stiglitz 1998)

This was a dramatic reversal in thinking and spelt the end of the Washington Consensus. It was argued that such statements were a plea to economists to accept that the world is more complex than their macroeconomic policies had assumed. It was simply not enough to expect the market to develop the necessary institutions as the state withdrew from the economy. This has led to the World Bank taking a much more microeconomic ap proach, with an emphasis on reducing corruption and strengthening the institutions which guide market de velopment. However, this is proving problematic in post Soviet states, as corruption has become so entrenched it is proving very difficult to combat. Missing from these debates, however, is the role that geography played in the transition process. As shown above, Eastern European states and the former Soviet Union countries have experienced rather different out comes as a result of shock therapy. One of the reasons for this, it is argued, is because the transition process failed to incorporate, or even acknowledge, the differing

Transitional Economies

geographies of post socialist regions. Countries had dif fering levels of economic development before they entered the Soviet sphere of influence. These can be split into four groups (see Figure 1): 1. The states involved with Europe’s Industrial Revo lution, such as what are now known as the Czech Republic and Slovenia. 2. Those which lagged behind group one in the indus trialization process, such as today’s Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. 3. Those which were still predominantly rural as they entered into the command economy, such as Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. 4. The ‘underdeveloped’ regions of Central Asia. The countries from the first two groups above had es tablished some form of market economy prior to their subjugation into the socialist space. Thus after its demise they were able to revive existing legal frameworks, such as property rights, almost immediately thereby avoiding the vacuum that existed in groups 3 and 4. While such legislation was not ideal, it did provide a basis around which institutions, such as a banking code, could be de veloped. Therefore, these countries were able to adopt a market framework very quickly, whereas in Russia such institutions had to be developed from scratch. This would be difficult enough under normal circumstances but

given the political turmoil, economic collapse, and the developing oligarchy who wished to steer institutional development to their benefit, it is no surprise that the process is still not complete. It was also assumed that the Soviet sphere of influence was a homogenous economic and political space, with mediations from Moscow accepted universally across it. The reality was markedly different, with interpretations of the plans differing widely from the macro country level to the actions of individual plant managers and workers. Some countries were able to interpret state socialism in differing ways, for example, within Hungary some small scale private enterprises were permitted. Thus upon moving toward a market economy there was some entre preneurial culture, as well as relevant legislation, which could be called upon. Furthermore, there were artificial divisions within the Soviet Union as sector planning meant that certain sectors of the economy were concentrated in individual republics. For example, Belarus was the site of a considerable amount of light industrial production and in Ukraine agricultural development was prioritized. Also, one industry towns were created, often based around one enterprise. Therefore, countries and regions simply did not have the infrastructure in place within which a market economy could easily develop. Geography also played an important role for the countries of East and Central Europe as the Soviet Union collapsed. These countries,

. Figure 1 The geographies of economic legacies.

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such as Poland and the Baltic States looked immediately toward Western Europe with the hope of joining the EU. This meant these states had institutional structures which they could work toward implementing.

development that is relevant to specific countries. Fur thermore, it recognizes that the economic forms that might eventually develop in the region might be very different to those that were expected and that forcing them, through policy and financial assistance, to conform to a textbook market economy is counterproductive.

Transition or Transformation? The very notion of transition suggests single start and endpoints. Using this theoretical base, economists de veloped a singular policy approach to be applied in countries wishing to move toward a market economy. This assumes that all the regions are starting from the same base point and that policy advice will be mediated in a uniform manner. By ignoring individual geographies, those leading the reform process were unable to foresee the problems that individual countries would have. Such a catch all policy also ignores the fact that the market economy they were trying to implement only existed in textbooks. Every country has its own version of a market economy, for example, the Swedish model is very dif ferent to the German form which in turn differs signifi cantly from the Anglo American variations. Therefore, it can be seen that as well as differing start points, there are also a multitude of endpoints. Thus the question must be asked as to what point transition economies start from and at what point is the process complete? Using the EBRD’s scorecards, most post socialist states have completed the transition process. Therefore the reform process in Russia and Ukraine is considered by some to be complete as their economies are, in theory, privatized, liberalized, and open to international com petition; a popular view amongst economists. However, as the above has shown, macroeconomic indicators fail to reveal the economic complexity in these regions. Many social scientists working in this area dispute that the reforms are complete, arguing that the form of economic development that has occurred in these countries is very different to that envisaged by those who steered the re form process. If macro level differences were not in corporated into the transition process then clearly micro scale experiences could not be articulated within such strategies. As these are the spaces where the momentous political and economic changes were mediated, inter preted, experienced, and lived it is understandable that the results of the orthodoxy have seen widely different outcomes across the post Soviet sphere of influence. The fact that there are so many outcomes problem atizes the term ‘transition’ even further. This has led to an increase in the use of the term ‘transformation’ when referring to these economies. Transformation suggests that there is not a singular starting point and that the process is fluid and the outcomes unclear. While this might seem like a semantic argument, this distinction demonstrates the diversity of the region and encourages institutional

See also: Communist and Post-Communist Geographies; Economic Geography; Economics and Human Geography; Geopolitics; Globalization, Economic; Liberalism; Neoliberal Economic Strategies; Neoliberalism and Development; Poverty; Privatization; Structural Adjustment.

Further Reading A˚slund, A. (1995). How Russia Became A Market Economy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Berglof, E. and Roland, G. (eds.). The Economics of Transition. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bradshaw, M. and Stenning, A. (eds.) (2003). East Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union: The Post Socialist Economies. Harlow: Pearson/DARG Regional Development Series. Burawoy, M., Krotov, P. and Lykina, T. (2000). Involution and destitution in capitalist Russia. Ethnography 1(1), 43 65. Burawoy, M. and Verdery, K. (1999). Uncertain Transition. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Gros, D. and Steinherr, A. (1995). Winds of Change: Economic Transition in Central and Eastern Europe. London: Longman. Gustafson, T. (1999). Capitalism Russian Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klein, L. and Pomer, M. (eds.) (2001). The New Russia: Transition Gone Awry. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Lane, D. (2000). What kind of capitalism for Russia? A comparative analysis. Communist and Post Communist Studies 33(4), 485 504. Lane, D. and Myant, M. (eds.) (2006). Varieties of Capitalism in Post Communist Countries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lavigne, M. (1999). The Economics of Transition: From Socialist Economy to Market Economy. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Pickles, J. and Smith, A. (1998). Theorising Transition: The Political Economy of Post Communist Transformation. London: Routledge. Smith, A. (2007). Articulating neo liberalism: Diverse economies and urban restructuring in post socialism. In Sheppard, E., Leitner, H. & Peck, J. (eds.) Contesting Neoliberalism: The Urban Frontier, pp 204 222. New York: Guilford. Smith, A. and Stenning, A. (2006). Beyond household economies: Articulations and spaces of economic practice in post socialism. Progress in Human Geography 30(2), 190 213. Stiglitz, J. (2003). Globalization and Its Discontents. London: Penguin. Stone, R. (2002). Lending Credibility: The International Monetary Fund and the Post Communist Transition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wedel, J. (1998). Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe. Basingstoke: Macmillan. World Bank (2002). Transition The First Ten Years: Analysis and Lessons for Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Washington, DC: World Bank.

Relevant Websites http://www.ebrd.com European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. http://www.imf.org International Monetary Fund. http://www.worldbank.org World Bank.

Translation F. M. Smith, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Back Translation A technique employed to ensure concept equivalence in translations which involves translation of a text (such as a questionnaire) into the target language and reverse translation to the original language by another translator. Versions are then compared to identify aspects requiring further clarification. Concept Equivalence A technique in translation which seeks to ensure equivalent values are being interrogated, for example, in a questionnaire survey delivered in different languages. Often combined with back translation. Domesticating Translation The translation strategy dominant in technical and scientific circles where the translated text is produced with emphasis on transmission of meaning between the two languages and fluency for the target audience. Although widespread, it is critiqued for reinforcing ethnocentric readings of the translated material as it renders the translation process invisible and may close down the varieties of meanings and styles present in the original text. Foreignizing Translation A translation strategy which highlights the translated nature of the text by retaining the original syntax and style as much as possible, or by including terms from the original, for example. By flagging the ethical and political choices made in translation, it can decenter the ethnocentrism of dominant translation strategies, which tend to make the act of translation invisible and may prioritize the cultural values of the target language. Interpreting The rendering of speech from one language to another requiring consideration of the types of translation strategy used, the positionality of the researcher and the interpreter, and the ethics of language usage in particular contexts. Translation The rendering of text from one language to another, requiring decisions about the relative emphasis on meaning and style, on fluency, fidelity to the original text, and freedom of translation.

Introduction Although translation is an extensive practice globally, and geographers are extensively involved in translation in their research, geographical writing has given only

limited attention to translation practices as a methodo logical issue. Translation practices are typically relegated to footnotes or ignored entirely in written research ac counts. This relative invisibility is surprising given the extensive consideration in human geographical research of power relations, working with ‘others’, the position ality of the researcher and questions of representation. Paying more attention to the practices and the politics of translation is crucial to the development of critical translation practice in geography, making an important contribution to cross cultural research. Geographers need to explore the theoretical underpinnings of various approaches to translation alongside the practical choices made in diverse translation strategies. These include decisions about the balance between translation as a search for equivalence and as a meaning making process, and between domesticating or foreignizing approaches to translation. Reflection on the situated practices of trans lation, both in the field and in the analysis and repre sentation of research, needs to take account of the agency of the translator and their relation to the researcher, the political implications of translation and the uneven cul tural and institutional power relations influencing the creation and representation of geographical knowledges. This helps to make more visible the often invisible spaces of translation in human geography research. Translation (rendering a written text from one lan guage to another) and interpretation (rendering speech from one language to another) are skilled professional practices, essential to the functioning of cross cultural communication. They operate in myriad, often uncom mented, everyday practices – among tourists, migrants and diaspora communities, as well as in law, business, diplomacy, or international development. Such is the significance of translation in popular cultural practices that He´ctor Tobar describes bilingual Hispanic com munities in the contemporary USA as the Translation Nation, while the Italian scholar, Umberto Eco goes so far as to argue that translation is the one ‘true’ language of the multinational and multilingual European Union. The impossibilities and limitations of translation are also reflected in popular culture (in Sophia Coppola’s film, Lost in Translation, for example) while paranoia about the inability to translate ‘foreign’ language worlds and anx iety at the power of the interpreter is portrayed in Syd ney Pollack’s film, The Interpreter, and highlighted in cases of criminal prosecution of translators engaged by the legal teams of people accused of terrorist acts. Tied up with these processes are unequal geographies of cultural,

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economic, and political dominance which mark some languages as lesser in status than others. Thus, acts of translation are never simply about meaning and com munication; they intersect with a broader politics of translation and are in turn subject to challenge and contestation. Diverse approaches to translation wrestle with these challenges. Whether the translated text can or should adhere closely to the style or meaning of the original, and whether this can produce a text in the translated lan guage which communicates meaning clearly to the target audience, has long been subject to debate. Writing in 1923, Walter Benjamin described the complex negoti ation of the translator between ‘fidelity’ to the original and the necessity for ‘freedom’ of the translator from the original text in order to communicate those meanings fluently to the audience of the translated text. For geographers seeking critical approaches to translation practices, relevant concerns emerge in relation in data collection and field work (In which languages are inter views conducted?), data analysis (Are the interviews analyzed in the original language, or in a translation of these? Who carried out the translation, and what effect does this have on the meanings conveyed?), dissemination and publication (Are issues of translation mentioned, with ambiguities and difficulties explained, and insights gained?), and ethical and political issues (Are particular social groups excluded because of their language (in) ability? Are sensitive topics and concepts carefully dealt with?). Geographers and other social scientists have begun to develop critical translation practices to address these issues, drawing on work from social theory and transla tion studies. This is outlined below before diverse prac tices around translation in quantitative and qualitative research methodologies are discussed. Finally, develop ment of critical translation practices needs to be con textualized within the politics of translation by taking account of the uneven geographies of translation and the institutional practices of the representation of geo graphical knowledges.

Toward a Critical Theorization of Translation Lawrence Venuti argues that the dominant approach to translation and interpretation in international professional contexts (including business, technical and scientific fields, and geographical research) is one which Bogusia Temple describes as a ‘transmission’ model of translation. This emphasizes the fidelity of the translation to the meaning of the original speaker or writer and also the need for fluency for the target audience. The role of the translator is to translate meaning into the target language as accurately as

possible, without the process of translation adding or subtracting from the original text, while also rendering the meaning transparent in the target language. Professional codes of ethics for translators therefore emphasize the neutrality of the translator or interpreter, making a com mitment to translate that which was said or written, without omission or addition, and to do so without the influence of personal views. The translator is profession ally invisible and for their influence on the text to be visible is considered an indication of a lapse in professional competency. In research, this positions the researcher and the translator epistemologically as objective instruments where elimination of bias or any effect on the data col lected, other than to facilitate comprehension, is the key concern. Broadly positivist in approach, these translation strategies view translators as ideally invisible: their func tion is to render the meaning of the original as closely and neutrally as possible into the target language in such a way as to make the translated text appear to be the same as the original without a translator’s intervention. In social sci ence contexts, this leads to translation being seen as a logistical challenge to be dealt with by employing com petent translators or interpreters with adequate linguistic skills to allow as close as possible a transmission of meaning between language contexts. Positivist approaches have, however, been subject to criticism from those advocating more ‘critical’ strategies of translation in geography and elsewhere. These critical ap proaches, broadly social constructivist in orientation, draw on postcolonial, post structuralist, and feminist critiques of translation from writers such as Derrida, Venuti, and Spivak. Critique centers around two themes – translation and meaning, and translation and agency – and situates practices of translation within a wider politics of translation. In thinking about translation as the communication of meaning, critical approaches emphasize the challenges, ambiguities, limitations, and possibilities of translation between linguistic and cultural contexts, and the political implications of these practices. While there can be some level of simple equivalence between languages (la chaise, the chair, der Stuhl), the challenge of transporting or mapping meaning from one frame of language reference to another is seldom so straightforward. This is particu larly the case with the kinds of concepts which may be involved in human geographical research. Terms such as nation, community, home, space, or place are not simple even in a single language such as English and the opportunities for diverse meanings and terms multiply when working cross culturally. While most translators (both positivist and social constructivist) debate the need to consider whether the approach to translation adopted is one which accepts source language or target language bias, and stress that no translation can avoid such bias in some form or another, critical translation differs to some extent from positivist approaches in challenging the

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assumption that this choice can be judged in terms of how invisible the process of translation remains and highlights instead the implications of different translation strategies. In human geography, explicit concern with translation has been limited. However, some scholars have given consideration to this question of meaning and translation. Martin Mu¨ller demonstrates the difficulties of working across languages, particularly in key terms where there may be a very rich set of connotations in one cultural context, but which may be obscured in translation, or of which the researcher may not be aware. This may occur where the original term is much richer than that which can be conveyed in the target language, as he explores in relation to a number of Russian terms (derzhava, vlast’, and sila) which all translate in English as ‘power’. Searching for an equivalence of meaning requires further clarification as each of these terms carries particular implications, especially in political contexts. Mu¨ller ar gues that greater considerations of these varied cultural connotations would enrich a number of studies on Russia and geopolitics published in English which gave little sense of the diverse notions of power being employed in the original texts. Nevertheless, he argues that even such concern fails to take account of the extent to which the collapse of meaning differences involved in translation constitutes a political moment when the range of meanings in the original language is elided by the choice of terms in the target language. Conventional translation, which may leave such choices uncommented, therefore is depoliticizing as it neutralizes translation as a seemingly invisible practice. Even where translators employ differ ent terms to indicate different original terms, the pol iticized or ideological nature of terms may be lost in translation. The apparently neutral translation can be come a hegemonic representation of the original, or may circulate independently of the original, while losing the political implications of the original. For researchers, this raises serious questions about working with material in the original or in translation, the interrogation of diverse and complex meanings, and the representation of the research material in papers and reports. In a parallel argument, Venuti describes the ‘neutral’ approach to translation as a ‘domesticating’ approach to translation where ‘fluency’ and ‘freedom’ in translation are employed to enforce dominant canons around clarity of expression (making the act of translation at once in visible) and yet also allowing for changes to the original (freedom) to render the text readily interpretable within the target language. Freedom and fluency are judged in terms of the cultural and linguistic norms of the target language so that the domestication of the foreign text into the target language constitutes an act of violence. This is not to privilege the original text over the target one, but to indicate that the effect of this approach is to

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render the process of translation and the difference of the foreign text invisible, placing the cultural frame of ref erence of the target language as the dominant one while leaving its effect unquestioned. Given the dominance of English in global contexts, this tends also to reinforce the dominance of English language cultural norms. As an alternative, Venuti proposes ‘foreignizing translation’ strategies which aim to retain a sense of the difference of the foreign text, of cultural references and linguistic patterns foreign to the translation language. Likewise, for Mu¨ller, the issue is not to create ‘better’ translations through producing greater equivalence, but to destabilize and denaturalize the hegemony of the translated text. In this he argues fundamentally for the need for language training among geographers, since those who work only from already translated material will have little awareness of the issues raised above. However, even where the re searcher works across languages, problems of represen tation remain. Possibilities such as leaving original terms untranslated and footnoting them, or deliberately work ing with the style of the original text as much as possible are all strategies for making the politics of translation more visible. Giving attention to the politics of translation also entails discussion of the agency of the translator in a form which is usually elided from traditional approaches to translation. Instead, language abilities should be dis cussed alongside more commonly discussed aspects of positionality such as gender, class, race, sexuality, or caste while the translator’s agency is recognized. The choices of the translator around particular translation strategies become part of a set of political choices in which trans lation is a meaning making process. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, discussing translating poems by Bengali women writers into English, describes how she starts by avoiding thinking about the audience for the translation and concentrates more on the meaning, and particularly the style and language of the original. She situates these as specific choices within the unequal language hierarchies between Bengali and English, in relation to a critique of postcolonial cultural practices, and in relation to the gender politics of the writers concerned. While this may seem to have less relevance in a social science context, in discussing her research on domestic workers in Kenya and Tanzania, Janet Bujra considers the implications of a very accurate, literal translation compared to a trans lation which gets at issues of slang, local references, or other themes. The latter may not necessarily produce a polished final text, but may give greater insight to the terms in which the research participants articulated their views. Translation is therefore a meaning making process, while it also seeks to transmit meaning in the greatest possible equivalence between contexts. It operates in the tension between what Jacques Derrida described as both

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the necessity and impossibility of conveying fully the meaning and style of the original text and its wider cultural resonances in the translated text. However, al though something is always lost in translation, reflecting both the incommensurability of translation between two languages, once translation is viewed as a meaning making process, insights can be gained from close at tention to the ambiguities, disjunctures, neologisms, and hybrid meanings which emerge from translation. This allows reflection on the limitations of the target language and its cultural meanings, and on the plurality of meaning in the ‘original’ text, which is itself often not unproblematic. Thus, Fiona Smith reflects on how to translate terminology from a study of community activist groups in Germany where those involved in fact use terminology with greater emphasis on citizenship and civic values (Bu¨rgervereine, Bu¨rger) than in the English term ‘community’. Crucially, this not only raised issues about translation, but also forced the denaturalization of the notion of ‘community’ activism in English. Working through moments of rupture or ambiguity, the researcher can identify themes requiring further interrogation, ex ploring, for example, what it means to use such terms for these social practices in the German context as well as how concepts from the English notion of ‘community’ might be implicated but worked out in different cultural or political registers. Considering the diversity of meanings in both source and target language gives rise to the possibility of translation as a hybrid form – neither wholly the original nor wholly separate from it, but working between and across language registers to high light the politics of translation and the politics of dis course in both language worlds.

Exploring Translation Practices in Human Geography Research The themes outlined above are negotiated in diverse ways in the practices of translation in human geography research. Three sets of typical practices are considered here: questionnaire surveys; working with interpreters; and working as a bilingual researcher. Questionnaire Surveys Cross national or multilingual questionnaire surveys need to focus on identifying equivalent ideas, measures, and concepts between different cultural and linguistic contexts. A broadly positivist approach to translation is commonly advocated where translation needs to be both accurate and appropriate. As explored by Behling and Law, this typically involves the search for ‘concept equivalence’ or ‘concept validity’ between languages. A common strategy for ensuring this is to translate the questionnaire into the target language and then have

another translator do a back translation from the target to the source language. The back translation and the ori ginal are compared to identify inconsistencies and am biguities, allowing meanings to be clarified and questions reformulated. Importance is placed on clear and un ambiguous translation and on the comparability of con cepts between languages. Creating that equivalence of meaning requires cultural knowledge alongside language proficiency. A word for word translation may not be helpful if it produces am biguous, insensitive, or offensive translations. The original concept might need adjusted to a register appropriate for the target language, creating challenges in ensuring that equivalent concepts or qualities are being measured in diverse contexts. For example, a cross national study ask ing students to evaluate the role of professors in geo graphical education at university needed careful translation between American English (where ‘professors’ is commonly taken to be most academic teachers) and German (where ‘professors’ are a specific senior section of the academic staff). Thus while the term ‘professor/Pro fessor’ is straightforward to translate, concept equivalence is more difficult to achieve. Awareness of appropriate frames of reference helps to elicit information from re spondents in a manner relevant to their cultural terms. In the development studies context, David Simon emphasizes sensitivity to different calendars, to units of measurement, and to using significant local events as reference points. Thus, quantitative survey research requires as much sen sitivity to the politics and ethics of translation as all cross cultural research. Despite these difficulties, even a basic effort at translation can develop further understanding of the issues being researched, and of how language abilities are implicated in social relations. Fiona Smith outlines how, in using an English and a Spanish version of their questionnaire which allowed them to survey those with lower level English skills, British students investigating the local labor market in a Spanish tourist resort came to understand how language abilities allowed some people access to more highly paid employment, while others lacking these language skills were excluded from these jobs. The questionnaire itself is not the only crucial element in survey research. It is also necessary to consider the positionality (gender, class, language ability, and in sider or outsider status) of those administering the survey and their influence on the research, while attention needs to be paid to issues of recruitment and training of inter preters or those administering the questionnaire in the field. These issues are discussed in more detail below. Working with Interpreters Some writers suggest the ideal for cross cultural research is where the researcher speaks the language of the re search participants, taking bi lingualism as the ‘gold

Translation

standard’ and suggesting the use of interpreters distances the researcher from the research. Certainly, cross cul tural research benefits enormously from greater linguistic communication, but situations inevitably arise where the use of interpreters and translators is necessary, or even desirable. In this case, a number of practical and technical issues require consideration, as do the social relations of the interpreter to the research process. Finding interpreters with suitable language skills, who are available and affordable, is a key challenge. While this may involve skilled professional translators, in practice it often utilizes local informants with a range of language skills. Actual choices depend to a great extent on funding levels and the time available for recruitment. Associated with the question of recruitment is the technical question of the kinds of translation or interpretation strategies which are possible or desirable. Researching domestic labor in Kenya and Tanzania, Janet Bujra explored a number of technical questions about translation strat egies. What terms were appropriate to use to ask the respondents about the practices being discussed? The politics of naming diverse domestic labor practices and the social roles involved with them meant careful choices were made about the terminology being used. (Sensi tivity to the impact of translation on research participants is explored further by Kevin Simms.) Bujra also decided about the kind of translation most suitable in that con text, suggesting a rougher translation retaining local terminologies, and expression was preferable to ren dering the talk into standard Swahili or English. In Venuti’s terms, a ‘foreignizing translation’ was adopted, rather than one which domesticated expression and meaning to the target language context. Working with interpreters therefore ideally involves careful attention to recruitment and training, which should at a minimum involve discussion with interpreters of the purpose of the research, ethical issues, and the translation strategy preferred. Thinking about the social relations of the interpreter to the research and the researchers involves discussion of the positionality of the interpreter and their agency in the research. Considering the positionality of the interpreter, Bujra and Simon both raise a series of issues. If interpreters are outsiders to the research context, will their translations be more objective, or tend to miss important issues of local interpretation? Are insider in terpreters more likely to be able to act as gatekeepers to access local populations? Or might they introduce bias to the research by interviewing those they already know, or social groups more similar to themselves? In some particularly divided or factional contexts, using an interpreter closely associated with one group may re duce the chance of accessing other social groups in the research. Likewise, the gender, class, or age position of the interpreter may require consideration so as not to

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offend or exclude particular groups of research par ticipants. Researchers should also understand that those able to act as interpreters may well be more affluent or educated than the research participants and should consider how this shapes the social relations of the re search, rather than assuming interpretation is a neutral conduit of meaning and information between research participants and researcher. Allied to this are questions about what material is being collected, recorded, or analyzed in the research. Is it appropriate to record the whole translation process or will the researchers only record the answers translated by the interpreter? Either scenario raises questions about what is being analyzed (the views of the translator, or of the participants) and how. Is the interpreter engaged in the analysis and understood epistemologically as a participant in a meaning making process or viewed as an ideally in visible transmitter of information between researcher and participants? Work by Twyman, Morrison, and Sporton on society– environment links in rangeland management in Botswana illustrates how a focus on the processes of meaning making within a research project can reveal key issues about how participants, interpreters, and researchers all negotiate meaning in a research setting. The researchers, from a British university, employed a number of skilled interpreters to allow them to interact with the wide range of languages used by the research participants. Rather than recording the answers to questions once they had been translated into English, the process of com munication back and forwards between the research participants, including the translators, was taped and transcribed. The research team then investigated the whole research process as one of complex meaning making where it was very difficult to map the ideas and meanings of the research participants on to English language terms (and vice versa). This led the researchers to rework the concepts with which they were researching. Furthermore, a focus on the processes of interpretation and translation of meaning between research participants illustrated that many research participants were already speaking in what was not their first language. In their everyday negotiations around rangeland management, translation was part and parcel of the practices of the research participants as they worked between a variety of languages and concepts to communicate their attitudes toward and practices of livestock and land stewardship. Attention to the processes of meaning making in trans lation and interpretation can therefore provide a nuanced appreciation of how concepts are mediated and utilized in cross cultural contexts. It decenters the conceptual and linguistic assumptions of the researcher(s) and fur thers understanding of how negotiations of meaning, translation, and interpretation play a key role in a range of socio spatial processes.

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Translation

Working as a Bilingual Researcher

The Politics of Translation

Arguably, working as a bilingual researcher, where the researcher speaks both languages fluently, does reduce the distancing effects of using interpreters and may result in the researcher being more aware of the challenges and choices involved in translation. However, bilingual re searchers cannot ignore decisions about translation strategies or the ethics and politics of translation. Kathrin Ho¨rschelmann outlined her approach in research in the former east Germany which drew on qualitative, in depth interviews about the cultural and social consequences of German unification. Central to it is consideration of her own positionality and of her strategy in working between two languages (German and English). The interviews were conducted in her native German and carefully transcribed in German, then analyzed through reading, coding, and note taking. Only the quotations selected for use in the final paper were translated into English. She adopted a ‘literal’ approach to translating the quotations. This produced a rather ‘artificial’ construction resulting from the ‘inevitable failure’ of ‘imitating German speech in written English’ but it preserved as much as possible of the style and emphasis of the original interview extracts. This foreignizing strategy also involved retaining original terms holus bolus – the term die Wende (the change, or turning point) was not translated but was retained in German to indicate the highly politicized and contested nature of this term which refers to the processes of rupture and transformation in Germany in 1989/90. Ho¨rschelmann notes how the research involved shifts between various forms (conversations to selected quota tions, spoken speech to written text, as well as a shift from German to English). As a result, the whole research process entails diverse translations, not only in the narrow linguistic sense but also in a wider sense. Informed by actor network theory, it involved an attempt to preserve and communicate meaning but also a loss of contextual and nonverbal information which was compensated for to some extent by the discussion of the texts and inclusion of wider contextual meanings and implications. For bilingual researchers, foreignizing translation strategies may help to highlight and represent diverse and divergent meanings. Academic writing adopts diverse textual practices including parallel language texts, ex tensive use of footnotes, keeping the register of the ori ginal language, or use of the original terms mixed in with the translation. Using two or more languages without translation of every line is another strategy, used by Altha Cravey in her research on Mexican communities in the USA. Analyzing translation as meaning making, reflecting carefully on the translation strategies entailed in bilingual research and its representation decenters the ethno centrism of the research process and signposts the pol itical moments involved in all language usage.

As is evident from the above discussion, the politics of translation relate fundamentally to questions of meaning and terminology and to the positionality of the re searcher and/or translator. However, it is necessary to add a further context within which the politics of trans lation must be considered, namely that of language hierarchies and the structural conditions of knowledge production and circulation. A contemporary example from Nina Laurie et al. demonstrates how the linguistic politics of working between indigenous languages and cultural values within Latin America is often highly contested and intertwined with transnational strategies of development, the professionalization of indigenous groups, and the roles and values of development funders and of state agencies. Thus, translation and intercultural practices are entwined with wider uneven socio spatial relations. Of particular relevance here are the structural con ditions under which geographical knowledges are pro duced and circulated. Commercial translation of literature translates many more titles from English into other lan guages than vice versa, reflecting and reinforcing the dominance of English language cultural production at a global scale. In technical and scientific publishing, in cluding academic geography, the trend is even more strongly toward publication in English. This creates its own tensions and difficulties for researchers and students who find themselves working always in translation as they study and produce geographical knowledges. This prob lematic positioning of geographical work conducted in languages other than English in relation to academic publishing and professional networks, and the dominance of ‘Anglo American geography’ have been raised by a number of geographers, such as Maria Dolors Garcia Ramon. Developing geographical knowledges, reading and writing in translation and working with the often unstated normative assumptions of English language geographical knowledges and practices, all serve to shape particular practices of geographical knowledge production and to center or marginalize particular experiences and know ledges. The implications for academic researchers are discussed by Helms et al., and Desforges and Jones discuss the experiences of bilingually educated students. Given the dominance of English as a published academic language around the globe, this raises questions of how geographical knowledges are produced and represented, since even those who pay attention to translation have not often produced bilingual (let alone polyvocal) texts, although a number of journals have now made efforts toward publishing at least translations of article abstracts. In this context, it is ironic that this article is written in English. However, the work discussed in this article seeks to take seriously questions of translation and

Translation

interpretation, and to situate this within the broader pol itics of language hierarchies. It challenges ethnocentric assumptions about the invisibility of cross cultural com munication and stands alongside discussions of the range of geographical research and knowledge produced globally in contexts and languages other than English. For geog raphers, the spatiality of translation and of the politics of language hierarchies at a range of scales from the local to the global are of significance. Thus, questions of cultural politics, situated knowledges, positionality, representation, and the construction of geographical knowledges are all intimately related to the strategies of translation adopted in geographical research and analysis. See also: Cross-Cultural Research; Fieldwork; Globalization, Cultural; Language and Research; Polyvocality.

Further Reading Behling, O. and Law, K. (2000). Translating Questionnaires and Other Research Instruments: Problems and Solutions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bujra, J. (2006). Lost in translation? The use of interpreters in fieldwork. In Desai, V. & Potter, R. B. (eds.) Doing Development Research, pp 172 179. London: Sage. Cravey, A. (2003). Toque una ranchera, por favour. Antipode 35, 603 621. 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. Eco, U. (1993). La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea. Rome: Laterza. Garcia Ramon, M. D. (2003). Globalization and international geography: The questions of languages and scholarly traditions. Progress in Human Geography 27(1), 1 5.

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Helms, G., Lossau, J. and Oslender, U. (2005). Einfach sprachlos but not simply speechless: Language(s), thought and practice in the social sciences. Area 37, 242 250. Horschelmann, K. (2002). History after the end: Post socialist difference in a (post) modern world. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27, 52 66. Laurie, N., Andolina, R. and Radcliffe, S. (2003). Indigenous professionalization: Transnational social reproduction in the Andes. Antipode 35, 463 491. Muller, M. (2007). What’s in a word? Problematizing translation between languages. Area 39, 206 213. Simms, K. (ed.) (1997). Translating Sensitive Texts. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Simon, D. (2006). Your questions answered? Conducting questionnaire surveys. In Desai, V. & Potter, R. B. (eds.) Doing Development Research, pp 163 171. London: Sage. Smith, F. M. (1996). Problematizing language: Limitations and possibilities in ‘foreign language’ research. Area 28, 160 166. Smith, F. M. (2003). Working in other cultures. In Valentine, G. & Clifford, N. (eds.) Key Methods in Geography, pp 179 193. London: Sage. Temple, B. (2002). Crossed wires: Interpreters, translators, and bilingual workers in cross language research. Qualitative Health Research 12, 844 854. Tobar, H. (2005). Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish Speaking United States. New York: Riverhead Books. Twyman, C., Morrisson, J. and Sporton, D. (1999). The final fifth: Autobiography, reflexivity and interpretation in cross cultural research. Area 31, 313 326. Venuti, L. (ed.) (2000). The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge.

Relevant Websites http://www.languageline.com Language Line Services: Interpreter Code of Ethics. http://www.languagemarketplace.com Language Marketplace: Code of Ethics for Interpreters and Translators. http://translationjournal.net Translation Journal (online journal for translators about translation issues).

Transnational Corporations in Developing Countries C. Berndt, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Equity Capital Equity capital is the foreign direct investor’s purchase of shares of an enterprise in a country other than that of its residence. FDI Inflows and Outflows FDI inflows and outflows comprise capital provided (either directly or through other related enterprises) by a foreign direct investor to an FDI enterprise, or capital received by a foreign direct investor from an FDI enterprise. FDI Stock FDI stock is the value of the share of their capital and reserves (including retained profits) attributable to the parent enterprise, plus the net indebtedness of affiliates to the parent enterprises. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) The components of FDI are equity capital, reinvested earnings, and other capital (mainly intracompany loans). Countries do not always collect data for each of these components; reported data on FDI are therefore not fully comparable across countries. Intracompany Loans Intracompany loans or intracompany debt transactions refer to short- or longterm borrowing and lending of funds between direct investors (parent enterprises) and affiliate enterprises. Reinvested Earnings Reinvested earnings comprise the direct investor’s share (in proportion to direct equity participation) of earnings not distributed as dividends by affiliates or earnings not remitted to the direct investor. Such retained profits by affiliates are reinvested.

Introduction A transnational corporation is a firm that has the power to coordinate and control operations in more than one country, ‘even if it does not own them’. (Dicken, 2003: 198; author’s emphasis).

Scholars across the disciplines can subscribe to this broad definition which hints at important changes since the academic discussion of the multinational/transnational corporation (MNC/TNC) started in the 1950s and 1960s. First, this refers to the question of exclusive ownership of assets. While it was crucial for firms to possess the capacity to internally produce and organize proprietary assets and match these to market needs, the emphasis today is less on monopoly possession of scarce and unique resources than on the capacity to organize knowledge flows on a global scale.

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Second and following from this, there is the question of how firms organize their core competencies. In a global economy, firms build complex webs of alliances, engage in collaborative projects, and constantly reinvent them selves, investing and divesting at ever more breathtaking speed. TNCs are responding to major upheavals which have occurred during the 1980s and 1990s, most notably the rise of the informational economy, the increasing role of knowledge in determining the competitive position of firms, the integration of international financial markets, and the continuing opening of national markets. Third and most importantly for the purpose of this article, these processes are inherently geographical, not so much because they take place somewhere, but because TNCs produce complex geographies, entangling and disentangling places at great distance with profound implications for our lives. In this context it is often ar gued that the crucial aspect of TNC power is the ability to take advantage of geographical differences. To this, one has to add the performative capacity to reproduce these differences, an aspect which is particularly salient with regard to relations between the Global North and the Global South.

The Changing Geography of the TNC As with any aspect of globalization, the organization of cross border production networks involves complex and often contradictory processes. Two dimensions can be distinguished here. The first concerns the centralization/ decentralization dichotomy. There is a discussion in the literature which assigns ‘global’ status only to those firms that grant peripheral sites little autonomy and centralize knowledge and core competences. This is opposed to more decentralized blueprints where worldwide oper ations are organized as a portfolio of national businesses. Globalization appears to imply centralization and limited autonomy ever more for peripheral sites in corporate networks. Yet, if one looks more closely at TNCs, the distinction is far less straightforward. A number of ac tivities may have to be standardized across different sites in the TNC network, for instance, the creation and availability of core knowledge or the formulation of a common corporate vision and mission. Yet other areas may require more sensitivity towards local difference. These include different consumer preferences, state regulations and laws, and what is often referred to as cultural differences: lifestyles, work practices, political cultures, etc. It is precisely this complexity of the

Transnational Corporations in Developing Countries

contemporary TNC which demands careful consider ation, above all in a North–South context. The second divide in the literature revolves around the benefits accruing to TNCs when they invest in locations abroad. TNCs are generally believed to tap into the comparative advantages offered by regions and nation states. Scholars such as Michael Porter argue that the role of place specific assets has profoundly changed since the first wave of globalization, where companies predomin antly pursued benefits by shifting activities to low cost locations. Regarding global sourcing only as a second best solution compared to the competitive advantages which arise from concentrations of highly specialized skills and knowledge, institutions, rivals, and sophisticated customers in a particular nation or region, Porter (1998) advances the localized cluster as the main locational asset for regions intending to attract FDI in today’s global economy. Discussions like these stress the virtues of stability and spatial fixity. For it is the ability to stabilize the flows of capital, goods, ideas, and people which distinguishes a successful region in the global economy. But it is equally important to take account of the crucial role of mobility in sustaining the corporate network and in providing the sort of environment in which TNCs are able to reap the benefits of their global strategies. Seen from a North– South perspective in particular, and this is extended further below, this implies, first, that sites and places of production are made by those movements and, second, that these places obtain their value for the TNC in re lation to other sites in the corporate network. Such a position offers an approach to the ongoing renegotiation of the spatiality of economic relations which avoids some of the pitfalls of a scalar perspective. First, this concerns the stylized opposition between ad vocates of all encompassing homogenization and those who insist that national or regional practices continue to diverge in the global economy. The second problem is the relationship between national and regional differ ences and management practices. According to the widespread culturalist logic, corporate decision makers setting up firms in other national contexts are faced with different institutions and cultures and are seen as having to adapt to or change these ‘ways of doing things’. The idea of relatively stable ‘host’ and ‘guest’ cultures being involved in cultural struggles over adaptation and as similation underlying this logic has been criticized for its neglect of translocal forces and hybrid forms. From an alternative perspective, TNCs are therefore conceptualized as highly specific organizational setups which often develop spontaneously; as hybrids, which combine elements of what is more commonly termed global, multinational, and international, or ethnocentric, polycentric, and geocentric model of TNC organization, respectively. Most importantly, the stress is less on quantification (e.g., FDI data, numbers of units, and

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employees abroad), but rather on connectivity and interrelatedness between different sites in TNC net works and the implications this may have for the Global South.

TNCs and the Global South In his contribution to a book edited by Jagdish Bhagwati in the early 1970s, Stephen Hymer (1972) asked about the role of the MNC at the end of the twentieth century. Arguing that it represented ‘‘an important step forward over previous methods of organizing international ex change’’ by bringing about an ever more extensive and productive international division of labor, he predicted the continuing expansion of the multinational form of industrial organization as a key element of global capitalism. Indeed, corporate cross border activities have in creased dramatically. The worldwide inward stock of cross border FDI, for instance, has risen 18 fold from 561 billion USD in 1980 to 10 129 billion USD in 2005 (Source: UNCTAD 2006). Of course, the global distri bution of FDI has always been a highly uneven affair. Over the 15 year period 1990–2005, developed countries attracted almost 70% of FDI inflows, developing coun tries and transition economies accounting for 28% and 2%, respectively. What is more, if one breaks the data down to 5 year intervals the overall share of so called developing countries has fallen, from 30.9% (1990–94) to 25.7% (2000–04; see Table 1 and Figure 1). And the cartography of global FDI flows gets even more un balanced in the latter group, if the disproportionate share of countries such as China, Mexico, or Brazil and the almost negligible flow to African countries are taken into account (Figure 2). These disparities are slightly offset by the growing role of southern TNCs and FDI origi nating in the Global South, but the noticeable growth of southern global players such as Lenovo or Tata in recent years does not change the overall picture. There has always been considerable controversy about the precise role of FDI from the perspective of the Global South. The underlying arguments do not seem to have changed much during the last 50 years or so. In a recent special issue of World Economy, Jagdish Bhagwati (2007) writes a robust defense against what he sees as oversimplified criticism. On the one hand, he refutes claims of tax competition and a ‘race to the bottom’, downplays the power of large TNCs in smaller countries, comments positively on the role of global media as guardians against political intrusion by foreign TNCs, and puts claims of systematic exploitation of workers, payment of low wages and sweatshop conditions into doubt. On the other hand, he stresses external economies to the sites of investment, the spillover of know how and

370 Table 1

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Global FDI inward flows according to geographical regions, 1990 2005 1990 2005

Developed economies Developing economies Economies in transition Total

1990 1994

1995 1999

2000 2004

Billion USD

%

Billion USD

%

Billion USD

%

Billion USD

%

633 376 720 256 126 762 18 914 498 908 417 980

69.72 28.19 2.08 100

68 733 038 31 012 086 786 042 100 531 166

68.37 30.85 0.78 100

211 987 762 87 020 879 4 433 444 303 442 085

69.86 28.68 1.46 100

297 063 217 106 026 772 9 727 076 412 817 066

71.96 25.68 2.36 100

Source: UNCTAD, 2006.

1200

Developed economies Developing economies Economies in transition

1000

Billions USD

800

600

400

200

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

0

Figure 1 Global FDI inward flows according to geographical regions, 1990 2005. Reproduced from UNCTAD, 2006.

technology as well as the learning effect for workers hitherto not familiar with modern industrial production. He reminds readers of the crucial role of domestic elites, putting much of the blame for the shortcomings of FDI led growth strategies on endogenous problems and stressing the necessity of supportive state policies. These arguments are well known to students of 1950s and 1960s development theory. Modernization theory rose to prominence during roughly the same time when the vertically integrated MNC came to be regarded as the dominant form of the business enterprise. It was little wonder therefore that scholars, at that time, looked at the large industrial corporation as the catalyst of develop ment processes. In line with the dominant economic paradigm of that time, hopes were predominantly dir ected at the establishment of domestic industries, but scholars such as Walt W. Rostow always took the inter national dimension seriously, for instance, the benefits of FDI inflows to a developing country’s capital stock or of technological spillovers to the domestic sector. Following

the neoliberal paradigm shift, direct investment by MNCs/TNCs moved fully at center stage and the im port substitution model was replaced by export led industrialization. From the 1950s and 1960s, when dependency theorists attacked the ideas of Rostow and others, until today, critics have advanced two lines of argument. The first may be termed ‘bypass problem’ and refers to the widely ac knowledged fact that large parts of the globe remain blind spots on the global map of corporate investment decisions. The case in point is Africa which received only 7.4% of the FDI attributed to developing countries in 2005. The second and more interesting argument for the purpose of this article may be termed ‘exploitation problem’ and refers to problems which arise because of the presence of foreign investment. Dependency theorists argued that international capital produced export en claves in host countries, created few external economies, and had minimal effect on national economies as a whole. Accordingly, TNC investment only intensified the

Transnational Corporations in Developing Countries

371

100

80

60

Brazil Mexico

40

China 20

05 20

04 20

03 20

02 20

01 20

00 20

99 19

98 19

97 19

96 19

95 19

94 19

93 19

92 19

91 19

19

90

0

Figure 2 Developing economies, FDI inward flows according to geographical regions and key receiving countries, 1990 2005. Reproduced from UNCTAD, 2006.

structural heterogeneity of the economies, corrupted domestic elites and further exacerbated the financial and technological dependence on the North. In the 1970s, critics developed these arguments further and pointed to the role of TNCs in shaping and exploiting an inherently uneven geography. At the forefront of this stance was Stephen Hymer (1972), who predicted the continuing expansion of the multinational form of industrial organ ization (‘‘law of increasing firm size’’). In addition to this, he identified the hierarchical division of labor between geographical regions, which corresponds to the vertical division of labor within the firm, as a key for the uneven character of the modern world economy (‘‘law of uneven development’’). This was referred to as new international division of labor between company headquarters in the North and different types of offshore ‘global factories’ in the South. In sum, for critical geographers in particular, the TNC/MNC epitomized the contradiction between physical fixity and mobility at the heart of the uneven geography of capitalism. Scholars such as David Harvey or Neil Smith regarded TNCs decision makers as powerful prisoners in a deeply ambivalent game, fever ishly searching for more advantageous conditions of production while contributing to geographical equal ization at the same time (Smith, 1989). For these critics, the ongoing search for geographical solutions to the capitalist dilemma, that is the ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey, 1981),

on the part of transnational capital put different regions on and off the map, promising individual countries modernization and progress, only to drop them like a hot potato shortly afterwards. Or as Hymer (1972: 133) put it: ‘‘As [the TNC] crosses international boundaries, it pulls and tears at the social and political fabric and erodes the cohesiveness of national states. [y] It creates hierarchy rather than equality, and it spreads its benefits unequally.’’ The role of the state, critically commented upon in this quote by Hymer, has always been a major issue in the TNC literature. And the extent to which southern gov ernments are able to influence investment decisions and to ensure that TNC investment in the Global South has positive effects continues to spark controversial dis cussions. In a stylized way, positions may again be traced back to discussions during the heyday of development economics. On the one hand are those who point to the decisive role of state policies in providing the sort of regulatory environment which allows for longer term benefits of TNC activities and which differentiates the winners from the losers in the competition for northern FDI. Following the positive performance of Southeast Asian economies, emphasis is put on investments into national education systems and the research and devel opment (R&D) infrastructure as preconditions for the knowledge spillovers associated with ‘export promoting’ or ‘outward oriented’ trade strategies. Current emphasis on ‘good governance’ by multilateral development

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Transnational Corporations in Developing Countries

organizations is a variant of this argument (Shah, 2006). Neoliberal apologists of TNC investment often give this argument a different twist and blame ‘‘bad domestic pol icies for harmful effects’’ of FDI (Bhagwati, 2007: 221–222). One sided positions like these have regularly provoked opposition from more critical scholars, Hymer (1972), for instance, arguing in similarly ideological vein that MNCs ‘‘weaken political control because they span many coun tries and can escape national regulation’’ (p. 127) and ‘‘reduce the sovereignty of all nation states’’ (p. 129). This was also the position of dependistas such as Osvaldo Sunkel, Theotonio dos Santos, or Andre Gunder Frank. However, Frank’s (1996: 34) admission to have ‘‘perhaps under estimated [the East Asian tiger economies’] capacity for technological upgrading and new participation in the international division of labor’’ reflects the gradual emer gence of less ideological and unforgiving positions during the 1990s. As a consequence of this, the debate on the relationship between the (Northern) TNC and the (Southern) state has become more differentiated and so phisticated. Crucially, this also includes a more self critical tone in parts of the mainstream literature: Take the recent exchange about the implications of offshore outsourcing for northern and southern economies between Paul Samuelson on the one side and his former students Jagdish Bhagwati and Gregory Mankiw on the other, or the Sti glitz–Williamson debate on the Washington Consensus, which includes the liberalization of FDI inflows amongst its ten propositions. It is obvious that there are a number of factors that intervene differently in a state’s capacity to positively influence the effects of TNC investments: the size of the country in question, strategic interest and motivation of TNC activities, economic structure, history, etc. In this context China is often cited as an example of the extent to which governments in the Global South have bargaining power and are able to dictate their terms of investment. China’s sheer size and political power notwithstanding, recent debates about the stalled implementation of a stricter labor law and the successful pressure against even basic labor rights exerted by northern capital (i.e., US companies via the American Chamber of Commerce) speaks a more sobering language. It is often overlooked that northern states and northern TNCs act in collusion, pushing through their interests against southern actors by forming ‘‘protection networks’’ as Immanuel Wallerstein (2005) would have it. This serves as a reminder that one should be wary of one sided arguments in the rugged terrain of state TNC relations.

Performing Production Systems and Market b/Orders The transnational corporation is the driving force behind the configuration of global commodity chains (GCCs)

and global value chains (GVCs). As outsourcing and offshoring processes gained momentum during the 1980s and 1990s, cross border trade in intermediate products (inter and intrafirm) has risen enormously. This was enabled by the global dispersion of knowledge and cap abilities, by the establishment of new transportation and communication technologies, and by specialization in modular production networks. The crucial question from the point of view of southern actors is whether they are able to improve their position within far flung global production systems, a process referred to as ‘upgrading’ in the literature. Although constituting an important step forward, scholars argue that the GCC/GVC approach may still not go far enough. It is argued that assignment of more or less stable positions in the capitalist world system to individual production sites (i.e., belonging to the center, the semiperiphery, the periphery) does not chime well with the heterogeneous experiences of production sites in the North and the South. This can be illustrated with the example of a US production plant in northern Mexico, which is analyzed in more detail elsewhere (Berndt, 2003, 2004). The plant is owned by a US corporation under the auspices of the Maquiladora program and produces electronic switches and control panels for the appliance and automotive industries. Production has taken place in the border city Ciudad Jua´rez since 1986. During recent years and in line with the experience of other Maquila doras, the plant operated in a volatile environment, re flected in the constant fluctuations of production volume (between 30 and 40 million USD) and personnel (be tween 300 and 450). Since the mid 1990s, the plant has experienced a slow upgrading process, symbolized by the relocation of advanced production from sister plants in the US. This process culminated in the transfer of membrane switch production from the US to Mexico, which involves the application of surface mount tech nology (SMT). SMT allows the construction of elec tronic circuits by mounting components directly onto the surface of printed circuit boards. Stakeholders in the Mexican plant, managers as well as workers, regarded these changes as proof of modernization and a further step towards ‘first world’ production, while decision makers in affected US plants understandably felt per ipheralized. The newly won self confidence, however, was soon withering again, when the company announced the opening of another production plant in Nanmien City in the Donguang region, China, in 1999 and started to move production away from Mexico. This included not only basic labor intensive but also more advanced technology. At the same time workers in Mexico were told that it was becoming increasingly difficult to com pete with their Chinese colleagues, not only with regard to wages, but also because of better productivity and

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quality in Nanmien City. Hopes for catching up were further dashed when membrane switch production was suddenly sold to another company on quality and prod uctivity grounds in 2006. Yet at the same time, the Mexican plant received high tech automotive products from a sister plant in Raleigh, North Carolina, which was closed down and production redistributed between Mexico and China. Economic change, whether analyzed at the plant level or at the level of regional or national economies, does not take place in a linear way with a clearly identifiable aim. Rather it is a chaotic process, occurring in leaps forward and backward, and being characterized by elements of chance. Yet, this does not mean that there is no logic and structure to the workings of TNCs in the Global South. In order to come to terms with this logic, it is paramount not to look at any location in isolation, whether it is the individual production plant, the subnational region, or the national economy. Downgrading and upgrading is a constant feature of sites in the North and the South, selective changes even dividing and fragmenting shop floors, cities, and whole countries in a way that it is in creasingly difficult to talk of homogenous entities. In this system, pressure is without any doubt exerted by the movements of whole plants from place to place. It is more important for decision makers, however, to wield lo cational choice and to maintain organizational flexibility. This refers to the ability to control and discipline indi vidual production units, plants, and respective locations in relation to other sites in the corporate production network rather than reverting to a ‘strategy of torched earth’. Differences in factor costs and endowments, state regulations, consumer taste, etc., play a crucial role in determining investment decisions. At the same time the inscription of difference presupposes a common frame of reference – of standards and norms which allow the classification of different parts of a system. Decisions over movements of goods, capital, and people in global pro duction systems therefore demand constant measurement and qualification. This includes practice disciplines and sociotechnologies such as benchmarking, transfer pricing, or quality management, and also attempts to implement social and environmental standards. This is why, from the point of view of managers, the value of any single pro duction site is always more than the sum of localized place specific assets, whether these are old style natural resources or cheap wages, or the trendier specialized skills and the tacit knowledge celebrated by the region alist literature. Understood in this way, flexible cross border pro duction systems are both plurilocal and translocal at the same time. They are ‘plurilocal’ because they bring about dense networks and entanglements, connecting pro duction sites in the South and in the North, and relating

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each element within global production networks to every other. They are ‘translocal’ because any individual site in these networks assumes different qualities depending on which location it is put in relation to. With their actions decision makers therefore never only exploit existing differences, they actively produce and reproduce differ ence, and the specific geography associated with this (e.g., constructions of distance/proximity, removal and repro duction of borders). The result is a confusing and blurred picture, a b/order regime which is deeply contradictory, but which suits capital interests well. Framing their work and everyday life from an out ward oriented global rather than an inward oriented national perspective, TNC executives are powerful dri vers of this b/ordering regime. Yet, as productive as it may be for the accumulation of profit, the global eco nomic order is not simply a product of intentional and strategic decisions on the part of TNC decision makers or other members of the transnational class. Without any doubt, executives, managers, and other TNC mobiles play a powerful role in shaping global production systems and markets. With their everyday practices they connect and disconnect, and format a flexible global economic geography. But they only rarely do so strategically. De cisions and actions more often are trial and error re sponses to global pressures – problems TNC managers obviously helped to create themselves. This provides a more realistic picture of what are in fact deeply contra dictory practices. At the same time this is also a more optimistic perspective. The insight that TNCs and their decision makers are not as powerful as many critics would have them and the acknowledgment of the con tradictions inherent in everyday business practices allow alternative representations and may open ways to contest an ultimately effective global division of labor. Such a position, however, requires an approach that focuses on the social practices of the actors involved and the way managers, executives, and also workers perform complex market and production orders. This refers to the way they literally order production steps, isolating ac tivities and assigning them to different locations, calcu lating value added, quality, and productivity, and giving complex flows and networks quasi linear form. Seen from this angle, only the idea of linear, chain like production allows the assignment of more and less advanced pos itions to different nodes in the network. And only when there is difference between more developed and less developed links in a chain is it possible to define pro cesses of upgrading and downgrading. What remains out of sight are the contradictions and ambivalences, for in stance, the existence of deeply fragmented production realities which are transformed with breathtaking speed and involve confusing positional changes depending on the product and production process in question. This does not chime well with representations that ascribe

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plants in the US core, in Mexico semiperipheral, and in China peripheral positions in global production net works. It is in this way that the actors involved in global production networks practically perform linear value chains. As long as these are taken as granted and given, it is possible to veil the contradictions necessary for their reproduction (e.g., the extent to which clandestine movements of goods, people, or capital are an integral part of global production systems). It is a crucial task for economic geographers to lay open these hidden geog raphies of global TNC activities.

Conclusion Roughly five decades after the phenomenon raised the attention of development economists, the MNC/TNC continues to be at center stage, if one intends to grasp the dynamics of the ever expanding division of labor that characterizes global network capitalism. Much of today’s debate is still surprisingly close to the uncompromising stand off between generally sympathetic positions in line with classical modernization theory and critical scholars portraying the TNC as the key driver of inequality and uneven development at the global scale. This stalemate needs to be unlocked. To be sure, in the light of the sheer scale of TNC activities and the inherently uneven character of capitalism, it would be foolish for geog raphers not to continue to critically engage with these issues. However, given the complexity and fluidity of globalized modernity, it is paramount in my view to adopt a more careful and modest approach when dealing with the TNC in a development context. As powerful as the northern TNC may be, its key actors – the trans national bureaucrats managing its operations, the prac titioners of practice disciplines such as accounting, auditing, or benchmarking working for global business service firms, or the representatives of business schools disseminating the latest managerial gimmick to even the tiniest supplier in multi tier production networks – are themselves acting in a (self inflicted) environment of volatility and uncertainty, more often reacting to un intended consequences of their decisions rather than strategically shaping the world. To be sure, this insight makes little difference to the daily life of the 16 year old operadora in a maquiladora plant in Ciudad Jua´rez, subject to the extremely problematic ‘translation’ of global management tools, or the male migrant from rural China, working and living in a sweat shop in the Donguang region. However, investigations into the consequences of TNC activities in the Global South, regressive or pro gressive, need to include other actors, for instance the contradictory role of the state both in the Global South and the Global North, the self reproducing burgeoning nongovernmental organization and development aid

sector, or the Janus faced northern consumer. This is the rationale behind the plea for a more differentiated and also modest approach informing this article. See also: Development I; Development II; Global Commodity Chains; Global Production Networks; Globalization, Economic.

Further Reading Amin, A. and Cohendet, P. (2004). Architectures of knowledge: Firms, capabilities, and communities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bartlett, C. A. and Ghoshal, S. (1998). Managing across borders: The transnational solution. New York: Random House. Berndt, C. (2003). El paso del nortey modernization utopias, othering and management practices in Mexico’s maquiladora industry. Antipode 35(2), 264 285. Berndt, C. (2004). Globalisierungs Grenzen: Modernisierungstra¨ume und Lebenswirklichkeiten in Nordmexiko. Bielefeld: Transcript. Bhagwati, J. (2007). Why multinationals help reduce poverty. The World Economy 30(2), 211 228. Bhagwati, J., Panagariya, A. and Srinivasan, T. N. (2004). The muddles over outsourcing. Journal of Economic Perspectives 18(4), 93 114. Dicken, P. (2003). The global shift: Reshaping the global economic map in the 21st century, New York. London: Guilford. Dos Santos, T. (1996). Latin American underdevelopment: Past, present, future. In Chew, S. C. & Denemark, R. A. (eds.) The underdevelopment of development: Essays in honor of Andre Gunder Frank, pp 149 170. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dunning, J. H. (2000). The eclectic paradigm as an envelope for economic and business theories of MNE activity. International Business Review 9, 163 190. Frank, A. G. (1969). The development of underdevelopment. In Frank, A. G. (ed.) Latin America: Underdevelopment and revolution, pp 3 17. New York: Monthly Review Press. Frank, A. G. (1996). The underdevelopment of development. In Chew, S. C. & Denemark, R. A. (eds.) The underdevelopment of development: Essays in honor of Andre Gunder Frank, pp 17 55. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Harvey, D. (1981). The spatial fix: Hegel, von Thunen, and Marx. Antipode 13, 1 12. Hedlund, G. (1986). The hypermodern MNC: A heterarchy. Human Resource Management 25(1), 9 35. Hymer, S. (1972). The multinational corporation and the law of uneven development. In Bhagwati, J. N. (ed.) Economics and world order: From the 1970s to the 1990s, pp 113 140. London: Macmillan. Jones, A. (2005). Truly global corporations? Theorizing ‘organizational globalization’ in advanced business services. Journal of Economic Geography 5(2), 177 200. Navaretti, G. B. and Venables, A. J. (2004). Multinational firms in the world economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pitelis, C. (ed.) (2006). Special Issue: Honoring the Work of Stephen Hymer. International Business Review 15(2). Samuelson, P. A. (2004). Where Ricardo and Mill Rebut and confirm arguments of mainstream economists supporting globalization. The Journal of Economic Perspectives 18(3), 135 146. Sapsford, D. and Greenaway, D. (eds.) (2007). Special Issue: Honoring the Work of Indian Economist Balasubramanyam V. N. World Economy 30(2). Shah, A. (2006). Local governance in developing countries. Washington: World Bank Publications. Sklair, L. (2001). The transnational capitalist class. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, N. (1989). Uneven development and location theory: Towards a synthesis. In Peet, R. & Smith, N. (eds.) New models in geography: The political economy perspective, pp 142 163. London: Unwin Hyman.

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Stiglitz, J. E. (2004). The Post Washington Consensus Consensus, Initiative for Policy Dialogue Working Paper Series, Columbia University, November 2004. Sunkel, O. (1972). Undervelopment in Latin America: Toward the year 2000. In Bhagwati, J. N. (ed.) Economics and world order: From the 1970s to the 1990s, pp 199 231. London: Macmillan. Teece, D. J. (2006). Reflections on the Hymer thesis and the multinational enterprise. International Business Review 15(2), 124 139. UNCTAD (2006). World investment report 2006 FDI Statistics (http:// stats.unctad.org/FDI/ReportFolders/ReportFolders.aspx; 13 April 2007). Wallerstein, I. (2005). Protection networks and commodity chains in the capitalist world economy. Paper given at the Conference on Global Networks: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Commodity Chains, 13 14 May 2005, Yale University. Williamson, J. (1999). What Should the Bank Think about the Washington Consensus, Paper prepared as a background to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000. Washington: Institute for International Economics (http://www.iie.com/ publications/papers/williamson0799.htm; 11.2.04).

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Relevant Websites http://unctad.org Comprehensive and up to date geographical FDI data from the UNCTAD World Investment Report; interactive. http://www.globalpolicy.org Part of the UN Global Policy Forum section Social and Economic Policy exploring how TNCs dominate the global economy and exert their influence over global policymaking. http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk Website of UK based organization (no affiliation with the above) providing detailed profiles of some of the world’s largest corporations and overviews of each major industry sector. http://www.corpwatch.org Website of US based organization providing information on corporate violations of human rights, environmental crimes, fraud and corruption around the world. http://www.csreurope.org Website run by the European business network for corporate social responsibility with over 60 leading transnational corporations as members.

Transnational Elites K. Olds, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction On 23 September 2007, the New York Times ran a story about the lives (and spaces) of a couple who should be known to most human geographers – Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett (Figure 1). The story included this passage: Until this year, when Ms. Sassen gave up a chair at the University of Chicago to return to Columbia, the couple inhabited three ‘‘global cities’’ a term that happens to have been coined by Ms. Sassen (whose book ‘‘The Global City’’ was published in 1991). They would spend six months in London followed by six months divided between New York and Chicago. ‘‘It seems so much more reasonable to be in just two cities,’’ Ms. Sassen said. ‘‘It’s terribly cozy.’’ Her most recent book, ‘‘Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages,’’ was published by Princeton University Press last year. ‘‘I am nomadic,’’ admitted Ms. Sassen, who was born in the Netherlands, grew up in Argentina and Italy and speaks six languages fluently. ‘‘I make myself at home wherever I go.’’ For her, ‘‘home’’ means one thing: ‘‘a place where I can work.’’ ‘‘When I go press room. people who anchor. It is

to giant conferences,’’ she said, ‘‘I go to the All I need is coffee, a computer table and will just leave you alone. My work is my how I keep the rhythm of my daily life.’’

Mr. Sennett, meanwhile, prefers to write at a neat, trim desk tucked into one corner of the house’s grandest space, a double height living room on the second floor that is illuminated by casement windows and a skylight as wide as the room. ‘‘I’ve spent a lot of my life in this room,’’ Mr. Sennett said. ‘‘I’ve written all my books here, and I’ve had the experience for a long time of this light. And the silence, which is so rare.’’

The lives and practices associated with this couple are hardly ordinary; there is a huge disjuncture between the practices and technologies, and the social and symbolic capital, of Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett, and those of the average person in New York or London, let alone the average person in Kalamazoo in the USA, Upper Slaughter in the UK, or Medan in Indonesia. Sassen and Sennett move across global space more frequently and at greater speeds; they contribute to the production of discourses that circulate across space and time, and in doing so they shape the nature of discursive fields not only in academia, but also in relation to select public policy debates; and they are affiliated with prominent and well resourced institutions (in their cases the London School of Economics and Political Science, New York University, and Columbia University), with global reach, that are based in global cities. In short Sassen and Sennett are ‘transnational elites’. Of course there are many types of transnational elites, and the New York Times could just as easily profiled the lives and spaces of the 26 year old Venezuelan conductor

Figure 1 Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett, New York, September 2007. Source: New York Times, 23 September 2007.

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Gustavo Dudamel (the new director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association), Eva Egron Polak (Secretary General of the International Association of Universities), Dipak Patel (the Zambian trade minister who is feted by numerous developing country trade negotiators for his insightful analysis of how the World Trade Organization (WTO) operates), or Tade Akin Aina (professor of sociology at CODESRIA, the University of Dar es Sa laam and the University of Cocody Abidjan, and former Ford Foundation officer). Sassen and Sennett are simply exemplars of what is really a very heterogeneous and multilayered transnational elite social formation. In this article I explore some of the above themes, highlighting how human geographers and closely aligned analysts have made sense of transnational elites. Of course, transnational elites have existed for hundreds of years; one only has to think of, for example, the thir teenth and fourteenth century merchant explorers so insightfully analyzed in Janet Abu Lughod’s now classic text Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250– 1350. But due to space limitations, and the relatively recent focus on transnational elites in human geography, this article is of a contemporary nature, focusing in on the emergence of the concept in the 1980s and 1990s, its subsequent development, and some of the key contri butions that have been made in the literature.

The Evolving Nature of the Transnational Elite Concept in Economic Geography While the term ‘transnational’ was utilized in the middle of the twentieth century, it was not until the 1990s that its usage became commonplace in the social sciences, in cluding in human geography and the subfield of eco nomic geography. The concept transnational emerged in the context of a broad structural transformation in the world space economy, as well as an associated analytical shift, to making sense of this transformation. The structural shift that underlies the emergence of the transnational elite concept in human geography was technological and ideological change (i.e., liberalism) that enabled manufacturing firms, especially in the West, to stretch their production chains out across global space. In the process, various segments of the production system were progressively stretched out across space, with new activities laid out within new territories. Research and development (R&D), for example, was most often re tained in the West, though production and assembly were most often relocated to the so called developing (or in dustrializing) world. Clearly this is a process that needed, and still needs to be, surveyed and coordinated. Why? Because while capitalism is a dynamic force it has to be constituted, and reacted to, by firms – the primary ‘mover and shakers’ of the global economy.

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Firms operating at a global scale were initially deemed multinational corporations (MNCs), though the term transnational corporation (TNC) is now the com monplace term of use, at least in economic geography. This discursive shift reflected the emergence of global scale ‘flexible’ forms of production, and improved understandings that global production chains were in creasingly ‘governed’, though not in formal ‘vertical’ sense. Nike’s global production chain is the case exem plar, with the US based firm not owning one factory, yet responsible for the governance (via subcontracting re lations) of the practices of hundreds of thousands of workers in dozens of countries in Asia and Latin America. In short, TNCs are firms that can control and coordinate operations in multiple countries, though the firms may not formally own the overseas affiliates. Regardless of whether we are speaking about pro ducer driven or buyer driven production chains, all forms of global production chains need to be coordinated and managed, and it this functional requirement that led to the emergence and use of the term ‘transnational elite’. Transnational elites were first conceived of, then, as the people who bring global production chains into being, and who then shape their nature in a governance sense. On the basis of this definition the social formation in cluded not only chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief financial officers (CFOs), but also the upper echelon of senior management; the ‘command and control’ officers of the private sector dimension of the world economy. In conjunction with the restructuring of the world economy, an analytical transformation took place, with the emergence and rapid dominance of political economy approaches in human geography. The Marxian influ enced political economy approach inspired research on the changing nature of the mode of production, capital– labor relations, and the spatial structure of the (world) economy. In the 1980s and 1990s the spatiality of such trans national elites was examined, though really indirectly inferred via an analysis of the locational patterns asso ciated with MNCs. These types of studies typically mapped the global geographies of such firms, often using a variety of proxy measures. The most influential meas ure was the Fortune 500 list annual ranking of America’s largest 500 companies. This measure was combined with a variety of other analytical tools, leading to the associ ation of MNCs and particular types of cities – world cities. The very different work of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)’s John Friedmann was among the most influential of this era, leading to the identification of a ‘world system of cities’ in which MNCs, and therefore transnational elites, were based. John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff (1982: 310) noted that such world cities have become tightly ‘‘interconnected with each other through

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decision making and finance,’’ and they now ‘‘constitute a world wide system of control over production and mar ket expansion.’’ Cities of course, cannot control global production chains; it is the transnational elites working within such firms that do so. Friedmann’s work on the nature of the global system reverberates with research and writing by economic/ development geographers like T. G. McGee and War wick Armstrong who sought to make sense of how the transnational capitalist class shaped the world system (using dependency parlance) so as to extract resources from the Third World, creating ‘theaters of accumulation’ (aka cities). Armstrong and McGee, foreshadowing sub sequent developments in the emergence of the term, fixed the spatial locations of elites – both global and

national – within cities. Figure 2 nicely captures the structural logic of their argument. Thus, ‘strategic decision making’ takes place in ‘global centers’, while ‘tactical decision making’ and ‘political control’ take place in ‘national’ metropoli. A functionalist take on culture is certainly evident in much of the ana lyses of the 1980s and 1990s, with these elites perceived to be ‘disseminating’ their ‘cultural influence’ below, to society. In a relatively known narrative, the structuralist ana lytic of Friedmann et al. was critiqued and extended. People like Peter Taylor, but especially Saskia Sassen, the sociologist cum planner and honorary geographer, worked with a more institutionally aware framework to determine the nature and function of what she deemed

Global centers

echnological

heatres of orld Accumulation inancial ominance in Production Cultural nfluence trategic ecision a ing

istribution

Surplus

Transfer

TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS INTERNATIONAL BANKS AGRI BUSINESS STATE POLICIES

Third World societies National metropolis actical ecision a ing heatre of ational Accumulation ational odern ector ominance Production istribution Cultural nfluence Political Control STATE POWER LOCAL OLIGOPOLY TNC BANKS

Regional centers aily ecisions ntermediary in Accumulation imited odern Production ore istribution unctions Recipients ransmitters of Cultural Patterns ocal political nfluences REGIONAL COMMERCIAL/ FINANCIAL GROUPS REGIONAL POLITICAL GROUPS

Rural/small town areas ocal raders Commercial armers ( atifundistas)

Agribusiness C ining aily ecisions Peasent Crafts Production (Apart from Agribusiness)

Changing Consumer

abits

Figure 2 Hierarchical model of economic organization in world economic system. Source: Armstrong, W. and Mcgee, T. G. (1985). Theatres of Accumulation: Studies in Asian and Latin American Urbanization. London: Methuen. Reprinted by permission of authors.

Transnational Elites

‘global cities’. Sassen’s now obligatory reference to the global city is worth citing, though in this case note the ways that she infers that there is a complex of inter dependencies between knowledgeable people within and between geographically dispersed cities: [A] combination of spatial dispersal and global inte gration has created a new strategic role for major cities. Beyond their long history as centres for international trade and banking, these cities now function as centres in four new ways: first, as highly concentrated command points in the organization of the world economy; second, as key locations for finance and specialized service firms, which have replaced manufacturing as the leading eco nomic sectors; third, as sites of production of innovations, in these leading industries; and fourth, as markets for the products and innovations produced. These changes in the functioning of cities have had a massive impact upon both international economic activity and urban form: cities concentrate control over vast resources, while fi nance and specialized service industries have re structured the urban social and economic order. Thus, a new type of city has appeared. It is the global city. (Sassen, 2001: 3 4)

Her analysis, and the research that has been influ enced by it, identifies the socioeconomic foundations of the global city – the managers and producer service (e.g., accountancy, law, advertising, and political risk consult ants), workers. Many (not all) of these people are the transnational elites who do the ‘work of globalization’ in the firms that are based on the nodes where the global system is constructed and reconstructed on a real time basis. The insights and gaps associated with work on MNCs and global cities spurred on two concurrent innovations with respect to transnational elites in economic geography. First, analysts pursued a much broader framework, effectively opening up the black box of ‘the’ transnational elite. Thus, the social formation was viewed in a more wholistic or collective sense, with an awareness that: (1) the social field made up of transnational elites was viewed with greater sensitivity such that the myriad of transna tional elites that exist were identified and studied; and (2) the dependencies of transnational elites upon other social groups within the spatial units that they use as a base (which is most often global or globalizing cities). Second, they focused on the unique features associ ated with particular types of transnational elites, in cluding the nature of sectorally specific labor markets (e.g., accountancy, law, architecture, and finance), or the unique features of transnational elites that depend upon nonmarket actors (e.g., academics and the media) for validation, legitimacy, and power.

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Broadening Out and Focusing In The analysis of elites has commonly recognized diversity. C. Wright Mill’s classic work – The Power Elite – for ex ample, examined not only ‘chief executives’ and the ‘corporate rich’, but also ‘warlords’, the ‘political direct orate’, and celebrities. Such ‘‘professors of power and wealth and celebrity’’ have provided food for fodder in both academic and especially nonacademic outlets for ages. In human geography, though, few researchers have examined elites beyond those associated with firms and the polity. In sociology, Leslie Slair’s work is representative of this type of work. Sklair, now an emeritus professor at the LSE, put over a decade of work into developing the concept of the transnational capitalist class (TNCC), culminating in his 2001 book The Transnational Capitalist Class. In Sklair’s view, which is partially derived out of Wallersteinian work on the world system, the global ization process has unfolded through the interdependent efforts of four ‘fractions’ of a coherent social formation: 1. those who own and/or and control the major TNCs and their local affiliates (corporate fraction); 2. globalizing politicians and bureaucrats (state fraction); 3. globalizing professionals (technical fraction); and 4. merchants and media (consumerist fraction). In which way, though, is the TNCC transnational? Sklair notes that the TNCC is transnational in five core dimensions: 1. The economic interests of its members are increas ingly globally linked rather than exclusively local and national in origin. 2. The transnationalist capitalist class (TCC) seeks to exert economic control in the workplace, political control in domestic, international, and global politics, and culture ideology control in everyday life through specific forms of global competitive and consumerist rhetoric and practice. 3. Members of the TCC have outward oriented global rather than inward oriented local perspectives on most economic, political, and culture ideology issues. 4. Members of the TCC tend to share similar lifestyles, particularly patterns of higher education, and con sumption of luxury goods and services. 5. Finally, members of the TCC seek to project images of themselves as citizens of the world as well as of their places and/or countries of birth. In this schema, transnational elites are characterized not only by class position, but also via the associated (it is assumed) capacity to exert near complete control over their foreseeable environment, their increasingly (it is assumed) nonlocal (or deterritorialized) disposition and

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imaginaries, and their reflexivity with respect to a sought after ‘cosmopolitan’ identity and reputation. While this broadening out process helps shed more light on the nature of the ‘movers and shakers’ of broad structural transformations, it initially retained a some what distanced and ‘top down’ (or satellite like view) character. While such top down approaches to the pol itical economy of economic and urban change have been subsequently critiqued for their functionalist assump tions, and the limitations of this level of abstraction, it is important to note that such analysts laid important groundwork for the more nuanced exploration of trans national elites that followed. In the development of analyses about globalization, TNCs, and the creation and governance of global net works, geographers gradually reframed their level of abstraction, and became more aware of the geographic ally and historically specific nature of transnational elites, of the nature of state–TNC relations, of the contin gencies associated with the construction of global net works, and of the critically important role of transnational political and policy elites in the de nationalization process. In short, a more process oriented and institutionally aware form of political–economic analysis emerged; one that rarely conceived of repre sentations such as that presented in Figure 2. For example, Nigel Thrift’s work provides a good example of the broadening out drive in work on trans national elites. Thrift’s work has frequently examined what Peter Dicken calls the ‘movers and shakers’ of the global economy. Thrift (often with Michael Taylor and Dean Forbes) began one thread of his career in the 1980s and early 1990s career examining the nature of MNCs, including those active in the Pacific Basin. Again, while the focus is ostensibly on MNCs, the texts can be read as a contribution to making sense of the geographies of transnational elites. A conceptual shift away from polit ical economy toward what Thrift has deemed ‘non representational theory’ has led to a continued focus on transnational elites, though from a level of abstraction that pays much greater attention to the sociotechnical networks, practices, governing power, and governability, of such elites. For example, Thrift has sought to shed light on the emergence of ‘fast capitalism’, and globally influential management practices. Though he does not use the term transnational elite, his work effectively fo cuses on such elites. Take the case of globally active and highly ranked business schools. Thrift suggests that we need to think about business schools as part of the ‘cultural circuit of capitalism’ – the fluid and highly interdependent network made up of management con sultancies, management gurus, business media, and business schools – and their associated infrastructures and technologies. Thus, business schools, which train up new generations of transnational elites, and which

employ some transnational elites, fundamentally depend upon an underlying media infrastructure that represents the schools, but that also governs them (especially via benchmarking and ranking schemes). Such an approach to transnational elites pays much closer attention to variegated nature of the transnational elite social for mation, and in the process we acquire a more processual understanding of the creation and governance of these elites versus treating them as ephemeral and all knowing masters of the universe. Thrift’s work resonates well with that of Saskia Sassen in her latest epic – Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages – which includes a focus on the emergence of what she calls four ‘global classes’. These classes (and class is used in a loose designative sense) are: 1. transnational professionals and executives; 2. transnational networks of government officials (in cluding experts, judges, and immigration officials); 3. global civil society activists; and 4. disadvantaged low wage workers, ‘‘including members of transnational immigrant communities and house holds (Sassen, 2006: 298–299).’’ She sees each of these classes as being interdependent with each other, and underlain by a ‘‘variety of economic, political and subjective structures.’’ that are insti tutionalized and shape the activities of these transna tionals. She carries on: Global networks with variable degrees of formalization and institutionalization are evident for each class. Fur ther, contexts such as the global corporate economy or the international human rights regime also play critical roles in the proliferation of global networks. These and other globalizing dynamics have weakened the exclusive authority, both objective and subjective, of national states over people, their imaginaries, and their sense of be longing. This facilitates the entry of non state actors into international domains once exclusive to national states. Economic, political, and civic processes largely confined to the national sphere can now go global, even when this is only an imaginary or a subjective disposition rather than a daily reality for many of these actors. (Sassen, 2006: 299)

Saskia Sassen, in conjunction with those of like minded geographers such as Beaverstock, Larner, Ley, McDowell, Olds, Thrift, Yeoh and Chang, Waters Yeoh, Huang, and Lam, and Yeung – a relatively small group of people relative to the size of the subfield of economic geography, and the impact of transnational elites upon society and economy – have sought to develop more nuanced accounts of the geographically and historically

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specific nature of transnational elites. In Territory, Au thority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages Sassen is resolute in arguing that all of these transnational social formations, including the elites, are ‘‘embedded, in often unexpected ways, in thick and localized environments: financial and business centers, national governments, the localized microstructures of daily civic life and struggles, and the translocal insertions of immigrants.’’ Kris Olds, for example, shed light on the complicated relationship between elite networks of architects (that he deemed the ‘global intelligence corps’, following Peter Rimmer’s earlier work) and an array of institutions situated in global cities than enable such architects to perform on two levels that simply have to be brought together for elites to become and/or maintain their elite status: the client–architect level, and the ‘intelligentsia’ archi tect level. Thus, architects classified as transnational elites need to work at both levels, acquiring contracts around the world, and also creating and disseminating ideas that are consumed in the ‘right’ institutions (e.g., Harvard’s School of Design) that are scattered in select countries. Geographers have sought to also bring in a concern with the ways in which the state is governing transna tional elites (vs. assuming they are all powerful). Wendy Larner’s work, for example, focuses on the development and effects of state led expatriate strategies for national development. In her 2007 paper she identifies the ra tionality and technologies associated with the develop ment process; she sees transnational elites from New Zealand (her focus) as being enrolled in state projects, and in the process the state is constructing new categories of elites, and in doing so contributing to the construction of what we take for granted as ‘globalization’. Other geographers have also sought to both broaden and deepen their frame of analysis with Jonathon Bea verstock’s work exemplary in this regard. Over the course of the last 16 years he has built up a voluminous, co herent, and insightful body of work on transnational elites (especially with respect to the producer services sector, and finance, law, and accountancy more specifically). Beaverstock, now based at the University of Nottingham, has shed light on the structural forces underlying the presence and power of such elites, the ways that they govern and are governed, the fundamentally important role of networks and institutions (from exchanges to clubs) to their modus operandi, and the role of ‘translocal’ cities in shaping the opportunities that such elites have should they choose to pursue them.

Concluding Comments ‘Elite’, ‘elites’, and ‘elitism’. Words that carry with them significantly varying baggage depending on what society

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and era one is speaking of. The ‘tall poppy’ cultures Australia and Canada have traditionally viewed elites with disdain if not outright hostility. At the other end of the spectrum, countries like France and Singapore have cultivated their elites, placing them on a pedestal, resting much hope that they would effectively ‘steer’ their countries through difficult challenges. Thus, the concept of ‘elite’ carries with it a value statement, foreshadowing the troubled and contested history of the concept of transnational elite, and perhaps (as it is noted later) the lacunae of research on transnational elites in economic geography (and human geography more generally). ‘Transnational elites’ are elites that engage in activities, including the production of discourses, that involve bor der crossings. Their bodies and ideas move across national borders on a regular basis, though each movement, and the totality of these movements, has a particular geog raphy; a very uneven geography that is reflective of un even development processes at a global scale. Over the last three decades a small coterie of economic geographers, and several honorary geographers like John Friedmann, Aihwa Ong, Saskia Sassen, and Leslie Sklair, have sought to shed light on the nature of such transna tional elites. Research approaches to such elites have shifted away from a more abstract form of political economy to a closer to the ground approach that has blended the insights derived out of a blend of approaches – institutionally focused political economy through to post structuralism, including Foucauldian inspired gov ernmentality approaches. These approaches to transna tional elites have partly drawn inspiration from social scientists interested in the ‘underbelly’, the excluded, the poorly paid, and often exploited migrant workers, many of whom are transnationals themselves. Analysts working in this area – an area we have paid scant attention to for reasons of brevity, have examined the increased presence and impacts of international migration, especially with respect to migrants who sought to retain involvement in ‘both’ sending and receiving nations; a transformation that coincided with ethnographic cum hermeneutic oriented analyses that were sensitive to the imaginaries and worldviews of relatively mobile but poor people. In economic geography research has increasingly pointed out that there is an institutional political econ omy to the lives of transnational elites. Their status and power is fundamentally dependent upon a myriad of institutions – public, private, and nonprofit – that support these people and their network building activities. Transnational elites and their ideas could not cross space and time were it not for the state apparatus, universities, think tanks, clubs, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the media, and so on, that enable them to be creative in whatever it is that they do. Transnational elites thus depend upon these institutions to construct the sociotechnical networks that sustain them. But the

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spread of such institutions across space is also highly uneven, and many people as creative as Sassen and Sennett, whom we started this article with, have been stranded mid career, ground down, forgotten about, or even murdered, in less hospitable climes. In closing it is worth deliberating about the paucity of work on elites in economic geography, and even more so in human geography. Human geographers have devoted far more attention to the excluded and marginalized than they have elites. This is in part because of problems of access (in a methodological sense), and also because of the ‘pro gressive’ politics of human geography, which supports a general inclination to practice ‘critical geography’. Given this disposition critical human geographers have tended to focus on the nature of the marginalized, and the forces underlying their marginalization, and in doing so they have shed less light on some of the elites who are integrally involved in creating, directly and indirectly, the marginal ization process. To be sure, research on elites, and even more so transnational elites, is difficult, especially with respect to issues of access. However, the discipline cannot continue to effectively ignore the primary architects of the systems that we all have to adapt to, and seek our liveli hoods in, whatever forms of work and play we engage in. See also: Financial Centers, International; Globalization, Economic; Transnationalism; Transnationality.

Further Reading Abu Lughod, J. (1989). Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250 1350. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Armstrong, W. and Mcgee, T. G. (1985). Theatres of Accumulation: Studies in Asian and Latin American Urbanization. London: Methuen. Beaverstock, J. (1991). Skilled international migration an analysis of the geography of international secondments within large accountancy firms. Environment and Planning A 23(8), 1133 1146. Beaverstock, J. (2004). ‘Managing across borders’: Knowledge management and expatriation in professional service legal firms. Journal of Economic Geography 4(2), 157 179. Beaverstock, J. (2005). Transnational elites in the city: British highly skilled inter company transferees in New York City’s financial district. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31(2), 245 268. Brenner, N. and Keil, R. (eds.) (2006). The Global Cities Reader. London: Routledge. Dicken, P. (2004). Geographers and ‘globalization’: (Yet) another missed boat? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29(1), 5 26. Dicken, P. (2007). Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy (5th edn.). London: Sage. Friedmann, J. and Wolff, G. (1982). World city formation: An agenda for research and action. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 6, 309 344. Godfrey, B. and Zhou, Y. (1999). Ranking world cities: Multinational corporations and the global urban hierarchy. Urban Geography 20(3), 268 281.

Johnston, R. J. and Sidaway, J. D. (2004). Geography and Geographers: Anglo American Human Geography since 1945 (6th edn.). London: Arnold. Knox, P., Agnew, J. and McCarthy, L. (2003). The Geography of the World Economy. New York: Oxford University Press. Larner, W. (2007). Expatriate experts and globalizing governmentalities: The New Zealand diaspora strategy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32, 331 345. Levitt, P. and Jaworsky, B. N. (2007). Transnational migration studies: Past developments and future trends. Annual Review of Sociology 33, 129 156. Ley, D. (2003). Seeking homo economicus: The Canadian state and the strange story of the business immigration program. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93(2), 426 441. McDowell, L. (1997). Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Olds, K. (2001). Globalization and Urban Change: Capital, Culture and Pacific Rim Mega Projects. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Olds, K. and Yeung, H. W c. (2004). Pathways to global city formation: A view from the developmental city state of Singapore. Review of International Political Economy 11(3), 489 521. Peet, R. and Thrift, N. (eds.) (1989). New Models in Geography: The Political Economy Perspective, vols. 1 and 2. London: Routledge. Rimmer, P. (1991). The global intelligence corps and world cities: Engineering consultancies on the move. In Daniels, P. (ed.) Services and Metropolitan Development: International Perspectives, pp 66 106. London: Routledge. Sassen, S. (2001). The Global City (2nd edn.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2006). Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sklair, L. (2001). The Transnational Capitalist Class. Oxford: Blackwell. Stutz, F. P. and de Souza, A. R. (1998). The World Economy: Resources, Location, Trade, and Development (3rd edn.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Taylor, M. J. and Thrift, N. J. (1982). The Geography of Multinationals. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Taylor, P. (2004). World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis. London: Routledge. Thrift, N. (1999). The rise of soft capitalism. In Herod, A., O´ Tuathail, G. & Roberts, S. (eds.) An Unruly World? Globalization, Governance and Geography, pp 25 71. London: Routledge. Thrift, N. (2005). Knowing Capitalism. London: Sage. Waters, J. (2006). Geographies of cultural capital: Education, international migration and family strategies between Hong Kong and Canada. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31(2), 179 192. Wright, M. C. (1956). The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Yeoh, B. S. A. and Chang, T. C. (2001). Globalising Singapore: Debating transnational flows in the city. Urban Studies 38, 1025 1044. Yeoh, B. S. A., Huang, S. and Lam, T. (2005). Transnationalizing the ‘Asian’ family: Imaginaries, intimacies and strategic intents. Global Networks 5(4), 307 315. Yeung, H. W. c. (2004). Chinese Capitalism in a Global Era: Towards Hybrid Capitalism. London: Routledge.

Relevant Websites http://www.ft.com/home/us Financial Times. http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/ Globalization and World Cities Research Network. http://international.metropolis.net/index e.html International Metropolis Project.

Transnational Ethnic Networks Jinn-Yuh Hsu, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Diaspora It refers to ethnic groups whose sizable parts have lived outside their country of origin for at least several generations, while maintaining some ties to the homeland. Overseas Chinese Business Networks Chinese business people can exploit their privileged ability to recognize worldwide market differences, or knowledge arbitrage. From this perspective, market differences can be translated into geographical market differences, and then into regional comparative advantage. Social Network Analysis Social network has been used as a metaphor to connote complex sets of relationships between members of social systems at all scales. But social network analysis needs to move from being a suggestive metaphor to an analytic approach to a paradigm. It takes account of the structure of a network, the relations among network members, and the location of a member within a network as critical factors in understanding social behaviors. Transnationalism The processes by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement.

One of the most promising contributions to recent de bates about globalization is the literature in which Cox et al. analyze the interplay between the various scales of economic activity, from the local to the global. These theorists recognize that the process of globalization constitutes of the complex relationships between mul tiple, different local systems – that we are in an era of glocalization, rather than globalization. The key chal lenge for this perspective is to understand how producers cope with the interface between the local and the global, or the governance mechanism in the glocalization pro cess. Some writers take the multinational corporation as the core economic actor in a global hierarchical fiat system, others like Scott and Dicken conceive of the global system as a network of regional worlds. Within this network governed economy, social ties between com munities in the interacting regions are a central concern. Rather than taking the large corporation as the major actor, the network approach focuses on the social embeddedness of the ostensibly profit oriented business world. Scholars adopting this network approach to globalization have focused on the role of ethnic ties, in particular, to explain the accelerated growth of cross

border economic transactions. They see social networks, not asocial economic rationality, as the basis for the emergence of economic transnationalism. Transnationalism has become a key field of study in international migration since the later part of the 1990s. Across a range of disciplines, academicians sought to define and trace the development of transnational com munities and practices, and examine the ramifications for identity and citizenship in an increasingly globalized world. Glick Schiller et al. (1992) define transnationalism as ‘‘the processes by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement.’’ The transnationalist approach is based on the observation that expatriates keep close personal and financial relationships with the source country and they retain a strong national identity even years after migrating. Driven by shared national identity, migrants establish social networks with other expatriates from the same source country. This common identity perpetuates a commitment to the source country that drives cross border linkages among nationals and de cisions to return. A migrant has thus a natural gravitation toward the home country and repatriation takes place once enough resources, whether financial or knowledge, have been gathered and when the social and economic conditions at home are perceived sufficiently favorable. Hence, the main motivating factor, according to Portes, is not one of personal utility but an identity marked by an attachment to one’s birthplace. The operation of social networks from below, through the mechanisms of transnational migration, would tackle the issue of the articulation of people’s everyday lives (both of elites and ordinary ones) with the macro forces of sociocultural and political–economic institutions in different geographical scales. Smith (2001) suggests that the globalization–localization process articulated in the global city is manifest in ‘transnational social space’ or the ‘translocality’, through the agency of ‘transnational migrant networks’. Among these networks, the transna tional connection made possible by a community of people, no matter whether elite or refugees, is the key agent in the emergence of transnationalism. In particular, the international migration of skilled people and wealthy people was identified as the actor in cross fertilizing both the sending and hosting cities with the traveling back and forth of highly specific knowledge, capital, and pro fessional networks. Evidence of the transnational hyper mobility of this highly skilled and capitalist class is the development of a growing population of ‘astronauts’ who

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work in ‘both’ places and spend much of their lives on airplanes. While their families may be based on either side of the Pacific (most often they stay in California, Vancouver, or Toronto because of the lifestyle advan tages), these wealthy migrants join their families for a couple of weeks every 3 or 6 months, taking advantage of the opportunities to play middlemen bridging the cross Pacific regional economies. Central to concept of transnationalism is the recon figuration of the geographical space and territorial boundaries to accommodate intricate and flexible inter actions engaged in by migrants at a global, regional, and local level. Such personalized networks used to be dis missed as outdated or marginal modes of transactions under modernism. Now they command new respect under the condition of late capitalism, globalization, and flexible accumulation. As demonstrated by Portes (1998), the transnational immigrant communities often actively bridge the donor and host regions, and constitute another network for capital, information, and people flow, besides, although not necessarily contradictory to, the mainstream channels of foreign direct investment and international trade. Some of the members of the diaspora simply settle abroad and become progressively integrated into local ways and constitute an enclave economy; others cultivate their networks across space, and travel back and forth in pursuit of reciprocal ventures. The reciprocal collaboration be tween the diaspora and the homeland can be in different forms: technology transfer and financial contributions, including both remittances and investments. While the former move along the course of assimilation, the latter refuse to be confined in either one space or the other. It is the latter that links their members with their countries of origin and turn the brain drain into a brain gain. Conventionally, the human capital paradigm refers to a substantialist view of skills as a stock of knowledge and abilities embodied in the individual and takes the concept of brain drain to denote the phenomenon whereby a country suffers an outflow of its educated elite, on a scale threatening the needs of national development in the long term. In contrast, the network approach, adopting a connectionist viewpoint, claims that skills cannot be understood without their social definition, construction, and integration, and consequently, individuals should be presented as being involved in knowledge intensive ac tivities, deeply rooted in their networks, with their own skills historically and physically contextualized. More often, a transnational technological community can pro vide an alternative and potentially more flexible and responsive mechanism for long distance transfers of skill and know how, particularly between very different business cultures or environments. Mohann (2002) classifies three types of linkages of diaspora and homeland development: development

‘in’, ‘through’, and ‘by’ the diaspora. The first one, de velopment in the diaspora relates to the pooling of fi nancial capital, intellectual capital, and political capital by members of an ethnic community for the purpose of growing wealth in the homeland country. Lots of sending governments have sponsored programs to get access to the pooling for development. For example, the Chinese government runs the Chun hui Program which grants fi nancial and manpower support to entrepreneurs who have returned, to start ventures in China. A number of ‘returning students venture parks’ were established to target returning entrepreneurs. The second type, development through diaspora means development as a result of networking within and between diasporas of the same ethnic group in different parts of the world. A classic example involves the networks of overseas Chinese from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the U.S. who contribute to economic development after China’s economic reform in late 1970s (see below). Another well noted example comes from the investigation made by Michell and Olds on the Pacific Place in Vancouver, a property project invested in by the Hong Kong–based property tycoon Li Ka Shing who took advantage of a long term North American base for his family and friends to build a cross Pacific Chinese business network in the pursuit of property development opportunities. Finally, the third type, development by diaspora refers to the diaspora working chiefly in helping the homeland development. For instance, many Jewish associations have been established to work with the Israelis to ar ticulate the needs of Israel to Washington, raise and contribute funds to elect congressional members who support Israel, and help defeat those who do not.

The Overseas Chinese Business Networks (OCBN): An Illustration The dominant example of the transnationalist approach is the analysis of the Overseas Chinese Business Net works (OCBN). The OCBN argument claims that Chi nese business people can exploit their privileged ability to recognize worldwide market differences, or what Kao (1993) refers to as ‘knowledge arbitrage’. From this per spective, market differences can be translated into geo graphical market differences, and then into regional comparative advantage, as Borrus (1997) argues for Asian production networks. It is referred to as the ‘global web’ of Chinese business and sees the close ties between the overseas Chinese and local Chinese communities as a central mechanism for economic cross fertilization in the Pacific Rim. By the same token, it has been argued that there is a distinctive and crucial synergy between overseas Chinese investors and local governments in Mainland China, one

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not found to the same extent or in the same form with non Chinese FDI. Yeung (1998) also demonstrated, based on his research about the investments made by Hong Kong based Chinese firms in the Southeast Asia, the Chinese cultivation of personal relationships insti tutionalized the trust, loyalty, reciprocity, and reputation that facilitated efficient business operations. Synergy is seen among the specific skill set of Chinese investors (experience with labor intensive exports to the West and with managing to achieve high quality and productivity from unskilled labor), cultural similarities and pro pensities (shared culture and language, ability to form trustworthy relationships, values of authority and hard work), knowledge of how to get things done in contexts of policy uncertainty while minimizing transaction costs, and industrial structures that tolerate higher levels of regulatory uncertainty and risk. In this view, global economic transactions are en hanced by the advantage of blood bonds. Ethnic ties render the utilization and coordination of resources among firms of the cross border regions flexible and economical, reinforcing their competitiveness. Such a system is seen as particularly advantageous in the current economic environment as it allows the members of the network to quickly identify complementary assets and build close partnerships at a global scale. Moreover, today’s learning economy involves more than purchasing technology and includes social dimensions such as the absorption of tacit knowledge which is embodied in technical staff. Consequently, the key to success in the rapidly changing market lies in capabilities to identify the right people (know who), and accordingly fix the right technologies and products (know how), as most innov ations are human embodied and involve teamwork. More recently, growing empirical evidences suggest that highly skilled engineers and professionals are re turning in large numbers. In many cases they have become key players in generating new technological practices and capacity in their home countries. Saxenian (2006) has found active engagement of Chinese and Indian engineers in the technological startups in Silicon Valley, California and noted the attempts of these e´migre´ to contribute to technology development in their home countries. Saxenian and Hsu (2001) also discovered that the international cir culation of technical expertise has become institutionalized by the local ethnic associations in California, that promotes the transnational ties and activities of e´migre´ entre preneurs or professionals in their home countries. These findings led to the term: ‘brain circulation’ that describes the phenomenon of skilled immigrants being of increasing benefit to both home and hosting nations. All of these possible links are established smoothly not on an individualistic base, but with the mediation of overseas organizations. Take the Silicon Valley–Taiwan connection as an example. One of the most important

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overseas organizations for high technology industries is the Monte Jade Science and Technology Association. It was formed to promote cooperation and mutual flow of technology and investment between Taiwan and Silicon Valley. The activities of the Monte Jade include monthly dinner meetings, which encourage and promote net working among members, special topic seminars that are put on in cooperation with other professional organiza tions, and social events and entertainment. Through Monte Jade’s efforts, many networking opportunities are created and proliferated. Similar to the Silicon Valley–Taiwan connection, China’s link became institutionalized by establishing a transnational community. One of the key associations, the Hua Yuan Science and Technology Association was formed in Silicon Valley in 2000 to ‘promote the technological, professional, and scientific development of the Chinese business community’. Hua Yuan and other Chinese pro fessional associations also sponsor regular business tours to China, receive government delegations, and serve as con duits for Chinese firms recruiting in the US. Through the forums provided by these organizations, two way channels were established for Silicon Valley’s high technology capital and China’s emerging market and manpower. Instead of focusing on personal linkages and ‘natural’ gravity towards home, the institutionalization argument emphasizes the importance of voluntarily created link ages that are targeted on specific objectives. Expatriates are not passive respondents to social and economic conditions in the home country, but social actors that are motivated by their linkages with home institutions and social capital from which they benefited before migrating. Not only are acceptable social and economic conditions an important factor for returning, but also opportunities that the home country provides for making use of the migration experience and established networks. Ex patriates are thus regarded as well informed agents that gather information about context and opportunities in their countries of origin.

Cautionary Remarks Critics have pointed out a number of flaws in the trans national economic network model which presumes that shared language, culture, and history facilitates the con struction of shared identities among ethnic diaspora. First, it tends to assume both the continuation of cultural commonalities and the power of shared identity to facili tate trustworthy business networks which can then operate efficiently with lower transaction costs. This culturalist position ignores internal differentiation among diaspora and takes identity as an unproblematic given. Second, it assumes that even while social connections are used for business purposes, their basis in solidarity and

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commonality resolves the problems of conflicting eco nomic interests. Third, even if business ties are more easily constructed and maintained among ethnic diaspora, and even if they do generate effective and stable cooperation, the approach still risks oversocializing economic behavior that is rooted in business and technological considerations and thus assumes that social relationships determine economic transactions and outcomes. While economic relationships are clearly socially and culturally embedded, markets and industries have their own dynamics that re ward certain types of organizations and practices and drive others toward bankruptcy and failure. In fact, the ‘Chinese business system’ should be examined in a dynamic and transformational way. Based on his case studies of the internationalization of a large number of Chinese firms from Singapore and Hong Kong, Yeung (2004) clearly illustrated that their business networks have been broadened in the globalization pro cess. The growing involvement of nonfamily, or even non Chinese members in the entrepreneurial activities of key actors in Chinese business networks showed that dynamic transformation process (e.g., professionalization) can propel these ethnocentric firms to survive in the relentless competition of world economy. Moreover, the role played by ethnic ties varies by sectors. Rather than arguing that ethnic social capital won’t work in the technology intensive industries, the critics contend that its role and style is changed. For example, Smart and Hsu (2004) find that ethnic social capital was crucial for reducing transaction costs (or in deed even making investment possible at all in certain circumstances) and enhancing mutual trust in the early stages of overseas Chinese investments in Mainland China. After the business environment became clearer and technology intensive investment became more sought after, ethnic ties became more important as col lective assets which assisted in the identification and re cruitment of appropriate talents among overseas Chinese in the United States and across the Taiwan Strait. In brief, the economy is not reducible to interpersonal re lationships, but composed of multiple production worlds that are defined by product configuration, market prin ciples, and technology and production process. Dense social ties cannot substitute for the sophisticated man agerial and technological learning that is required to compete in a particular sector in spite of the fact that the social dimension of learning is critical. Another controversy with the thesis of transnational ethnic network involves the role of the state. The stu dents of developmental state attack against the ignorance of the state leadership in the transnationalization process. Rather than counting for the rise of transnationalism as ‘globalization from below’, they argued that it is the state, particularly in the latecomer industrialization, which initiates and fosters the cross border networking, and

sponsors the returnee program to take advantage of the diaspora connection in industrial upgrading. Such a developmental statist argument reveals a partial truth that the late industrializing state pushes aggressively in encouraging spinoffs from public labs to take shape from dense social–technical networks, and recruiting overseas experts back to start up new ventures. However, the key challenges met by the developmental states are the construction of network development to participate in the new economy which becomes im perative to integrate local, regional, and global structure of innovation into a system. In other words, if the de velopmental state is argued to be a top down, bureau cratic rationality based governance mechanism, how can it build up and articulate with the supposedly bottom up, trust based social networks? How can the potential ten sion between the top down and the bottom up be settled? As a matter of fact, while making a distinction from the argument of ‘globalization from above’, transnationalism does not contradict with the role played by the state in controlling borders and regulating migration, as critiqued by Waldinger and Fitzgerald (2004). In contrast, trans national social relations are usually anchored in, while also transcending, one or more nation states. The trans nationalist discourses insist on the continuing significance of national borders, state policies, and national identities, while simultaneously crossing over them, and constituting a hybrid social space. Instead of maintaining a kind of zero sum assumption of exclusiveness of nation states and globalization, the transnationalist discourses take them as engaging in a process of mutual construction. Finally, the idea of transnational ethnic network bases its conceptualization on the network governance approach which revolves around Granovetter’s embedd edness notion. As observed by Peck (2005), the Grano vetterian reading of embeddedness epitomizes a highly versatile key concept in the economic geography of the so called ‘cultural turn’. Invariably, economic geography until more recently turns networks into shorthand for enduring, trust based ties, and focuses on the indeed very human side of family, friendship, and kin in economic relations. Consequently, network, in most economic geography literature, is used as a metaphor or governance form, rather than an analytic tool. In contrast, as suggested by Grabher (2006), economic geographers can alternatively take social network analysis seriously and systematically investigate the behavioral consequences of network configuration. In light of the analysis, the critical role of network position and struc ture fundamentally departs from the cohesion fixated ideas of networks. Burt’s (2001) social network analysis invites an understanding of arbitrage and innovation that sharply contrasts with the trust based relations prevailing in the study of transnational ethic networks in particular, and economic geography in general. From the standpoint

Transnational Ethnic Networks

of network analysis, the arbitrage advantage and lock in disadvantage of transnational ethnic network can be analyzed by exploring the interdependencies between accounts on structure and context. See also: Embeddedness; Ethnic Economies; Global Production Networks; Networks; Transnationalism and Technological Transfer.

Further Reading Amsden, A. and Chu, Wan wen. (2003). Beyond Late Development: Taiwan’s Upgrading Policies. Cambridge: MIT Press. Beaverstock, J. (2002). Transnational elites in global cities: British expatriates in Singapore’s financial district. Geoforum 33, 525 538. Borrus, M. (1997). Left for dead: Asian production networks and the revival of U.S. electronics. In Naughton, B. (ed.) The China Circle: Economics and Technology in the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, pp 139 163. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Burt, R. (2001). Structural holes versus network closure as social capital. In Lin, N., Cook, K. & Burt, R. (eds.) Social Capital: Theory and Research, pp 31 56. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Coe, N. and Bunnell, T. (2003). ‘Spatializing’ knowledge communities: Towards a conceptualization of transnational innovation networks. Global Networks 3(4), 437 456. Coe, N., Kelly, P. and Olds, K. (2003). Globalization, transnationalism, and the Asia Pacific. In Peck, J. & Yeung, H. (eds.) Remaking the Global Economy, pp 45 60. London: Sage. Cox, K. (1997). Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local. New York: Guilford Press. Dicken, P. (2003). Global Shift: Transforming the World Economy (4th edn.). New York: Guilford Press. Dicken, P. and Yeung, H. (1999). Investing in the future: East and Southeast Asian firms in the global economy. In Olds, K., Dicken, P., Kelly, P. F., Kong, L. & Yeung, H. (eds.) Globalisation and the Asia Pacific: Contested Territories, pp 111 122. London: Routledge. Grabher, G. (2006). Trading routes, bypasses, and risky intersections: Mapping the travels of ‘networks’ between economic sociology and economic geography. Progress in Human Geography 30(2), 163 189. Haque, N. and Kim, S. (1994). Human capital flight: Impact of migration on income and growth. IMF Working Paper. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund. Hsing and You Tien (1998). Making Capitalism in China: The Taiwan Connection. New York: Oxford University Press. Hsing and You Tien (2002). Ethnic identity and business solidarity: Chinese capitalism revisited. In Laurence, J. C. & Cartier, C. (eds.) The Chinese Diaspora: Space, Place, Mobility, and Identity, pp 221 236. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Hsu, Jinn Yuh and Saxenian, A. (2000). The limits of guanxi capitalism: Transnational collaboration between Taiwan and the US. Environment and Planning A 32(11), 1991 2005. Kao, J. (1993). The worldwide web of Chinese business. Harvard Business Review. March April: 24 36. Ley, D. (2004). Transnational spaces and everyday lives. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29, 151 164. Lin, J. (1998). Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclaves, Global Change. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Low, M. (1997). Representation unbound: Globalization and democracy. In Cox, K. (ed.) Spaces of Globalization, pp 240 280. New York: Guildford Press. Lundvall, B. A. (1996). The social dimension of the learning economy. DRUID Working Paper: 96 1. Aalborg: Aalborg University. Meyer, J. B. (2001). Network approach versus brain drain: Lesson from the diaspora. International Migration 39(5), 91 110. Mitchell, K. and Olds, K. (2000). Chinese business networks and the globalization of property markets in the Pacific Rim. In Wai chung

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Yeung, H. & Olds, K. (eds.) Globalization of Chinese Business Firms, pp 195 219. Basingstoke: McMillan Press. Mohann, G. (2002). Diaspora and development. In Robinson, J. (ed.) Development and Displacement, pp 77 139. London: Open University Press. Olds, K. (2001). Globalization and Urban Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Riain, S. (2004). The Politics of High Tech Growth: Developmental Network States in the Global Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patterson, R. (2006). Transnationalism: Diaspora homeland development. Social Force 84(4), 1891 1907. Peck, J. (2005). Economic sociologies in space. Economic Geography 5, 127 176. Portes, A. (1998). Globalisation from below: The rise of transnational communities. ESRC Transnational Communities Program Working Paper No. 1. Oxford Powell, W. and Smith Doerr, L. (1994). Networks and economic life. In Smelser, N. & Swedberg, R. (eds.) The Handbook of Economic Sociology, pp 368 402. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pries, L. (2005). Configurations of geographic and social spaces: A sociological proposal between ‘methodological nationalism’ and the ‘space of flows’. Global Networks 5(2), 167 190. Redding, G. (2002). The Chinese business system of China and its rationale. Asia Pacific Journal of Management 19, 221 249. Saxenian, A. (2002). Transnational communities and the evolution of global production networks: The case of Taiwan, China and India. Industry and Innovation 9(3), 183 202. Saxenian, A. (2006). The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Saxenian, A., Hsu and Jinn Yuh (2001). The Silicon Valley Hsinchu connection: Technical communities and industrial upgrading. Industrial and Corporate Change 10(4), 893 920. Schiller, N. G., Basch, L. and Szanton Blanc, C. (1992). Transnationalism: A new analytic framework for understanding migration. In Schiller, N. G., Basch, L. & Szanton Blanc, C. (eds.) Toward a Transnational Perspective on Migration, pp 1 24. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Scott, A. (1998). Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition and Political Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smart, A., Hsu and Jinn Yuh (2004). The Chinese diaspora, foreign investment, and economic development in China. The Review of International Affairs 3(4), 544 566. Smith, M. (2001). Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell. Storper, M. and Salais, R. (1997). Worlds of Production: The Action Frameworks of the Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (1999). Migrations, Diasporas and Transnationlism. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Waldinger, R. and Fitzgerald, D. (2004). Transnationalism in question. American Journal of Sociology 109(5), 1177 1195. Yeung and Wai Chung (1998). Transnational Corporations and Business Networks: Hong Kong Firms in the ASEAN Region. London: Routledge. Yeung and Wai Chung (2004). Chinese Capitalism in a Global Era: Towards Hybrid Capitalism. London: Routledge. Yeung, Y. (2000). Globalization and Networked Societies: Urban Regional Change in Pacific Asia. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Zhou, M. (1992). Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave. Philadelphia, PA: Temple Universiy Press. Zhou, Y. and Tseng, Y. (2001). Regrounding the ‘ungrounded empires’: Localization as the geographical catalyst for transnationalism. Global Networks 1(2), 131 153.

Relevant Websites http://www.montejade.org/homepage/ Monte Jade Science and Technology Association.

Transnationalism D. Ley, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

While there are disagreements about the beginnings of globalization – a dominant current paradigm across a number of interdisciplinary research fields – no one dis counts the significance of the neoliberal innovations of the 1980s that accompanied the pro market policies of President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher. Trans national corporations were the agents of ever more in tensive global economic activity, as they increasingly controlled raw material, manufacturing, financial, and consumer sectors of the economy. So it is scarcely a surprise that in conjunction with these global flows of capital, what has been called a transnationalism from above, scholars in the 1990s were soon recognizing a corresponding transnationalism from below, the acceler ating global movement of labor. But these migrant workers did not necessarily follow the conventional role of settlers to a new land. A much more flexible model of movement saw repeated journeys between homeland and destination countries, with variable periods of residence at each end. So prevalent has this style of migration become that by 2005 the UN’s Global Commission on Inter national Migration was identifying a new norm, with the former paradigm of permanent migrant settlement giving way to a new pattern of temporary and circular migration. This is a significant reconceptualization of inter national migration. The conventional wisdom envisages a simple account of departure, arrival, settlement, and as similation as the migrant undergoes a status passage from an e´migre´ of the old world to an acculturated citizen of the new world. An extension of this model includes return migration, undertaken by a minority, as a completion of a migration cycle, with the same sense of finality and closure once the return move to the homeland has been completed. Transnationalism complicates that view as migrants move repeatedly across national borders, and ‘here’ and ‘there’ remain, for them, part of a single social field. Such a transnational social space is sustained by the availability of cheap and fast communications and transportation. The ever more affordable real cost of air travel permits relatively frequent visits among members of households and communities who are fragmented on opposite sides of national borders. Access to cheap tele phone services, the Internet, and television satellite dishes allow for daily or weekly renewal of ties with friends, families, and cultures elsewhere. In addition to the maintenance of old world social networks, researchers quickly discovered that money as well as good wishes were sent through communications networks, giving rise to the important study of the

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relationship between migrant remittances and economic development at the origin. In a few cases economic flows moved in the other direction, from homeland economic activity to relocated family members overseas. In addition, some migrants have sustained homeland political con nections, particularly with the expansion of dual citizen ship, permitted by a growing number of nations in part to retain influence over their diasporas; Italy has taken this process furthest, creating four overseas electoral con stituencies for its diaspora. Research has also noted the development of transnational organizations and social movements as well as the activities of formal political participation. Studies of transnationalism have proliferated by region and by focus, and a number of special issues of journals have reviewed and extended the subfield.

Transnationalism by Discipline The initial contributions to the now abundant literature on transnationalism came from anthropologists who noted the density of migrant transactions between destinations in the United States and origins in the Caribbean islands and Central America. These studies were commonly ethnographic in method, with a rich description and interpretation of activities that spanned national borders. The entry of sociologists to the field led to methodological disagreement, with Alejandro Portes and his co workers in particular expressing concern at what they regarded as a lack of rigor in some of the anthropological work. They criticized the uneven treat ment of evidence. By only citing those cases where transnational activities could be demonstrated, and dis regarding those cases where they were absent, re searchers were only ‘sampling on the dependent variable’, thereby exaggerating the extent of the phenomenon. Ideally a sample should be randomly selected to be more representative of a larger population of immigrants, in cluding those with and without significant transnational activities. In place of the qualitative evidence produced in the ethnographies, the critics also urged the necessity for standardized and measurable evidence from large surveys that would demonstrate the significance of transnationalism and permit comparative studies in dif ferent regions. By and large, geographers have sided with the quali tative approach of anthropology rather than the quanti tative preferences of sociology, though they have typically employed the compromise of semi directed

Transnationalism

interviews of immigrants rather than lengthy ethno graphic studies. This approach provides some methodo logical uniformity in data collection while at the same time there is room for exploration of individual experi ences. One emphasis has been to challenge the argument that globalization is associated with the ‘end of geog raphy’. The compression of time and space associated with faster travel and cheaper communication un doubtedly diminishes the friction of distance. It has been argued that this ease and frequency of movement has led to a ‘deterritorialization’ of transnational migrants, as they tend toward a cosmopolitan and placeless identity. Moreover, the power of transnationalism from above, the strength and reach of private corporations, is said to di minish the role of national government, and thereby di lute the distinctiveness of individual places. A strong argument could be made that neither of these challenges to the continuing significance of place and space holds. First, cosmopolitans also have particular loyalties and place affiliations. It has been noted that rather than being transnational many migrants might better be described as translocal, for their movements are between a small number of distinct localities, for ex ample, between a Mexican village and a co ethnic neighborhood in a city in the United States, or between the central neighborhoods of a global city like London and equivalent expatriate neighborhoods of some other world city, perhaps Hong Kong or Sydney. Second, time– space compression by collapsing distance actually deep ens the significance of geographical variation. For, the spatial extension of the migrant’s life world permits ac cess to a range of geographical conditions. A popular saying among wealthy migrants to Canada from Hong Kong has been, ‘‘Hong Kong for making money, Canada for quality of life.’’ Such a statement acknowledges not only that households are able to partake of quite different geographies but also implies that the art of transnational behavior is to maximize net household benefits across these diverse geographical settings. More than this, at different stages in the life cycle one setting may rise to prominence over the other. In the case of wealthy East Asian migrants to Canada or Australia, East Asia takes priority during the years of career and equity building, but its attributes diminish during childrearing when Western educational opportunities are preferred, and again at retirement when quality of life considerations prevail. Indeed, the variable attributes of different geo graphical places at particular life stages are those that motivate repeated movement. We should not assume, however, that transnational migrants are always masters of spatial variation. The wealthy migrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea who arrive in North America, Australia, and New Zealand have considerable business experience. While this stock of human capital facilitates their entry status,

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for some visa types there is also the necessity that they develop a business in their place of landing. Despite their successful track record in their homeland, empirical study has shown that they rarely repeat as positive a performance as migrants. A typical reason is their un familiarity with the regulated economic culture of their destination countries. The labyrinthine complexity of labor, environmental, and business regulations is con fusing, and in addition tax rates are much higher than the 15% or so they are used to paying in East Asia. It is because geography still matters that successful business people in East Asia are often unable to match their performance in North America or Australasia.

Dimensions of Transnationalism Relatively few studies exist that document the extent of transnational behavior, because such data are difficult, and therefore expensive to collect, requiring a survey with a large sample undertaken in a number of languages. Table 1 shows a profile of transnational activities undertaken by a sample of close to 1500 immigrants interviewed by telephone survey in Vancouver, Canada. Interviews were conducted in the respondent’s choice of English or one of the leading five Asian languages spoken at home. Given this constraint, a random sample of re spondents was contacted in five parts of the city that varied by socioeconomic status and age of housing. Contact was made with an adult household member, who might or might not be the principal wage earner, con tributing to a significant fraction of respondents who were not in the labor force. Almost all respondents continue to have friends or family in their country of origin and not surprisingly a high level of contact is maintained with them, at least weekly for 45% (Table 1). Cheap international rates meant that the telephone was overwhelmingly the most popular means of contact, though half also used e mail, while only a fifth maintained contact through the postal service. Two thirds of immigrants travel back to their country of origin – a lengthy trans Pacific crossing for most – and of these over two fifths make the trip at least once a year. Traffic also moves in the other direction, with more than 60% of immigrants receiving visitors from their home country, 40% of these at least once a year. We may conclude from this survey that transna tional contacts are sustained with some regularity be tween origin and destination. The survey also probed the economic dimensions of transnational contacts. Surprisingly, less than 15% ac knowledged sending remittances to families back home, a rather low figure that may be influenced by the pattern of immigration to Vancouver that includes few sending countries, other than the Philippines, that are reputed as

390 Table 1

Transnationalism

Basic enumeration of transnational activities

Question

Yes

No

#

%

Family or friends in pre-migration country? Do you keep in touch with them?

1332 1271

90.1 95.4

How often? Daily Weekly Monthly Yearly Less than once a year Don’t know/Refused Total

87 486 524 139 23 12 1271

6.8 38.2 41.2 10.9 1.8 0.9

How do you keep in touch?a E-mail Telephone Postal mail Visits Refused Total

652 1167 253 302 3 1271

51.3 91.8 19.9 23.8 0.2

Do you travel to that country?

1008

68.2

How often? More than once a year Once a year or so Less than once a year Don’t know/Refused Total

201 238 550 19 1008

19.9 23.6 54.6 1.9

Does your job require you to travel to that country?b Do you own property there, or have a home? Do you run a business there? Do you provide financial assistance to people there? Do family or friends from that country visit you here?

48 329 47 212 903

7.9 22.2 3.2 14.3 61.1

How often? More than once a year Once a year or so Less than once a year Don’t know/Refused Total

123 237 514 29 903

13.6 26.2 56.9 3.2

#

Refused

Total

% 143 60

9.7 4.5

4 1

1479 1332

468

31.6

3

1479

555 1123 1411 1247 567

91.7 75.9 95.4 84.3 38.3

2 27 21 20 9

605 1479 1479 1479 1479

a

Respondents were allowed two answers to this question; percentage figures therefore exceed 100. 676 out of 1479 immigrant respondents are currently employed (another 155 are self employed). Reproduced from Hiebert, D. and Ley, D. (2006). Characteristics of immigrant transnationalism in Vancouver. In Satzewich, V. & Wong, L. (eds.) Transnational Identities and Practices in Canada, pp 71 90. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. b

receiving high levels of remittances. In contrast, more than a fifth still own property in their homeland, a figure possibly inflated by former farmers from India in the sample who have not sold their holdings. But only 6% travel to their homeland for job related purposes, and half as few again own a business there. These more dis criminating indicators indicate a more slender role for economic transnationalism than the near ubiquitous pattern of social traffic. While it is difficult to know how generalizable these results are, the general profile – broad social traffic, much more limited economic linkages – agrees with other surveys undertaken in immigrant gateway cities in the United States and Canada.

The Vancouver data do however, because of the par ticular profile of the respondents, produce lower esti mates of remittances than has been shown in other studies. All data on remittances are estimates, for many economic transactions do not enter public records, while some official sources, notably the International Monetary Fund, have a very expansive definition of the term. Nonetheless, we do know that remittances are a signifi cant part of the foreign earnings of small countries and even of larger nations including India, Mexico, China, and the Philippines. As such they are potentially an im portant component of economic development in these countries, particularly in villages and small towns where

Transnationalism

funds from individual senders may rebuild family homes, while the targeted projects of overseas hometown asso ciations complement community infrastructure – paying for a school, a road, a medical clinic, or clean drinking water – and thus may play important local roles. Despite measurement problems there is agreement that the scale of remittances is large and increasing – a World Bank estimate suggests that flows are now two thirds the size of foreign direct investment in developing countries. Moreover, remittances are less cyclical and more dependable than market flows. World Bank esti mates suggest that in 2005 India received $23.5 billion in remittances from overseas workers, China $22.4 billion, and Mexico $21.7 billion. Such large numbers represent the sum total of many individual cases of self denial and hardship by migrants, for example, Ghanaians or Paki stanis who endure severe overcrowding and long work hours in gateway cities in the global North to maximize the funds sent home, or Filipinas who as domestic workers sacrifice autonomy and sometimes dignity in order to support families back home.

Political Aspects of Transnationalism Partly because of the economic impact of rising levels of remittances, developing countries have been attempting to maintain their connections with their global diasporas. A second reason, notably in China and India, and also to a growing extent in countries with emerging shortages of skilled labor, such as Japan or Australia, is to encourage the return home of nationals who are skilled workers in foreign countries. As mentioned earlier, in its last federal election, Italy established four overseas constituencies for members of its diaspora to elect deputies to the Italian Parliament. Other emigrants play an even more direct role in national politics. In a recent election in an African state, competing candidates for one seat were both resi dents of New York City. Such transnational political identities are facilitated by the growing tenure of dual citizenship, so that home country political identities and passports are maintained even while new passports and political rights are collected from the receiving country. The holding of dual passports certainly permits a practice of ‘flexible citizenship’ to be practiced, with households maximizing their rights in different nations for different purposes. During the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon in 2006, numerous expatriates contacted their missions in Lebanon requesting safe evacuation. As the immigrant receiving nations of Canada and Australia began their preparations, they were surprised to learn the size of their expatriate populations. Canada discovered the existence of 40 000–50 000 passport holders living in Lebanon, Australia some 25 000 citizens. A majority were living in Lebanon continuously and many held jobs there,

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but they had lived in their receiving country long enough to acquire a passport and citizenship rights. The evacu ation of its nationals cost Canadian taxpayers over $80 million and sparked political discussion about the po tential abuse of citizenship privileges, particularly as a number returned to Lebanon once hostilities had ended. Meanwhile perhaps 250 000 Canadian passport holders are living in Hong Kong, having returned following a typically brief residential tenure in Canada. The broader issue here is the dilution of citizenship responsibilities with transnational movement. To what extent is national belonging, and individual and house hold contribution to the national project compromised by dual citizenship and split loyalties? It would seem as if transnational migrants might be opportunistic in their deployment of citizenship obligations, and that is cer tainly the sense of Aihwa Ong’s reference to ‘‘flexible citizenship’’ to describe the behavior of wealthy trans Pacific movers. But an American study, undertaken by Portes and his co workers, did not support this expect ation. Among a large sample of Colombian, Salvadorean, and Dominican immigrants in US cities, those engaging in cross border economic and political activity tended to be longer settled, of higher status, satisfied with life in the US, and naturalized citizens. In contrast, the Vancouver study mentioned earlier (Table 1) found exactly the opposite. While agreeing that transnational economic ventures are limited to a small proportion of immigrants, the Vancouver data showed that such residents tended to be more recent immigrants, and had landed in Canada with business class visas. They were less likely than other migrants to be naturalized Canadian citizens and also much less likely to feel a subjective affinity with Canada. The difference between the two studies is striking, and alerts us to the diversity among immigrants. The con temporary scale of transnational behavior includes households with diverse characteristics and thus a range of measurable outcomes.

Criticisms of Transnationalism In less than 20 years, transnationalism has become the new migration paradigm in the definitive words of the UN Global Commission on International Migration. Inevitably, it has suffered from overstatement and over use; we have already noted challenges to anthropological work along these lines. But a range of additional dis agreements have also been launched by less sympathetic critics. A repetitive challenge is that transnational behavior is not new but has been practiced by earlier migrants in cluding the old European migration of the 1880–1930 period to the United States. It is claimed that the Jews from Eastern Europe and the Italians who arrived in large

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Transnationalism

numbers during this period also maintained contact with home – indeed one of the early classics in social science examined the letters home from Polish peasants in the United States. It has been observed as well that between a quarter and a third of migrants from this first migration wave returned to Europe, so that departure from the sending country in no way implied a final rupture. While this argument has merit, the scale and intensity of cross border transactions today, plus the expansion of dual citizenship, have created a qualitatively different en vironment, facilitating not only a different order of magnitude in transnational contacts, but also a re definition of what it means to be a migrant. The ubi quitous presence of television satellite dishes on the outer walls of apartments in European cities, picking up homeland television signals, indicates that many migrants live each day in the cultural and informational environ ment of home even as they are physically located in a foreign land. A second criticism challenges the degree of agency imputed to migrants in transnational approaches. While globalization narratives often introduce strong economic constraints around individual actions, there is a danger that transnational emphases move unduly in the opposite direction, exaggerating the freedom of migrants to pursue their own agendas. Indeed, Katharyne Mitchell has taken the argument further, challenging the tendency of some authors to celebrate transnational migrants as political actors who transgress, even subvert, state boundary maintenance. This position seems out of kilter with the empirical record. On the basis of his survey data, Portes’ team claimed that the Latin American migrants with the most extensive transnational economic ties are those who are most assimilated in US society, scarcely provocateurs. Wealthier trans Pacific migrants similarly have no ar ticulated political project; their objectives are economic and familial, and if they transgress national boundary control it is in pursuit of these household aims. Even if the characterization as provocateurs is removed, there is still an impression of footloose agency in the lit erature that needs to be qualified. To have access to mo bility is to have the freedom to escape local constraints, but in fact uneven geographies continue to exert their effects. For one thing, transnational movement may be a result of business failure in the receiving country which rekindles the attraction of the homeland; certainly, this is a finding from research on the return of skilled workers to the People’s Republic of China after a failure to equal their pre migration professional status in North America. In deed, it is common to find downward economic and social mobility, especially for male household heads, following immigration, a status deficit that readily motivates return migration or transnational movement, with the household head replenishing the income stream from business ven tures in China, while family members continue to benefit

from Western education and quality of life. The regular ‘Pacific shuttle’ that brings temporary reunion to such fragmented ‘astronaut’ families does not address the trauma of family separation, challenging in different ways to men, women, and children in such households. As narrated to the author by one such family: ‘‘When he leaves we cry in Vancouver, and he cries in Taiwan.’’

Conclusion In an ever more mobile and interdependent world, transnational populations comprise a significant and growing share of many nation states. Their flexibility and predilection for movement bring a series of new chal lenges to the receiving nation state. Whereas a policy such as multiculturalism, or assimilation for that matter, is aimed to contain and perpetuate a population of na tional citizens – transnational migrants may or may not allow themselves to be corralled by a single nation state. The extension of dual citizenship and the innovation of diaspora politics is an attempt by both sending and re ceiving nation states to come to terms with their wan dering citizens. Sending nations are anxious to maintain contact with skill sets and remittance flows that bring palpable benefits, while receiving nations wish to con solidate their hold on valued human capital that has entered their borders and taken up citizenship. In dem onstrating the pervious nature of national borders, transnational migrants add weight to globalization the ories that announce the erosion of the borders and the authority of the nation state. Yet transnational migrants remain also subject to national political and economic regimes and vulnerable to (as well as benefiting from) the stresses of geographical separation and the uncertainties of spatial variation. Their mobility for economic ad vancement is commonly secured at the cost of a fraught emotional geography. See also: Emigration; Immigration I; Population Geography; Segregation.

Further Reading Ali Ali, N., Black, R. and Koser, K. (2001). The limits to ‘transnationalism’: Bosnian and Eritrean refugees in Europe as emerging transnational communities. Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, 578 600. Bailey, A. (2001). Turning transnational: Notes on the theorization of international migration. International Journal of Population Geography 7, 413 428. Basch, L., Glick Schiller, N. and Szanton Blanc, C. (1994). Nations unbound : Transnational projects, postcolonial predicaments, and deterritorialized nation states. Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach. Beaverstock, J. (2005). Transnational elites in the city: British highly skilled migrants in New York City’s financial district. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31, 245 268.

Transnationalism

Global Commission on International Migration (2005). Migration in an interconnected world: New directions for action. Geneva: Report to the United Nations of the Global Commission on International Migration. Hiebert, D. and Ley, D. (2006). Characteristics of immigrant transnationalism in Vancouver. In Satzewich, V. & Wong, L. (eds.) Transnational identities and practices in Canada, pp 71 90. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Jackson, P., Crang, P. and Dwyer, C. (eds.) (2004). Transnational spaces. London: Routledge. Ley, D. (2004). Transnational spaces and everyday lives. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 29, 151 164. Ley, D. and Kobayashi, A. (2005). Back to Hong Kong: Return migration or transnational sojourn? Global Networks 5, 111 127. Mitchell, K. (2004). Crossing the neoliberal line: Pacific rim migration and the metropolis. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Ong, A. (1999). Flexible citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Portes, A., Haller, W. and Guarnizo, L. (2002). Transnational entrepreneurs: An alternative form of immigrant economic adaptation. American Sociological Review 67, 278 298.

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Vertovec, S. (1999). Conceiving and researching transnationalism. Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, 447 462. Waldinger, R. and Fitzgerald, D. (2004). Transnationalism in question. American Journal of Sociology 109, 177 195. Waters, J. (2002). Flexible families? Astronaut households and the experiences of lone mothers in Vancouver, British Columbia. Social and Cultural Geography 3, 117 134.

Relevant Websites http://international.metropolis.net/International Metropolis Network on Immigration and Urbanisation. http://www.migrationpolicy.org/ Migration Policy Institute. http://www.iom.int/International Organization for Migration.

Transnationalism and Labor Geography P. F. Kelly, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Labor Geography The study of labor markets, work processes (both waged and unwaged), and labor mobilization as they are constituted in places, across space, and at various scales. Labor Regulation The institutional and cultural means by which contestation within labor markets and labor processes is stabilized. Remittances The monetary transfers that migrants make to their places of origin. Reproductive Labor The unwaged domestic work that is necessary for the sustenance of a current workforce and the raising and socialization of a future workforce. Segmentation The pattern of job allocation among workers in a labor market, usually referring to the overand under-concentration of certain groups (e.g., by gender or ethnicity) in particular kinds of employment. Transnationalism The phenomenon of multistranded economic, political, cultural, and social connections maintained by international migrants with their places of origin.

Labor Geography Labor geography comprises the study of labor markets, work processes (both waged and unwaged), and labor mobilization as they are constituted in places, across space, and at various scales. Although issues of labor supply have always featured in economic geography, it is only since the early 1990s that a wider sense of the issue has emerged as a distinctive field. In classical formulations of economic geography, labor was simply incorporated as one component of the pro duction process. Thus, when locating a factory or retail store, or when explaining processes of urban and regional development, labor was an input with specific endow ments of skill and a particular cost. Marxist approaches to economic geography, emerging in the 1970s, viewed labor in class terms. That is, not simply as an input for production, but as one side of a contested relationship between owners (and managers) of firms and their workers. Labor was thus conceptualized as part of a structural process and subject to the imperatives or logics of a capitalist system. In the 1990s several conceptual developments saw a shift in the way that labor was viewed. First, through the

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influence of regulation theory, the ‘labor market’ came to be seen as a social regulated and embedded institution rather than something that operated through the ‘natural’ workings of the market, or the abstract dictates of cap italism (although a structural understanding of capitalism still largely underpinned this regulationist approach). To this, geographers contributed an understanding of labor markets as regulated ‘locally’, through spatially uneven institutions and practices. Attention to the particularities of place added new depth to labor market studies. Second, the work of feminist economic geographers differentiated the labor market experiences of men and women and sought to dissolve the traditional distinctions made between spheres of ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’. In this way, gendered expectations concerning unwaged labor in the home were seen as central to understanding differences in sectoral and occupational concentrations in the waged labor market, and uneven levels of pay and mobility. Third, but also emerging in part from feminist ap proaches, closer attention has been paid to the ways in which workers are not simply robotic components of a production process, but are instead embodied actors with gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, citizenship, and other identities. These axes of difference are important in understanding how individuals are allocated to different kinds of jobs and how discipline in the workplace is achieved. Furthermore, embodied workers don’t just carry out functions in the labor market, they also ‘per form’ their roles in bodily ways that draw upon and reinscribe these various forms of difference. In service sector work in particular, it has been shown that ‘looking’ and ‘acting’ the part is inseparable from the objective ‘skills’ required in determining how jobs are allocated. Finally, the emergence of labor geography has been most closely associated with a drive to give appropriate recognition to the role that organized labor plays in shaping the economic landscape. Thus, when unions tackle employers locally, regionally, nationally, or even transna tionally, they actively contribute to the spatial structure of economic activity in a way that was hardly recognized even in radical approaches to economic geography. This might take the form of forcing employers to structure the geog raphy of their operations in a particular way (e.g., when a North American auto union bargains for new investment in a particular plant during collective agreement negoti ations), or it might involve the creation of a certain culture of industrial relations in a locality that drives away certain employers but attracts others.

Transnationalism and Labor Geography

These various branches of labor geography have together placed greater emphasis on how labor markets, work processes, and industrial relations actually operate in the real world. To gain this insight, studies have generally focused on the specificity of particular places, and have therefore provided a corrective to the univer salizing tendencies of both classical economic theory and its Marxist adversary.

Transnationalism Despite the importance of understanding labor markets, work processes, and industrial relations within localities, it is important to remember that they are also shaped by various flows across space. Of particular interest here are those flows that cross national borders. These might be flows of investment capital, traded commodities, or or ganizational processes in transnational firms. But they might also be transnational flows and connections es tablished by workers themselves. In recent studies of migration, it is these latter flows – the social, economic, political, cultural, and organizational connections estab lished by migrants – that have spurred a renewed interest in transnationalism. In many respects they are the inverse of the transnationalism represented by large corporations and intergovernmental organizations, representing in stead a form of transnationalism ‘from below’. Migration has always been a part of human history, but the magnitude and geographical scope of con temporary flows rival anything that has been seen before. Between 1975 and 2005, the estimated number of inter national migrants around the world increased from 84.5 million to around 196 million. This represented an increase from 2.2% to 3.0% of the world’s population. But international migrants do not simply leave their countries of origin and set up a new life elsewhere. They often maintain a variety of social, economic, cultural, and political ties with their home country. The most tangible of these are financial remittances sent to households back home. In many countries these now represent a signifi cant contribution not just to their families and com munities, but also to the national economies in which they are spent. Remittances sent through formal channels alone (and the real amounts would be larger still) in creased from US$46 billion in 1990 to an estimated US$276 billion by 2006. To get a full sense of the transnational ties maintained by migrants, however, we would also have to note the many strands of connection that migrants maintain – information relayed, cultural expectations transmitted, political alliances and support networks forged, family and household relations stret ched, and citizenship rights dislocated. This article will examine four ways in which eco nomic geographers have demonstrated the intersections

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between migrant transnationalism and the various di mensions of the workplaces and labor processes described above. The first concerns research that has explored how migrant transnationalism affects the working of labor markets, especially those in major gateway cities where migrants have tended to settle, as well as other cities where temporary migrant workers form a significant component of the labor force. The second relates to the effects of migrant transnationalism on the operation of workplace labor processes. The third explores how transnational ties often stretch households across global space and can affect the way in which unwaged labor is allocated within the home. The fourth examines how workers have themselves organized transnationally in a number of instances.

Transnationalism and Labor Markets How do migrants’ transnational connections affect the operation of the labor market and their experiences within it? The first point concerns the way in which in formation about the labor market circulates. Such infor mation might include intelligence about employment opportunities arising, necessary training and credentials, contacts inside potential employers, or regulatory issues around welfare unemployment benefits. On the em ployer’s side it might include knowing who is available with the skills to do a particular job and knowing how to assess foreign credentials. It is often assumed that markets, including those for labor, are efficient at circulating such information be tween buyers and sellers, but in fact information travels through particular channels and the most effective of these channels in the case of labor markets are the social networks of existing employees. But where employees are immigrants, especially recent immigrants, flows of in formation are not just among social networks within an urban labor market, but also to migrant source areas around the globe. Thus, in the case of Taiwanese pro fessionals recruited to work in the electronics and soft ware industry in California’s Silicon Valley, it is frequently trans Pacific social networks that supply the talent pool. The same is true in less secure and less well paid jobs. In Vancouver, Canada, for example, immigrants from India’s Punjab dominate the airport taxi sector, largely because social networks extending back to India have become the prime channel through which recruit ment occurs. In the UK, Ireland, and elsewhere, Filipino nurses are present in increasing numbers in hospital and clinics, in part because information flows have been es tablished with sending areas in the Philippines. The re sult in the Philippines has been the massive expansion of nursing training programs (as they become viewed as a ticket to emigration) and a crisis in the Philippine

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healthcare sector as so few experienced nurses remain. In this way, then, transnational flows of labor market in telligence drive labor market processes at both ends of the migration process. An important corollary of this is that migrants from particular places become destined for certain kinds of jobs in certain sectors, even before they have made their journey to their host societies. Once employed, migrants often have transnational commitments and obligations to their family members back home – to repay money loaned, to support a household, or to finance the immigration applications of family members left behind. These commitments place an intensified pressure on the migrant to participate quickly in the host city’s labor market (and without being too choosy about which job to accept). Transnational obligations may also require that a migrant intensifies her participation in the labor market by holding down several jobs. The result, then, is an intensification of participation in the workforce and curtailed job searches in which immediate rather than appropriate employment is the imperative upon arrival. Given that such immediate employment is likely to be in low paid precarious service sector jobs, and is likely to be found through networks of migrant compatriots, the result is a perpetuation of pat terns of segmentation in the labor market. While labor market information flows and partici pation decisions may both incorporate a transnational component, an even more significant issue concerns the ways in which a transnational migrant’s status as non citizen (and possibly as a racialized minority as well) shapes the conditions of their integration into the labor market. In contexts where transnational migrants are in corporated into the labor force as temporary workers rather than immigrants, there is a dislocation between their citizenship rights at ‘home’ and their labor market participation in a ‘host’ society. Singapore’s labor market is predicated upon such distinctions to an unusual extent. In 2000, almost 30% of Singapore’s work force (and about one quarter of its total population) were noncitizens. Furthermore, the city state implements a system whereby the rights of foreign workers are dictated by a graduated system of visas and work permits, so that highly paid foreign workers in areas such as financial services and academia can be accompanied by their families and can exercise most of the same rights as citizens. Low paid temporary workers in domestic service work and con struction, on the other hand, are regulated by a strict set of conditions that curtail their rights under the constant threat of deportation. While Singapore is an extreme example, the threat of deportation that hangs over non citizens in every immigrant city creates a potentially ex ploitable and marginalized workforce. Issues of citizenship rights and visa conditions present clear and tangible ways in which a transnational life (living and working in one place, but rooted and enfranchised

with citizenship in another) can lead to particular labor market outcomes. But individuals also make subjective decisions about jobs, careers, work hours, etc., based on cultural expectations. Hence, it is important to consider how the construction of identity is forged in the labor market through a transnational consciousness. What this means in practical terms is that jobs, salaries, class, and status are often evaluated by migrants in relation to distant comparisons and expectations. For deprofessionalized and subordinated transnational migrant workers, this means that when salaries are translated into purchasing power back home, when personal status is gauged based on the respect accorded in one’s home rather than one’s host community, and when compatriots have gone through similar degrading experiences, expectations within the labor market may be adjusted.

Transnationalism and Workplace Processes The preceding section established some of the ways in which the transnational connections maintained by mi grants affect their integration into host labor markets. But transnational ties may also influence the micro politics of the workplace and thereby shape the ability (or inability) of migrant workers to assert their rights, demand better conditions of employment, or seek advancement up the managerial hierarchy. For many migrant workers in low paid and insecure employment, it is precisely their transnationalism that undermines their capacity to assert rights in the work place. As citizens of one territory but workers of another, they may only be protected in theory by labor laws. In practice, the precariousness of their migrant status and their transnational obligations to family members back home, mean that there would be a heavy price to pay for pushing back against abusive employers or the authorities of host states. In Canada, research on the working con ditions of Filipina domestic workers (many employed as ‘live in’ caregivers for young children) has shown that women, whose employment, visa, and even food and shelter, are all dependent on their employers, are vul nerable to abuse of various forms – from inadequate provision of private living space, to compulsory overtime, to physical abuse. It is frequently the obligations of such workers to their transnational households and their lack of citizenship rights that forces them to endure such abuses. A less tangible form of transnational connection may also inhibit the advancement of immigrants in their workplaces. In addition to their financial obligations to family members ‘left behind’, immigrants also bring with them a different set of cultural codes and norms of workplace practices. These might include expectations in terms of teamwork or individualism, culturally

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acceptable levels of self promotion, and norms with re spect to requesting promotions, pay increases, or time off. These are practices learned in one cultural context (the source country) but implemented and evaluated by oth ers, in another context. Hence, a transnational juxta position of cultural codes can create circumstances where an immigrant’s workplace practices are read as being inappropriate for advancement and upward mobility. In the immigrant receiving countries of the ‘Global North’ these are frequently cultural barriers that exist for racialized minority groups in particular. While not rooted in tangible transnational ties, they are very much the product of immigrant workers being seen as ‘of ’ some other place. Transnational ties may, however, have the opposite effect and can, in limited ways, empower employees in their workplaces. An example is provided by research on the information processing industry in Jamaica which provides services such as data entry and software code modification. The workforce in this sector is largely young, female, and nonunionized. The worker–manager relation is one of constant tension. While few workers have overtly resisted work conditions, many have en gaged in acts of everyday resistance that may hamper the ability of firms to meet contractual deadlines for their clients. Examples include absenteeism, working to rule, rejecting overtime when offered, and ‘finger dragging’ (i.e., deliberately slowing the work rate when basic targets have been met). These are activities that can actually reduce the wages that workers receive, and may indeed put their employment in the industry in danger. The viability of these strategies – and the psychological boost that workers may receive from them – can only be understood in terms of the transnational household connections of workers in this Jamaican context. Remit tances from overseas relatives provide a cushion against the low wages and harsh discipline of the information processing industry, and embolden workers to engage in workplace resistance that would otherwise be too risky.

Transnationalism and Reproductive Labor Transnational migrants at various levels in the labor market are frequently separated from their immediate families. This sets up a situation in which the repro ductive work of running a household, maintaining a home, and raising children, is often displaced from the place of work of the household’s principal earner. This transnational household arrangement often implies a significant restructuring of the division of unwaged do mestic labor. In one study, researchers examined the household dynamics involved in transnational labor migration by

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professional and managerial Singaporeans into China. Intra household gender power dynamics are heavily impacted by this process, but so too are state ideological frameworks around household definitions and gender roles. The reproductive activities of professional and managerial families must be negotiated and frequently the burden of making this adaptation falls to wives who, whether they engage in waged work or not in Singapore, still take on the lion’s share of such duties. In another study, female Ghanaian immigrants to Canada engage in ‘transnational mothering’ as a result of women migrating to work in Canada but deciding to leave their children behind in the care of relatives. Researchers have also found examples where domestic reproductive work is located in the immigrant host so ciety, while waged work is conducted in the sending country. This occurs in the case of so called ‘astronaut’ families. Governments in Canada and Australia have established ‘business immigrant’ programs in which in dividuals are admitted based on the investment capital they have available and their ability to establish and run entrepreneurial ventures. In practice, many such immi grants (most of who have come from, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan) find it difficult to run successful businesses in a different cultural and institutional en vironment. As a result, many return to their places of origin to continue business careers there, but leave their families (meaning, in nearly all cases, wives and children) to live in Vancouver, Melbourne, etc. In such circum stances, waged work in one place is linked with unwaged work in another place through a transnationalized household structure.

Transnational Organizing As labor geography emerged as a distinctive field in the 1990s, a core concern was the ability of organized labor, in the form of trade unions, to shape the geography of capitalist development. In this literature, transnational ism refers less to the movement of migrants and the ties that they maintain across space (as in the preceding three sections), and more to one possible scale at which labor movements might conduct campaigns and even consti tute themselves organizationally. For some researchers, transnational organization has been shown to be a necessary response by trade unions to the global spread of corporate power. Certainly it is true that transnational unionism has yielded some important successes for the labor movement. In a dispute in 1996– 98, for example, Liverpool dock workers forged inter national relationships to undermine the Merseyside Dock and Harbour Company during a dispute con cerning casualization. Union activists organized several successful international days of action in 1996 and 1997

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that saw Swedish, French, Danish, Canadian, American, and Australian workers taking action to target ships and operators connected with Liverpool. International sup port proved to be a potent weapon for the dockworkers in their dispute, increasing the scale of the dispute and directly threatening the employer’s profits. In another example, a local of the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) in Ravenswood, West Virginia, took on the metals trading empire of the international finan cier Marc Rich. The dispute arose in 1989 when an aluminium plant was purchased by investors who over saw the immediate sacking of 100 workers, increased the pace of work in the factory, and disbanded a joint worker–manager safety committee. Over the course of the next 18 months, five workers were killed and several injured in the Ravenswood plant. In a subsequent round of bargaining, union workers were locked out and de cided to take up the fight through their national union (the USWA) and the American Federation of Labor Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL CIO). The campaign began to spread when it was discovered that the new investors were lead by Rich, a notorious financier living in Switzerland and wanted in the US on tax fraud charges. This led to a transnational campaign that in volved worldwide lobbying of over 300 end users of Ravenswood metals to stop buying the product. There after, in a series of actions involving unions in Western Europe, attempts were made to disrupt economic activ ities associated with Rich. By the spring of 1992, anti Rich activities had been organised in 28 countries on five continents, with the result that in June of that year, the management was forced to concede defeat and to re instate the sacked workers. Studies tracing the transnationalization of unions and their campaigns emphasize, however, that the optimal scale for prosecuting labor disputes need not necessarily incorporate transnational networks. In many circum stances and in many sectors, local and national scales are the key pressure points for asserting the demands of workers. Research in labor geography has also shown that transnational labor activism need not necessarily come in the form of organized labor. Other examples of transna tional mobilization of, or for, labor include activist or ganizations that assert the rights of workers across national borders, either through advocating for those workers collectively, or through consumer campaigns that seek to influence labor processes in distant pro duction sites. Numerous examples of international labor advocacy organizations exist outside of the formal trade union movement, including some that focus explicitly on the plight of migrant workers. One such organization, Migrant Forum Asia, was formed in 1994 as a network of regional nongovernmental organizations. Its purpose is to forge ‘‘concerted action to address discriminatory laws

and policies, violence against women migrants, unjust living conditions, unemployment in the homeland and other issues affecting migrant workers.’’ Significantly, the organization’s mandate includes the issue of unemploy ment in sending countries, which drives transnational migration in the first place. Another case of transnational labor activism is found in consumer campaigns to ensure labor standards are upheld in distant production sites. The Clean Clothes Campaign, for example, focuses on improving working conditions in the global garment and sportswear indus tries. With an international secretariat in Amsterdam, it also has local campaigns in 11 Western European coun tries: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. A similar campaign, with a more North American focus is the Maquila Solidarity Network (MSN), based in Toronto but focusing on working con ditions in the garment sector in Mexico, Central Amer ica, and Asia. The MSN defines its aim as being: ‘‘to strengthen the capacity of civil society organizations in the North and South to challenge the negative impacts of industry restructuring in the global garment industry. In a global economy, groups in the North and South must work together for employment with dignity, fair wages and working conditions, and healthy workplaces and communities.’’ In both cases, transnational internet based fundraising and campaigns form an important channel for placing pressure on employers, retailers, and govern ments to address workplace exploitation.

Conclusion This article has explored the intersections between transnationalism and labor geography in various ways. In each case, transnationalism has referred to the ways in which workers establish transnational ties and networks to create form of globalization ‘from below’. The first three sets of examples related to the transnational ties maintained by migrants, while the last related to trans national organizing by, or on behalf of, workers. In the case of labor market processes, the transnational circulation of information shapes both migrant flows supplying the labor market, and in some cases the nature of training infrastructure in sending countries as well. Financial obligations to family members back home may also affect a migrant’s participation in the labor market. In cases where migrant are permitted to work on tem porary visas only, then the transnational dislocation of working lives from citizenship rights creates a vulnerable position for migrant workers in the labor market. This vulnerability can be translated into the work place, where obligations to home, and a lack of citizen ship rights, can leave transnational migrants open to

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abuse. In addition, the enactment of embodied cultural practices learned from home contexts can frequently leave migrants marginalized, underestimated, and dis criminated against in their new workplaces. In some in stances, though, transnational sources of livelihood can support a higher degree of labor resistance, as the ex ample of Jamaica illustrated. Labor market studies often relate to work that is sold to an employer for a wage, but every waged employment relationship is underpinned by a set of unwaged labor processes that sustain and reproduce the workforce, primarily in domestic spaces. In some instances, these reproductive forms of labor are conducted within households that are stretched transnationally, so that waged productive labor and unwaged reproductive labor are dislocated. The consequence of this is a reordering of divisions of reproductive labor within the household. Finally, labor geography’s core concern with the agency of workers has a transnational dimension in the case of disputes and campaigns that expand out of local scales to encompass global networks of allies. Examples indicate some successes when labor asserts itself trans nationally in this way. In all of these processes, our understanding of labor geographies has been deepened through attention to the ways in which local processes are constituted, in part at least, by their connections across space with distant places. Clearly this does not imply that labor geographies should be analyzed, nor labor activism engaged, in a way that prioritizes transnational processes. But it does imply that local and national scales alone are not sufficient to develop a full understanding of the geographies that workers create.

Bauder, H. (2006). Labor Movement: How Migration Regulates Labor Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castree, N. (2000). Geographic scale and grass roots internationalism: The Liverpool dock dispute, 1995 1998. Economic Geography 76, 272 292. Herod, A. (2001). Labor Geographies. New York: Guilford. Kelly, P. F. and D’Addario, S. (2007). Filipinos are very strongly into medical stuff: Labour market segmentation in Toronto, Canada. In Connell, J. (ed.) The International Migration of Health Workers. London: Routledge. Kelly, P. F. and Lusis, T. (2006). Migration and the transnational habitus: Evidence from Canada and the Philippines. Environment and Planning A 38, 831 847. McDowell, L., Batnitzky, A. and Dyer, S. (2007). Division, segmentation, and interpellation: The embodied labors of migrant workers in a Greater London hotel. Economic Geography 83, 1 26. Mullings, B. (1999). Sides of the same coin? Coping and resistance among Jamaican data entry operators. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89, 290 311. Pratt, G. (1999). From registered nurse to registered nanny: Discursive geographies of Filipina domestic workers in Vancouver, BC. Economic Geography 75, 215 236. Sassen, S. (1995). Immigration and labor markets. In Portes, A. (ed.) The Economic Sociology of Immigration, pp 87 126. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Saxenian, A. (1999). Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs. San Francisco, CA: Public Policy Institute of California. Waters, J. (2002). Flexible families? ‘Astronaut’ households and the experiences of lone mothers in Vancouver, British Columbia. Social and Cultural Geography 3, 117 134. Wills, J. (1998). Taking on the cosmocorps: Experiments in trans national labor organization. Economic Geography 74, 111 130. Willis, K. and Yeoh, B. (2000). Gender and transnational household strategies: Singaporean migration to China. Regional Studies 34, 253 264. Wong, M. (2006). The gendered politics of remittances in Ghanaian transnational families. Economic Geography 82, 355 381. Yeoh, B. (2006). Bifurcated labor: The unequal incorporation of transmigrants in Singapore. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 97, 26 37.

Relevant Websites See also: Immigration II; Labor Market; Remittances; Transnationalism.

Further Reading Bauder, H. (2005). Habitus, rules of the labor market and employment strategies of immigrants in Vancouver, Canada. Social and Cultural Geography 6, 81 97.

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http://cleanclothes.org Clean Clothes Campaign. http://www.iom.int International Organization for Migration. http://en.maquilasolidarity.org Maquila Solidarity Network. http://www.mfasia.org Migrant Forum Asia.

Transnationalism and Technology Transfer J.-Y. Hsu, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Industrial Upgrading As more and more developing country producers are integrated into global markets, there is downwards pressure on the prices of both agricultural and manufactured products. For producers to maintain or increase incomes in the face of this pressure, they must either increase the skills content of their activities or move into market niches which have entry barriers and are therefore insulated to some extent from these pressures. The shifts in activities which sustain higher incomes are taken as upgrading. Knowledge Knowledge is viewed fundamentally as a heterogeneous resource that firms value in different manifestations. Mostly the main types of knowledge can be distinguished as codified knowledge versus tacit knowledge, and individual knowledge versus collective knowledge. Overseas Diaspora It refers to ethnic groups whose sizable parts have lived outside their country of origin for at least several generations, while maintaining some ties to the homeland. Structure Hole Burt defines it as ‘‘a gap between two individuals with complementary resources or information.’’ When the two are connected through a third individual as entrepreneur, the gap is filled creating important advantages for the entrepreneur. Competitive advantage is, therefore, a matter of access to these ‘structural holes’. Technology Transfer Students of technology transfer make an important distinction, separating ‘material transfers’ and ‘design transfers’ from ‘capacity transfers’. While technology transfer involves management and investment, it is difficult to rely exclusively on the transfer of machines and blueprints. Therefore, the migration of engineers must be considered an essential element in the effective transfer of technology. Transnational Technical Community A community that spans borders and boasts as its key assets share technical knowledge and ethnic networks.

There has been a resurgence of interest in the impli cations of innovation and learning for the creation and maintenance of economic competitiveness since the new economy, or knowledge based economy, became the buzzword in the past two decades. Two types of know ledge have been identified by the students of knowledge management: on the one hand, codified knowledge is

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necessarily explicit, formal, or systematic, and can be expressed in words and numbers, scientific procedures, or universal principles. The codified type of knowledge is easy to transfer, store, recall, and valorize. On the other hand, tacit knowledge is extremely difficult to transfer, and is gathered from the accumulation of practice, the ability to communicate, and wisdom. Johnson et al. raised a critical assessment of the dualism of codified/tacit knowledge used by Cowan et al. They argued the di chotomy was problematic since it was rare that a body of knowledge could be transformed into codified form without losing some of its original characteristics and that most forms of relevant knowledge were mixed in these respects. Under the influence of new information technology and global knowledge economy, codified knowledge be comes ubiquitous, and the creation of unique capabilities and products hinges on the production and use of tacit knowledge. It is asserted that knowledge creation and diffusion should be taken as a situated practice embedded in distinctive communities and actor networks in which the powers of context, spatial and temporal, have to be placed at the center. Accordingly, the combination and composition of tacit and codified knowledge depend on the context within which agents or organizations ma nipulate knowledge. While codified knowledge can be disseminated through impersonal means, tacit knowledge is closely associated with meaning and understanding, and personal communication is indispensable for its transfer. In the times we now live, when communication technol ogy is highly developed and information is widely avail able, interpersonal connections have become more, rather than less, important for the exchange of knowledge. But we recognize that knowledge has the properties of being embedded in an individual, who is part of an or ganizational context. The consequence of combining personalized knowledge and organizational embedded ness is that knowledge can be at either end of the tacit codified continuum and may therefore be straightforward or almost impossible to transfer. In fact, the mobility of personnel as the most effective way to overcome the problem of tacit dimension of knowledge transfer has been well identified. One of the major goals of technology transfer is to cultivate local technological capabilities. (According to Bell and Pavitt (1993: 163), technological capabilities consist of the re sources needed to generate and manage technical change, including skills, knowledge and experience, and insti tutional structures and linkages.) Students of technology

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transfer make an important distinction, separating ‘material transfers’ and ‘design transfers’ from ‘capacity transfers’. Material transfer is characterized by the import of new materials and techniques. Local adaptation is not conducted in an orderly and systematic fashion. The local adaptation of borrowed technology and the devel opment of new machines tend to occur primarily as a result of trial and error, often termed ‘learning by doing’. Design transfer is primarily carried out through the transfer of certain blueprints, formulas, books, etc. The knowledge contained in these design materials is coded and explicit, and must be adapted to local conditions. Capacity transfer means the transfer of scientific know ledge, which leads to the production of locally adaptable technology, based on technology prototypes existing abroad. A critical element in the process of capacity transfer is the migration of scientists and engineers, as most of the innovative knowledge is human embodied and diffuses through personal contact and association. While technology transfer involves management and investment, it is difficult to rely exclusively on the transfer of machines and blueprints. As Almeida and Kogut track the movements of over 400 engineers and show their patterns of mobility influence the inter and intraregional patterns of knowledge flow. It is particularly relevant to the knowledge economy in which the access to knowledge becomes the key for the construction of competitive advantage. According to Lundvall, the learning economy includes mastery over the know what of facts and information, the know why of principles and theorems, the know how of competence and skills, and the know who of knowledge in networks of collaboration and communication. Moreover, as Lundvall argued, the learning process involves more than purchasing technology, and includes social dimensions such as the absorption of tacit knowledge, which is em bodied in technical staff. As a result, the know who be came the key job in identifying appropriate technologies to transfer. The importance of the know who illustrated a critical ‘gatekeeper’ role in technology transfer. Studies using a social network approach to innovation and product de velopment determined that strategically positioned in dividuals facilitate information dissemination which in turn facilitates innovation. Individuals with more in formal contacts outside the organization, or ‘gatekeepers’, were critical for importing novel information and linking the organization with its environment. These gatekeepers effectively serve as the primary link to external sources of information and technology. The role of gatekeeper well epitomizes why some companies seem to be able to adopt technologies earlier than others. This could be related to their absorptive ability to screen their environment and identify new potential solutions from external sources. One way to

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achieve this is to have contacts in the supporting scien tific community. These boundary spanning individuals, or gatekeepers, are most likely well connected and in formed. They have insight into the related technologies and underlying sciences.

The Rise of Transnational Technical Community and Technology Transfer Based on a perspective of social network, a growing body of transnationalism, or globalization from below, tried to decode the technology diffusion and transfer which were usually engaged exclusively with the transnational cor porations and nation states. It contended that a transna tional community of engineers has coordinated a decentralized process of reciprocal industrial upgrading by transferring capital, skill, and know how to the source region and by facilitating collaborations between specialist producers in the two regions. The transnational com munity thus allows local companies from latecomer in dustrializing countries to avoid the problems that many corporations face when they establish operations in the technology hub such as Silicon Valley. Foreign firms need to be able to integrate into the region’s social networks to gain access to up to date technology and market infor mation, while simultaneously maintaining the ability to communicate quickly and effectively with decision makers in the headquarters. It argues that the multinational cor poration may no longer be the advantaged or preferred organizational vehicle for transferring knowledge or per sonnel across national borders, but a transnational tech nical community provides an alternative and potentially more flexible and responsive mechanism for long distance transfers of skill and know how – particularly between very different business cultures or environments. As demonstrated by Amin and Cohendet, two major advantages are exploited by the governance mode of community. The first is that communities ‘freely’ absorb the sunk costs associated with building the infrastructure needed to produce or accumulate knowledge, usually in a completely nondeliberate manner embedded in their daily practices which render the codification of tacit knowledge easy and costless. The second is that com munities do not need a visible or explicit central au thority to control the quality of work or enforce compliance with any standard procedure, as communities monitor the behavior of their members and render them accountable for their actions. By the same token, these advantages apply to the transnational technical com munities in the current global economic system. First, an increasing specialization of production and a deepening social division of labor generates entre preneurial opportunities for innovation in formerly per ipheral regions. By exploiting these opportunities in their

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home countries, a transnational technical community can build independent centers of specialization and innov ation, while simultaneously maintaining ties to the technology hubs such as Silicon Valley to monitor and respond to fast changing and uncertain markets and technologies. The community was well positioned to establish cross regional partnerships that facilitate the integration of their specialized components into end products. In the transnational community, ethnic ties and interpersonal relationships can facilitate collaborations and reduce the uncertainty of economic deals. The members of the transnational ethnic network are likely to be better informed on the capabilities and requirements of domestic labor and the sort of training local labor requires. In other words, such social ties fulfill the need of ‘know who’ in the learning economy in which the social dimension is the key and often ignored issue in the constitution of competitiveness. These transnational re lationships support technology transfer by supporting joint problem solving and complementary innovation. Close, trust based relationships among the transnational community of engineers are thus an essential pre condition for the flexible collaboration needed to adapt and survive in today’s fast paced competitive environ ment. The case study of the Silicon Valley–Hsinchu (Taiwan) connection vividly verifies the point. In add ition, the development of the Indian software industry owes much of its growth to the Indian diaspora in the Silicon Valley, as shown by Kapur. Second, accounting for technical upgrading in late industrializing regions is a contested issue. In fact, as discovered by Saxenian, the links of the key technological latecomers such as Taiwan, India, and Ireland, with the Californian technology hub unfold in several ways: the latecomer companies recruit overseas engineers, they set up listening posts in Silicon Valley to tap into the brain power there, or successful overseas engineers return to the homelands to start up their own businesses. All of these possible links are established smoothly not only on an individualistic basis, but largely through the mediation of overseas organizations. In spite of ethnic ties that fa cilitate cross regional technological cooperation, the technical community benefits more from integration with broader business networks. It is clear that the overseas diaspora helped transfer technology and business models back to the homelands. It is particularly true that while the latecomer firms in both regions had to rely on ethnic ties with mainstream businesses during their embryonic stages, ethnic ties could ease information collection across the globe. Trust and reciprocity incubated from primary ethnic bonds and informal personal relationships facilitate cooperation between these regions, and broaden the scope of network building. While some top down accounts, such as that of Alice Amsden suggest that the developmental state and key big companies (national

champion) should be put at center stage in the process of late industrialization, other accounts focus on global production networks (GPNs) and argue that late devel opment benefits from its insertion into global value chains. Both are partially true, but fail to take seriously the embedded institutions in transborder connections between technologically leading and following regions. In fact, a new strand of GPNs perspective has more detailed and nuanced analysis of the social and developmental dynamics of contemporary capitalism at the global–local nexus, which becomes the mandate for the transnational corporations to survive and prosper in the interconnected economic system. The GPN perspective asserts that strategic coupling between GPNs and regional assets, or an interface mediated by a range of institutional activities across different geographical and organizational scales will be critical for the development of each region in the global economy. At the same time, the transnationalist discourses insist on the continuing significance of na tional borders, state policies, and national identities, while simultaneously crossing over them, and consti tuting a hybrid social space. Instead of maintaining a kind of zero sum assumption of exclusiveness of nation states and globalization, the transnationalist discourses take them as engaging in a process of mutual construction. In light of the GPN perspective, the transnational technical community plays a critical mediating role in the glob alizing process of regional development.

The Limit of Transnationalism in Technology Innovation As Amin and Cohendet warns, governance by community does not come without limits. One of the major causes of failure is the risk of parochialism, discrimination, or vengeance on other communities. A second limit is the risk of lack of variety. These cautious remarks apply to the mediating work of transnational technical community in technology innovation and transfer. In fact, as shown by social network analysis, networks with an abundance of structural holes, a gap between two individuals with complementary resources or information, by situating people at the confluence of different social domains, create opportunities for the novel combination and recombination of ideas. These same networks, how ever, pose a problem for acting on such ideas. Structural holes pose an action problem because the dispersed, un connected people found around structural holes are in herently more difficult to mobilize or coordinate, especially around novel ideas. Dense networks present the optimal conditions for the exchange of the complex in formation necessary for innovation in complex organiza tions but present an idea problem because of the redundancy of information circulating within the network.

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Individuals who are active in introducing dissimilar others and facilitating action among previously tied alters (or people in one’s social network) will be more involved in the combinative activity that leads to innovation. The information advantage Burt associated with networks with structural holes roughly corresponds to the advan tageous position occupied by the gatekeepers in the earlier social networks/innovation literature to the extent that both imply boundary positions. Extensive social knowledge about the personnel and differing styles of critical departments across the organization resulting from informal ties and potentially shared design experi ence contribute critically to cross boundary innovation efforts. In other words, knowledge heterogeneity was a significant predictor of both overall managerial per formance and innovation performance. As a result, a number of limits should be raised about the relations of transnationalism and technology transfer. First, the transnationalist argument risks oversocializing economic behavior that is rooted in business and tech nological considerations. This is the blind spot in the discourse on social constitution, which assumes that so cial relationships determine economic transactions and outcomes. The economy is not reducible to interpersonal relationships, but composed of multiple production worlds that are defined by product configuration, market principles, and technology and production process. In other words, dense social ties cannot substitute for the sophisticated managerial and technological learning that is required to compete in a particular sector in spite of the fact that the social dimension of learning is critical. Second, close ties sometimes will become blind trust, and make firms unconscious of the exterior technological breakthroughs or new business opportunities. To make things worse, ethnicity embedded system occasionally compels people to compete based more on the thickness of tie than the depth of capability. In other words, a socially overembedded industrial world without cautious monitoring might lead to unproductive situations, rather than a healthy and efficient production system. The peril of lock in is usually put aside by the transnationalist (as well as networked firm) argument. In light of the discussion above, two interesting threads, among others, could be elaborated in the future research. The one is a comparative study between the performances of transnational technical communities in divergent ‘home countries’ which demonstrate contra dictory industrial structures and absorptive capabilities. Another thread lies in the combination of GPN per spective and transnationalist discourse by the use of so cial network analysis. By doing so, a number of typologies of global–local interface could be built up for the ad vanced study of transnational technology transfer. See also: Transnationalism.

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Further Reading Almeida, P. and Kogut, B. (1999). Localization of knowledge and the mobility of engineers in regional networks. Management Science 45(7), 905 917. Amin, A. and Cohendet, P. (2004). Architectures of Knowledge: Firms, Capabilities, and Communities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Amsden, A. (2001). The Rise of the Rest: Challenges to the West from Late Industrialization Economies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, M. and Pavitt, K. (1993). Technological accumulation and industrial growth: Contrasts between developed and developing countries. Industrial and Corporate Change 2(2), 157 210. Bunnell, T. and Coe, N. (2001). Spaces and scales of innovation. Progress in Human Geography 25(4), 569 589. Burt, R. (2001). Structural holes versus network closure as social capital. In Lin, N., Cook, K. & Burt, R. (eds.) Social Capital: Theory and Research, pp 31 56. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Coe, N., Hess, M., Yeung, H., Dicken, P. and Henderson, J. (2004). ‘Globalizing’ regional development: A global production networks perspective. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29, 468 484. Cohen, W. and Levinthal, D. (1989). Innovation and learning: the two faces of R&D. Economic Journal 99, 569 596. Connell, N., Klein, J. and Powell, P. (2003). It’s tacit knowledge but not as we know it: Redirecting the search for knowledge. Journal of the Operation Research Society 54(2), 140 152. Cowan, R., David, P. and Foray, D. (2000). The explicit economics of knowledge codification and tacitness. Industrial and Corporate Change 9(2), 211 253. Dicken, P., Kelly, P., Olds, K. and Yeung, H. (2001). Chains and networks, territories and scales: Towards a relational framework for analyzing the global economy. Global Networks 1, 89 112. Grabher, G. (1993). The Embedded Firm: On the Socioeconomics of Industrial Networks. London: Routledge Press. Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology 78, 1360 1379. Hobday, M. (2001). The electronics industries of the Asia Pacific: Exploiting international production networks for economic development. Asian Pacific Economic Literature 15(1), 13 29. Johnson, B., Lorenz, E. and Lundvall, B. A. (2002). Why all this fuss about codified and tacit knowledge? Industrial and Corporate Change 11(2), 245 262. Kapur, D. (2001). Diasporas and technology transfer. Journal of Human Development 2(2), 265 286. Lall, S. (1987). Learning to Industrialize: the Acquisition of Technological Capability by India. London: Macmillan. Lundvall, B A. (1996) The social dimension of the learning economy. DRUID Working Paper 96 1. Maskell, P. and Malmberg, A. (1999). Localised learning and industrial competitiveness. Cambridge Journal of Economics 23(2), 167 185. Sabel, C. (1989). Flexible specialization and the re emergence of regional economies. In Hirst, P. & Zeitlin, J. (eds.) Reversing Industrial Decline? pp 17 70. New York: St. Martins. Saxenian, A. (2006). The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Saxenian, A. and Hsu, J. Y. (2001). The Silicon Valley Hsinchu connection: Technical communities and industrial upgrading. Industrial and Corporate Change 10(4), 893 920. Smith, M. (2001). Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell. Storper, M. and Salais, R. (1997). Worlds of Production: The Action Frameworks of the Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tsoukas, H. and Vladimirou, E. (2001). What is organizational knowledge? Journal of Management Studies 38(7), 973 993. Tushman, M. and Scanlan, T. (1981). Boundary spanning individuals: Their role in information transfer and their antecedents. The Academy of Management Journal 24(2), 289 305. Uzzi, B. (1997). Social structure and competition in interfirm networks: The paradox of embeddedness. Administrative Science Quarterly 42, 35 67.

Transnationality S. Huang, National University of Singapore, Singapore & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Networks These may be conceived structurally as webs through which information, values, capital, people, and goods flow. Social networks (often based on familial, friendship, or ethnic ties) are particularly important in mediating the volume and direction of transmigrant flows. Simultaneity It reflects the everyday geographies that incorporate activities, routines, and institutions located both in a destination country and transnationally, given that transmigrants’ embeddedness in multisited transnational social fields encompass those who move as well as those who stay behind. Transnationalism from Above/Below It refers to transnational activities and enterprises initiated and carried out by structural forces and institutions (such as states and transnational corporations) and those resulting from grassroots initiatives (including those) by individuals respectively. Transnationality This is a condition of sustained interconnectedness experienced by transmigrants whose everyday geographies span social fields located in two or more nation-states. Transnationality may be best embodied in the person of the multiple passport holder who circulates easily between two or more nation-states, building a life history rooted in and affected by multiple national affiliations. Transnational Social Spaces/Fields These move the idea of migration spaces as fixed and contained within the boundaries of a nation to one that conceptualizes space as more relational and tied to opportunity structures and migrant experiences. Social fields are thus interlocking networks of social relationships through which ideas, practices, and resources are unequally exchanged, organized, and transformed, and exist above and beyond the social contexts of national societies.

Introduction Conceptually, the landscape of transnationality is a variegated and evolving one, researched by scholars from a variety of disciplines, especially cultural studies, an thropology, and increasingly geography, and still lacking a well defined theoretical framework. A review of the literature reveals some differing conceptualizations about what transnationalism and transnationality encompass

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and at times, ambiguity in how the terms (especially ‘transnationality’) are utilized. The idea of transnation ality was perhaps first expressed by Randolph S. Bourne in an essay on ‘Trans national America’ published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1916, which called for the ac ceptance of a new cosmopolitan ideal characterized by dual loyalties and the ‘‘free and mobile passage of the immigrant between America and his native land.’’ While the term transnational‘ity’ (as opposed to transnational‘ism’) is more often than not implied rather than explicitly employed in much of the current trans nationalist scholarship, it continues to be used primarily in the context of immigrant transnationalism to em phasize the state of simultaneous embeddedness in more than one society that many transmigrants in the era of globalization experience due to changes in the nature of capitalism. The resultant restructuring of the global economy has in turn brought about new migration strategies which hinge on flexibility in terms of location and allegiances. Discussions of transnationalism almost never fail to cite the work of anthropologists Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc ex plicating the multistranded networks (social, cultural, familial, political, economic, and religious) that are sus tained between societies of origin and settlement under conditions of contemporary international migration. In other words, transnationality may be first and foremost thought of as a condition of sustained inter connectedness experienced by transmigrants whose everyday geographies span social fields located in two or more nation states. It is generally agreed that this sim ultaneity of transnational social fields has been fostered by significant technological advancements in transporta tion and communications – including rapid air flights (from budget to first class), electronic transmissions over the Internet and e mail, and inexpensive and even free telephone connections – which have facilitated regular and nearly instantaneous cross border flows of goods, remittances, information, and people in the con temporary period. Some scholars have even attributed causal weight to new technologies in accelerating inter national linkages and transforming the form of migration from older linear and circular patterns, to its current morphology in which migrants are said to move easily and participate actively in the social, business, political, and familial affairs of two or more nations, thus neces sitating the development of new transnational frame works to understand migration.

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Earlier theorizing on transnationalism, mainly by cultural anthropologists, centered around the ideas gen erated by Glick Schiller, Basch, and Szanton’s work, and highlighted a transnationality of multiply located lives that contemporary transmigrants participate in, as they, unlike their predecessors, continue to actively engage in the societies from which they emigrated even as they invest in building new lives in their new societies. In this conceptualization, transnationality may be best embodied in the person of the multiple passport holder who cir culates easily between two or more nation states, build ing a life history rooted in and affected by multiple national affiliations. Thus, the transnational is often one who has multiple (perhaps ambivalent and even con flicting) loyalties as opposed to exclusive allegiances. However, transnationality cannot be limited to an in terrogation of the state–citizen relationship and simply confined to formal conferment of citizenship. As Aihwa Ong has argued, the form and meaning of citizenship has been reworked by globalization, and many traveling subjects may also employ the locational strategies and tactics of ‘flexible citizenship’ to capitalize on and re spond opportunistically to different nation state regimes by locating investments, work, and family in different geographical sites across the world. Such flexible citizens include those of the elite cap italist class (such as entrepreneurs, managers, techno crats, and professionals) who often set up ‘astronaut families’ in which the wife and mother is planted in one country to anchor a home for the children so as to take advantage of the social, cultural, and educational facilities of the destination, while the husband and breadwinner undertakes the transnational shuttle between workplace in the country of origin and family at the destination. The envelope of actors who may experience multilocal lives under the dynamics of transnationality also includes more marginal migrant ‘others’ (such as contract workers in domestic service or the construction and shipping industry) whose sustained links with home through the regular exchange of tangible and intangible goods creates transnational social fields that both maintain their own cultures as well as allow them to embrace those of the host society. Thus, more recent understandings of transnationality have moved from the more exact, as defined by transnational citizenship involving rights and enforceable claims on the state, to the more evocative where the simultaneity of cultural rather than legal citizenship is assumed to be the salient feature.

The Logics of Transnationality Transnationalism is argued to force a rethinking of the role of geography in the formation of identity. Rather than viewing transmigrants as agents who move easily

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between bounded and separate worlds, geographers have been especially interested in how transmigrants’ social spheres may be conceived as the same society differen tially located in space but tightly woven across borders. As such, the boundaries of social fields do not necessarily coincide with the territorial space of the nation state. It is in these transnational social spaces, or translocalities, where the everyday activities and geographies of trans national communities occur and accumulate to enable transmigrants who share some form of identity to find and develop dense networks and social relations with one another in host societies, as well as to create and maintain links with home and other translocal spaces in other parts of the world in a multidirectional manner. These social spaces may be abstract entities such as business networks, but also include real geographical spaces, whether for malized in the form of social clubs and expatriate or ganizations, or informally convened such as migrant contract workers’ weekend enclaves. These networks and social spaces can significantly influence transmigrant adaptation and flows across global space which, in turn, mediate flows of information, finance, commodities, cul tural values, and the like. Traditionally bounded notions of community and locality based on fixed spatialities are thus argued to be rendered obsolete by such a relation ally constituted sense of ‘citizenship’. The concept of social fields is an important one as it allows an incorporation of nonmigrants – those who do not themselves move or who move infrequently – into the domains of transnationality. Some scholars have pointed out that individuals may participate in transna tionality differentially, with the scope and intensity of transnational practices ranging along a continuum of different forms of transnational social practices: from core transnationalism/narrow transnationality (involving indi viduals whose daily lives are integrally tied up with transnational social fields) to expanded transnationalism/ broad transnationality (involving individuals who may engage infrequently but intensely in transnational prac tices that are not well institutionalized). Others, however, have noted unequivocally that the notion of transnation ality (and its attendant terms) should be restricted only to activities and flows that involve a high intensity of exchanges on a regular and sustained basis. In trying to understand transnational social fields, emphasis has moved from a focus on global narratives of structural conditions (a kind of transnationalism ‘from above’), which enable the fluidity and seemingly effortlessness of movements in an increasingly borderless world, to the quotidian and mundane practices that sustain – and resist – transnational mobilities and transnationality (transnationalism ‘from below’). While the former approach often ignores the con textual nature of transnational linkages and adopts a homogenizing account of capitalism’s transnational

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workings, downscaling the analytical lens from the global to the everyday reveals how the logics of transnationality work at smaller scales, such as that of the household, to reveal micro geographies of how capitalism is practiced and played out in different transnational contexts, and leading to, for example, a difference between the trans nationalism experienced by a Hong Kong businessman based in Vancouver, and another based in Sydney or Shanghai. Recent work has drawn attention not only to the significant efforts, resources, and organization but also to the emotional and mental costs that are an in herent part of living life transnationally. Such efforts (through telephone calls, e mails, overseas flights, and so on) and costs (monetary, homesickness, displacement, possibilities of strained or broken marriages, and so on) are well exemplified in the dynamics of maintaining transnational families stretched across space but whose constituent members continue to function economically and emotionally as a collective. It is also clear that even for the individual elite transmigrant with a hypermobile career, globetrotting lifestyle, and cosmopolitan con sciousness, the actual overcoming of transnational space is not unproblematic. While discussions of transnationalism tend to under score the persistence of linkages and connections between transnational social spaces, how these affect the way people think about their senses of citizenship and be longing as well as their practice of transnationality is often less clear in the literature. Is transnationality a reflection of deterritorialization and the transcendence of the na tion, or about being embedded, located, and incorporated in multiple localities? On the one hand, transnationals, because of their multilocal lives, are often argued (in a rather cliche´d way) to be ‘neither here nor there’, always in a space of flows, routed but rootless. It is said that they never quite arrive at their destination because they have never quite left home and hence are never really home. Yet, on the other hand, transnationals have also been said to be both ‘here and there’, multiply routed between and rooted in the fabric of two or more social fields, whether through business dealings, cultural practices, social pro cesses, or political engagements. Thus, the spatial stretching that is seen as the core of transnationalism is at times theorized as a form of deterritorialization, dis rupting and challenging the notion of singular, territor ialized identities and loyalties and at other times as a respatialization, creating and nurturing the global citizen who is culturally embedded and politically engaged somewhere but also at home in other locales. Both these viewpoints demonstrate that transnational maneuverings have brought about new modes of con structing identity and subjectification that cut across political borders and which give rise to tensions between nationally defined versus transnationally assumed iden tities. Have transnational interconnectivities rendered

any strictly bounded sense of community or locality obsolete? Do nation states still continue to define, dis cipline, control, and regulate the transnational movement of people and the differential incorporation of migrant groups within their borders? Does being ‘trans’national mean simply a crossing of national borders, a total transcending of the nation or something in between? Scholars who propose the loss of viability of the na tion state frame contemporary migration patterns as part of the larger process of deterritorialization. They argue that while citizenship historically marked not only a belonging and commitment to a specific place, but also that as a citizen, one performed one’s rights and re sponsibilities within the context of the nation state; additionally, transnationality reflects a weakening of conventional associations of citizenship with territorial referents of the nation state. With legal and economic freedom to move across borders and between cultures, transnationals have not only their feet, but also their hearts and minds, in more than one nation. Because of their transnational orientations and positions, and even multiple citizenships, their loyalties are divided between country of origin (from which they may derive their identity) and country of residence (from which they may derive their rights). Observers also point out how despite the attempts of states to control interaction across bor ders, borders have also grown increasingly ‘leaky’. Dissenting voices to the notion that transnationality fosters deterritorialized, free floating citizens argue that the transnational must not be seen in direct opposition to the national, and highlight the tension in the word ‘transnational’ which always keeps the national in focus. On one level, from the perspective of the ‘state’, schol arship has noted how transnationality has induced gov ernments to govern dispersed subjects via ‘graduated sovereignty’ (Aihwa Ong’s term) whereby even as the state continues to maintain territorial control of subjects within its borders, it also employs a differential system of power to control and regulate its subjects abroad. It has also been demonstrated that an increasing number of states now actively extend their territorial boundaries to reclaim emigrant members by offering continued social and political membership to those residing outside their territories. For example, to promote transnational par ticipation, Singapore has not only introduced overseas voting privileges to Singaporeans abroad, it has also es tablished an Overseas Singaporean Unit in 2006 to con nect and engage with the 140 000 or so Singaporeans working and living overseas and has also organized ‘Singapore Days’ in major cities like New York and London to encourage overseas citizens to relive, for one day, Singapore culture and life (in the form of food, cultural performances, and the like). While efforts on the part of more economically well off countries like Singapore are directed at luring its local talent home in

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the longer term (in the light of an aging population, below replacement level birthrates, and the global war for talent), the projects of transnational reincorporation of their citizens abroad – through inter alia, health and welfare benefits, as well as property and voting rights – for less economically well off nations such as the Phil ippines, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador, are tied to ensuring that remittances are sent ‘back home’. On another level, from the perspective of the ‘citizen’, transnational location may enhance rather than diminish the transmigrant’s sense of national iden tity, as individuals reference their national memberships to establish a clearer sense of place and identity in the receiving nation. Transnationality can also cultivate ab sentee patriotism and long distance nationalism in cases where transmigrants are not fully validated by their host society and therefore continue to seek recognition and validation in their countries of origin. Thus, scholars argue that rather than seeing transna tionality as a ‘post’national cartography (i.e., the demise of the nation state), we should view transnationality as ne cessitating a reconceptualization of the way we tradition ally think about the nation state as a bounded, territorial container, and citizenship rights and respon sibilities as also granted and contained within this crucible. Instead, the boundaries of the state and the rights and responsibilities of transnational citizenship may be viewed as evolving – sometimes expanding and sometimes con tracting – with the changing tides and currents of trans migration flows. Indeed, we need to tread cautiously in equating transnational connections with disloyalty to the nation state; it is more useful to regard transnationality as an expression of the way in which nation states have been reconstituted to enable transnationals to assert local loy alties while participating in global values and lifestyles. It also needs to be pointed out that in spite of transnation ality, the state continues to assert – with increasingly re strictive immigration policies – control and authority of the population and resources within its territories, and also the flows across its borders. Indeed, technical advances have significantly increased the state’s capacity to monitor not only what people say and do, but also its capability to monitor and regulate its borders.

The Uneven Scape of Transnationality Beyond eyeing with some suspicion the liberatory po tential and claims of transnationalism as dismantling nationalisms and state structures, we should also chal lenge any assumptions that the hypermobility and easy transgression of national borders are emancipatory for all individuals alike. Because of the continued power that nation states wield to exclude undesirable alien ‘others’ and differentially incorporate migrant groups into their

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folds, transnationality is not an even playing field. Not everyone can participate in transnationality; neither do those who participate in it all experience it equally or uniformly. Increasingly too, transnational mobilities are brokered by agencies and organizations that mediate the types and directions of transnational flows, as in the case of labor agents and head hunters that recruit labor, whether lower skilled foreign domestic workers, higher skilled IT workers, or elite professionals. In terms of class, communities, and individuals with greater economic resources and human capital and those ‘more fortunately geographically positioned’ are able to register higher levels of participation and assert different degrees of autonomy over the nature of their engagement with transnational transactions and processes that mi grants maintain between their new and old ‘home’ countries. For example, mobile entrepreneurs sustain far more elite and high level forms of transnationality (e.g., through aspects such as financial investments, conference calls, frequent jet setting, and political and cultural in volvement) as compared to the far more modest forms of transnationality associated with low or unskilled migrant contract workers (e.g., through short message services (SMSs), weekly telephone calls, and bimonthly remit tances home). Additionally, while the hypermobile international class of talented cosmopolitans has states eager to transform them into citizens, many states have in place policies to ensure that low skilled contract migrant workers remain in permanent transience on the circuits of the global labor market. In failing to distinguish between mobile and less (or non)mobile subjects, accounts of transnationality also often fail to acknowledge the gendered dimensions of transnationality. Fortunately, a small but growing body of feminist literature has begun to highlight how transna tional movements can have enormously different effects for men and women. This body of work has established that in valorizing mobile masculinity and localized femininity in terms of transnational strategies, the ex perience of living and working in transnational social fields tends to reinforce male authority and is thus not emancipatory for most women. Male transnationals more often than not. feature as entrepreneurs, career builders, adventurers and breadwinners who navigate transnational circuits with fluidity and ease, while women are alternatively taken to be missing in action from globalized economic webs, stereotyped as exotic, subservient or victimized, or relegated to playing supporting roles, usually in the domestic sphere or as a trailing spouse. (Yeoh, 2005: 151)

Thus, the transnational field continues to reproduce the patriarchal binaries between male and female, with men remaining on the economically productive and

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public side of the divide, and women on the socially reproductive and private half, regardless of whether they leave with their high flying men folk to establish new homes overseas, or stay on in their home countries to protect hearth and home in support of the men’s trans national journeyings. Others have also highlighted how racial aspects can make transnational movements a difficult and even terrifying experience for racial minorities.

Whither Transnationality Research? Despite some 20 years of discussion and debate, the field of transnational studies is still a relatively fragmented one, studied by a range of disciplines using a variety of ap proaches. Somewhat overused but not always explicated, the idea of transnationality (and related concepts) remains by many accounts, rather ‘conceptually muddled’. Its prodigious use exacerbates the fact that too much writing on transnationality is often at the abstract level rather than grounded in everyday geographies. In calling for grounded empirical work on transnationality, scholars have high lighted the need for the research to have more geo graphical specificity to enable better and comparative understandings of transnationality’s place specific vari ations. As already observed, not every one is able to ex perience, or experiences, it the same way; neither is it manifested the same way everywhere. Unfortunately, while there is general agreement that more empirical research is necessary for tighter conceptualization, and that new methodological and conceptual tools are needed, the methodologies and scope by which to study transnation alism/transnationality are still unagreed. Nonetheless, there appears to be a growing chorus of voices that suggest that any serious effort to develop in depth and comparative empirical work on transna tionality must move in the direction of multisited ethnographic research that employs a translocal frame work. Work also needs to adopt a longitudinal per spective as the dynamics of transnational migration change over time, ebbing and flowing with crisis and opportunity. Some have also argued that for transnational research to move forward conceptually, collaborative multidisciplinary work is vital. In constructing the transnational as a field of enquiry, it is also vital that more attention is paid to migrants’ multiple positions and focus on the very different and unequal ways in which the register of social actors covered by transnationalism ex perience transnationality as a major feature of globalizing forces. Research needs to distinguish the jet setting elite from the less powerful players on the transnational field; it also needs to acknowledge the gendered, racialized, and classed discourses that are too often ignored in global narratives of transnationality.

Finally, in examining issues of sojourning versus set tling, routes versus roots, and ephemerality versus em placement, most studies of transnationality have conceived of space simply as the backdrop to the practice of trans national social relations and the evolution of transnational social forms. More recently, geographers such as Peter Jackson, Philip Crang, and Claire Dwyer have contended that to fully appreciate the contours of transnational spaces, research needs to recognize that spaces are not simply containers waiting passively to be filled by trans migrants but instead, they must be seen as constitutive of transnationality in all its different dimensions. See also: Diaspora; Identity Politics.

Further Reading Crang, P., Dwyer, C. and Jackson, P. (eds.) (2004). Transnational Spaces. London: Routledge. Deforges, L., Jones, R. and Woods, M. (2005). New geographies of citizenship. Citizenship Studies 9, 439 451. Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L. and Szanton Blanc, C. (eds.) (1992). Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity and Nationalism Reconsidered. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Hannerz, U. (1996). Transnational Connections. London: Routledge. Kofman, E. (2005). Citizenship, migration and the reassertion of national identity. Citizenship Studies 9, 453 467. Levitt, P. and Glick Schiller, N. (2004). Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society. International Migration Review 38, 1002 1039. Ley, D. (2004). Transnational spaces and everyday lives. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 29, 151 164. Mitchell, K. (2002). Cultural geographies of transnationality. In Anderson, K., Domosh, M. & Pile, S. (eds.) Handbook of Cultural Geography, pp 74 87. London: Blackwell. Ong, A. (1999). Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press. Portes, A., Guarnizo, L. E. and Landolt, P. (1999). The study of transnationalism: Pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field. Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, 217 238. Smith, M. P. and Guarnizo, L. E. (eds.) (1998). Transnationalism from Below. Comparative Urban and Community Research, vol. 6. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Vertovec, S. (2001). Transnationalism and identity. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27, 573 582. Waldinger, R. and Fitzgerald, D. (2004). Transnationalism in question. American Journal of Sociology 109, 1177 1195. Westwood, S. and Phizacklea, A. (2000). Trans Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging. London: Routledge. Yeoh, B. S. A. (2006). Mobility and the city. Theory, Culture and Society 23, 150 152.

Relevant Websites http://canada.metropolis.net Metropolis Canada (clicking on ‘partners’ will bring you to links to specific research partners in North America that look specifically at issues of immigration and integration). A project that aims to improve policies for managing migration and cultural diversity in major cities by enhancing academic research capacity, focusing academic research on critical policy questions, options, and delivery mechanisms, and developing effective ways to use research in decision making.

Transnationality

http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk The Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS). The center aims to provide a strategic, integrated approach to understanding contemporary and future migration dynamics across sending areas and receiving contexts in the UK and EU. http://www.transnational studies.org The Transnational Studies Initiative. This initiative attempts to bridge foster conversations on transnational studies between academics and practitioners working on a variety of topics, from a variety of disciplines, around the world.

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http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk Transnational Communities Programme. A research program that looked into the human dimensions of globalization and aspects of emerging transnationalism. Although ended, the website provides descriptions of the program’s research projects, events, and publications (including the Global Networks journal and over 80 downloadable Working Papers) and links with other research institutes.

Transport and Accessibility J. Gutie´rrez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Hub and Spoke Structures Air-transport structures that concentrate the movements on a reduced number of routes converging in one or several large airports. Impedance Resistance to movement (cost of transport). Impedance Function Function used in accessibility indicators to measure the cost of transport. Space–Time Prisms Two-dimensional representation of the area that can be reached by an individual. The horizontal axis represents a planar space and the vertical one measures time in a 24 h scale. The slopes of the prism depend on the speed of the travel. Transport Generalized Cost The sum of the monetary (fare on a public transport journey or fuel, parking charge, toll, etc., in a car journey) and nonmonetary (travel time converted to a money value) costs of a journey.

Accessibility Concept Accessibility is one of the key concepts in transport geography. This complex notion appears in the scientific forums of the 1950s, under the auspices of Hansen, who then defined accessibility as the potential of opportunities for interaction. Since then, several definitions have emerged that relate accessibility to the concepts of prox imity or facility for spatial interaction in relation to eco nomic and social opportunities. To put it more precisely, the term ‘accessibility’ expresses the facility with which activities may be reached from a given location by using a certain transport system, or in other words, the oppor tunities available to individuals and companies to reach those places in which they carry out their activities. Therefore, in contrast to the term ‘mobility’, which refers to actual movements (movements of passengers or goods over space), accessibility refers to a characteristic of places or individuals (facility to reach a destination or ensemble of destinations).

Why Is Accessibility Important? There is a well known relationship between transport infrastructures, accessibility, and regional development. The improvement of infrastructures produces an increase

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in accessibility that positively affects the competitiveness of the economic system and favors the appearance of specialization benefits and scale economies. In fact, re gions with high levels of accessibility to the locations of input materials and markets tend to be more productive and competitive than peripheral and remote regions. The effects of transport infrastructures on regional develop ment are weak when there is already high accessibility in the area (highly developed and efficient transport net works), but greater when there are accessibility problems in the region (underdeveloped transport networks, bottlenecks, etc.). Accessibility is not only important from the economic point of view. It is also of high value from the perspective of social welfare. Accessibility to work, health, education, and services is one of the key components when it comes to evaluating the level of welfare of the population. Re mote rural areas generally have serious problems in ac cess to services, which is a determining factor in migratory processes and the depopulation of such terri tories. On the other hand, there is a broad offer of em ployment and services in large cities (both in quantity and in quality), which is considered as a factor of at traction for the population. Accessibility is usually seen as a positive factor, but it may also have negative implications. High value natural spaces may be in danger if a new highway is built in the area to facilitate access for the population. Maintaining the inaccessibility of certain natural spaces is a means of protecting them.

Transport Networks and Accessibility The spatial distribution of accessibility depends to a great extent on geographic location. Within one and the same geographic region, there are areas that take a cen tral position from which the main activity centers can easily be accessed. By contrast, there are other areas that have disadvantages derived from their peripheral lo cation, far from the main markets and centers of activity. However, accessibility does not only depend on geo graphic position. Transport networks also play a deter mining role. On the one hand, places crossed by efficient infrastructures, such as motorways, have greater accessi bility and development potential (corridor effect) than those located in interstitial spaces between corridors (shadow effect). On the other hand, high speed transport systems produce relevant changes in the distribution of accessibility. In the case of the high speed train, the

Transport and Accessibility

reduction of stopping places produces the so called tunnel effect: the new transport system efficiently links large cities with one another, but not so with regard to the small towns situated along the line. The effects are therefore similar to those of air transport, which is highly concentrated around the main airports. From this point of view, geographic position is becoming less and less im portant, whereas the connection to high speed networks is becoming more relevant. The structure of transport networks decisively influ ences the distribution of accessibility. Radial transport networks tend to reinforce the accessibility of central areas, while the decentralized networks distribute ac cessibility more homogeneously and favor decentral ization. This idea may be applied to different spatial scales, as, for example, national motorway networks or metropolitan road networks. In the case of metropolitan areas, radial networks favor the consolidation of mono centric systems, while decentralized networks favor polycentric structures. Transport systems are in constant evolution, modifying accessibility conditions. Changes are not only due to in frastructures but also due to the organization of the ser vices. Thus, for example, hub and spoke structures in air transport systems reinforce the accessibility of the main airport centres to the detriment of the smaller ones.

Relationships among Transport Systems, Accessibility, Land Use, and Mobility Accessibility is closely related to other geographic con cepts. It can be modified by changes in transport infra structure (e.g., the building of a new motorway) or in land use (e.g., the building of a new hospital or shopping center). Yet on the other hand, an improvement in ac cessibility favors changes in land uses, and these in turn influence mobility. There are complex relationships between transport infrastructure, land use, accessibility, and mobility. In Figure 1, these relationships may be followed beginning with the transport infrastructure. The improvement of

Transport infrastructure

Accessibility

Mobility

Land use

Figure 1 Relationships between transport infrastructure, land use, accessibility, and mobility.

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transport infrastructure brings about an increase in ac cessibility. Within the more accessible areas there may appear changes in land use (e.g., new residential areas or new facilities). As a result, the number of trips increases because there are now new areas of generation and at traction of trips. But accessibility not only acts indirectly through land uses, it also does so directly: the better accessibility conditions created by the improvement in infrastructures may modify the modal split (more trips in private transport, as a result of the building of a motor way), alter the routes of car users, or it may even generate induced demand (trips that would not be made if the new infrastructure did not exist). Finally, the existence of greater mobility in the area may, in mid or long term, produce congestion problems, which logically entail a loss in accessibility and worse conditions in the area for attracting more activities (land uses changes). Congestion problems can be solved by enlarging the capacity of the transport system, so that there would be an improvement in accessibility in the area bringing about new changes in land use and mobility.

How to Measure Accessibility? The spatial distribution of accessibility can be calculated by means of accessibility indicators (see the next section) using the geographic information system (GIS). The re sults are usually displayed in the form of maps (although also in table and graphic form). There is a wide variety of accessibility indicators, for they may be used for very different purposes. Yet most of them combine two basic elements in a single measure: the cost of transport to centers of activity and the cap acity of attraction of these centers: The cost of transport is a measure of the friction of • space. This may be expressed in units of distance,

•

time, money, or transport generalized cost, bearing in mind possible restrictions on the network (one way directions, prohibited turns, etc.). The attraction capacity of the destinations expresses the offer of activities (both quantitative and qualita tive). But activities may be treated in a more detailed way, particularly in studies on small urban or rural areas: for example, the accessibility to health or edu cational services can be measured. This not only af fects the activities considered in the destinations, but also population groups or companies taken into ac count in the origins. Thus, for example, tourists are interested in tourist attractions, but consumers in shopping centers; for their part, consumer oriented firms consider accessibility to the population, whereas business oriented firms the accessibility to other companies.

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Transport and Accessibility

La Coru a Bilbao

Zaragoza Barcelona

Valladolid

Madrid

Valencia

Main cities Alicante

ROAD NETWORK High capacity road network

Murcia

Other roads Travel time to the nearest city (minutes)

Sevilla

10

Granada

10 20 M laga

20 30 30 40 40 50

0

55

N

50 60

Kilometers

60 90

110

90

220

Figure 2 Travel times by motorway to the nearest city in Spain.

Accessibility indicators may be calculated in different ways, depending on the modes taken into consideration:

Location-Based Accessibility Measures: Weighted Average Travel Times

Unimodal accessibility: Only one transport network is • considered, such as, for example, the road network. Multimodal accessibility: The results from two or • more unimodal accessibility indicators are added

The simplest location based accessibility measures are obtained by calculating the travel cost to particularly relevant destinations, for example:

•

together (e.g., roads þ railways). Intermodal accessibility: An intermodal network is used which enables transfers between modes (e.g., between roads and railways), by using the most fa vorable mode on each stretch of the trip.

Some Accessibility Indicators There is a wide variety of accessibility indicators, which respond to the different aims of the researches. Some of the indicators used in human geography, from different perspectives, are as follows.

travel time to a previously selected destination (e.g., a • hospital or the Central Business District (CBD) or travel time nearest of the destinations con • sidered (e.g., tothethenearest hospital or, in Figure 2, ac cess time to the nearest city). A more complex formulation is that of the weighted average travel times (or location indicator). This consists of calculating the average access times with regard to the destinations considered, taking as weight the volume of activity in the destination, according to the following expression: Pn

j 1 Ai ¼ Pn

t ij mj

j 1

mj

½1

Transport and Accessibility

where Ai is the accessibility of node i, tij is the travel time by the minimum time route in the network between node i and destination j (in minutes), and mj is the mass (volume of activity) of the destination j. The mass (attraction capacity) of the destination center is used to weight in order of importance the minimal time routes. This indicator reflects quite well central and per ipheral locations of the demarcation area with respect to the destinations considered. Figure 3 shows a distri bution of accessibility in which the core peripheral rings are distorted by the presence of motorways, which offer the possibility of traveling at higher speeds. This measure is not a gravity based indicator, so that it does not place the emphasis on short distances (impedance function ‘b’ in Figure 7). This fact seems to be critical in order to evaluate the infrastructure effects at the national level. Infrastructure-Based Accessibility Measures Some measures are used to describe the functioning of a transport system (in terms of sinuosity, congestion, etc.).

413

One of these measures is the network efficiency indicator. It offers a measure in terms of the relative ease of access according to the network efficiency. Most of the location based measures (as the location indicator) highlight differences between peripheral and central locations. Network efficiency indicator neutralizes the effect of geographical location, and the ordinary notion of costs is replaced by the ease of access in relative terms (network efficiency), as follows: Pn

t ij mj tˆij Ai ¼ Pn j 1 mj j 1

where Ai measures the accessibility of node i, tij and mj are defined as above, and tˆij is the ideal time spent between the nodes i and j, assuming the hypothetical existence of a high speed infrastructure (motorway or high speed train, according to the mode) in straight line (Euclidean impedance). The weighted average of the ratio t ij =tˆij is calculated according to the mass of the destinations (impedance function ‘b’ in Figure 7), but other weight

La Coru a Bilbao

Zaragoza

Valladolid

Barcelona

Madrid

Valencia Main cities ROAD NETWORK Alicante

High capacity road network Other roads

Murcia

Weighted average travel time (hours) 4.30

Sevilla Granada

4.30 5 5 5.30

M laga

5.30 6 6 6.30 6.30 7

N

7 7.30

Kilometers

7.30 8 8

0

55

110

½2

220

Figure 3 Weighted average travel times by motorway to the main Spanish cities.

414

Transport and Accessibility

La Coru a Bilbao

Zaragoza Valladolid

Barcelona

Madrid

Main cities

Valencia

ROAD NETWORK High-capacity road network Other roads Alicante

Weighted average ratio real time/ideal time 1.1

Murcia

1.1 1.2 1.2 1.3

Sevilla

1.3 1.4

Granada

1.4 1.5 M laga

1.5 1.6 1.6 1.7 1.7 1.8 1.8 1.9

N

1.9 2

Kilometers

2 0

55

110

220

Figure 4 Network efficiency: Spanish motorway network.

factors can be used as, for example, the real transport demand in each city pair (impedance function ‘a’ in Figure 7). This indicator should be interpreted from an infra structural viewpoint. It measures in relative terms the efficiency of the infrastructure in the access to the rele vant destinations. The results are given in meaningful units: how much network impedance surpasses Euclidean impedance. For example, a value equal to 2 means that the network impedance doubles the Euclidean one and so forth. This indicator allows us to identify not only high accessibility corridors (along the motorways) and shadow areas (those apart from the corridors), but also nodal places in the corridors (the nodes at which motorways converge) (Figure 4). Gravity-Based Accessibility Measures: Economic Potential Economic (or market) potential is a gravity based measure that has been extensively used in accessibility

studies. According to this model, the level of opportun ities between two nodes increases with the mass of the destination node and declines with the distance (time) between both nodes (impedance function ‘a’ in Figure 7). Its classical mathematical expression is as follows: Pi ¼

n X mj

tx j 1 ij

½3

where Pi is the economic (market) potential of node i, mj and tij are known terms, and x is a parameter that reflects the effect of the distance decay function. In the majority of accessibility studies the value of the parameter x is 1. If x >1, it means that more weight is given to short distances. The results provided by this indicator must be carried from an economic point of view. It measures the close ness of potential economic activity to a particular node. Main urban agglomerations tend to have the highest economic potential, while remote rural areas face prob lems of lack of accessibility (Figure 5).

Transport and Accessibility

415

La Coru a Bilbao

Zaragoza

Valladolid

Barcelona

Madrid

Valencia Main cities ROAD NETWORK Alicante

High-capacity road network Other roads

Murcia

Economic potential 175 000

Sevilla

150 000 175 000 Granada

140 000 150 000 130 000 140 000

M laga

120 000 130 000 110 000 120 000 100 000 110 000

N

90 000 100 000

Kilometers

90000 0

55

110

220

Figure 5 Economic potential: Spanish road network.

Daily Accessibility This indicator develops the notion of ‘contact networks’ calculating the amount of population or economic ac tivity that can be reached from each node within a limit of travel time (as an indicator of the position of a city in the urban system). The threshold figure is usually es tablished between 3 and 4 h, so that it is possible to go and return within the day and carry out some activity at the destination city. Its mathematical expression is as follows: DAi ¼

n X

mj dij

considered (Figure 6 and impedance function ‘c’ in Figure 7). The results are of the following type: from a node i, within a travel time limit of 3 or 4 h, 5 million inhabitants can be reached. Areas located near several main cities tend to have the highest accessibility values. This measure is particularly useful for calculating accessibility for business and tourist trips, for the need to stay overnight in the destination city means an important extra cost for both firms and individuals.

½4

j 1

where DAi is the daily accessibility indicator of node i, mj is the mass of the destination center j (e.g., population), and dij takes the value of 1 if tij is less than 3 h, and 0 otherwise. This index can be viewed as an extreme case of a potential market indicator, because the distance decay function takes the discontinuous form of all or nothing depending on the threshold of travel time

Individual-Based Accessibility Measures: The Space–Time Geography Approach The space–time geography approach puts the emphasis on individuals, not on locations. It considers accessibility in terms of the possibilities for individuals to take part on activities, incorporating spatial and temporal constraints. Space–time prisms are used to identify the potential areas of opportunities that can be reached by each person

416

Transport and Accessibility

La Coru a Bilbao

Zaragoza

Valladolid

Barcelona

Madrid

Valencia

Main cities

Alicante

ROAD NETWORK

Murcia

High-capacity road network Other roads

Sevilla

Accessible population in 4 h (millions)

Granada

13 M laga

11 13 10 11 9 10

0

55

N

7 9

Kilometers

4 7

110

4

220

Weight

Figure 6 Daily accessibility: Spanish motorway network.

1 (a)

Travel time

1 (b)

2

1

(c) 1 Study area limit 2 Travel time limit (4 h)

Figure 7 Accessibility impedance functions. (a) Economic potential all relationships within the study area are taken into account, but inversely to the travel time, so that short-distance routes contribute very heavily in measurements of potential but very little those over long distances (distance decay). (b) Weighted average travel time all relationships within the study area are considered too, but routes on short distances do not contribute more than others in accessibility calculations, since there is not distance decay. (c) Daily accessibility indicator exclusively are considered the centers within a certain travel time limit, but not the rest of the centers within the study area. Within this time limit there is not distance decay too.

taken into account its time constraints. For example, a shop assistant who works in the CBD is near a large number of shops (good spatial accessibility) but is at work most of the time that the shops are open (temporal

constraints). It is certainly a detailed approach allowing many subsets of individuals to be considered. But con sequently large amounts of data are required and ana lyses are only possible for small areas.

Transport and Accessibility

Accessibility in Transport Infrastructure Planning One of the main aims in transport policies is to improve accessibility. The building of new infrastructures is to a great extent justified by the increase in accessibility (improving access to markets from peripheral regions, facilitating access to services, solving the access problems to the CBD, etc.). In order to simulate improvements in accessibility brought about by a transport plan, accessibility indicators can be used considering two scenarios: the scenario with plan (which includes the infrastructures proposed in the plan), and the scenario without plan (which only takes into account existing infrastructures). If one calculates the distribution of accessibility in both scenarios and differences are obtained between the two maps, the re sulting map shows the areas that will obtain more benefits as a result of the building of the proposed infrastructures. On the basis of the accessibility values, dispersion measures (such as the variation coefficient) can be ob tained in order to know the degree of spatial equity in the distribution of accessibility on that particular region. By comparing both scenarios (with and without plan), it is possible to know whether the plan increases or reduces spatial equity. Thus, for example, the development of a centralized network of radial motorways tends to favor the center in detriment to the periphery and therefore increases spatial imbalances; yet if it is later converted into a decentralized network by building transversal motorways, it will reduce the spatial imbalances between center and periphery. Accessibility indicators are also used in urban and regional planning. Analyses of accessibility allow one to know those areas that are not properly served by a cer tain type of facilities and to choose the best locations to build new facilities (such as health centers, schools, and shopping centers). They will likewise enable one to identify those areas poorly covered by the urban system.

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See also: Aviation; GIS and Cartography; Transport, Public; Railways; Regional Connectivity; Space-Time; Transport Geography; Transportation and Land Use; Welfare Geography.

Further Reading Farrington, J. and Farrington, C. (2005). Rural accessibility, social inclusion and social justice: Towards conceptualisation. Journal of Transport Geography 13, 1 12. Frost, M. E. and Spence, N. A. (1995). The rediscovery of accessibility and economic potential: The critical issue of self potential. Environment and Planning A 27, 1833 1848. Geurs, K. T. and van Wee, B. (2004). Accessibility evaluation of land use and transport strategies: Review and research directions. Journal of Transport Geography 12, 127 140. Hagerstrand, T. (1970). What about people in regional science? Annals of the Regional Science Association 24, 7 21. Handy, S. L. and Niemeier, D. E. (1997). Measuring accessibility: An exploration of issues and alternatives. Environment and Planning A 29, 1175 1194. Hansen, W. G. (1959). How accessibility shapes land use. Journal of American Institute of Planners 25(2), 73 76. Jones, S. R. (1981). Accessibility Measures: A Literature Review (TRRL Laboratory Report 967). Crowthorne: Transport and Road Research Laboratory. Koenig, J. G. (1980). Indicators of urban accessibility: Theory and applications. Transportation 9, 145 172. Kwan, M. P. and Weber, J. (2003). Individual accessibility revisited: The implications of changing urban form and human spatial behavior. Geographical Analysis 35, 341 353. Morris, J. M., Dumble, P. L. and Wigan, M. R. (1978). Accessibility indicators for transport planning. Transportation Research A 13, 91 109. Moseley, M. J. (1979). Accessibility: The Rural Challenge. London: Methuen. Pirie, G. H. (1979). Measuring accessibility: A review and proposal. Environment and Planning A 299 312. Reggiani, A. (ed.) (1998). Accessibility, Trade and Locational Behaviour. Andershot: Ashgate.

Relevant Websites http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/ The Geography of Transport Systems. http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm84.htm Victoria Transport Policy Institute.

Transport and Deregulation P. White and A. Sturt, University of Westminster, London, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary

nineteenth century had raised similar problems. Regu lation took three main forms:

Deregulation The. process of removing controls which may limit the quantity of transport service provided, price levels, routes to be served, etc. Economies of Scale An association between the scale of an economic activity and unit costs, leading to lower unit costs as scale of production increases (e.g., costs per vehicle-km run falling as total vehicle-km increase). Low-Cost Carrier (LCC) A form of airline concentrating on a low-price, low-cost market, typically by minimizing passenger service on board, airport turnround time, etc., and utilizing internet booking. Major examples include Ryanair and easyJet. Privatization The transfer to private ownership and/or control of assets and operations previously in the public sector. Quality Regulation Regulation of aspects of transport service not directly related to the quantity of service provided, nor price – typically, rules intended to improve safety levels and/or reliability of service to the user. Regulation The process of applying controls to the quantity, price, etc., of transport services. Re-Regulation The reintroduction of regulations (not necessarily in their original form) after a period of ‘deregulation’. Yield Management A system of pricing based on maximizing use of capacity, by varying price according to capacity available, and demand, in real time, using passenger pre-booking, initially adopted by ‘low-cost’ airlines but now in wide use for long-distance travel by all public modes.

1. Quantity. The total quantity of service provided was regulated, so as to ensure stability of production, and enable the supposed effects of excessive competition to be avoided. In some cases this took the form of area monopolies (such as that of London Transport from 1933), in others the licensing of individual routes (as in the regulation of bus services outside London from 1931), although in practice the degree of competition permitted under the latter was often small. A direct example of ‘quantity’ regulation is that which limits the number of licensed taxicabs in a defined area, still common in many countries. 2. Price regulation. Prices charged by operators were re stricted, to avoid unreasonable increases. An element of consumer protection was also introduced through requiring display of prices (e.g., the specification of fare scales charged by metered taxicabs) enabling the user to see what the maximum permitted charge would be. 3. Quality regulation. This related mainly to specifying minimum standards for vehicles, drivers, and infra structures, primarily to improve safety levels in the industry concerned – for example, through driver and operator licensing. Under franchising or tendering systems, this may be extended to monitoring of service quality (e.g., to minimize the percentage of services running later than a defined range), but as such is not generally applied directly by the regulatory body.

Basic Concepts The concept of ‘deregulation’ has come into widespread use in transport and many other industries in the last 20–30 years. However, it is often used in a vague form, covering many distinct processes. The first half of the twentieth century saw the de velopment of extensive motorized transport systems, greatly increasing mobility and supplanting other modes for most journeys other than very short distance. How ever, this rapid development was often associated a number of problems, including poor safety records, fi nancial instability in the industries concerned, and the need to protect customers. Indeed, the railways in the

418

In the case of the railways, nineteenth century regulation had been concerned firstly with giving consent to build new infrastructure, subsequently with safety, and control of price levels. New modes which developed in the twentieth century initially experienced a period of min imal regulation (e.g., the bus and coach industry in Britain in the 1920s), but this was subsequently followed by a national system. Even the airline industry was regulated from an early stage, and more heavily so in the period after World War II. Much of the regulation af fecting road transport was developed and applied in the 1930s, affected by the general economic recession at that time, which may have influenced thinking in the dir ection of protection and stability, in addition to factors specific to the transport sector. However, such regulation has often applied more strictly to forms of public transport than other modes.

Transport and Deregulation

Growth in car ownership and use has meant that in most countries this mode now accounts for the great majority of person km traveled. In general, however, it has been subject to much less regulation than other modes, al though increasingly strict controls are now applied to improve its safety. Attempts to regulate within the public transport market in order to protect existing operators (e.g., railways against express coaches) may have limited effect given the major role of the car. Most regulation has been applied at the level of na tional governments. However, international organizations (such as the European Union) play an increasingly im portant role. In some cases, notably the taxi and private hire vehicle market, regulation continues to be applied at a much more local level.

Regulation and Ownership The process of ‘deregulation’ can be seen as reaction to excessively strict forms of regulation, especially in terms of quantity and price control, which may have done little to achieve their objectives (e.g., regulating prices at low levels during an inflationary period could result in low profitability for an industry, discouraging investment, and hence to the long run disadvantage of its users). It often stems from the same political philosophy as ‘privatization’, that is, the transfer of publicly owned operations to private ownership. Very often the modes of transport protected (or restricted) by regulation were also in public ownership (e.g., national rail systems in most European countries). However, the two processes do not necessarily coincide. For example, there was a period of intensive competition in Britain between long distance rail and express coaches, following deregulation of ex press coach services in 1980, yet the dominant coach operator (National Express) was in public ownership until its sale in 1988, and the corresponding rail services were not privatized until the late 1990s. It may also be the case that privatizing businesses which retain a monopoly element may result in stricter (or at least, more explicit) forms of regulation than ap plied before. For example, the rail industry in Britain has been subject to far more controls over prices, and service specifications for particular routes, than applied under the more informal relationship between the British Railways Board and the government prior to privatization.

Examples from Experience in Britain Some examples from the British case illustrate the principal outcomes of regulation. Under the Conserva tive government of Mrs Thatcher elected in 1979, the first major element of deregulation was that of

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long distance coaches in 1980. While Britain already contrasted with other large European countries in per mitting some express coach operations in competition with rail, competition within that industry was very limited, a dominant position having been built up by the state owned operator National Express. Removal of quantity and price controls enabled many new operators to enter the market, and for coach to compete more in tensively with rail than before. Operators simply notified the routes they wanted to run, and were free to charge prices they wished. Initial impacts included a large number of new entrant operators, and a rapid growth in total express coach use of about 50% in the first 5 years, coming from both diverted rail passengers and new de mand. However, National Express remained dominant, contrary to economic theories which suggested that in a market with low entry costs, a large number of competing operators might be expected. While there is little evi dence for simple economies of scale in direct operating costs, a large operator may be in a much stronger position in terms of marketing, especially through providing a comprehensive interconnecting network. From the late 1980s until 2003, there was little competition for Na tional Express within the coach sector. It is also note worthy that the major new competition which has emerged – in the form of the ‘Megabus’ network, based entirely on price yield management with pre booking – has been developed by the large Stagecoach Group (see below), not smaller operators. Express coach deregulation appears to have func tioned well in terms of widening user choice, giving both a greater supply to service (by frequency, and route coverage) and intensive price competition, especially in the early period of deregulation. Hence, it is reasonable to infer that net user benefits were produced (these would also apply to some rail users remaining with that mode, whose fares might be lower than otherwise, due to the need for rail to respond to price competition from coach). This outcome may well have influenced coach deregulation in Norway and Sweden. In the British case, express coach deregulation was followed by that of local buses in 1986 (outside London and Northern Ireland). The objectives here may have been different, in that the major concern of government was with the rapidly growing public expenditure for support of the bus industry. In addition to enabling higher levels of service and/or lower prices than would otherwise be the case, there was concern that inefficient methods of operation were being supported. Network wide financial support was prohibited, and instead the aim was that most services would be com mercially registered (i.e., covering all their costs from revenue). It was recognized that some services, such as those in low density rural areas, might not be com mercially viable, and in such cases a mechanism for

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support was introduced, in which competitive tendering (rather than funding of the incumbent operator) was applied. In contrast to the effects of express coach deregu lation, that of local buses did not produce a growth in ridership (despite a large rise in vehicle km run). This was due in part to increased fares when large subsidies were removed (notably in some large metropolitan areas). However, there is also evidence that price competition functions less effectively for local, short distance markets than in long distance markets. In the latter, users tend to plan ahead, often prebooking journeys, and the mix of purposes makes the market as a whole more price sen sitive. In the latter, taking for the first bus or train to arrive is a logical response on frequent services. Ex tending waiting time to allow for the use of a cheaper service may involve a greater user cost overall (when value of waiting time is quantified), and hence is often unattractive. The taxi market also displays this charac teristic, the ‘search time’ for a cheaper taxi often off setting the benefit of lower fares. Contrary to some fears, deregulation of the coach and local bus sectors did not result in a worsening of the safety record. In the longer run, the casualty rate (killed and seriously injured per thousand million passenger km) has continued to fall. In part, this may be attributable to stricter ‘quality licensing’ introduced from 1981, which required each operating business to hold a separate ‘Operator Licence’. This in turn is subject to curtailment or cancellation where a poor maintenance record has been found, for example.

Airline Deregulation in Europe The USA and Europe are the world’s only geographically extensive examples of airline deregulation. In the USA full deregulation was achieved almost overnight in 1978. Here a state of market maturity now exists, with one large low cost carrier (LCC), that is, Southwest Airlines, together with several medium sized LCCs accounting for a fairly stable 25% of the air passenger market. In the European Union (EU) by contrast, deregulation was more recent and phased in over the period 1987–97. As a result the EU now has a rapidly growing (7–8% pa) and changing low cost sector. Emphasis in this review here is on EU air deregulation and its impacts. However, analysis is complicated by the fact that many EU air passenger services are provided by airlines whose networks extend beyond, or are based outside, the EU. British Airways is a global player and several major EU carriers are now embedded in global alliances each involving several non EU operators. Prior to 1987 European airlines were subject to the international regulatory arrangements laid down in the

immediate post World War II years to foster growth in the nascent civil aviation industry. The core principle was that each nation had sovereignty over its own air space. For each airline route, a bilateral Air Service Agreement had to be negotiated between the countries involved. These reciprocal agreements specified the airports to be served and the capacity (usually frequency) to be offered. It was left to individual countries to designate the airline chosen to operate their share of the route. In practice, the designated carrier was usually the State owned ‘flag carrier’ (BA, KLM, Lufthansa, etc.). Nominally national governments also controlled fares, but in practice these powers were usually delegated to the International Air Transport Association (IATA) where representatives of the world’s airlines gathered in an annual conference to agree fares. The upshot of this regulatory framework was a complete absence of market forces in international air transport. Each airline route was a duopoly in which the two airlines involved effectively had powers to fix fares at whatever level they deemed necessary to meet their costs. The situation was further complicated by the fact that, for prestige and other reasons (some unclear), many governments heavily subsidised their flag carriers. The air traveler was faced with a technically reliable and geographically extensive but high cost air service net work. This suited the needs of the business dominated air transport market of the 1950s and 1960s, but was ill adapted to the potential mass leisure market of sub sequent years. The result was the emergence of a parallel low cost Charter airline sector with seasonal routes linking northwest Europe to (mainly Mediterranean) vacation destinations. Charter airline seats could be bulk purchased by tour operators, but under IATA regulations could not be sold on a ‘seat only’ basis to individual travelers. Although by 1980, it accounted for almost half of the European internal air transport market, Charter offered little real competition to Europe’s state flag carriers. In the mid 1980s, a few EU countries (notably UK, Irish Republic, and The Netherlands) attempted to promote airline competition by negotiating liberal Bi lateral Air Service Agreements (greater fares flexibility, relaxed capacity sharing rules, etc.) on a few of Europe’s busiest routes. Full EU wide deregulation was achieved over the period 1987–1997 with particular importance attaching to the so called EU ‘Third Package’ measures of 1993. For EU based airlines operating intra EU routes, EU wide general multilateral arrangements replaced the need for route by route bilateral agreements. As a result, any EU airline can now theoretically operate on any chosen EU route, free of capacity and fares controls. This statement slightly oversimplifies the real situation. In fact, several key EU international gateway airports, including London Heathrow, and London Gatwick have no slots available for new operators, thus perpetuating the

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advantages of existing airlines (and swelling airport profits). Furthermore, several EU member states (in cluding Greece, Italy, and France) found ways to sub sidize their flag carriers despite EU rules to the contrary. This again distorted free market competition, to the disadvantage of not only new operators, but also the more cost effective ‘old’ operators. The initial impact of deregulation on the European airline scene was rather modest. There were some signs of competition between flag carriers on heavily trafficked city pair routes: the London–Amsterdam and London– Dublin routes both experienced falling fares and rapid traffic growth. EU flag carriers in general pursued cost reductions by improved labour productivity. Several major EU operators began a significant spatial re structuring of their straggling route networks into oper ationally more efficient (but also more delay prone) hub and spoke configurations: the KLM operations focused on Schiphol are a good example of this. However on much of the EU airline network until the late 1990s, it was largely a case of ‘business as usual’. The main ongoing impact of deregulation has been the emergence of a dynamic LCC sector. Two airlines, in particular, spear headed this development. Ryanair foun ded as a conventional airline in 1986, became Europe’s first LCC in 1992. EasyJet operated as an LCC from its inception in 1997. The spectacular success of these early LCCs resulted in the foundation of numerous other EU LCCs. Some of these, including GO, BUZZ, and BMI Baby, started life as subsidiaries of existing carriers (BA, KLM, and BMI, respectively). Most EU LCCs to date have been loosely modeled on an enduringly successful American low cost airline, namely Southwest Airlines. Although no two LCCs are alike, most EU examples share a common set of cost saving characteristics. Single class cabins and high seating densities are the norm. LCCs are often described as no frills airlines; a reference to the fact that they provide no free in flight catering. This saves not only the cost of meals, it also permits cabin crew numbers to be reduced to the minimum required for safety reasons. LCCs use a simplified pricing system based on one way fares rather than the complex price discrimination strategies and associated restrictions for lowest fares (e.g., that a stay must include a Saturday night) which have traditionally been associated with air travel. The simple LCC point to point route patterns permit more intensive use of aircraft and crews than is possible with the complex hub and spoke plus interlining operations used by established airlines. The use of regional airports, rather than major international gateways, results in both lower landing charges and fewer delays. Indeed, the existence of a surplus of airport capacity in the form of a high density of regional airports each competing for new users has been a key factor in the success of EU deregulation.

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There has been considerable disquiet that some of the very low airport charges on offer amount to subsidization of the low cost airline sector out of public funds. The European Commission recently and successfully took Brussels South Charleroi airport to court for such behaviour. Recent studies suggest that the production cost per seat km of an efficient European LCC is less than half that of a conventional short haul carrier. These dramat ically lower unit operating costs are further reinforced by marketing cost savings mentioned earlier. The result for the passenger has been attractively low fares together with a rapidly widening range of destinations. Not sur prisingly, the LCC sector has experienced explosive growth in demand for its services. In 1994, the LCC sector (effectively Ryanair alone) accounted for a tiny proportion of intra EU air travel – some 3 million trips. By 2000, LCCs already accounted for 18 million trips. In part, this LCC growth has been at the expense of con ventional airlines; however, most of it has been newly generated traffic. In addition to their success in leisure travel, LCCs are now increasingly penetrating the busi ness market. Over the period 1999–2004, there were in effect two groups of airlines employing quite different business models competing in the growing EU air travel market. They were the LCCs described above and the full service network carriers (FSNCs) as the remaining conventional EU (ex flag carrier) airlines came to be known. While both groups have had their business fail ures, there can be little doubt that the LCC format is increasingly winning the battle for leisure market share. Recent figures suggest that there are over 60 LCCs op erating in Europe and that between them they now ac count for around 25% of the intra EU air travel market. The most recent development in the deregulated EU air travel market has been the partial adoption of the LCC business model by the one time FSNCs. The rapid growth of the EU’s low cost sector has interesting spatial dimensions. The airline map of Europe has been transformed. LCCs have preferred to grow their markets by adding new destinations rather than by adding capacity to long established routes. In 1996, just over 200 city pairs were served by non stop flights. By 2004, this number had risen to around 430 and this growth is ongoing. Substantial research effort is now devoted to the geographical impacts of EU air deregu lation. It may be that deregulation’s consequences have been as great for Europe’s airports and their hinterlands as they have been for the airline industry itself. In par ticular, deregulation is extending the economic stimulus of tourism to regions located far from the main corridors of the pre deregulation airline network. Viewed overall the far reaching impacts of EU airline deregulation have significantly benefited the consumer.

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What the future holds for Europe’s air transport industry is rather unclear. The large annual European air traffic growth levels resulting in part from deregulation are now threatened by factors exogenous to the airline industry and to the EU. These include rising fuel costs and rapidly mounting concern about air transport’s contribution to global warming.

Issues in Analysis of Deregulation Effects The strongly held views on both sides of the debate often result in somewhat subjective analysis of the impacts of deregulation. It is important to consider what other fac tors may apply in the time period over which impacts are being assessed, and to avoid very short periods after the introduction of deregulation, which may give atypical results. Some changes may not be the result of deregu lation per se, but of other factors changing during the same period. Examples include growth in car ownership (which would be expected to reduce bus ridership in any case), national economic growth (which tends to stimu late rail and air use), and the condition of the labor market (e.g., when there is substantial unemployment, it may be possible to reduce wages and worsen working conditions as a means of reducing unit costs – this ap plied to the local bus industry in Britain in the 1980s. It may also have influenced the ability of new low cost carriers to recruit aircrew at various periods). However, it may subsequently become necessary to raise wage and improve working conditions to recruit sufficient staff in a tighter labour market, as can now be seen in Britain.

Spatial Variation in Impacts Spatial variation may also be an important factor, even within a single country such as Britain. For example, scope for lower wages at the time of local bus deregu lation in the 1980s was greatest vis a` vis previously standard national rates in areas with lower living costs and greater unemployment, such as the South West. Population trends will also affect total demand, ir respective of the regulatory system in place – this is an element in comparing the growth in bus use in London with decline in other major cities, for example. At an international level, these variations will be much greater. For example, per capita car ownership varies greatly, affecting the potential total market for public transport. Overall population density will affect the scope for rail services. In some respects, deregulation impacts may be greater on higher density flows, where there is scope for add itional carriers and a wider variety of service options to be introduced – for example, on trunk intercity routes,

offering a range of rail, coach and air services with a wide mix of fares, frequencies and service quality. Conversely, lower density areas may experience little impact, or even a worsening of service where cross subsidy previously applied. An effect which runs counter to some economic theories has been the continued role of large operators in markets subject to extensive competition. Indeed, the role of such groups continues to grow in many cases. Where there are no substantial economies of scale, one might expect a large number of small competing operators to characterize a market. One example already mentioned is that of the ex press coach industry in Britain, where an operator able to offer a well marketed national network may be in a much stronger position than smaller organizations. Even in local bus operation, where a large network may be of limited value, a process of consolidation has also been very evident, notably through groups such as Stagecoach, First, and Arriva which in total provide about 60% of local bus ser vices by turnover. Among the factors accounting for this may be some economies of scale in vehicle and materials purchasing (even through the largest single element of costs, labor, is not so affected), concentration of manage ment expertise, and access to capital (e.g., by floating on the stock market). In some cases, a common ‘brand’, such as the ‘Megarider’ travelcard of Stagecoach, may be more easily marketed as a single product. Likewise, in the airline sector, while many new op erators have emerged, many have been short lived, and some individual companies have become much more successful, securing growing market shares (notably Ryanair). Similar concentrations may also be seen in a market characterized by franchising (in part because the min imum size of franchises requires a relatively large or ganization to make effective bids), such as that for passenger rail services in Britain. The same groups dominant in the bus sector (along with National Express) play a similar role in rail. Some groups are developing international activities – for example, Arriva of Britain has many subsidiaries elsewhere in Europe, and French operators play a growing role in the British market. International forms of ownership are also developing in the airline industry, and the traditional ‘flag carrier’ is being replaced by larger groupings (such as the Air France/KLM merger). However, ownership restrictions applied by the USA may limit this process on a wider scale. Looking over a wider range of countries, it is evident that many European states retain relatively strict forms of regulation and ownership, notably larger states such as France and Germany, which continue to restrict the degree to which coach and rail can compete, for example. However, there is also growing concern about the high cost of supporting some publicly owned or regulated

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transport services, resulting a wider interest in com petitive tendering (although not deregulation per se). This can already be seen in Scandinavian countries in par ticular, and is also evident in The Netherlands, for ex ample. A common approach to provision of competitively tendered services is now being adopted by the European Union, albeit with much debate and revision to the initial proposals. This may result in greater competition where currently a single monopoly provider is found. However, it would not necessarily result in greater direct com petition for passengers over the same routes by different operators. See also: Aviation; Transport, Public.

Further Reading ANON (2005). Can Ryanair stick to the winning formula? Aviation Strategy. Bradshaw, W. and Lawton Smith, L. (eds.) (2000). Privatisation and Deregulation of Transport: Proceedings of a Conference at Oxford University July 1998. London: Macmillan. Commission of the European Communities (2005). Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on public passenger transport service rail and by road. COM(2005) 319 Final. Brussels. Dennis, N. (2007). Stimulation or saturation? Perspectives on the European low cost airline market and prospects for future growth. Transportation Research Board Research Record 2007, doi: 10.3141/2007 07. Dobruszkes, F. (2006). An analysis of European low cost airlines and their networks. Journal of Transport Geography 14, 249 264. Doganis, R. S. (2001). The Airline Business in the 21st Century. London: Routledge chs. 2 and 6.

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Estache, A. and Gomez Lobo, A. (2005). Limits to competition in urban bus services in developing countries. Transport Reviews 25(2), 139 158. European Conference of Ministers of Transport (ECMT) (2007). (De)Regulation of the taxi industry. Round Table 133. Paris. Fan, T. (2006). Improvements in intra European inter city flight connectivity: 1996 2004. Journal of Transport Geography 14, 273 286. Freeman, R. and Shaw, J. (eds.) (2000). All Change British Railway Privatisation. London: McGraw Hill. Hensher, D. A. (ed.) (2005). Competition and Ownership in Land Passenger Transport: Selected Refereed Papers from the 8th International Conference (Therdbo 8), Rio de Janeiro, September 2003. Oxford: Elsevier chs. 1, 9, 14, 15, 20, 22 and 28. Hibbs, J. (2006). The Railways, the Market and the Government. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Shaw, J. (2001). Competition in the UK passenger railway industry: Prospects and problems. Transport Reviews 21(2), 195 216. Trethaway, M. W. (2004). Distortions of airline revenues: Why the network airline business model is broken. Journal of Air Transport Management 10, 3 14. Van Der Veer, J. P. (2002). Entry deterrence and quality provision in the local bus market. Transport Reviews 22(3), 247 265. White, P. R. (1997). What conclusions can be drawn about bus deregulation in Britain? Transport Reviews 17(1), 1 16.

Relevant Websites http://www.caa.co.uk Civil Aviation Authority. http://www.cpt uk.org Confederation of Passenger Transport UK. http://www.rail reg.gov.uk Office of Rail Regulation. http://www.pteg.net Passenger Transport Executive Group.

Transport and Globalization K. O’Connor, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Containerization The use of a box with internationally agreed dimensions for the shipment of goods. Gateway City The first place of contact of a transport network in a nation or region. Global Cities Concentrations of the production of high-level services and the focus of international commercial links between nations. Hubs Concentrations of passenger and/or freight traffic. Intermodal Movement of freight between transport modes. Logistics The comprehensive organization of the movement of freight. Production Systems The ways that firms arrange the collection of raw materials and/or components and the delivery of final goods. Supply Chains Links within and between firms for the movement of goods. Transport Systems The organization of transport by routes and modes.

Globalization involves the dispersal of production across the globe. Transport systems of various kinds have en abled that dispersal to take place. This can be seen in historic examples as production took tentative steps from a small known world to a global network. It is apparent today in the tightly organized production systems that involve collection and distribution to and from sites spread within and between continents on regular timet abled services. These services tend to favor hub cities, which now stand out as the key players within most transport systems. These changes have reorganized spaces within cities, as airports have emerged as new centers of activity, seaports and airports have been relocated, and new transport infrastructure built to cope with the movement of freight and passengers. Change continues with some smaller cities, and the fringes of cities, feeling the impact of new transport technologies and methods.

Introduction Transport is perhaps the sine qua non of globalization. In a very broad sweep of history, the stages in the spread of production across the globe are closely linked to eras in transport systems. These eras appeared following the

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efforts of explorers and then matured as technicians re fined the ships, trains, trucks, and eventually planes to carry people and freight. Through their evolution and maturation, these methods of transport extended the mobility, speed, and reach of goods and services of firms, merchants, and also of people. Taking advantage of these gains enabled firms to expand by accessing new and often cheaper sources of raw materials, as well as by supplying larger markets. Realizing those opportunities needed new management skills in trade and transport operation. Those with the requisite skills in effect managed the global economy, and reshaped the size, location, and in ternal organization of cities where they worked. The pressure of those forces is still being felt with some new cities playing a role in global transport, new skills being applied in old cities, and new patterns emerging within them to accommodate new needs.

A Historical Perspective on Globalization and Transport The global economy emerged in stages. For a time it was expressed in small amounts of trade around the Medi terranean Sea, and into the agricultural communities of the Middle East and beyond. A series of cities emerged along the transport routes across what was a small part of that small current world. Better organization allied to higher standards in shipping and land transport spread the reach of this trade and eventually very long supply chains con nected Western Europe to much of Asia. Many of these supply chains were organized via Venice. Merchants there, familiar with a range of sea and land transport systems, were able to connect sources of materials and supply markets that were long distances away to their east and also to their west. Venice became in its time what we now call a ‘global city’. Later, sea transport improvements would re define the scale and scope of the global economy in terms of ocean frontages rather than inland caravan routes; the capacity to manage and direct this new set of supply chains fell to Atlantic coast rather than Mediterranean cities. Amsterdam was especially prominent in this era. The importance of ocean frontages was then enhanced by land transport improvements. First canals, then rail, and eventually road linkages enabled the goods from the sea to be carried to and from the resources and markets inland. What followed was not only industrial expansion on a massive scale, most obviously in northwestern Europe, but also the accelerated expansion into new territories associated with colonialization. In the colonies,

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ocean based points of contact provided the foundation for subsequent urban settlement of continents, and eventually nations. The colonial cities dotted along the US, Canadian, Australian, African, Latin American, and Asian coastlines provided the local infrastructure for supply chains using global sea transport and regional (and local) land transport to connect farmers, and miners in many places across the globe to factories and con sumers in Europe. Return voyages bought consumer goods and the equipment needed for colonial manage ment and development. Shipping was the core element of these supply chains and provided the exotic as well as the low cost supplies to Europe, while also providing access to large new markets. Steady technical improvements in shipping meant that transport that was once scarce, dif ficult, and unpredictable became more reliable. The na tion (Britain), and the city (London) that managed much of the new arrangements in shipping gained most from this era. In the colonies, a gradual sorting out of the importance of places took place as shipping service began to select some ports over others. Places that acted as gathering points or key stops along the way had special prominence. Singapore owes its emergence as major port to that effect. The management of the colonial networks eventually required better contact and electronic com munication systems were developed. These snaked ten tatively across the globe, following some of the sea routes and focusing on the large colonial seaports. The skeletal structure they created has been replicated in the complex webs of optic fibers that now span the globe. In a more recent period, and in another part of the globe, the location and growth in economic activity was also closely linked to the utilization of sea transport. A new focus of economic activity in Asia emerged once transport innovations allowed large scale shipping of coal, iron ore, and oil. Those innovations were eventually reflected in the global domination of the steel mills of Japan and later Korea. That steel was later built into global exports of cars, ships, and industrial machinery. Around the same time the mobility of all sorts of in dustrial goods, and the role of shipping, was increased substantially once a simple standard container was adopted by the world’s shipping lines. This piece of equipment meant that goods could be packed in one part of the world and moved easily to any other part of the world, lifted from ship to train to truck before arriving intact at a customer’s factory or warehouse. The scope and significance of this simple physical move was ex panded substantially when digital information was added to the box, and the data transmitted by global tele communications systems. The optically scanned code on the side of the box, connected to the shipping manifest, showing delivery arrangements at the destination enabled finely articulated logistics systems to be developed and run on predetermined schedules. Today, much of the

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stock for sale in the retail stores in the US or Western Europe was packed into a container on an industrial es tate somewhere in China several weeks earlier. The order for the container load might have come from a US warehouse computer connected both to the factory in China, and to a transport company (with sea, rail, and road connections) that would arrange the pickup and delivery of the container. This new reliability and flexibility in intermodal trans port has enabled major redirections in the organization of production. Globalization is now expressed in production systems that fragment production into separate processes located across the world. It is now common for the finance and management, design, component production, and as sembly of a good or service to be located in many different places. Final deliveries are made to a wide array of des tinations. These global production systems only work when predictable global sea and air logistical services are avail able. This logistical capacity can have a direct role in production systems where delivery times, and their flexi bility, are built into production planning. In fact, in some firms corporate structure and organization has been re shaped to coordinate production in time as well as in space. This ease of transport has changed the pattern of trade. Rather than one nation’s goods or resources mov ing to another nation where they are not available, today’s trade is made up of complex and multidirectional movement of the same goods and services between in dividual firms. For example, car parts and cars cross the Atlantic and the Pacific in containers in both directions as producers based in the US, Japan, and Europe draw upon supplies from, and arrange assembly in, places as diverse as Brazil, Mexico, and Thailand. Similarly, trade in ser vices is greatest between North America and Europe, the two leading sites of service production. That exchange accounts for the very substantial amount of business travel on aircraft between those two continents. This new level of mobility of goods and services has been grafted on to an international trading economy that emerged over the previous 400–500 years. That graft has not been a simple match however, as the focus of traffic has changed and new ports, new air transport hubs, new rail, and road links have emerged. Once again, those capable in the management and organization of the new transport tasks have become prominent. Today that in cludes firms associated with the ports of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai, as well as a shipping company from Copenhagen (Maersk) and an air freight company cen tered at Memphis (Federal Express). At the same time some of the old cities have retained their role in the management of the new network. For example, the Baltic Exchange (established in the eighteenth century) still provides a global market place for sea and air freight from its location in the City of London. Hamburg, too, remains as an influential operator in transport and logistics.

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Geographic Impacts of Global Transport The examples cited above show how the evolution in transport technology has been associated with the steady and evolving globalization of the world economy. That evolution has had some distinctive impacts. Many of these emerge from the geographically selective character of transport services. That can be seen initially in the linear connection between an origin and a destination that is provided by a mode of transport. This linearity creates a geographic selectivity first in which points are connected, and second in the benefits it offers places along the way. Hence, the caravan routes across Central Asia, the shipping routes across the Mediterranean, the shipping routes along the coasts of Africa and India, the rail net across the US, and airline routes from Asia to Europe all have a linearity, and all have created narrow corridors of impact across vast continents. Some places along these routes emerged as markets, production sites, or centers of administration. Those outcomes narrowed the local and regional impact of globalization and priv ileged some places over others. That privilege is felt especially in ‘gateway cities’. Gateway cities are places where global transport systems make local contact. Their role is best seen in the port cities on colonial coastlines, but their effect would have been felt in the caravan staging points of Central Asia, can be seen at rail junctions and termini, and now in the role played by major airports in cities. The transport privilege of a gateway city emerges because it offers first access to global goods and services and may have fre quent services. It can be a place of management of the transport system, requiring effort in the organization of physical goods and information, dispersing inward sup plies and assembling outgoing goods; that means it is a place of local trading, as inbound and outbound goods and services are sold by local merchants. Finally it has a set of functions (offices, storage facilities, technical ser vicing, and so on) not needed in other cities, which en riches its commercial activity. The gateway city effect was important in the development of New York, Montreal, San Francisco, Melbourne, Sydney, and Mumbai. Today, Hong Kong and Shanghai draw much of their vitality from their role as gateway cities in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangste Delta, respectively. These experiences illustrate how the operation of the transport system itself creates a locally uneven impact of globalization.

The Changing Geographic Impact of Transport That uneven impact has been refined and changed as each transport system has evolved and in some cases replaced. This evolution has usually been expressed in

both size and speed of vehicles. As ships, planes, and trains became larger and technically advanced in terms of speed and fuel consumption, the initial short stages be tween linear or coastal patterns of transport were grad ually extended. Some earlier stopping points were bypassed and some original gateway cities were no longer needed as new technologies were adopted. Later, new standard roads would bypass some smaller towns, while high speed rail services operated with fewer stops. This outcome is well illustrated in the concentration of sea traffic at a series of major nodes. Steady increases in the capacity and speed of container ships have changed the networks of shipping. Today, loads are gathered from regional supply as well as local sources for transshipment from small to large vessels in ports such as Hong Kong and Singapore before being moved across oceans (by passing smaller ports enroute) to markets. In air trans port, increased speed and size were provided by the introduction of jet engine, and the creation of the Boeing 747 aircraft. Both represented sudden major changes from existing technology. The first lifted the speed and range of aircraft considerably as the jet engine had much greater speed and lower fuel needs of the old piston engines. The Boeing 747 was a very major step up in size and range, enabling many more passengers (and freight) to be flown between airports. The first effect of these changes was felt in a substantial reduction in the number of stopping points along international routes. As an ex ample, in the petrol engine era there were up to five or six stops between Singapore or Hong Kong and London; the Boeing 707 reduced these to three or four; later the Boeing 747 would eliminate stops on this route al together. Across the Atlantic, steady improvement in aircraft speed and capacity obviated the need for tech nical stops at Shannon (Ireland) and Gander (Canada). In the northern Pacific, jet aircraft were able to use great circle routes between the US and North (and later Southeast) Asia. Initially these routes involved Anchor age as a technical stop over, but soon the routes were flown nonstop. The technical capacity to fly great circle routes across the polar regions (facilitated by the adop tion of global positioning systems) had another important consequence: northern and eastern US cities like Min neapolis, Chicago, Detroit, and New York became as close to Asia as San Francisco and Los Angeles. Up until this time the latter cities had been the main gateways to Asia, fed by traffic across the central Pacific via Hawaii and Guam. Flying times to Europe were also reduced, and daily nonstop flights between Tokyo and London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt became common. Si multaneously, places like Honolulu, Anchorage, Mumbai, and Bahrain had less daily through traffic. The geographic effect of these technical develop ments in the jet aircraft network (especially the increase in the size of aircraft) was not limited simply to the

Transport and Globalization

bypassing of places along a route. As was occurring in the concentration of sea freight in containers, there was a gathering of larger numbers of passengers at a smaller number of places, labeled ‘hubs’. The large numbers of passengers were needed in part to justify the use of larger aircraft; this approach had a significant impact on the relative size of airports in Southeast Asia, with com petition between Bangkok, Singapore, and Hong Kong for the regional hub role. In the US, the hub concept was used by airlines to reorganize their domestic services. Hub airports were fed by short links from surrounding cities, many of which had once been stops along the old trunk routes. As a result, hubs had more frequent and more diverse airline connections, so they began to assert some of the effects of the early gateway cities, providing good opportunities for business (and in many cases cheaper fares). Some were creations of the old transport system (such as London and New York), others reflected new patterns and capacity (Los Angeles and Singapore), others the home base of airlines (Chicago, Dallas–Fort Worth, and Atlanta). In this way, the air transport system has redirected the urban effects of globalization. In fact, the hierarchy of global cities is now mirrored in the hierarchy of busy airports. Today’s large airport cities can be seen as a spatial expression of the working of the global economy. It is possible that outcome may be changing a little as airline services are increasing at mid sized cities. That reflects the development of smaller long haul aircraft that can provide point to point services to pairs of nonhub cities. Debate about whether the future will in volve more very large aircraft flying from hub to hub, or more services between mid sized cities on smaller air craft, is ongoing. Similar change can be seen in the technical develop ment in sea transport. Steady expansion in the size and speed of shipping reduced the need for stops on long routes, so removing the servicing and management roles from many places, and also their regular delivery of goods. The adoption of containers accelerated this se lectivity; that change led to a steady rise in ship size, so that the hub system created for large and long distance aircraft has been replicated by large and long distance shipping services. Hub ports were fed by delivery from other cities; in some cases rail and road freight services facilitated the gathering and dispersal of containers to and from a hub, replacing earlier coastal services. The scale of container ships is continuing to rise, so that the hub to hub service seems likely to remain significant in the future. The data displayed in Table 1 provide an indication of just how powerful the hub system has become in global transport. Almost one half of all the containers moved through the 100 busiest port cities are handled by those cities ranked in the top ten; the top 20 ports handle

427

Table 1 Shares of transport activity at top 100 airports and seaports 2002 Cities ranked in

Share of traffic Top 10 11 to 20 21 to 30 31 to 40 41 to 50 51 to 60 61 to 70 71 to 80 81 to 90 91 to 100

Sea ports

Air ports

Container movements TEUs

Passenger number

Air freight tons loaded

48.0 14.6 9.0 7.0 6.4 4.8 3.5 2.5 2.2 2.0 100.0

30.5 15.0 13.3 9.5 7.7 6.6 5.6 4.6 4.0 3.2 100.0

38.7 22.3 12.4 7.3 5.6 4.1 3.3 2.4 2.3 1.6 100.0

Source: Containerisation International 2002. Airports Council International 2002. Note: Data for cities with more than one port or airport have been merged.

almost two thirds of the total. Air freight is similarly concentrated: the share of freight moving through the top ten airports as not quite as significant, but the top 20 account for 60% of the tonnage handled. Air passenger movements are less concentrated: one has to include the top 30 cities to account for 60% of all passenger move ments. These outcomes illustrate that mix of size, speed, and reach of ships and planes has consolidated and strengthened hub operations. Although hubs are prominent, there is a well de veloped technical capacity to manage the transshipment of goods from large to small ships, from ships to rail or road, from large planes to small planes, and from planes to trucks. That technical capacity (based on information technology) ensures that the transport system is well equipped to collect from, and deliver to, small places. Hence, perhaps paradoxically, the logistics system in modern transport has allowed the links associated with globalization to be felt well beyond the larger sea and airport cities of the world. That has made the sea con tainer (and on some continents the parcel delivery sys tem) almost ubiquitous.

Global Transport and Change within Cities Transport systems have long provided one cornerstone in the structure of a metropolitan area as seaports stimu lated commercial zones nearby and rail stations gener ated passenger and freight handling facilities. Today, the airport is the key focus of movement of people into and

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out of a city. At the same time airfreight has increased, so that the warehouses and storage facilities that once sur rounded the seaport have been replicated (at a larger scale) around airports. In addition, the construction of hotels and business parks has made the airport a new commercial center in a number of cities. At the same time the hub role of some cities, which involves handling of freight at a much greater physical scale than in the past, has challenged the fortunes of the original seaports and rail yards. The traffic associated with these new transport systems, and the storage space needed, has created many local planning problems. In some cities, airports, seaports, and rail terminals have been relocated to the outer fringe. Special local solutions, including new road or rail links dedicated to freight movement across a city, have been adopted to accom modate (and redirect) the freight traffic. Where new capacity cannot be provided cities have managed to ex pand and retain activity through physical extension, along with innovative management, of existing facilities: Singapore and Hong Kong illustrate that outcome with seaport planning, while London and Chicago show the way in airport planning. In many cities, however, old port and rail yards remain unused and derelict, reminders of the forces of change in the global transport system. Only a few have become potential redevelopment sites (no tably the redevelopment of London Docklands). The relocation of transport facilities to suburban and even distant fringe locations has contributed to the spread of urban development in large metropolitan areas. That outcome reflects the power of logistical systems to connect producers to one another and to consumers, which in effect has spread the benefit of some agglom eration economies across the whole of a metropolitan area rather than being available just at its core. In effect, some suburban or fringe sites are now effective locations for many businesses, even those serving global markets. In overview, then, globalization is the long shadow of the transport system. Over time, transport has changed in technical terms, and in its management and organization. As it has done so it has usually involved more of the world (although concentrated in some parts), more of the cities (although concentrating on some at the expense of others), and has often shifted the focus of metropolitan development to outer and fringe locations. That complex set of outcomes means an understanding of the impact of globalization is difficult to comprehend without

understanding the current stage and trends within transport. See also: Global Commodity Chains; Global Production Networks; Globalization and Transnational Corporations; Transport Geography.

Further Reading Burchardt, A. (1971). A hypothesis about Gateway Cities. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 61, 269 285. Goetz, A. (1992). Air passenger transportation and growth in the US urban system 1950 1987. Growth and Change 23, 217 238. Gordon, P., Richardson, H. W. and Yu, G. (1998). Metropolitan and non metropolitan employment trends in the US: Recent evidence and implications. Urban Studies 35, 1037 1058. Hesse, M. (2004). Logistics and freight transport policy in urban areas: A case study of Berlin Brandenburg/Germany. European Planning Studies 12, 1035 1053. Ivy, R. I., Fik, T. J. and Malecki, E. (1995). Changes in air service connectivity and employment. Environment and Planning A 27, 165 179. O’Connor, K. (1995). Airport development in Southe East Asia. Transport Geography 3, 269 279. O’Connor, K. (1996). Airport development: A Pacific Asian perspective. Built Environment 22, 212 223. O’Connor, K. (2003). Global air travel: Toward concentration or dispersal? Journal of Transport Geography 11, 83 92. O’Connor, K. and Scott, A. (1992). Airline services and metropolitan areas in the Asia Pacific region 1970 1990. Review of Regional and Urban Development Studies 4, 240 253. Rodrigue, J. P. (1994). Transportation and territorial development in the Singapore extended metropolitan region. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 15, 56 74. Smith, D. S. and Timberlake, M. (1998). Cities and the spatial articulation of the world economy through air travel. In Cicantell, P. & Bunker, S. (eds.) Space and Transport in the World System, pp 213 240. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. The Economist. (2006). The Physical Internet. A Survey of Logistics, 379(8482), (June 17).

Relevant Websites http://www.logisticsquarterly.com Ideas for Logistics and Transportations Magazine. http://outsourced logistics.com The Global Supply Chain authority. http://www.tli.gatech.edu/ The Supply Chain and Logistic Institute. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTTLF/Resources/lpireport.pdf The World Bank. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/freightplanning U.S. Department of Transportation. http://www.worldcargoalliance.com World Cargo Alliance.

Transport and Social Exclusion J. Hine, University of Ulster, Newtownabbey, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Reverse Commute Problem Travel from inner cities to suburban locations. Social Exclusion Nonparticipation in normal activities of society. Transport Disadvantage Poor access to transport.

Introduction The link between transport provision, policy, and social exclusion is complex, but it is also clear that there are powerful synergies with poverty, sustainable develop ment, and the regeneration of communities. Social ex clusion is closely associated with ‘social justice’ and ‘accessibility’, terms that have been cited in the literature for a considerable time now. More recently, studies in the fields of human geography and transport studies have demonstrated that the link between transport and social exclusion is essentially related to differential levels of access to modes of transport, often referred to as trans port disadvantage, and poor access to goods and services. More recently, research efforts focused on linkages with well being and aspects of quality of life which make it difficult for people to participate fully in society. A number of factors are seen to contribute to social ex clusion; it is clear that access to transport is central to all these. These include differentials in education, training opportunity and attainment, socioeconomic circum stances, local environment as well as access to infor mation and physical accessibility to a wide range of opportunities, including employment, shopping, and recreation. Internationally, attention has been focused on low income neighborhoods and where social and economic changes have resulted in joblessness; the concentration of vulnerable people in deprived neighborhoods; family breakdown; poor core public services and public service failure; and the declining popularity of social housing. The problem in these areas has been compounded by a lack of attention to links between poor neighborhoods in urban centers and local and regional economies, and the links between planning and economic development which can accentuate the barriers to work, education, and childcare. In the US, a significant form of social exclusion can be found in the isolation of poor inner city residents from jobs that are increasingly located in the suburbs and the urban fringe. This has resulted in the reverse

commute problem among these groups. Transport dis advantage can also be acute in informal settlements and favelas where poor transport links emphasize economic and social dislocation. A greater understanding of the geographical/spatial nature of social exclusion is critical to the delivery of transport solutions. The use of geographic information system (GIS) and accessibility measurement has become an important research and policy development area. New research areas have developed from this, including the analysis of activity spaces and social networks, and as sessments of the impact of new information technology on travel.

Defining Social Exclusion Social exclusion has come to be accepted as a term that refers to the loss in the ability (by people or households) to fully participate in activities and society and connect with many of the jobs, services, and facilities. There is broadly an agreement in the literature that social exclusion represents a conceptual shift away from the traditional forms of explanation and should not be considered equivalent to older terms and definitions previously applied to individuals, groups, and processes considered to exist and operate outside a certain social norm – such as poverty, deprivation, and the underclass. Despite no common definition of social exclusion there is also no common definition of the dimensions and factors involved in it. But in both cases, the approaches taken by various authors, though different in detail, broadly overlap. Typically, these dimensional frameworks refer to the key areas of daily life. It is also recognized that the ability of a group or individual to participate across these dimensions could be affected by a number of factors. These include the individual’s own character istics, life events, and characteristics of the area resided in and social, civil, and political institutions of society. In sociology and studies of time use, this has been referred to as the structure of social obligations that often make travel necessary (e.g., legal, economic, and familial obligations). In terms of transport shaping patterns of social ex clusion, it is clear that there are a variety of processes that can impact on the synergies of this relationship. These processes can include: (1) the nature of time–space or ganization in households; (2) the nature of the transport system; and (3) the nature of time–space organization of

429

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the facilities and opportunities individuals are seeking to access. The nature of these will differ according to gender, age, cultural background, level of ability, and economic circumstances. The seven categories of ex clusion suggested by Church et al., connected to trans port, are: ‘physical exclusion’: refers to a situation where phys • ical barriers inhibit the accessibility of services which

• • • • • •

could be experienced by mothers with children, eld erly, or frail, those encumbered by heavy loads or those who do not speak the dominant language of the society; ‘geographical exclusion’: refers to a situation where poor transport provision and resulting inaccessibility can create exclusion not just in rural areas but also in areas on the urban fringe; ‘exclusion from facilities’: refers to the distance from facilities – for example, shopping, health, leisure, and education – from people’s homes, especially from those with no car, makes access difficult; ‘economic exclusion’: refers to a situation the high monetary or temporal costs of travel can prevent or limit access to facilities or jobs and thus income; ‘time based exclusion’: refers to a situation where other demands on time such as caring restrict the time available for travel; ‘fear based exclusion’: refers to a situation where worry, fear, and even terror influence how public spaces and public transport are used, particularly by women, children, and the elderly; and ‘space exclusion’: refers to a situation where security and space management strategies can discourage so cially excluded individuals from using public trans port spaces.

Of course, it can be argued that transport exclusion mechanisms can be peripheral to non transport mech anisms but what is important to recognize is that trans port, or rather the lack of access to it, can compound these factors. At a local level it is clear that there is a need for the identification of a selection of indicators that reflect the processes linked to social exclusion and in particular, the role of transport in that exclusionary

Table 1

process. Indeed, the idea of introducing dimensional frameworks to the debate on the links between transport and social exclusion highlights the need for approaches that can identify this range of experience. Research studies have now started to address this using travel diaries combined with social surveys and GISs.

Social Exclusion and Patterns of Transport Disadvantage Internationally, research has identified that those groups most likely to experience transport disadvantage are those on low incomes, women, elderly and disabled people, and children. Evidence also indicates clearly that multiply deprived households are highly intercorrelated with other factors such as low incomes, low levels of car ownership, and public sector housing. Essentially, these groups are those with traditionally lower levels of access to cars. Race is also an important indicator of transport access and social disadvantage. Low-Income Groups For Great Britain, the National Travel Survey, for ex ample, shows that over the period 1989–91 to 2004 although the number of households in the lowest real income quintile with no car has declined by 20%, a substantial proportion in this income group have no car – 54% in 2004 (Table 1). This is despite evidence which indicates that the availability of bus services has changed little over this period in urban areas and has actually increased in rural areas. (In the National Travel Survey this is measured as households within a 13 minute walk of an hourly bus service.) Low income families are moving into car ownership as a response to rising public transport fares and poorer levels of public transport ac cessibility to different labor and housing markets in creasingly in peripheral locations. Walking and public transport are the dominant modes of transport for people from households on low incomes, but in particular for non car owning households in the lowest income quintile.

Household car ownership by income band, 1989/91 and 2004 1989/91

Lowest real-income quintile Second quintile Third quintile Fourth quintile Highest real-income quintile

2004

None

One

Two or more

None

One

Two or more

73 48 25 12 7

24 44 55 55 46

3 8 20 33 47

54 37 20 11 8

38 47 52 46 40

7 15 28 43 52

Source: Department for Transport (2005) National Travel Survey.

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Women

Exclusion from Services

Women also experience exclusion in a number of ways as a result of poor public transport services. There is evi dence from many parts of the world that travel patterns differ by gender, including, for example, the United States, Sweden, Australia, and most of Africa. There are clear issues affecting women’s transport which relate to patterns of travel, patterns of employment, income, car ing responsibilities, and access to forms of travel (par ticularly access to cars). There are also differences among women in terms of the experiences of specific groups (e.g., older women, disabled women, women from ethnic minorities, and women living in rural areas and lone parents). As with older people and the disabled, the de sign of the infrastructure can mitigate against the use of a local transport system. Women with young children are perhaps hardest hit in this respect. Personal safety when using or trying to access transport infrastructure is also a major consideration for this group.

Lack of readily available transport, whether car or public transport, has a clear impact on whether particular goods and services can be accessed. In the case of public transport the problem, especially for communities with low levels of car ownership, is that services are more likely to be located on transport corridors. This when combined with timetables that do not accommodate new forms of employment (e.g., shift work) means that access can be problematic and that temporal barriers to job markets have been created. Lack of personal transport and poor public transport also have been found to reduce the ability of people, living in disadvantaged areas, to access financial services, and creates difficulties in accessing health facilities for women. The cost of public transport is often cited as a barrier to accessing further education.

Disabled Disabled people are a group that also features in dis cussions surrounding the link between transport and social exclusion. They suffer because for a variety of reasons they find it difficult to access public services. These reasons include: low incomes, physical layout of infrastructure and design of vehicles, and location of stops. The restructuring of bus services to the edges of residential and commercial areas on main transport corridors could potentially have a profound effect on this group. There is, however, little evidence to suggest the extent and nature of such service restructuring exercises on this group.

The Impact of Transport Disadvantage and Social Exclusion Barriers to Employment Poor transport access is an important barrier to em ployment opportunities. For young people in rural areas, transport is vital to holding down a job; public transport is often seen as unreliable with timetables that do not match up with work schedules. Cost and availability of childcare, lack of knowledge of the local job market, and an unwillingness to travel outside the locality can also be barriers to employment. In disadvantaged housing areas, the economic reality is sharply defined by the resource constraints of childcare, travel to work time, cost, and availability. Particularly, when confronted by low wages and an increasing proportion of part time work, travel to work costs may make taking a low income job an un economic option.

Fear and Perceptions of Safety Inadequately managed and structured public transport systems can be responsible for influencing perceptions of safety and fear. Perceptions of safety and fear can have significant effects on levels of personal mobility. Older people, women, and those from ethnic communities are more likely to fear crime while using public transport. Behaviors found include avoidance of making a trip, es pecially in the dark. Fear of interchange facilities and stations in the dark and at off peak periods, have high lighted the need for a security presence in these locations. The consequence of this fear is that trips are either not made or that alternative arrangements are made where it is possible to avoid these situations. Switches from bus to car are often a result of these fears and the inability of the services to meet shift patterns. Other work has found that taxis can play a very important role in these circumstances. For younger people, work has found that the anxieties experienced when using public trans port are similar to those for adults. Young women in particular feel very unsafe after dark when using public transport.

Policy Responses Increasingly, local services and activities are located in inaccessible places for noncar owners, new sites for em ployment and housing are also located on the edge of towns and cities. Public transport networks often do not adequately serve these out of town/edge of town lo cations. In many towns and cities during the off peak (early morning and late evening) periods, buses can be a rare commodity. Typically, social exclusion and its re duction through improved public transport are treated as

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a general policy aim at the local government level. This may reflect a lack of control over public transport op erators, following de regulation, with regard to the price and quantity of public transport; however, policies are in place for concessionary travel and the buying in of so cially necessary public transport services. Policy responses, typically, are based around ap proaches aimed at: (1) improving levels of personal mobility; (2) providing mobile key services; and, (3) nontransport solutions. Traditionally, policy inter ventions for the transport disadvantaged in this area have emerged from the specialist transport provider who has sought to address those gaps in provision not filled by mainstream transport providers. Also, other interventions have resulted from the need to introduce concessionary travel for older and disabled people and the growth of guidance and legislation on these matters. Improving Levels of Personal Mobility Bus policies

Public transport network coverage is a key public policy issue. The commercialization of local bus services, seen as essential by operators for future business growth, has resulted in the development of Metro type urban bus routes or high frequency corridors in many towns and cities. In rural areas, the focus has often moved to the provision of fewer higher frequency or limited ser vice routes. In these situations, the emphasis is not on route subsidy from public funds, although in the UK where operators control a large part of the network there are examples of cross subsidy between routes. A con sequence of the trend toward high frequency corridors in urban areas has been a movement away from the pro vision of socially necessary services especially in the off peak periods. These are often in or adjacent to areas with high proportions of public sector housing. In rural areas, network shrinkage has been endemic partly in response not only to higher levels of car own ership in these areas but also due to cost cutting meas ures associated with a reduction in revenue support for public transport. In other European countries, compared to the UK, this trend has been less pronounced due to higher levels of subsidy. In the US, the emphasis has tended to be on capital projects for rail and the devel opment of public transport to address the reverse com mute problem for low income inner city residents trying to access jobs in the suburbs and welfare to work schemes. Nonetheless, funding support for innovative rural public transport schemes is very unusual; funding tends to only cover more regular bus operations. Despite this there is growing evidence of rural operators beginning to work more closely with community transport operators. For example, in the Messary Valley in Southern Crete, the local municipality decided to operate a regular

service for transporting students to school and local in habitants to shopping and health facilities in the nearby town. In Galway, Ireland, the coordination of private bus operators, voluntary transport operators, and non emergency health transport operators has been used to provide a network of flexibly routed and demand re sponsive services. In England, increased funding of rural public transport in England through the Rural Bus Subsidy Grant and the Rural Bus Challenge (RBC) has encouraged innovation particularly with regard to the development of demand responsive systems and com puterized booking. In terms of the impact on community transport operators, it has been clear that consultation between local authorities and community transport op erators has increased and that there has been a fostering of community transport through the joint use of com puterized booking systems. There is also evidence that in these RBC schemes there has been sharing of vehicles with community transport schemes; these arrangements not only maximize vehicle usage but also provide add itional revenue for the overall RBC scheme. In Northern Ireland, a rural transport fund has been established to integrate community transport operations with Ulsterbus services and assist with the development of social car schemes. An established method of improving access to bus services is through a general or targeted subsidy. Until recently, there has been limited evidence to suggest the benefits of this approach for low income groups. Work has suggested that the cost of subsidies and fare reduction are less than has been previously thought. A fare re duction in metropolitan areas in money and time savings to passengers and other road users would outweigh the costs of the subsidy. During the rise of neoliberal policies around the world, pressure to reduce subsidies grew. For instance, in the UK the 1985 Transport Act, which de regulated bus services in Great Britain, heralded the end of low fare policies; in other words, passenger transport authorities and local authorities could no longer subsidize bus ser vices except those that were deemed to be socially ne cessary and unprofitable. De regulation in Merseyside and resultant fare increases have been cited as the main cause of reduced use. Targeted subsidies is another approach that is used to grant concessionary travel to pensioners, the disabled, children under 16, and students aged up to 18 years in full time education. Research indicates that these schemes encourage travel – those with concessions travel more often and further. Nonetheless, it is possible for other groups to be included in a concessionary scheme on a voluntary basis. Improving the accessibility of ser vices is another aspect of bus policy. The UK Disability Discrimination Act 1995, which legislates for mainstream public transport to become accessible to the disabled and

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433

wheelchair users, when combined with local transport strategies and quality partnerships will ensure a fleet of accessible vehicles. The adaptation of street infra structure, including bus boarders and raised platforms, upgrading of bus shelters, and the enforcement of parking in bus lanes and around bus stops, is also an important component of this approach.

however, this role has expanded to shopping and leisure based trips. These schemes have been effective although funding and volunteer resources do dictate their avail ability, which is restricted according to specific eligibility criteria.

Taxis and specialist transport services

Potentially, many transport and accessibility problems can be addressed by non transport solutions. These so lutions encompass the use of mobile services for rural communities, including banks, doctors, and dental sur geries. The use of information communication technol ogy (ICT) now also offers opportunities for these types of resources and services to be offered remotely as in the case of banking or booked in advance of use. Virtual mobility has been seen as a means to reduce work related travel, but it also offers transport poor households op portunities to access work, goods, and services. ICT can allow home based working enabling people from ex cluded groups with low levels of mobility to enter the labor market. New ICT approaches also allow more flexible hours of working for those with caring re sponsibilities. Nonetheless, at the time of writing, more data are required to assess the impact of online services in the areas of health, learning, and leisure before the impact of this new technology can be assessed.

Specialist services are typically provided by the volun tary sector. These services typically consist of: group hire bus services; dial a ride services, and voluntary car schemes. The objectives of dial a ride services were originally to provide a demand responsive service serv ing low density suburban areas. As a concept they have been around in the UK since the early 1970s. Initial experiments with this form of transport found that the services were expensive and failed to cater to dispersed trip patterns. Despite this, the approach remains an ac cepted method of delivering services to the elderly and disabled, a section of the population where transport needs can be expensive. The efficiency of dial a ride systems has been improved by computerized scheduling packages that in effect provide the operator of services with a reservation system for services. A variety of dial a ride services are now offered by community transport operators. Another specialist transport concept is the ‘service route’. This is concerned with bringing the bus service closer to the residents and as such represents a move away from traditional route planning, which is based on radial routes coming into a city or town center. The service route is a regular route network but the route is based on where the proportions of elderly and disabled people live and important destinations, such as health centers, hospitals, and shops. These schemes have been implemented internationally in Denmark, Finland, Norway, The Netherlands, Canada, and the US. Available evidence indicates that they are cost effective and reduce the need for specialist transport. Taxis are the most flexible transport service and are a popular alternative to other modes of transport even though they are the most expensive form of transport in the UK. On average taxis are 5 to 7 times more expensive than other modes per passenger mile while those groups in the population that tend to use taxis the most also tend to be on lower incomes, although there has been a growth in their usage by the general population for leisure purposes. To combat the high cost taxi card schemes exist as a subsidy for travel by this mode. Two forms of taxi operation have developed. Essentially, there are those taxis that are run through voluntary driver schemes and taxis operated by commercial firms. Voluntary car schemes have been concerned with transporting people for social services, health, and education purposes;

Virtual Mobility and Nontransport Solutions

Conclusion Improving levels of personal mobility through transport investment can play an important role in reducing social exclusion. Patterns of transport disadvantage are present in many towns and cities and represent a key challenge to transport policy. Human geography has a key role to play not only in the development of new solutions but also in the spatial analysis of these transport problems. The problem with social exclusion, associated with its com plexity, is how it can be used to develop policy goals. Nonetheless, the ideas of basic needs and well being are powerful when the experiences of those on low incomes and in deprived communities are examined. Indeed, it is the examination of these transport experiences that should prompt closer examinations of the allocation of resources and the distributional consequences of these policy decisions. Trends in transport use and the operation of public transport networks however seem to downplay the im portance of accessibility to goods and services for the transport disadvantaged; instead, the policy has been developed favoring mode shift objectives which chal lenge habitual car use. This often obscures the basic needs function of public transport and specialized com munity transport operations. Analyses in transport and

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human geography need to be extended to provide nar ratives and spatial analyses of the transport choices of car poor households where travel time budgets are clearly of a different structure. See also: Governance, Transport; Transport Geography.

Further Reading Axhausen, K. (2007). Activity spaces, biographies, social networks and their welfare gains and externalities: Some hypotheses and empirical results. Mobilities 2(1), 15 36. Cervero, R. (2004). Job isolation in the US: Narrowing the gap through job access and reverse commute programs. In Lucas, K. (ed.) Running on Empty. Bristol: Policy Press. Church, A., Frost, M. and Sullivan, K. (2001). Transport and social exclusion in London. Journal of Transport Policy 7(3), 195 205. DETR (2000). Social Exclusion and the Provision and Availability of Public Transport. London: DETR. Gaffron, P., Hine, J. and Mitchell, F. (2001). The Role of Transport in Social Exclusion in Urban Scotland: Literature Review, Scottish Executive Central Research Unit, Edinburgh. Hine, J. and Grieco, M. (2003). Scatters and clusters in time and space: Implications for delivering integrated and inclusive transport. Transport Policy 10(4), 299 306. Hine, J. P. and Mitchell, F. (2001). The Role of Public Transport in Social Exclusion, Scottish Executive Central Research Unit, Edinburgh.

Hine, J. P. and Mitchell, F. (2003). Transport Disadvanatge and Social Exclusion: Exclusionary Mechanisms in Transport, Transport and Society Series. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Lucas, K. (2004). Running on Empty Transport, Social Exclusion and Environmental Justice. Bristol: Policy Press. Bristol. Raje, F., Grieco, M., Hine, J. P. and Preston, J. (2004). Transport, Demand Management and Social Inclusion. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Social Exclusion Unit (2003). Making the Connections: Final Report on Transport and Social Exclusion, Cabinet Office, London.

Relevant Websites http://www.eclipse eu.net ECLIPSE (European Cooperation and Learning to Implement Transport Solutions to combat Exclusion) is one of 24 projects funded under the European Commission 2nd Transnational Exchange Programme (TEP) which forms part of the Community Programme. http://www.matisse eu.com MATISSE (Methodology for Assessment of Transport Impacts of Social Exclusion) project is a preparatory action funded by the European Commission’s Directorate for Employment and Social Affairs. The key objective of the project is to compile and validate an evaluation tool to assess the impact of transport related policy interventions on social exclusion. http://www.foe.co.uk UK Friends of the Earth study using GIS to assess accessibility levels of the bus network in the City of Bradford, UK. http://www.socialexclusionunit.gov.uk UK Government Social Exclusion Unit provides policy statements and reviews of policy.

Transport and Sustainability K. Button, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Acid Rain The acidic precipitation that has harmful effects on plants, aquatic animals, and infrastructure. Global Warming The increase in the average temperature of the Earth’s near-surface air and oceans. Greenhouse Gases Gases present in the Earth’s atmosphere and warm near-surface temperatures through the greenhouse effect. Kyoto Protocol An international agreement with the objective of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Polluter Pays Principle Principle that polluting party pays for the damage it causes to the natural environment. The Cafe´ Standards US federal regulations intended to improve the average fuel economy of cars and light trucks.

Introduction There is mounting concern about the long term ability of the natural environment to absorb the activities of mankind. While environmental concerns have taken a variety of forms over the years, as information has ex panded and as rising incomes have led people to become more concerned about their natural surroundings, so a variety of issues have emerged. These have ranged from quite local matters of protecting the productive capacity of land to concerns, often with religious overtones, that certain actions will lead to Armageddon. The emergence of modern science, improved data, and the ability to carry through complex simulations at the end of the twentieth century has provided a more systematic basis upon which to examine this issue. The notion of ‘‘Space ship earth,’’ expounded by Kenneth Boulding (1966) and the subsequent work of the United Nations’ Commission on Environment and De velopment (1987), with its focus on sustainable devel opment, has introduced a more holistic and structured approach to the environmental debate. The basic argu ment of these studies is that current generations need to leave a legacy for future generations that does not di minish the resource base of the planet. There is no prescribed path for attaining this, indeed there may be many potential paths. This work led to more operational concepts that involve economic sustainability, environ mental sustainability, and social sustainability to ensure that the overall objective is met.

Although the concept of sustainability is very much a holistic one, there has been some sectoral digression from this comprehensive approach as notions such as sustain able energy, sustainable transport (sometimes couched as sustainable mobility), and sustainable agriculture have emerged. This type of stove piping moves away from the original idea of sustainability that essentially allowed transferability between activities provided the overall environmental threshold was retained. In other words, there is nothing inconsistent within the holistic approach in having more atmospheric damage resulting from so ciety using additional carbon fuel for heating as long as there is at least a comparable reduction in its use in other activities such as using the motorcar. The narrower def inition of sustainable transport that emerged in the late 1980s has, however, led to the seeking of ways to move the existing volume of people, goods, and information so as to limit its impact on the environment, the economy, and society without fully considering possible social trade offs with other activities. The situation is also a dynamic one. The nature and scale of the challenges confronting policymakers is con tinually changing as new scientific evidence emerges on both the local health and social effects of transport produced pollution, and as a better understanding of global environmental trends materialize. At the same time, while challenges are continually shifting, so new policies and institutions, as well as market induced feedbacks, are emerging to provide potential ways of reconciling the various social and environmental costs and benefits of transport.

The Challenges Transport takes various forms and there are many aspects to it (Figure 1). From an environmental perspective, the issues are not simply the amount of transport but also who uses it and the particular mode favored. The en vironmental damage associated with transport depends as much on whether it is used for passenger movements or freight (e.g., the former is highly concentrated and gen erally goes close to environmentally sensitive urban areas) as the amount moved. It also depends on the mode of transport used (e.g., a ton of freight moved by rail is likely to have a different impact than a ton moved over the same distance by truck) and the intensity of that use (e.g., four people making a trip by car leave a smaller environmental impact than if they all went in their in dividual vehicles). However, within each mode there are

435

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Transport and Sustainability

Activity

Mode

Traffic

Infrastructure Road Passengers

Vehicle manufacture Rail

Freight

Vehicle travel Marine

Vehicle maintenance Air

Vehicle disposal

Figure 1 The various ways in which the transport and sustainable interaction can be viewed.

further breakdowns to consider; there is not just the implications associated with the direct movement of people and goods but also the environmental impacts stemming from producing the hardware required, in cluding the infrastructure. From an analytical perspective and policy formulation perspective, all these stages need to be embraced when considering sustainability. Transport also poses particular environmental chal lenges somewhat different to many other activities. It is by definition largely a mobile source of pollution; it has been described as ‘‘industry on wheels’’ by Thomson (1974). This can make the measurement of environmental damage difficult and can pose problems when it comes to responsibility for remedial policy formulation. It also relies on a large, immobile infrastructure, it is responsible for a diverse range of environmental effects, and it is a major generator of numerous individual types of pol lution such as the global warming gas, and carbon dioxide (CO2) to which it contributes 14%. Figure 2 offers a very stylized impression of the implications of some of the most important environ mental effects of transport in terms of their geo graphical spread from source and the duration over which they have an impact on the ecosystem. For ex ample, nitrogen oxide (NOX) can contribute to acid rain that has both a relatively long term impact on plant life and water quality that extends considerable distances from its source. Other forms of environmental damage such as lead emissions that cause brain damage to

CO2 Aromatics Chlorofluorocarbons NO

Water contamination Lead Noise 0

Impact radius

Figure 2 The relative spatial range and temporal duration of transport-associated environmental damage.

children are very local in their impact and are soon washed away. The impacts imposed on the environment also vary according to mode of transport and across countries. The US’ transport system, for example, is estimated to con tribute about 37% of global CO2 emissions stemming from transport use, mainly because of the country’s very high level of automobile ownership and the low fuel efficiency of its car park. Road transport is the main direct global contributor to these greenhouse gas emis sions, accounting for 76% of transport’s contribution, with rail transport contributing another 2%, water

Transport and Sustainability

Table 1 Contributions of individual transport modes to overall transport CO2 emissions and to total CO2 emissions in the UK Natural logarithm of million tons of carbon (Ln MtC) Road transport Passenger cars Light duty vehicles Buses Heavy goods vehicles Mopeds and motorbikes Railways Civil aircraft Shipping All domestic transport Total UK emissions International aviation International shipping All transport emissions UK CO2 emissions

(Ln MtC)

As % of total domestic transport

As % of total UK CO2 emissions

32.6 19.4

93.1 55.5

21.4 12.8

1.0 7.6

2.8 21.6

0.6 5.0

0.1

0.3

0.1

0.7 0.6 1.0

1.9 1.9 2.9

0.4 0.4 0.7

35.0

100

23.0

152.5 9.0

100 5.5

1.6

1.0

45.7

28.0

163.1

100

transport 10%, and international air transport 7%. These figures do not include the emissions associated with the electricity generated for railway use and with the pro duction and maintenance of transport vehicles and infrastructure. Table 1 offers another form of breakdown, and also highlights deviations from the global average. It details the case of the UK. This shows the importance of indi vidual modes, both domestic and international to the overall effects of transport on the environment and also as a proportion of CO2 emissions in the country. What this type of table omits, however, is the increasing en vironmental burden associated with international trans port. While much of this stemming from surface modes is captured in the domestic data, the increasing use of air and maritime transport outside of national borders is adding to atmospheric and sea pollution. The emissions of CO2 at high altitude by aircraft, for example, would seem to have a greater impact on global warming than similar amounts emitted at surface levels. Given that more localized effects of other forms of environmental damage associated with transport are more site specific, it is difficult to both measure the overall scale of the problem and attribute it to specific modes. Ambient levels of noise, for example, differ between locations, making the implications of traffic

437

difficult to isolate. Similarly, the damage done by acid rain chemicals such as NOX depends very much on re gional geography. While estimates are sometimes made of the total amounts of some of the emissions into the atmosphere or pollutants into the sea, the actual impacts of pollution and the damage it causes depend on local conditions. Nevertheless, they can have important social and economic implications for local communities and thus their longer term sustainability. The implications of greenhouse gas emissions are largely to be felt in the long term, and thus assessment of their potential magnitudes requires forecasts of traffic. Transport forecasting is, however, notoriously difficult. In general traffic levels are closely correlated with income growth because of the derived nature of the demand for its use. Forecasts based upon existing policies indicate that transport use will double from their 1990 levels by 2050 but that emissions of CO2 will grow even faster because of the increasing use of synfuels produced from coal and gas, which are twice as polluting as conventional oil. It is predicted that there will be a disproportional increase in the greenhouse gas emissions associated with air transport. While the global warming effects of CO2 emissions pose direct environmental effects, sustainable develop ment also involves local environmental and social and economic considerations. Local pollution associated with transport not only poses concerns about the health and welfare of those affected but also raises issues of social equity: it is often argued that serious inequalities in welfare are economically inefficient and politically un sustainable. The US federal government, for example, requires that any transport initiative involving federal funding integrate consideration of environmental justice in the decision process. Sustainable development also means that economic performance is efficient over the long term, indeed the report of the World Commission spends considerable time on this. Historically, large parts of national transport systems, ranging from the roads built by the Romans, through the mountain footpaths for Inca runners in South America, through to the maritime coaling stations of the British Empire and the transcontinental railroads of Canada and the US, were constructed to sustain pol itical systems and to create social cohesion. In the higher income countries of the world, transport accounts for about 8% of national incomes and serves an important intermediary role in facilitating high quality supply chain inputs to industrial and agricultural production. Transport also has a particularly important role to play in sustainable economic development in lower income countries; the World Bank devotes some 14% of its an nual lending to transport initiatives. Many of these emergent economies, however, while enjoying higher material standards of living are also generating significant

438

Transport and Sustainability

amounts of pollutants and contaminants. China, for ex ample, has 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world and is the second largest emitter of CO2. Although the widespread use of coal in industry is the primary con tributor, part of the problem is due to the rapid increase in car ownership and use. In 2000, vehicular CO and NOX emissions were, for instance, 30 and 3.8 million tons re spectively, and vehicles consumed 65.6 million tons of oil. The problem, under current policies, would seem likely to worsen; in the 1980s there were virtually no private cars in China but by 2003 there were 14 million, and it is forecast that by 2015 there will be 150 million.

Policy Issues Most policies regarding sustainability are sector based – hence the idea of ‘sustainable transport’ – rather than being holistic. This more localized approach is often because of the difficulties of defining global policies for such things as carbon emissions. One of the problems with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, for example, has been the difficulty in reaching a consensus across a multitude of nations on a common approach to reducing global warming gas emissions. Further, because in many cases there are considerable local variations in impact and cause, this may quite logically require more bespoke actions. This type of approach, for example, can be seen in the initiatives of the European Union (European Commission, 2001) and at the individual country level (UK Department for Transport, 2006). There are also issues concerning the way to approach sustainability and at which point in the transport supply chain to act. Policy may be initiated at the root cause of the concern – in terms of CO2 emissions this may be done through a blanket carbon tax that is set to limit CO2 emissions irrespective of how carbon is burned. Transport uses can thus be traded off with uses of carbon fuel for other purposes. The UK pursued this type of policy in the 1980s. As a second best option the policy may be aimed at transport use of carbon fuels – for example, specific taxes on fuel used for motoring – or even more indirectly by limiting in absolute terms the overall growth and pattern of passenger and freight transport use. A modal approach, in this context, is geared more toward switching traffic to the least environmentally in trusive modes and often employs subsidies to the cleaner alternative. A wider approach, see again Figure 1, is to aim policy at the entire range of activities associated with transport. The latter, often called a ‘whole life’ approach, explicitly recognizes the wide diversity of ways in which transport affects the environment. There are generally trade offs between environmental benefits and economic and social effects; to use economic

jargon there is seldom a Pareto improvement whereby some parts of society gain but no one loses. In effect there is always some sort of payment involved. The Organ ization for Economic Cooperation and Development in the 1960s obtained agreement among its members to adopt the ‘polluter pays principle’. This does not mean that direct payments are always needed but rather the onus of responsibility lies with the perpetrator. Working out what this payment should be is a challenging task. It is important however, because many transport policies in the past have been ‘government failures’ in the sense that actions to achieve a particular objective have not taken into account the full costs that they can impose, and in particular not the full environmental costs. Sustainable development is holistic but physical measures of economic, environmental, and social effects are in diverse units. There has thus been extensive work seeking to put monetary values on the various elements of these three dimensions of sustainable development so that a common unit of measurement would allow trade offs to be made. Valuing these items is far from easy, and this applies to transport as much as it does to other sectors. Figure 3 provides details of the various stages that have to be gone through before the actual monetary determination stage is reached. Most are complex and Impact assessment

Valuation

Activity

Emissions

Transport and chemical conversion

Concentration/deposition

Response of receptors (humans, flora, materials, ecosystem)

Changes in utility

Physical impact

Welfare loss

Monetization

Costs

Figure 3 Valuing the environmental impacts of transport.

Transport and Sustainability

none without controversy. They combine scientific in formation with economic and social information; inevit ably there is a degree of subjectivity involved. The measures that have been adopted to make pol luters pay have been varied. The economic efficiency of policy is not always the primary objective when the outcome results in an unfavorable impact on income distribution or certain groups in society. Regulations and standards are common methods to control emissions. These are sometimes applied directly on the emissions (Figure 4 gives as an example, the European Union controls levels over particulates from diesel fuel and NOX outputs) but may also be indirect on such things as the fuel efficiency of cars (as with the US Corporate Average Fuel Economy or CAFE standards). These types of policies are found attractive because they are relatively easy to understand and cheap to administer and enforce. In other cases, emissions charges may be imposed that allow transport to be used but only if an environmental charge is paid equal to the costs imposed; for example, many airports charge more for noisy aircraft to land and take off, and countries such as Sweden have both carbon taxes and car owners have to pay a disposal fee when buying their vehicles. Taxes and regulations are often imposed at the local level, rather than as national pol icies, to reflect specific geographical circumstances. There are also more direct economic instruments that seek to bring environmental considerations directly within markets. They involve allocating property rights to environmental assets and allowing these to be traded. Tradable permits were, for example, used in the US to allow for the efficient removal of lead from gasoline. Essentially, the US government limited the lead available to refineries and gradually reduced this amount. Refiners 120

were given initial quotas in proportion to their prior use, and were allowed to buy and sell among themselves with the aim that the least efficient refineries would be forced from the market as their costs rose leading to production being focused in the most efficient and less environ mentally damaging plants. This is very much the idea behind the carbon trading schemes that have been initi ated between some countries since the Kyoto Protocol. In a number of respects transport policy has been successful, at least in developed countries, in meeting some of the criteria that many feel are relevant for wider sustainability. Many forms of local air pollution have been reduced with the use of unleaded fuel, the reduction in particulate emissions from diesel engines, and the adop tion of catalytic converters to deal with NOX. A number of waterways and ports have had contaminates removed or significantly reduced. Economic de regulation of trans port in many countries – the removal of price and market entry controls – has resulted in greater efficiency and with this increased outputs of goods and services to help achieve economic sustainability. There has globally been an increase in mobility that has added to social cohesion. However, success in these areas has caused additional emissions of greenhouse gases as traffic has grown, espe cially in developing countries, and carbon fuel use has risen. This has brought forth new assessments of policy that are embracing a more holistic approach to CO2 emissions with transport as only one element in them.

Conclusions Interest in sustainability came to the fore in the late 1980s when scientific evidence really began to build up

Particulates

NO

100

80

60

40

20

Year

6 20 0

4 20 0

2 20 0

0 20 0

8 19 9

6 19 9

4 19 9

2 19 9

0 19 9

19 8

8

0

Figure 4 European Union emissions standards for cars.

439

440

Transport and Sustainability

regarding global warming and the contribution that transport was making to greenhouse gas emissions. Prior to that the environmental damage done by transport was certainly a concern, and most countries had, to varying degrees, initiated policies to limit noise nuisances and local pollution problems such as smog and lead. Acid rain emissions, that can have wider geographical effects, were also reduced as catalytic converters became compulsory on automobiles. The notion of sustainability had ori ginally been thought of in the context of sustainable economic development but broadened out as it became appreciated that excessive environmental damage was itself unsustainable. Transport is a major contributor to environmentally damaging pollution but also serves important roles in the economy and in ensuring social and political cohesion. Inevitably trade offs have to be made if the transport is to fit appropriately within a wider sustainable structure. To date, however, there has been a tendency to treat sectors in isolation from each other with the result that policy is often aimed at seeking ‘sustainable transport’ rather than treating transport as part of a more holistic system. This has led to some major improvements in many local en vironments, albeit mainly in developed countries, with less NOX, lead, and particulate emissions but with more limited success at tackling global challenges such as greenhouse gas emissions. The rapid economic growth of China, India, and other physically large economies, and the concomitant growth in their vehicle fleets is posing particular burdens on efforts to reduce the environmental footprint of transport. See also: Climate Change; Transport Geography.

Further Reading Banister, D. and Button, K. J. (eds.) (1993). Transport, the Environment and Sustainable Development. London: E & F.N. Spon.

Black, W. R. and Nijkamp, P. (2002). Social Change and Sustainable Transport. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Boulding, K. (1966). The economics of the coming spaceship Earth, presented at the Sixth Resources for the Future Forum on Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy in Washington, DC. Commission on Environment and Development (1987). Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. European Commission (2001). European Transport Policy for 2010: Time to Decide. Luxemburg: European Commission. European Commission (2005). Doing More with Less: Green Paper on Energy Efficiency. Luxemburg: European Commission. Hahn, R. W. and Hester, G. L. (1989). Marketable permits: Lessons for theory and practice. Ecological Law Quarterly 16, 380 391. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (1992). Market and Government Failures in Environmental Policy: The Case of Transport. Paris: OECD. Schweitzer, l. and Valenzuela, A. (2004). Environmental injustice and transportation: The claims and the evidence. Journal of Planning Literature 18, 383 398. Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (1997). Environmental Taxes in Sweden Economic Instruments of Environmental Policy, Report 4745. Stockholm. Thomson, J. M. (1974). Modern Transport Economics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. UK Department for Transport (2006). The Eddington Transport Study: Transport’s Role in Sustaining the UK’s Productivity and Competitiveness. London: The Stationary Office. UK Treasury (2006). The Economics of Climate Change. London: UK Treasury. World Business Council for Sustainable Development (2004). Mobility 2030: Meeting the Challenges to Sustainability. Geneva: WBCSD.

Relevant Websites http://www.euractiv.com/en/transport/transport infrastructure environment/article 168342 European Union Information Website. http://www.ipcc.ch/ Inter Governmental Panel of Climate Change. http://www.euro.who.int/transport/hia/20021009 2 World Health Organization.

Transport Geography R. D. Knowles, University of Salford, Greater Manchester, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Accessibility The ease with which activity sites can be reached for goods, services, employment, education, and recreation. Transport is the main but not the only factor; the Internet provides instant, space-free access to certain services. Death of Distance The misconception that as telecommunications have annihilated space, they have made the physical transport of people unnecessary. Deregulation The abolition of government regulations controlling, for example, the issuing of transport route licenses and transport fares. Differential Collapse in Time–Space The process of time–space convergence is geographically uneven as investment in transport innovations varies and creates a misshapen world in terms of accessibility. Gender Gap A difference in behavior or performance attribute between men and women. Intermediacy The spatial attribute of locations en route between important origins and destinations and geographically well located in relation to traffic flows. Intermodal Transport Where goods, containers, or vehicles can transfer quickly and cheaply between different modes of transport enabling the use of two or more modes of transport. An example is a landbridge route where a container can be transferred from ship to rail and back to ship between Western Europe and China or Japan via a North American rail route and compete with a longer shipping route via the Panama Canal. Mobility The ability of individuals or groups of people to move around. New Mobilities Paradigm A major recent upturn in the significance of the study of mobility in social sciences to examine how, why, and where people move. Peak Oil When global oil production peaks and becomes more expensive to use and alternative types of fuel become necessary. Social Exclusion Where people have lost the ability to connect with jobs, services, and facilities that they need to participate fully in society. Telecommuters People whose jobs allow them to work from home using computers with Internet access. Time–Space Convergence The idea that as a result of faster transport places move closer together in terms of travel time.

Introduction Transport has been described by David Keeling as ‘quintessentially geographic’. This is because it plays a crucial role in defining the function and character of spaces and places while facilitating the flows and inter actions within and between them. Transport and geog raphy share a mutual interrelationship; while transport is central to the study of geography, geography is also central to the study of transport. Transport is an enabling technology; it makes possible a variety of geographies of human interaction. Specialization in production and the division of labor, accessing raw materials and energy supplies, distribution and trade, personal mobility, and accessibility to employment and other activity sites all require effective transport systems. Transport geography examines spatial aspects and impacts of transport systems at local, national, and global scales. It encompasses the development, location, and structure of transport networks and analysis of their use by people and freight; impacts of transport systems and policies on the economy, society, and environment; and issues of personal mobility, accessibility, and social ex clusion. In the interdisciplinary study of transport, transport geography complements the contributions of economists, civil engineers, logistics and supply chain managers, planners, psychologists, and sociologists and adds important spatial perspectives.

The Development of Transport Geography Transport geography emerged as a leading subdiscipline in the 1960s and 1970s when it was at the forefront of the quantitative–theoretical revolution in human geog raphy. Its largely positivist approach and a focus on spatial organization and interaction and network analysis led to a lasting interest in modeling and analytical– empirical research which was boosted later by the development of geographical information systems. However, this narrow emphasis on mechanistic models and network analysis resulted in transport geography becoming rather detached from socioeconomic and political realities and therefore somewhat isolated from the rest of human geography. At the same time many human geographers saw cheap transport and personal mobility as a norm and largely discounted transport in their examination of social and economic patterns and systems.

441

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Transport Geography

Peter Rimmer was in the vanguard in calling for a more humanistic, nonpositivist transport geography in the late 1970s but progress was slow. More transport geographers began to engage in the analysis of transport policy, socioeconomic aspects of decision making, and transport’s impacts on people. Behavioral approaches to transport required more focus on individual and house hold activity patterns and decision making. Analysis of transport welfare problems led to more exploration of accessibility, mobility and gender issues, and transport needs but this was sidelined for more than a decade by the market based transport policies of the 1980s. Wide spread deregulation and privatization of transport how ever has provided a wealth of opportunities for research into the organization of transport systems and networks and the spatial and economic outcomes of policy change. At a time when urban, political, and economic geog raphers were exploring Marxist social theory, transport geographers were engaging more with other transport disciplines. A renaissance in transport geography in the 1990s saw the development of new methodologies and theories stimulated in particular by globalization, sustainability issues, and transport–societal relationships and enabled by spatial analysis technologies. The Journal of Transport Geography provided an international focus for research in the subdiscipline from 1993 accompanied by an array of new transport geography texts. Engagement with eco nomic geography started to revive with its emphases on ‘new economic geography’ and ‘new trade theory’ and transport geography’s renewed interest in freight trans port systems and freight flows. Interdisciplinary links with logistics and supply chain management are of growing importance. The current major opportunity for transport geography to re engage more fully with social and cultural geography and with other social sciences lies in the common interest in mobilities. David Keeling re cently highlighted the importance for transport geog raphers of theorizing and conceptualizing relationships between people and places focused on accessibility and mobility as the core of human interaction.

Differential Collapse in Time–Space and the Increased Importance of Location Transport helps to shape patterns of development and accessibility and presents future opportunities. Innov ations that provide faster and cheaper transport and mechanized handling technologies have reduced the barrier to interaction that distance presents. This has led many geographers to ignore the importance of transport and take it for granted. However, the reductions in time– space and cost–space are very unequal, and relative dis parities have widened between core and peripheral areas

at global and national scales. The differential collapse in time–space is a product of unequal investment in trans port within as well as between areas. Access to transport also varies enormously and is limited by personal income, age, mobility impairment, and gender as well as by lo cation. Richard Knowles showed that this differential collapse has enhanced the importance of location by creating a misshapen world in terms of accessibility. Time–space convergence is the term coined by Don Janelle to describe the effect of a succession of innov ations in faster transport from steam railways, steamships, and motorized transport to high speed trains and pro peller, jet, and supersonic aircraft. More than 150 years of time–space convergence have been followed in the last 30 years by a plateau in the general speed of transport modes although local convergence can still occur, for example, with new bridges and tunnels, intermodal ser vices, and high speed trains. William Black described the withdrawal of Concorde’s supersonic jet services as a rare example of time–space divergence. On the contrary there is now increasing incidence of time–space divergence caused by traffic congestion, airline security checks, reduced speed limits, and the withdrawal of a range of transport services particularly to peripheral lo cations and smaller settlements. Time–space divergence presents a range of important contemporary geographical research issues which have been largely ignored apart from work identifying the local pain of transport service withdrawal, for example, by Andrew Goetz on US air transport and Robert McCalla on global intermodal seaport terminals.

Telecommunications and the ‘Death of Distance’ Telecommunications have transformed global com munication since the 1960s and particularly in the last 10 years. Global positioning systems have revolutionized navigation and enabled operators of all transport modes to develop real time information systems. Mobile (cell) phones and laptop computers using wireless internet have removed the restriction of fixed locations for per sonal communication. They have changed the perception of travel time from wasted to useful time and transformed travel space into working or leisure space. However, Frances Cairncross’ notion of the ‘death of distance’ is not correct. Electronic communication rarely provides a total replacement for the physical movement of people or goods. Most people still prefer to meet in person than over a video link. Current research shows that only a small minority of jobs are likely to be undertaken fully from home. Although there are now more tele commuters, most still sometimes travel to a workplace and also tend to live further away than daily commuters.

Transport Geography

Point-to-point

B

A Corridor

B

A B

Flexible routing

B

A

A Hub-and-spoke

Fixed routing

443

B

Transshipment node Route node Network node

A

Unserviced node

Route Alternative route

Figure 1 Freight distribution and network strategies. From Hesse, M. and Rodrigue, J. P. (2004). Journal of Transport Geography 12, 179.

Internet shopping still accounts for a small minority of transactions and itself requires transport for home de livery. Transport geographers are well placed to identify and explain why activity patterns and locations are changing under the influence of these new technologies.

Transport Innovation and Globalization Probably the most significant transport revolution in the last half century has been in sea transport. Major in novations in shipbuilding technology have allowed much larger bulk carriers and container ships to be built which together with mechanized port handling facilities have sharply reduced maritime freight transport costs. These shipping innovations have allowed raw materials to be sourced globally with coastal areas benefiting more than interior locations. Globalized industrial production takes advantage of lower wage rates in less developed and newly industrialized countries and is enabled by cheap containerized transport and lower or zero import tariffs. Economies and societies are becoming more enmeshed and interdependent as the world shrinks with time–space and cost–space convergence. The development from the 1950s of quick and low cost mechanized handling of unitized freight in standard containers removed the financial and time barrier created by traditional methods of manual handling of freight in ports. This enabled intermodal transport routes and in land loadcentres to be developed and has allowed shorter rail/ship landbridge and minibridge routes, particularly in North America, to compete with all water routes. How ever, many bulk carriers are now too large to use the Panama and Suez Canals. Since 1988, the largest, post Panamax, container ships have also been too large for the Panama Canal, although the latter is now being enlarged.

Jean Paul Rodrigue has called for transport geographers to focus much more research on global and national freight transport systems which underpin so much eco nomic development. There are vast opportunities for research into maritime and land based freight flows, route networks, and terminals (Figure 1). More geog raphers need to recognize the powerful role of logistics providers and supply chain managers in choosing routes, terminals, and freight transport operators and understand the importance of their decision making processes (Figure 2). The location and turnover of the largest container ports provides a good measure of the extent and spread of globalization (Table 1 and Figure 3). The world’s biggest ports until recently were located mainly in developed countries. In 1975 New York and Rotterdam were the largest ports while seven of the top 20 container ports were in the USA, five in both Europe and Southeast/East Asia and two in Australia, handling a total of 10.6 million TEU (twenty foot equivalent unit). By 2003, the 20 largest container ports handled 144.8 million TEU, a more than twelvefold increase; Hong Kong and Singa pore were now the largest ports and the rapid growth of China’s manufacturing exports showed with three of the world’s top four ports. Overall 11 of the top 20 ports were located in Southeast/East Asia, five in Europe, three in the USA and one in the Middle East. Hub and feeder transit container ports such as Singapore and Gioia Tauro in Italy have developed on major global trading routes.

Transport and Economic Development Transport investment usually facilitates economic de velopment but the relationship is complex and two way

444

Transport Geography Conventional

Raw material

Manufacturing

Distribution

National Regional Local Retailers distribution storage distribution

Storage

Customers

Raw materials & parts

Contemporary

Raw material

Distribution center

Manufacturing

Retailers

Customers

Supply chain management

Material flow (delivery) Information flow (order)

Core component

Figure 2 Conventional and contemporary arrangement of freight flows. From Hesse, M. and Rodrigue, J. P. (2004). Journal of Transport Geography 12, 176.

Table 1

Container traffic (‘000 TEU) at the world’s 20 largest ports

Rank

Ports

Container traffic (1975)

Ports

Container traffic (2003)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

New York Rotterdam Kobe San Juan Hong Kong Oakland Seattle Baltimore Bremen Long Beach Tokyo Melbourne Yokohama Hamburg Antwerp Hampton Roads Sydney London Keelung Le Havre

1730 1078 904 877 802 522 481 421 409 390 368 364 328 326 297 292 262 260 246 231

Hong Kong Singapore Shanghai Shenzen Busan Kaohsiung Los Angeles Rotterdam Hamburg Antwerp Dubai Port Klang Long Beach Qingdao New York/New Jersey Tanjung Pelepas Tokyo Bremerhaven Laem Chabang Gioia Tauro

20 449 18 100 11 280 10 615 10 408 8 840 7179 7107 6138 5445 5152 4840 4658 4239 4068 3487 3314 3190 3181 3149

TEU ¼ 20 foot equivalent unit; NJ ¼ New Jersey; Brhvn ¼ Bremerhaven. Source of data: Containerisation International. From Knowles, R. D. (2006). Transport shaping space: Differential collapse in time space. Journal of Transport Geography 14, 407 425.

and there are sometimes unintended negative effects. Impacts of transport investment are spatially uneven and favour some sections of the population. Additional transport investment in already developed countries can yield fewer benefits and tends to generate additional traffic. David Banister and Joseph Berechman identified the need for positive economic externalities, good in vestment factors, and a favourable political environment to be in place for transport investment to assist regional economic growth.

More research is needed to measure the role of transport investment in economic development whether in regenerating former industrial towns, particularly derelict industrial or dockland sites, or stimulating the growth of peripheral areas. Isolating the role of transport investment is easier where new bridges and tunnels are built across straits and tidal estuaries and tunnels are cut through mountains; these fixed links create measurable time–space convergence and reconfigurate local eco nomic and social space.

Transport Geography

445

1975

Rotterdam (2) London (18) Le Havre (20)

Seattle (7) Baltimore (8) Oakland (6) Long Beach (10)

Hamburg (14) Bremen (9) Antwerp (15)

New York (1) Hampton Roads (16) Hong Kong (5) San Juan (4)

Tokyo (11) Yokohama (13) Kobe (3) Keelung (19)

Sydney (17) Melbourne (12)

2003

Rotterdam (8)

Antwerp (10) Los Angeles (7) Long Beach (13)

New York/New Jersey (15)

Hamburg (9) Bremen/Bremerhaven (18) Busan (5)

Gioia Tauro (20)

Dubai (11) ingdao (14) Shanghai (3) Hong Kong (1)

Tokyo (17) Shenzhen (4) Kaohsiung (6) Laem Chabang (19)

Port Klang (12) Tanjung Pelepas (16)

Singapore (2)

Figure 3 World’s largest 20 container ports 1975 and 2003. From Knowles, R. D. (2006). Journal of Transport Geography 14, 414.

Centrality, Proximity, and Intermediacy Centrality within the central business district (CBD) of large urban areas is longer than the undisputed optimal locational goal for activity sites and this is reflected in polycentric, rather than monocentric, peaks in urban land

values. Locations that are in proximity to large markets can offer quicker and cheaper access in congested urban areas than central locations, hence the extensive use of motorway and ring road junctions for activity sites and of secondary airports by low cost airlines in deregu lated airline markets. However, proximity can also be a

446

Transport Geography

negative attribute if a place is too close to and falls under the economic or traffic shadow of a larger node. Douglas Fleming and Yahuda Hayuth invented the term ‘intermediacy’ to describe the spatial property of lo cations between important origins and destinations; these include hubs, route junctions, break in bulk points, and gateways. The geographical importance of intermediate locations, situated close to principal transport flows be tween major markets, has grown for in transit inter change of traffic in deregulated transport markets. Intermediacy is also important in determining advan tageous locations for intermodal transfers of traffic and for refueling stops. Although intermediacy is an important geographical concept it is little recognized in academic research out side transport geography. Globalization has led to a rapid re evaluation of intermediate locations by entrepreneurs especially in the transport, logistics, and supply chain sectors. This is an area of research potential for trans port geographers, economic geographers, and business communities.

Transport Deregulation, Privatization, and Network Adaptation Widespread liberalization or deregulation of transport services from government control, through gradual or outright abolition of route licensing and controls on fares or freight rates, can change the shape of transport net works and often reduce the cost of transport. The theory of contestable markets assumes that there will be a competitive transport market among privately owned transport companies whereas many transport markets are dominated by monopolies or near monopolies. Deregu lated transport is market orientated, follows traffic demand flows, and tends to enhance metropolitan advan tage. Some markets, such as European air transport and British express and local bus transport, have been dis torted by the presence of state or municipally owned companies which potentially have access to subsidies. Deregulated air transport has become a very active research field for transport geographers initially in the USA after domestic air transport deregulation in 1978, later in Europe with air transport liberalization, and more recently elsewhere. Human geographers studying world urban systems also use airport passenger totals and flows as functional measures of importance. New airlines, mergers and bankruptcies, and organiza tional changes in the deregulated airline industry and good data availability have enabled transport geog raphers to research extensively into hub structures, air ports, changes in route networks and fares, and into competition between ‘legacy’ airlines and low cost car riers. In the USA, deregulation of the domestic passenger

airline market led to the development of hub and spoke networks by large incumbent ‘legacy’ airlines. Hubs in large cities are linked with smaller cities by regular feeder and distributor flights and are connected with other hubs by frequent direct flights. Hub airports tend to be located en route along main traffic flows in intermediate locations rather than in larger but more peripherally located cities. Passengers usually benefit from more flights and cheaper fares but at the expense of longer, more circuitous journeys if via a hub. Low cost competitors to legacy airlines within both the USA and Europe, following a model pioneered by South West Airlines, charge lower fares by offering ‘no frills’ services, usually on point to point routes with no timetabled connections. They also often reduce airport charges and turn round times by using smaller, secondary airports close to urban markets. Andrew Goetz showed that there have been some negative outcomes for passengers from US air transport deregulation; he identified ‘pockets of pain’ where communities lost air services or where legacy airline dominance resulted in higher fares. European air trans port deregulation since 1997 has also allowed low cost competitors, led by Ryanair and easyJet, to cut fares, compete with legacy airlines, and generate new traffic (Figure 4). However, shorter distances between cities, high speed rail competition, continuing state ownership of some legacy airlines, and allegiance of some passengers to nationally based airlines have created a less even pattern of change than in the USA (Figure 5). These dynamic processes of change spreading from the USA and Europe to other airline markets provide major research opportunities in a field which is well connected with the expansion of leisure travel and the wider ‘new mobilities’ agenda. The perceived success of air transport deregulation has not been replicated in all transport markets. De regulation of local bus services in Great Britain outside London, followed by piecemeal privatization of state owned and most municipal bus companies, resulted in very little competition, much higher fares, a collapse of integrated services and fares, and a continuing reduction in passengers in all regions and most towns and cities. Geographical analysis shows a market oriented focus on heavily trafficked, profitable urban corridors, enhanced in many areas by bus quality partnerships between private bus companies investing in better services and local au thorities giving buses priority on the roads. In contrast, there has been reduced focus on peripheral and rural areas and on evening and weekend services. In an in creasing mobile society based largely on private car use, the substantial minority of people reliant on buses to access increasingly distant activity sites have suffered a substantial reduction in both personal mobility and accessibility.

Transport Geography

1991 Routes: 23 Main nodes: 2

1995 Routes: 20 Main nodes: 2

2001 Routes: 90 Main nodes: 2

2004 Routes: 292 Main nodes: 11

447

1999 Routes: 54 Main nodes: 2

2003 Routes: 174 Main nodes: 5

Figure 4 The growth of the Ryanair network 1991 2004. From Dobruszkes, F. (2006). Journal of Transport Geography 14, 260.

Urban Expansion, Transport Technology, and Planning Urban expansion and transport technology have been closely interconnected since the development of mech anized transport. From the compact and circular form of the pre industrial city based on walking short distances, a pronounced star shaped urban form developed in re sponse to development opportunities aligned to tram and commuter rail routes but focused strongly on one CBD. Mass car ownership, cheap oil, and cheap land sub sequently enabled and encouraged low density urban expansion and infilling between radial routes unless they

were constrained by planning restrictions. In a few European countries, the public transport accessible city was deliberately strengthened in the mid twentieth century by land use and transport development plans that limited urban sprawl. Copenhagen’s 1947 Finger Plan is a well known example with new planned high density suburbs connected to its CBD along five electrified commuter rail lines (Figure 6). Limited access radial and orbital highways have fur ther facilitated urban expansion and a refocusing of jobs, shops, and leisure facilities at activity sites remote from the CBD. In most American cities, CBDs have declined as jobs and higher order retailing moved out to ‘suburban

448

Transport Geography

The low-cost effect (at city level, departures, 2004 vs. 1995) Increasing of supply, all scheduled flights (millions of seats) 25.09 11.51 5.00 1.58 The low-cost effect (The low-cost seats increase/ all seats increase) 0.76 1.00 0.51 0.75 0.26 0.50 0.00 0.25 Source: OAG Processing: F. Dobruszkes.

Made with Philcarto - http://perso.club-internet.fr/philgeo

Figure 5 The low-cost effect (city level departures 2004 versus 1995). From Dobruszkes, F. (2006). Journal of Transport Geography 14, 262.

downtowns’ or ‘edge cities’ which are difficult to serve by public transport. In Europe decentralization is less pro nounced as lower car ownership, fewer limited access highways, tougher planning controls, dearer land prices, and better public transport have restricted urban sprawl and allowed multifunctional CBDs to survive. Transport geographers are well placed to contribute to research into recent processes of repopulating and re generating cities, further stimulated by the growing de bate about sustainable urban areas, global warming, and dependency on quickly depleting fossil fuel resources.

Unsustainable Energy Supplies and the Consequences of Peak Oil William Black drew attention to the unsustainability of oil dependency for transport systems in particular and

the global economy in general. With global demand for oil increasing yearly by over 2% and the likelihood of global ‘peak oil’ production being reached soon, the price of oil based fuels will at that stage increase sharply and quickly become too expensive to power motor vehicles. Global warming and climate change are linked to the increase of greenhouse gas emissions with private cars, an important contributor. Both issues highlight the urgent need to develop alternative renewable fuel sources with less harmful emissions such as hydrogen, derived from water, and biofuels, which compete for land with food crops, both of which cost much more than the cheap twentieth century oil. Much higher fuel prices would have far reaching consequences for economies and so cieties predicated on cheap oil and low cost personal mobility and cause time/space divergence. Demand for transport would reduce but the spatial structure of so ciety would take many years to adapt.

Transport Geography

Transport geography has the potential to make sub stantial contributions to examining the consequences of the demise of cheap oil and the search for more sus tainable but dearer energy supplies.

golden opportunity for transport geography to reposition itself back into the core of human geography. Mass car ownership has transformed personal mobil ity and permitted and encouraged the dispersal of ac tivity sites for employment, retailing, warehousing, and leisure to car accessible locations especially near to junctions on high capacity roads. Average yearly distance traveled has increased sharply in developed countries with leisure travel exceeding work journeys and domin ated by car and air travel. However, people without ac cess to cars suffer increasing social exclusion and reduced accessibility as more activity sites move beyond walking distance. This is compounded by a well above inflation increase in bus and train fares and most people who are dependent on public transport have low incomes. Car ownership and availability is far from universal and varies with geographical location as well as by in come, age, gender, and disability. The need to own a car increases in rural and smaller urban areas where public transport services are more limited or nonexistent (Table 2). This is reflected in much higher proportions of households with regular use of cars in rural areas and smaller towns, in all income groups and accounting for a much higher share of household income. The ability to drive also varies by age and gender. There are still sig nificant albeit declining differences by age, especially for those over 70 years old. The gender gap between males and females is particularly pronounced in the age groups over 50 years old (Table 3). In an increasingly mobile world, access or lack of access to cars provides the main distinction between people who are highly mobile and enjoy good accessibility and those who are increasingly isolated. Locational differences add to a substantial re search agenda which is at the heart of human geography and social science inquiry. The failure of the ‘predict and provide’ policy, of trying to build new road space to accommodate the growing volume of car traffic, led to Phil Goodwin’s espousal of a ‘new realism’ in transport policy which prioritizes demand management and improved public transport. In Great Britain, local authorities have been given a new re sponsibility to undertake accessibility planning of medical,

Mobility and Accessibility The significance of transport and travel in geographical inquiry is undiminished. We are in an age of un precedented personal mobility at local, national, and international scales throughout the developed world. The movement of people is now at the core of social science research exemplified by Mimi Sheller and John Urry’s ‘new mobilities’ paradigm. The increasing significance of mobilities and transport flows and spaces provides a

Figure 6 Copenhagen’s Finger Plan 1947. From Knowles, R. D. (2006). Journal of Transport Geography 14, 418.

Table 2

449

Households with regular use of cars by type of area in Great Britain 2005

Type of area

Cars per household

No car (%)

One car (%)

Two or more cars (%)

Greater London Provincial conurbations Other urban areas: Over 250k 25 250k 10 25k 3 10k Rural areas Great Britain

0.83 0.99

39 32

43 41

18 27

1.14 1.13 1.13 1.24 1.59 1.15

23 25 23 20 11 25

45 43 47 43 37 43

32 31 30 37 52 32

Source of data: Transport Statistics 2006. London, Department for Transport.

450

Transport Geography

Table 3

Full car driving licence holders by age and gender in the UK 1975/6 2003

Age Group

17 20 21 29 30 39 40 49 50 59 60 69 70 þ All adults

Male (%)

Female (%)

Gender gap (M F) (%)

1975/6

2003

1975/6

2003

1975/6

2003

36 78 85 83 75 58 32 69

31 74 88 91 90 87 69 81

20 43 48 37 24 15 4 29

24 62 77 78 69 59 27 61

16 35 37 46 51 43 28 40

7 12 11 13 21 28 42 20

Source of raw data: Transport Statistics 2004. London, Department for Transport.

Transport component

Land-use component Locations and characteristics of demand

Supply

Demand competition

Passenger and freight travel

Travel demand Available opportunities

Travel time, costs, efforts

Supply

Demand

Locations and characteristics of infrastructure

Locations and characteristics of opportunities Accessibility to opportunities

Temporal component Opening hours of shops and services Available time for activities

= Direct relationship

Individual component Needs, abilities opportunities

Time restrictions Available time

= Indirect relationship

Income, gender educational level Vehicle ownership, etc.

= Feedback loop

Figure 7 Relationships between components of accessibility. From Geurs, K. T. and van Wee, B. (2004). Journal of Transport Geography 12, 129.

retailing, and educational facilities. This has helped to revive interest among human geographers and other social scientists in the concept of accessibility as a means of tackling mobility deprivation (Figure 7).

Conclusion This chapter has traced the development of transport geography as a subdiscipline of human geography and explored its changing relationships with other transport disciplines and social sciences. An earlier focus on

positivist and quantitative methodologies has shifted to include nonpositivist and qualitative methodologies. The differential collapse in time–space and cost–space has enhanced the importance of location contrary to a widely held view in human geography that transport has become relatively unimportant. Telecommunications have trans formed communication but have not eliminated the im portance of distance. Transport innovations, especially in freight shipping, continue to play a central role in glob alization processes. Relationships between transport and economic development are important but complex and difficult to measure. As well as centrality, locational

Transport Geography

qualities of proximity and intermediacy have become increasingly important in more flexible and deregulated transport markets. Urban expansion continues to be enabled by transport innovations but constrained by planning restrictions and more expensive fuel. The sus tainability of future transport fuel supply will become even more important after peak oil production has been reached. In an increasingly mobile world, personal mo bility and accessibility are central to transport geography inquiry and should reposition the subdiscipline at the core of human geography. See also: Human Geography; Mobility; Transport and Accessibility; Transport and Deregulation; Transport and Globalization; Transport and Social Exclusion.

Further Reading Black, W. R. (2003). Transportation: A Geographical Analysis. New York: Guilford Press.

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Fleming, D. K. and Hayuth, Y. (1994). Spatial characteristics of transportation hubs: Centrality and intermediacy. Journal of Transport Geography 2, 3 18. Goetz, A. R. (2006). Transport geography: Reflecting on a subdiscipline and identifying future research trajectories. The insularity issue in transport geography. Journal of Transport Geography 14, 230 231. Goetz, A. R., Ralston, B. A., Stutz, F. P. and Leinbach, T. R. (2004). Transportation geography. In Gaile, G. L. & Wilmott, C. J. (eds.) Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoyle, B. S. and Knowles, R. D. (eds.) (1998). Modern Transport Geography (2nd edn.). Chichester: Wiley. Keeling, D. J. (2007). Transportation geography: New directions on well worn trails. Progress in Human Geography 31(2), 217 225. Knowles, R. D. (2006). Transport shaping space: Differential collapse in time space. Journal of Transport Geography 14, 407 425. Knowles, R. D., Shaw, J. and Docherty, I. (eds.) (2008). Transport Geographies: Mobilities, Flows and Spaces. Oxford: Blackwell. Preston, J. and Raje, F. (2007). Accessibility, mobility and transport related social exclusion. Journal of Transport Geography 15, 151 160. Rodrigue, J. P., Comtois, C. and Slack, B. (2006). The Geography of Transport Systems. New York: Routledge. Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A 38, 207 226. Tolley, R. S. and Turton, B. J. (1995). Transport Systems, Policy and Planning: A Geographical Approach. Harlow: Longman.

Transport, Public J. Preston, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Elasticity The ratio of the proportionate change in one variable with respect to the proportionate change in another. An example of an own elasticity is the elasticity of the demand for bus with respect to its own price. An example of a cross elasticity is the elasticity of the demand for bus with respect to the price of car. Interconnection The extent to which transport networks are connected in physical terms both within and between modes. Intermodality Passenger (or goods) movements that consist of a combined chain from origin to destination involving at least two different modes (excluding walking for passengers). Interoperability The ability of national and geographically defined transport networks to provide operations and services across national borders and across physical and technical barriers. Returns to Scale The proportionate change in output divided by the proportionate change in inputs (and hence with fixed input prices, the proportionate change in costs). It is the inverse of the cost elasticity with respect to output. Value of Time The ratio of the marginal utility of time to the marginal utility of money. It is used to convert time into money units.

Introduction Public transport may be defined as any mode of transport available for hire and reward. In other words, any form of transport available for use by the general public. This includes not only bus and rail, but also taxis, as well as air and sea services. It can include both passenger and freight services, although own account freight services (where a company moves its own goods) are not normally thought of as public transport. In practice, the term public trans port (transit in the US) has tended to refer to land based passenger transport and, especially, bus and rail services. Even where the definition of public transport is limited to bus and rail services (and variants thereof), there is a spectrum of modes that may be considered can be dis tinguished in terms of costs and capacity (see Figure 1). Low capacity and low cost public transport systems include taxis, mini micro buses and paratransit. Higher cost variants include demand responsive transport (DRT) and personal rapid transit (PRT) systems. Examples of

452

PRT include the ParkShuttle system in use at Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam) and the ultra light transport (ULTra) system being developed for Heathrow Airport (London). Medium capacity public transport systems include various bus and tram technologies including single deck, double deck, and articulated buses/coaches and trolley buses. In addition, there are traditional trams (streetcars in the US) and more modern light rapid transit (LRT) systems. Bus systems may have their own road space (bus lanes and busways) and their own guidance (either curb, electronic, or optical). Guided bus (O bahn in Germany) and LRT systems are sometimes referred to as inter mediate public transport as they may be seen to combine features of both bus and rail systems. However, con ventional bus systems, when operated with articulated vehicles in convoys with dedicated stops and rights of way, can reach high capacities. An early example of such a system was Sao Paulo (Brazil). More recently these systems are being formalized as bus rapid transit (BRT) systems, as exemplified by Bogota (Colombia). High capacity public transport systems are normally associated with heavy rail technology. A distinction can be made between urban, suburban, and inter urban ser vices. Urban rail services (U bahn in Germany) are typified by short station spacings, high frequencies, electric traction, and underground routes in the central area. Examples include the London Underground, the Paris Metro, and the New York Subway. Suburban ser vices (S bahn in Germany) have longer spacings between stops, less frequent services, run predominantly on the surface, and can include diesel traction (at least outside Germany). Inter urban services have long gaps between stops, relatively infrequent services, and can involve a

Rail-based systems

Intermediate public transport

Costs

Glossary

Bus-based systems Taxi-based systems Capacity

Figure 1 Schematic taxonomy of public transport modes.

Transport, Public

mix of diesel and electric traction. A distinction can be made between conventional rail services and high speed services (the definition of which usually requires top speeds in excess of 250 km h 1) such as the Shinkansen in Japan, the train a` grand vitesse (TGV) in France, and the InterCity Express (ICE) services in Germany. Interesting technologies that do not easily fit into these categories include monorail systems (such as the early suspended system in Wuppertal, Germany, and the more recent straddle system in Sydney, Australia), mag lev (such as the Shanghai Airport service), and flywheel technology (such as the Parry People Mover system in Stourbridge, England). Hybrid track sharing systems have been developed in Germany, with light rail and heavy suburban rail sharing tracks (Karlsruhe) or even guided bus and rail sharing tracks (Essen). There is no such subdiscipline as public transport geography and whatever work has been done by geog raphers has tended to be interdisciplinary, carried out in conjunction with engineers, economists, and planners, among others. Academic work on public transport has focused on three main themes. The first theme is that of public transport operations as spatial systems worthy of study in their own right. The second theme, driven by transport economists as much as geographers, focuses on the economics of public transport systems and has tended to provide more analytical accounts, with an emphasis on elasticities, returns to scale (RTS), and cost–benefit op timization. The third theme highlights the role of public transport as a derived demand. People do not usually demand public transport in, and of, itself (although in some cases, such as heritage steam railways, they clearly do) but from the derived benefits of being able to engage in economic and social activity. There has therefore been interest in ways that public transport interacts with the wider economy and promotes social inclusion, as well as the impact of public transport on the environment, its interaction with private transport, and its contribution to sustainable development.

Operations One area that geographers have focused on is the role of public transport operations across the globe. A useful distinction here can be made between developed, de veloping, and transitional economies. In developed countries, public transport use often peaked during or just after World War II and since the early 1950s has exhibited a long decline, particularly for bus transport. The United States represents an extreme example where, outside the major cities, bus and rail use is negligible. Countries such as Australia and Canada exhibit similar trends. The decline has been less extreme in Western Europe and in the developed economies of East Asia.

Table 1 (2002)

Passenger transport shares in selected countries Car (%)

Great Britain France Germany Poland Japana USAa

453

Bus and coach (%)

Rail (%)

Passenger kms per capita

88.1

6.4

5.5

12 430

86.7 82.7 77.0 61.5 96.2

4.7 8.9 13.5 7.0 3.5

8.6 8.4 9.5 31.5 0.3

14 283 10 276 5691 9592 23 388

a 2001 data. Source: UK Department for Transport. (DfT) (2005). Transport Stat istics Great Britain. London: DfT. Tables 10.1 and 10.6.

Indeed in certain countries (Switzerland, Japan), absolute levels of public transport use have increased, although the relative importance of public transport has declined with the rise of the motor car. Table 1 shows that even among major developed nations there are large variations in mobility levels and modal shares, with public transport only having a 4% share of the passenger market in the US but a 38% share in Japan. Whereas the problems for public transport in de veloped countries are associated with insufficient and declining demand, in developing countries problems tend to be associated with growing demand and insufficient supply. Public transport use is often high, rail provision is limited, and conventional bus services are overcrowded, unreliable, and slow. Bus fleets are often characterized by high failure rates, due to inadequate investment in ve hicles and maintenance facilities and a shortage of spare parts (which often have to be imported). Paratransit services of various types and various degrees of legality have often emerged to satisfy unmet demand. Examples include Jeepneys in the Philippines, Dolmus in Turkey, KombiVans in South Africa, and Matatu in Kenya. These modes are sometimes referred to as informal or un conventional public transport. With respect to long distance passenger transport, rail plays an important role in countries such as China and India but has a less important role in much of Latin America and Africa. The role of public transport is different again in the transitional economies of the Former Soviet Union and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Under Communist rule, public transport had very high market shares, with particularly high use of tram and trolleybus technology. The transition to market economies saw a rapid decline in public transport use and a corresponding increase in motorization. Market shares have since sta bilized somewhat (albeit still with year on year losses of share for public transport), and remain higher than in Western Europe. A major challenge is the funding of the investment required by the dilapidated public transport infrastructure.

454

Transport, Public

One area of active study is the determination of the appropriate public transport mode in different locations. The emphasis has been on radial corridors in major cities in the peak hour and peak direction, where the choice has between bus, heavy rail, and intermediate public transport technologies (see Figure 2). However, geog raphers have also highlighted that suburb to/from central business district movements no longer dominate urban transport patterns in the way they once did. Suburb to suburb movements have correspondingly become more important. These circumferential (or orbital) movements are more difficult to serve by conventional public trans port due to their diffuse nature and the low density of flows. Emphasis has been placed on examining the scope for more flexible forms of public transport such as dial a ride and web based versions that are collectively referred to as demand responsive transport. The scope for these services to feed into conventional public transport at key interchange transfer points has also been examined. Quantitative variants of this work have involved the de velopments of public transport network modeling tools such as the Volvo Interactive Planning System (VIPS – now incorporated in the VISUM suite of programs) and the use of operations research tools to optimize the use of vehicles and staff.

With respect to inter urban transport, a key area of study has been examination of the evolution of public transport networks. Initial work was stimulated by Taaffe, Morill, and Gould’s deterministic model of the devel opment of transport networks in West Africa. Behavioral and probabilistic variants were also developed, such as Kansky’s work on the development of the railroad net work in Sicily. More generic work on the evolution of transport systems highlighted the role of historical, technological, physical, economic, political, and social factors. With respect to the morphology of transport systems, one area of research has been efficacy of fully connected networks compared to sparser networks based on hub and spoke principles. The bulk of research has focused on air passenger transport and container ship ping, but there have been applications to express coach and urban buses. Quantitative variants of this work use graph theory and accessibility indices to measure the impacts of new public transport links. There has also been interest in the interrelationships between different scales and types of (public) transport. The European Commission has referred to this as the ‘three Is’. The first I is the physical interconnection be tween local (urban and rural), national, and international networks. Trans European Networks (TENs) are being

200 180

Average operating costs (p pkm 1)

160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20

0

10 000

20 000

30 000

40 000

50 000

60 000

70 000

80 000

90 000

100 000

Demand (average daily passengers) SingleBus Bus (single) on bus lane DoubleBus (Guided) Modern light rail Regional heavy rail LRV

ArtBus Bus (single) on busway Guided light transit LRV tracksharing Underground

DoubleBus SingleBus (guided) Minibus Suburban heavy rail Personal rapid transit

Light rail vehicle.

Figure 2 Average operating costs as a function of demand for a 12 km urban public transport route (in pence per passenger kilometer, 2000 prices). Source: www.tsu.ox.ac.uk/research/test.

Transport, Public

developed to improve interconnectivity. The second I is the interoperability between different transport systems. For example, although there are physical connections between Europe’s rail systems, differences in track and loading gauges, electric traction, train control, signaling, and operating practices, make it difficult for services to operate across national systems. European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) has been developed to overcome such technical aspects of the interoperability issue. The third I is intermodality. This is normally framed with respect to road services providing feeder services for the movement of containers by rail but is also relevant for public transport, particularly the develop ment of the parkway concept for rail services.

Economics Academic work on public transport has been somewhat dominated by transport economists who tend to down play the spatial nature of their work. The key contri bution of geographers has been to highlight the spatial nature of economic concepts such as public transport demand, supply, prices, investments, regulation, and ownership. With respect to demand, economists note that public transport is like most other economic goods, in that de mand is a function of the price of the good, the price of rival goods, income, and tastes. However, demand is also a function of the amount supplied, as waiting times and walking times decrease as service is increased. This leads to the Mohring Effect whereby average user cost de creases as more service is provided. Demand is also a function of journey quality and in particular speed. Price and time variables are often brought together into a generalized cost measure. In public transport demand analysis, the key indi cators are elasticities, which measure the ratio between the proportionate change in one variable and the pro portionate change in another. The most widely used elasticity is the elasticity of demand with respect to price, which is the proportionate change in demand divided by the proportionate change in price. For example, for local bus travel an elasticity of –0.4 is often quoted which suggests that if bus fares increase by 10%, a decrease in demand of 4% can be expected. By contrast, for many long distance journeys by rail the price elasticity is greater than 1 (in absolute terms). This is an important threshold because when the elasticity exceeds 1 (in ab solute terms), a reduction in fares can lead to increases in revenue. It is in such elastic markets that budget fares are offered. As well as for price, elasticities have been esti mated for journey time, wait time (or proxies such as headway, frequency, or vehicle kilometer), access/egress time, and reliability. Compilations of the available

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evidence on elasticities are provided by a number of bodies, such as the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) in the UK (see also Figure 3), the Transportation Research Board (in the US), and the Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics (BTRE) in Australia. Some researchers have conducted meta analyses of these studies. In absolute terms, elasticities tend to be higher: in the off peak (than the peak); for optional, leisure jour neys (rather than mandatory, business and commuting journeys); for inter urban journeys (compared to local journeys); and in situations where public transport has competition from other modes. High income travelers (such as business people) tend to be time sensitive with high service quality elasticities but low price elasticities. Low income travelers (such as students and the elderly) tend to be price sensitive with high price elasticities and low service quality elasticities. Besides own elasticities – the elasticity of one aspect of a particular good (say rail demand) with respect to another aspect of that good (say rail price) – cross elasticities have also been heavily researched. They are the elasticity of one aspect of a particular good (say public transport demand), with respect to another aspect of another good (say private transport price). They will be positive where goods are substitutes (car and bus) but negative where goods are complements (car and rail based park and ride). They are heavily influenced by market shares. In advanced economies, where public transport has relatively low market shares, the cross elasticity of car demand with respect to public transport price is often very low (substantially less than 0.1). By contrast, the cross elasticity of public transport demand to car price can be quite high as can cross elasticities within the public transport market. Another measure that is widely used is the value of time. This is the ratio of the marginal utility of time to the marginal utility of money. A number of meta analyses have been undertaken of values of time. For travel during the course of work, empirical studies suggest the value of time is broadly equivalent to the wage rate plus over heads (superannuation, national insurance, etc.). For other travel (including travel to and from work), it is often found to be between a quarter and a half of the wage rate. The value of time is therefore closely corre lated with income. The value of travel time for rail is usually higher than that for bus for two reasons. First, rail has a higher proportion of business travelers. Second, rail users tend to have higher incomes than bus users. Similar measures have been developed to determine the values placed on comfort (e.g., the level of overcrowding), in formation provision (pretrip, at stop, and on vehicle), station facilities, etc. With respect to the supply of public transport, economists note that this is a function of the price of public transport, the price of rival products, input prices

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Public transport UK and outside SR Public transport UK SR Public transport outside UK SR Bus UK and outside SR Bus UK SR Bus outside UK SR Metro UK and outside SR Metro UK SR Metro outside UK SR Suburban rail UK and outside SR Suburban rail UK SR Suburban rail outside UK SR Bus UK MR Bus UK LR Metro UK LR Bus London SR Bus outside London SR Suburban rail SE England SR

2003 study

Suburban rail outside SE England SR 1980 study

Bus UK P SR Bus UK OP SR Metro UK P SR Metro UK OP SR Suburban rail UK P SR Suburban rail UK OP SR 0.00

0.20

0.40

0.60

0.80

1.00

1.20

1.40

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Figure 3 Summary of mean values and ranges of fare elasticities. SR Short run, MR Medium run, LR Long run, P Peak, OP Off peak. Source: Balcombe, R. (ed.) (2004). The Demand for Public Transport: A Practical Guide. TRL Report 593. Crowthorne: TRL, Figure 3.1.

(and in particular the wage rate and the price of capital – the interest rate), the objectives of producers, and the level of technology. In advanced economies, where cap ital is relatively cheap and labor expensive, capital in tensive forms of production are employed such as the automated Val system in Lille (France). In developing economies, where labor is cheap and capital expensive, labor intensive forms of production are employed such as the hand drawn rickshaws of Kolkotta (India). Cost and productivity studies have been deployed to determine the optimal conditions for public transport production and a number of reviews are available in the literature. Studies show that the cost of provision in the peak is often much higher than the off peak (due to lower util ization of staff and vehicles) and, for bus travel, provision in urban areas is more costly than in rural areas, largely due to the greater peakiness of demand and more con gested roads. Publicly owned firms may have output maximizing rather than profit maximizing objectives and will tend to produce more service than privately owned firms. Moreover, the costs of publicly owned firms are

often higher than privately owned firms, while firms fa cing competition often have lower costs than firms pro tected from competition. In studies of public transport supply, emphasis has been placed on RTS – the proportionate change in output divided by the proportionate change in inputs (which, with fixed input prices, is the inverse of the cost elasticity with respect to output). Where RTS are greater than 1, the firm exhibits increasing returns (economies of scale) and would benefit from being larger (see Figure 4a). Where the RTS are less than 1, the firm exhibits decreasing returns (diseconomies of scale) and would benefit from being smaller. Where the RTS are 1, the firm exhibits constant returns and is of optimal size (at least in terms of technical efficiency). For the bus industry, econometric studies suggest that firms exhibit constant returns across a broad range of outputs from 100 vehicles to 1000 vehicles or more. However, this assumes constant input prices. In practice, smaller firms may benefit from the use of cheaper, nonunionized labor, while larger firms can exploit purchasing power

AC

Transport, Public

Increasing RTS

Constant RTS

Decreasing RTS

Size e.g., VKM

AC

(a)

Increasing RTD

(b)

Constant RTD

Decreasing RTD

Density e.g., VKM/NKM AC Average cost NKM Network kilometers RTD Returns to density RTS Returns to scale VKM Vehicle kilometers

Figure 4 (a) Economies of scale; (b) Economies of density.

advantages for fuel, vehicles, and capital. It has been ar gued that the ‘big five’ stock exchange listed public transport companies that have emerged in the UK (First Group, Stagecoach, Arriva, Go Ahead, and National Express) try to simultaneously mimic being big (e.g., purchasing done centrally) and small (operations de volved to the depot level). For the rail industry, econo metric studies in Europe suggest that there may be economies of scale for small railway companies such as in the Republic of Ireland and diseconomies for large rail way companies such as Deutsche Bahn (DB, Germany) and Socie´te´ Nationale des Chemins de fer Franc¸ais (SNCF, France). Optimal sized companies might include the railways in Belgium and Norway. However, most railways exhibit increasing returns to density (RTD) in that costs decrease less proportionately than density (train kilometers per route kilometer) (see Figure 4b). This is particularly true of the lightly trafficked Nordic

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railway (Finland, Norway, Sweden). By contrast, the congested system in the Netherlands exhibits decreasing returns. With respect to fares, simplified systems based on flat fares, zonal fares, or distance related fares, with or without a taper with distance, are the norm for local public transport. For longer distance public transport, more complex fare regimes exist, partly because of the prevalence of prebooking and off vehicle sales. In such circumstances, public transport firms may try to intro duce perfect price discrimination in which prices vary by the amount of travel purchased and by the type of tra veler (first degree price discrimination). For example, discounts may be offered to regular travelers through the provision of season tickets, network cards, and smartcards (such as Octopus in Hong Kong or Oyster in London) or through brand loyalty schemes (similar to the frequent flyer programs offered by airlines). This is referred to as second degree price discrimination. In addition, different fares may be offered to different types of travelers. For example, many train companies charge higher fares for services believed to be used by business travelers and lower fares for services believed to be used by leisure users, based on the time and direction of travel, the de gree of flexibility required, and the time of booking. This is referred to as third degree price discrimination and may be compounded by product differentiation (e.g., the distinction between first class and standard rail services). The outcome of such revenue yield systems is a geog raphy of public transport prices that is highly variegated by both space and time. Similar variations exist in terms of patterns of public transport investment and subsidy. Cost–benefit analyses show that the best returns from public transport invest ments tend to occur in congested urban areas and on heavily used inter urban routes, although recent work suggests that the appraisal of mega projects, particularly rail, may exhibit systematic upward biases. Investments in smaller urban areas and in rural areas, at least in ad vanced economies, can rarely be justified on narrowly defined cost–benefit grounds but can be justified using more qualitative multicriteria analysis. In many parts of the world, public transport is sub sidized and there are a number of reasons why this should be so. The Mohring effect provides a first best rationale for subsidizing high frequency urban public transport. Operator economies of scale (or more precisely density) may provide some basis for subsidizing certain inter urban services. The fact that car users do not pay the marginal external costs they generate (in terms of con gestion, accidents, and environmental costs), provides a second best argument for subsidizing public transport. Other arguments for subsidizing public transport include its option value as a standby for when private transport is not available and its merit good characteristics in

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providing basic levels of mobility for disadvantaged groups (such as the young, the elderly, and those on low incomes). Cost–benefit studies tend to show that public transport subsidies exhibit the highest returns in the big cities. However, in practice rural services are often heavily subsidized through revenue support, dispensation on fuel tax, and user subsidies. Another area of study has been that of ownership and competition in public transport. The classic public transport model has been one of public ownership and control. This model still exists in much of North America and Western Europe. The alternative model is one of private ownership and deregulation of fares and service levels. This is the model that was adopted for local buses in Great Britain (outside London) in the mid to late 1980s and was subsequently adopted by some other countries (most notably Chile and New Zealand). This is sometimes referred to as competition on the road. Yet another model, referred to as competition off the road, involves the public authority specifying services and private firms competing for the tenders to provide the services. Pioneers of this model form include San Diego (USA), London (UK), and Copenhagen (Denmark). Similar models exist in the rail industry but with a fur ther distinction in terms of the extent of vertical inte gration between operations and infrastructure. When Japan corporatized and then privatized its railways, they remained vertically integrated. By contrast, when rail ways were privatized in Great Britain, it was against a backdrop of a vertically fragmented industrial structure. Transport economists relate public ownership and con trol to public interest theories that emphasize the role of the state in controlling market failures. Economic geog raphers relate such polices to the Fordist/Keynesian consensus and regimes of mass accumulation. Similarly, transport economists relate the privatization and deregulation of public transport to neoliberal public choice theories that emphasize regulatory failure as a result of processes of capture and creep. Economic geographers relate this to post Fordist regimes of flexible accumulation.

Integrating Issues There are a number of issues that link public transport with other sectors of socioeconomic activity. The first issue is the impact that public transport can have on the wider economy. Geographers have long been interested in the interactions between land use and transport. Work by the International Study Group on Land Use and Transport Interaction (ISGLUTI) showed how public transport systems can lead to the centralization of urban employment and the decentralization of population. There have been extensive studies of the impact of new

urban public transport systems on land values, historical studies of the impact of railways on the development of national economies, and on the regional impacts of high speed rail. Recently the new economic geography has focused on the extent to which public transport (par ticularly rail) can promote agglomeration benefits. A second issue is the extent to which public transport can promote social inclusion. Studies have shown how cheap, frequent public transport can enhance the acces sibility of facilities and promote participation in civil society. However, these same studies have also shown how certain groups, such as the elderly, the disabled, and ethnic minorities, find existing public transport systems difficult to use. Research has therefore been undertaken to re engineer public transport so as to promote usability. A third issue is the extent to which public transport can promote environmental betterment. Per passenger kilometer, buses and trains tend to consume less energy and land, emit less air pollutants, make less noise, and contribute less to climate change than cars. However, this green advantage is being eroded as cars are designed to be more eco friendly and trains, for example, are tending to become heavier and more powerful. A fourth issue is the extent to which public transport can contribute to integrated transport. This has a number of aspects which are sometimes referred to as rungs on the integration ladder. The bottom rung is the integration between different modes of public transport, including coordinated timetables, integrated fare structures, and comprehensive information provision. The Verkehrsver bund of West Germany such as in Hamburg were early pioneers of this form of integration. Middle rungs involve the integration of public and private transport policies. An example is the use of the congestion charge in central London to finance improvements to the bus system. Upper rungs of integration involve the coordination of transport activities with those in education, healthcare, and social services, while also integrating transport policy with policies concerning land use, the environment, and regional development. The fifth issue is the extent to which public transport can contribute to sustainable development. Sustainability could be thought of as a high level form of integration which brings together appropriate economic, social, and environmental criteria. International studies have shown that cities with high population densities and high public transport shares tend to be more sustainable, for example, in terms of energy consumption per capita. Examples include Hong Kong and Singapore. The development of public transport is seen as a key strategy in the promotion of smart growth. The role of public transport in pro moting sustainable communities is likely to be crucial for its future prospects. See also: Transport and Deregulation; Transport, Urban.

Transport, Public

Further Reading Balcombe, R. (ed.) (2004). The Demand for Public Transport: A Practical Guide. TRL Report 593. Crowthorne: TRL. Berechman, J. (1993). Public Transit Economics and Deregulation Policy. New York: North Holland. Davison, L. J. and Knowles, R. D. (2006). Bus quality partnerships, model shift and traffic decongestion. Journal of Transport Geography 14(3), 177 194. De Borger, B., Kerstens, K. and Costa, A. (2002). Public transit performance: What does one learn from frontier studies? Transport Reviews 22(1), 1 38. Flyvbjerg, B., Bruzelis, N. and Rothengatter, W. (2003). Megaprojects and Risk. An Anatomy of Ambition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanson, S. and Guiliano, G. (eds.) (2004). The Geography of Urban Transportation. New York: The Guilford Press (in particular see Chapter 8, Pucher, J., Public transportation). Hay, A. (1993). Equity and welfare in the geography of public transport. Journal of Transport Geography 1(2), 95 101. Iles, R. (2005). Public Transport in Developing Countries. Oxford: Elsevier. Kansky, K. J. (1963). Structure of Transportation Networks: Relationships between Network Geometry and Regional Characteristics. Department of Geography Research Paper 84. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Knowles, R. D. (1996). Transport impacts of Greater Manchester’s metrolink light rail system. Journal of Transport Geography 4(1), 1 14. Mohring, H. (1972). Optimisation and scale economies in bus transport. American Economic Review 62(4), 591 604. Nash, C. A. (1981). The Economics of Public Transport. London: Longman. Newman, P. and Kenworthy, J. (1999). Sustainability and Cities. Overcoming Automobile Dependence. Washington, DC: Island Press. Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM)/Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) (2003). Land Value and Public Transport. London: ODPM. Oum, T. H., Waters, W. G. and Yu, C. (1999). A survey of productivity and efficiency measurement in rail transport. Journal of Transport Economics and Policy 33(1), 9 42. Pratt, R. H. et al. (2000). Traveler Response to Transportation System Changes. TCRP Web Document 12, Washington DC: TRB.

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Shaw, J. (2000). Competition, Regulation and the Privatisation of British Rail. Aldershot: Ashgate. Taaffe, E. J., Morril, R. L. and Gould, P. R. (1963). Transport expansion in underdeveloped countries: A comparative analysis. Geographical Review 53, 503 529. UK Department for Transport (DfT) (2005). Transport Statistics Great Britain. London: DfT. Tables 10.1 and 10.6. Wardman, M. R. (1998). The value of travel time: A review of British evidence. Journal of Transport Economics and Policy 32(3), 285 316. Webster, F. V., Bly, P. H. and Paulley, N. J. (1988). Urban Land Use and Transport Interaction Policies and Models. Report of the International Study Group on Land Use Transport Interaction. Aldershot: Gower. White, P. R. (2002). Public Transport: Its Planning, Management and Operation (4th edn.). London: UCL Press.

Relevant Websites http://www.dynamic.dotars.gov.au Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics (BTRE) Transport Elasticities Database. http://www.cpt uk.org Confederation of Passenger Transport (CPT). http://www.eltis.org European Local Transport Information Service (ELTIS). http://www.its.usyd.edu.au International Conference on Competition and Ownership in Land Passenger Transport (the Thredbo Conference Named after the Location of the First Conference in 1989), Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies (ITLS). http://www.uitp.com International Union of Public Transport (Union Internationale des Transports Publics UITP). http://www.uic.asso.fr International Union of Railways (Union Internationale des Chemins de fer UIC). http://www.tsu.ox.ac.uk Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford.

Transport, Rural D. Banister, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Accessibility The ability to reach needed services and facilities. Accessibility Paradigm Builds on the uniqueness of place and the ability to reach needed services, but explicitly includes accessibility as a relative concept that has strong social and distributional implications. Demand Responsive Transport Public transport that does not operate on a fixed route or times, but ‘responds’ to the requirements of its passengers. Mobility The amount of travel undertaken. New Mobilities Paradigm Places are not fixed but implicated within complex networks which bring together certain performances in certain places at certain times.

Introduction The car dominates the transport scene in rural areas and this situation is likely to remain so, with the USA leading the way as over 97% of rural households own a car and over 91% of all trips are made by car. The pattern of usage across all ages, incomes, and race, is the same, and mobility levels are higher than those in urban areas due to the longer distances traveled. In one sense the rural transport problem has been solved and there is no debate in the USA, as those without cars are politically invisible as their numbers are so small. Similar patterns of car dependence can be found in other parts of the world, but to a lesser degree of domination. However, these headline figures disguise the fact that there is a sub stantial minority that cannot drive or does not have access to a car. Nationally in the UK, about a third of households have two or more cars (2005), but in rural areas this figure is 52%. About 75% of UK households have a car, but in rural areas this figure rises to 89% (2005). Within these headline figures, there is a substantial minority of people, including those under 17 years of age (nearly 20% of the rural population), households that are in the lowest income groups (35% of those in the lowest quintile are in non car owning households), and those that are too old to drive (19% of adults do not drive). In each of these groups (too young, too poor, or too old), mobility depends on others (lifts), public transport, and the availability of services and facilities within walking distance. The total figure for those without access to car

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as a driver is about 32%. This figure is derived from those who are too old or living in non car owning households – about 12% – and those too young to drive – about 20%. Getting around in rural areas is not a problem if you have the exclusive use of a car as a driver, but it is for the one third of the population that is dependent on others for their transport. Physical accessibility is described within the context of rural development and it is argued that social con structs should be seen as being as important. This in cludes the levels of car availability and its affordability. Alternative conceptualizations of accessibility are pre sented in terms of the remoteness and income trade offs, the importance of social justice and social inclusion, and the essentially aspatial arguments presented as part of the new mobilities paradigm. The contrasting situation in developing countries is covered as rural migration and abstraction may take place out of the rural areas to the cities, leading to hardship and greater poverty in the rural areas. Finally, some future prospects are summarized.

Transport and Rural Development Rural development provides the wider context within which transport facilitates the means to gain access to work, leisure, and other opportunities, but the uniqueness of location must also be recognized. Each situation is different and there is no universality in solutions, as illustrated in Table 1. Much of the debate has revolved around physical concepts of accessibility, with less attention being paid to social and distributional issues such as affordability, employment opportunities, gender differences, and educational and skills levels. Remoteness is not a matter of poor infrastructure in rural areas, as the quality and extent of the road network are both good, but a problem of income, social constraints, and lack of services for those without cars. It seems that social justice has strong spatial dimensions in rural areas – this is the poverty of access. Addressing this problem requires a wide range of innovative thinking and services, including promoting better use of available car and taxi services, such as the taxicab innovation resulting from the deregulation of bus services in rural Sweden. There is a considerable trans port resource already available, and at a modest cost it would be possible to use new technology to encourage lift sharing, car pooling, and flexibility in travel times to raise occupancy levels. Many of the travel demand

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Table 1

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Transport and rural development

Evidence Economic issues 1. Higher levels of employment are observed in rural areas, with increases in commuting distances and willingness to travel 2. Informal networks are effective at finding jobs in buoyant local labor markets where there are reasonable levels of accessibility 3. Perceptions of the rural area important to employers and inward investment good quality transport infrastructure often quoted as an important factor 4. With new infrastructure, competition increases across labor market areas and may reduce wages in rural areas even further 5. There is limited evidence on specialization and increases in productivity brought about by transport investment 6. Migration to rural areas through better transport may raise rural house prices 7. Abstraction effects of transport investments, and the opportunity for businesses to serve regions rather than localities 8. Logistics is more important than just cost minimization 9. Limited evidence of road-induced relocation and expansion Social issues 10. Social exclusion is reduced through subsidy to the service and to the user 11. Fuels costs are important to the rural poor as there are no alternative forms of transport to the car 12. Accessibility in rural areas has been used primarily in a physical transport context combining income and remoteness

Comments Restricted to the better-paid and well-qualified population; problems for low-skilled and older (>50 years) unemployed, and for women, part-time employed, and others (e.g., students) Possession of a driving licence is a good indicator of employability and motivation to get a job Transport costs are a small proportion of overall business costs transport infrastructure enables labor mobility rather than reducing distribution costs Wage rates for rural residents may also rise if they are prepared to travel to work elsewhere net effect is a widening difference in rural income levels Need here for more monitoring and ex-post studies; transport costs important at the margin and need to be seen in relation to profits, as well as costs Limited evidence of this effect, and it may also put upward pressures on rural wage levels Debates about increases in agglomeration and economies of scale from larger production units, and the resulting increases in travel distances this depends on the costs of transport Distribution networks are based on a mix of cost, time, reliability, and flexibility criteria Importance of roads in perceptions of competitiveness and image of area The modes used are more important than the infrastructure hence the tendency to invest in capital projects means that social exclusion may be increased, not reduced The impacts of higher fuel prices can be over-estimated, as rural drivers travel further but more economically Accessibility needs to be broadened as a concept to include institutional and organizational barriers; poverty (and lack of skills and motivation) is also a structural issue

From Banister, D. (2005). What are sustainable rural communities? Thought piece for the commission for rural communities, Cheltenham, October, p 38.

patterns in rural areas are small in scale and diffuse, and ideal for private transport. There may also be environ mental benefits in the sense that a full car or taxi is better than an empty bus. The main aim of public transport policy should be to increase effectiveness through transforming bus com panies from service providers to managers of a range of mobility services. This would include better co ordination of all services currently operated by a variety of different agencies (e.g., Demand Responsive Trans port), the introduction of rural transport brokers (already operating in some local authorities in the UK), much closer linkages with all service provision (e.g., pensions, postal services, shops, health centers, and education facilities), and a new role of facilitator bringing together car sharing schemes, the voluntary and community sectors, social services transport, and the delivery of goods and services to needy households. Transport would

become fully integrated with rural service provision and it would concentrate on providing for those without access to a car, as well as improving the use of all available forms of transport. The broader issue raised here is whether public policy should continue to subsidize the higher costs of providing a whole range of services and facilities in rural areas. The longer distances make it more expensive and harder to provide the same level of provision as in urban areas, and this problem is magnified by the lower levels of demand in rural areas. The provision of affordable housing in more accessible locations might encourage people to move from the remote areas to the more accessible areas, where services and employment opportunities are easier to provide. The debate here concerns the promotion of more traditional approaches to public responsibility for social welfare, as compared with the more recent expectations of individualism and self reliance, while at

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the same time recognizing the importance of cultural dif ferences and accepting that there is no universal solution.

Social Constructs Accessibility planning is concerned about coordinating transport with business priorities and the need to main tain social inclusion, so that those at risk can be identified and access to employment increased. In the past, little attention seems to have been placed on ensuring acces sibility to key services and employment, either through transport or location policies, and this has increased social exclusion, with the common perception that the lack of access to private transport is an instrumental barrier. The lack of an integrated approach to the location of employment and key services, combined with poor public transport provision, have again reinforced social exclusion, and it is often those same excluded people that are affected by the negative externalities from transport due to the higher levels of traffic noise and pollution. This argument was powerfully presented by the UK Social Exclusion Unit (2003), but reflects the wider concerns in the European Union (EU), Australia, and the USA about migration from rural areas and the perception that rural areas are becoming the domain of rich car drivers seeking a higher quality of life (Figure 1). Specific groups at risk have been highlighted. An analysis of secondary data sourced mainly from UK government statistics, found that poor transport limits women’s employment and quality of life, as women rely more upon trip chaining and off peak travel (owing to part time work). Rethinking public transport to meet the needs of women would have commercial, inclusion, and environmental benefits. In addition, evidence shows that women can face constraints in their travel patterns, and hence employment opportunities, as a result of their household responsibilities. High income

No accessibility problems

Increasing mobility Accessibility problems

Low income

The Select Committee on Education and Employ ment (1998) reported that lone parents were at a dis advantage in getting to work as only 35% have access to a car, compared with 90% of couples with children. Similarly, other research has found that travel problems, connected with childcare, low wages, and part time work can act as a barrier to employment and that some em ployers also discriminated on travel to work grounds, particularly if the employee did not have their own car. Residents of rural areas are at risk from exclusion. A survey of unemployed job seekers in the north of Scotland highlighted the problem in that despite the majority of these job seekers holding current driving licenses, relatively few had access to their own transport. The cost of owning and running a vehicle was cited as the main reason for this. For 54% of the long term unemployed, the costs associated with private transport were viewed as an important barrier to work. Socio economic factors, such as gender, having dependent children, and low education levels, have been found to be more influential in determining shorter potential travel times of job seekers (and hence increasing the chance of gaining employment) than the provision of public transport accessibility and access to private transport. The evaluation of the rural transport partnerships (RTPs) in England has examined about 100 of the more than 600 schemes funded by the Countryside Agency in collaboration with other rural agencies. Their main benefits have been to help lever additional levels of funding for innovative transport schemes, and this in turn has benefited local businesses through increased local spending by residents and tourists. The RTP projects have also opened up new opportunities for those without alternative transport, and over a third of projects were considered to have contributed to the regeneration of deprived areas. Half the projects also impacted positively on rural employment, through providing direct jobs, as well as encouraging higher levels of rural spend. Reductions in social exclusion can be achieved through enhanced accessibility provided by improvements to the planning and delivery of local transport and the location of employment and key services in accessible locations. Existing planning policy guidelines are designed to pro mote the location of employment in accessible areas by ensuring that new business developments which em ploy large numbers of people are located in urban centers and/or near public transport interchanges.

New Conceptualizations Near town

Remote

Increasing accessibility

Figure 1 The remoteness and income trade-offs.

Transport problems in rural areas can be summarized along two dimensions, remoteness and income levels (Figure 1). Along the diagonal there are few problems, as those on high incomes have a car available and can afford

Transport, Rural

to live in the remote locations. Less affluent households can live in or near to the urban centers where there are better public transport facilities and where travel distances are shorter. Those locations or income groups above the diagonal also have no problems as the income axis outweighs the remoteness axis. It is in those households that fall below the diagonal where problems lie, as their income remoteness situation is not in balance. This is often not a physical problem of lack of transport infrastructure, but a social and economic problem of lack of income and suitable public transport or other service provision. This can be addressed through subsidy and service provision (both transport and non transport alternatives) to reduce the levels of remoteness or raise their effective income levels so that they move toward the diagonal – this is a mobility solution to increase their propensity to travel through subsidy. Alternatively, they could move away from the remote area to again reach the threshold situation (i.e., the diagonal in Figure 1) at a given level of income. This is an accessibility solution to increase their proximity to jobs, services, and facilities. The responsibility for accessibility planning cuts across most public sector activities in rural areas, suggesting that a ‘structural’ perspective has been used that assumes the means to tackle social exclusion is essentially aspatial. Poverty and low income, lack of qualifications and skills, low levels of economic activity, as well as age and gender, are all structural factors used to explain the lack of opportunity, but equally important is the issue of poverty of access. Accessibility is central to social justice, but not all areas can have or should have the same levels of accessibility. People make residential location choices as to what is more important to them, whether it is acces sibility or a higher quality environment. In this new accessibility paradigm it is argued that accessibility is not an absolute concept but one that has strong relative dimensions in terms of needs and rights (in the Rawlsian tradition). By setting accessibility as a general goal, it provides the necessary impetus for policy sectors to work together to achieve greater social justice and social inclusion. This contrasts with the new mobilities paradigm that moves away from spatiality and scale, arguing that places are not fixed but implicated within complex networks by which hosts, guests, buildings, objects and machines are con tingently brought together to produce certain perform ances in certain places at certain times. (Hannam et al., 2006: 13)

Here it is argued that places are not rural but they are dynamic and create co presence in a variety of ways.

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In both paradigms thinking has gone way beyond tradi tional physical concepts of remoteness and income (Figure 1), to cover social inclusion and social justice on the one hand, and social capital and the sociology of networking, including the existence of small worlds that are spatially independent, on the other. The new more abstract notion of social capital and the nonexistence of space ignores the spatial imperative and the real difficulties that poor residents in rural areas have as a result of their physical remoteness. There needs to be an acceptance that social capital and networks are dependent on accessibility, and that limited mobility will in turn limit social capital. This seems to be a reformu lation of the old debate between mobility, as the amount of travel and networking (quantity), and accessibility, as the ease with which needed facilities and activities can be reached (quality).

Developing Countries The provision of rural transport services is often cited as being central to development in developing countries, as it is argued that there is a strong link between economic growth and transport. However, the evidence is not clear as transport provides a strong complementarity to other economic and social factors. Transport is again linked to rural development, and the role it plays in mitigating poverty through providing employment (in construction and operation), reducing levels of household expenditure, improving economic efficiency in moving goods and ser vices, in providing access to public services (e.g., health care and education), and in improving health, quality of life, and the environment. Research has also provided a clear example of the differential impacts of transport in providing access to education, in terms of getting children to school, and getting them to stay in class. In developing countries, rural transport is primarily concerned with poverty reduction. Low income groups receive the lowest quality transport options, and at the same time these groups are exposed more than others to transport’s negative impacts. There is much evidence to suggest that the poorest spend a higher percentage of their income on transport in both developed and developing nations. The poor also receive the brunt of the risks and negative externalities of motorization, despite the fact that few of the poor own motorized transport themselves. Low income groups tend to live at the periphery of employment centers and thus have greater travel distances. Gender and age inequities create mobility challenges for large parts of the population, and women face specific restrictions on movement due to the complex nature of their activity patterns. The same issues are raised here as in developed countries, but with a much greater degree of polarization

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as the levels of poverty are correspondingly much higher. There is also an insatiable demand for more travel and rapid motorization, with likely further inequalities aris ing, as well as dramatically increased levels of resource consumption and emissions. Nevertheless, there are some well documented examples of innovation that have clear implications for transport elsewhere, as they com bine high quality with low cost solutions. These include bus rapid transit (mainly in and around cities), cycle priorities, a range of unconventional paratransit and informal transport services, and car free areas, as well as nonmotorized initiatives (in Africa). All of these can substantially raise rural accessibility, and many of these innovations could be transferred to developed countries.

Future Prospects The future of rural transport should combine technolo gies that allow the best use of cars to raise occupancy levels in developed countries, with innovative non motorized and collective transport ideas from developing countries, to provide mixes of modes that respond to the needs of current patterns of travel and communication in rural areas. Conventional rail and bus services will be limited to corridors of higher demand between larger urban centers, where development can be concentrated at the key locations along these routes so that high levels of accessibility can be maintained. House prices may well have captured the quality of the transport network through the higher prices paid for properties in some more accessible rural homes. The network effects can be both positive and negative (two way road effect), and the difficulty is in isolating real net increases in the local economy (additionality) in terms of new jobs, inward investment, and tourism, as compared with a redistri bution effect from one place to another. Further increases in car ownership in rural areas in all countries will gradually marginalize those without access to a car, but there are many opportunities to reduce rural inaccessibility in both physical and social terms. The fundamentally different geographies, economies, and social priorities outside the USA suggest that innovation in terms of management and organization of existing services, looking at transport as part of a range of rural activities, and experimenting with new modes and ideas could substantially benefit those living in rural areas without access to a car. See also: Distance; Mobility; Poverty; Poverty, Rural; Rural Geography; Transport and Accessibility; Transport and Social Exclusion; Transport Geography.

Further Reading Banister, D. (2005). What are sustainable rural communities? Thought piece for the commission for rural communities, Cheltenham, October, p 38. Banister, D. and Wright, L. (2005). The Role of Transport in Supporting Sub National Growth. Report prepared for the Department for International Development, May, p 42. Brake, J., Nelson, J. D. and Wright, S. (2004). Demand responsive transport: Towards the emergence of a new market segment. Journal of Transport Geography 12(4), 323 337. Commission for Rural Communities (CRC) (2005). The State of the Countryside 2005. Wetherby: Countryside Agency Publications. Countryside Agency (2004). Evaluation of the Rural Transport Partnerships, Countryside Agency Research Note, CRN78, June. DHC (2004). Relationships between Transport and Rural Economies. Report on Literature Review and Proposed Methods, prepared for the Countryside Agency by Derek Halden Consultancy, November. Farrington, J. and Farrington, C. (2005). Rural accessibility, social inclusion and social justice: Towards conceptualisation. Journal of Transport Geography 13(1), 1 12. Gray, D., Shaw, J. and Farrington, J. (2006). Community transport, social capital and social exclusion in rural areas. Area 38(1), 89 98. Lindsay, C., McCracken, M. and McQuaid, R. (2003). Unemployment duration and employability in remote rural labour markets. Journal of Rural Studies 19(2), 187 200. Nutley, S. D. (1996). Rural transport problems and non car populations in the USA: A UK perspective. Journal of Transport Geography 4(2), 93 106. Nutley, S. D. (2003). Indicators of transport and accessibility problems in rural Australia. Journal of Transport Geography 11(1), 55 71. Pucher, J. and Renne, J. L. (2005). Rural mobility and mode choice: Evidence from the 2001 National Household Travel Survey. Transportation 32(2), 165 186. Rosenbloom, S. (2003). Facing societal changes: The need for new paradigms in rural transit service. Journal of Public Transportation 6(1), 1 18. Social Exclusion Unit (2003). Making the Connections: Final Report on Transport and Social Exclusion. London: ODPM. http:// www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/social exclusion task force/B/media/ assets/www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/social exclusion task force/ publications 1997 to 2006/making transport 2003%20pdf.ashx (acessed in June 2008). Vasconcellos, E. A. (1997). Rural transport and access to education in developing countries: Policy issues. Journal of Transport Geography 5(2), 127 136. WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable Development) (2001). Mobility 2001: World Mobility at the End of the Twentieth Century. Geneva: Atar Roto Presse.

Relevant Websites http://www.rural transport.net Actions on the Integration of Rural Transport Services. http://www.cfit.gov.uk Rural Transport: An Overview of Key Issues, Published by the UK Commission for Integrated Transport (2001). http://www.ruralcommunities.gov.uk The UK Commission for Rural Communities. http://www.worldbank.org The World Bank’s Homepage for Rural Transport. http://www.transport links.org Transport for Development.

Transport, Urban B. P. Y. Loo, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Land Use–Transport Interrelationship The close and complex set of relationships between land use and transport. Traffic is seen as a joint consequence of landuse activities and transport capabilities. Metro System An off-street, high-speed, heavy railway system which operates on exclusive rights-ofway and in the urban areas of cities. Paratransit It includes public transit services which have flexible routes, timetables, and/or fares. Sometimes, these services may be provided to particular market segments only. Sustainable Urban Transport An urban transport system which minimizes adverse environmental impact, ensures the long-term economic and financial feasibility, and promotes social equity. Transit-Oriented Development A type of development which promotes higher public transit usage. It is often characterized by a compact and mixed land-use pattern near major transit stops. Urban Freight Transport The movement of goods within cities and is essential to support the urban economy. Over time, a larger share of the urban goods movement is organized and carried out by logistics companies.

Introduction An urban transport system considers all elements of transportation, including the infrastructure, rolling stock, and traffic flows, in a city as a functional entity. The interrelationships among different system components are emphasized. Generally speaking, the most notable characteristic of an urban (vs. rural, regional, national, or international) transport system is the high concentration of human activities within a limited space, especially at the commercial and business districts (CBDs), of the cities. The results are severe traffic congestion and other associated air quality, parking, and safety problems at the CBDs and the major arteries leading to it, especially during the morning peak hours when people commute to work. In many cities, the average traffic speed at the CBD fell below 15 km per h during the morning peak hours (usually 08.00–10.30 a.m). Strategies to solve the urban traffic congestion prob lems can broadly be divided into the supply oriented and demand oriented ones. The former focuses on the

provision of extra infrastructure, such as downtown sub urb expressways, urban ring roads, and car parks. The latter refers to transport demand management (TDM) measures, which range from simple ones like traffic signals, intersection controls, and stopping restrictions to the more advanced ones like flexitime, congestion pricing, and high occupancy lanes. In an urban context, it is obvious that the scope of providing extra infrastructure is often limited because of the dense, built up areas and the high land price. Moreover, the provision of more transport infra structure would arguably lead to newly generated trans port demand, called induced demand, because of the expanded transport capacity and the shorter travel time. Various TDM measures were adopted by cities at dif ferent development levels. Congestion pricing is one of the TDM measures advocated by economists for a long time but has been receiving renewed interests in the twenty first century. The essential idea is that the road users should pay for the external costs that they impose on the other road users by entering the congested urban areas. The con gestion pricing scheme can vary from a uniform charge per day to variable pricing depending on the season, day of the week, time of the day, or even actual congestion level of the road or area (defined by cordons). Congestion pricing dif fers from the other road pricing schemes, such as road and tunnel tolls, whose primary aim is to raise revenue. Ex periences of congestion pricing and its various impact have been closely examined in London (United Kingdom), Oslo (the Netherlands), Singapore, and Stockholm (Sweden). Nonetheless, despite all these efforts, urban traffic con gestion is still prevalent in all large cities worldwide. The world’s first urban traffic congestion pricing scheme was implemented in Singapore in 1975. Its ‘area licensing scheme’ (ALS) had undergone significant extensions in coverage (in terms of the types of vehicles, area, and time) before it became fully automated and integrated into the electronic road pricing in 1998. In Europe, the London congestion charge has attracted wide attention because it was one of the largest congestion pricing schemes in the world and was introduced by a democratically elected city mayor. Like the experience of Singapore, both the charge and the spatial extent of the London congestion charge have increased since its inception in 2003.

Urban Passenger Transport Different Urban Passenger Transport Modes Passenger transport often represents the largest volume of urban traffic. In policy analysis, it is customary to

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distinguish between private and public transport. The former includes nonmotorized modes of walking and cycling, and motorized modes of motorcycles and auto mobiles. The latter includes conventional mass carriers, such as the metro systems, light rails, trams (streetcars), and buses, and paratransit modes, such as taxis, share ride taxis, jitneys, minibuses, and other public transit modes which have flexible routes, timetables, and/or fares. Many low technology and slow paratransit modes are common in Southeast Asia. Examples include the ‘tuk tuk’ in Thailand and India, ‘tricycles’ in the Philippines, and ‘becaks’ in Indonesia. Other paratransit modes are provided for certain market segments only. School buses, demand responsive buses for the transport disadvantaged (particularly the disabled and the elderly), and residents’ coach are some cases in point. Residents’ coach, offering exclusive and high quality service to middle class resi dents living in low density suburbs, has had some success in replacing private car use. Overall, there is a broad range of paratransit both in terms of technology and standard of service. Figure 1 shows the major means of urban passenger transport in terms of their carrying capacity and the environmental impact (particularly air pollution). In the figure, it is assumed that all on road vehicles use diesel or gasoline. Technological advancement means that alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs), including liquified petroleum gas (LPG) and electric vehicles, have become more widely used over time. Attempts to introduce AFVs have been made in many cities, to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels and to minimize the environmental impact caused by the heavy, urban vehicular traffic. Monetary incentives (such as a reduction of the ‘first registration tax’ and other forms of subsidies) and legislative Environmental impact per passenger

amendments have been made to encourage the replace ment of private automobiles by AFVs and the use of AFVs to provide public transport services. Some notable examples include California in the United States and Hong Kong in the People’s Republic of China. In California, the California State Government has actively encouraged the use of AFVs. Following the amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1990, a new classification of vehicles based on tailpipe emission was introduced. Plans and legislation were formulated to facilitate the transition to AFVs. The California Air Resources Board oversees that vehicle manufacturers in California meet mandatory low emission vehicle sales quotas. In addition, electric or natural gas (particularly LPG or CNG) dual fuel vehicles were promoted in Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. In Hong Kong, LPG taxis were made mandatory; and there were government support schemes for purchasing electric or LPG minibuses. As a city develops, people desire higher personal mobility. One way to achieve this is through a high reliance on motorization. This has to be supported by massive investment on the construction of expressways and the road network, an expanding automobile industry, and the heavy consumption of nonrenewable energy. A second way to achieve higher personal mobility is through the development of the urban public transit system. Overall, the relative importance of motorized private transport differs substantially across different cities, even with similar development levels. This can range from as low as 10% of the trips made by private transport in Hong Kong to more than 90–95% in most American cities. Although the reasons for the varying importance of public transport vary in different cities, most large cities

Automobiles (solo driving) Automobiles (carpooling) taxis

Minibuses and other paratransit modes Singledeck buses Doubledeck buses Light rails

Cycling

Walking

Figure 1 Different passenger transport modes in an urban transport system.

Metro systems

Carrying capacity (number of passengers per vehicle)

Transport, Urban

with high shares of public transport were served by metro systems. Metro systems refer to the heavy railways with exclusive rights of way serving the urban areas of the cities. However, the building of metro systems requires a very long lead time (typically 7 years or more) and heavy capital investment (ranging from US$60 million to US$0.3 billion per km). However, the building of the metro system per se would not guarantee that it could generate all the expected beneficial effects of encouraging higher public transport usage and fulfilling other policy objectives such as a compact urban form. Hence, very often, the introduction of the metro systems requires coordination with other mass transit modes to ensure sufficient railway patronage. Examples include the cancellation of long distance bus routes running parallel to the railway lines and/or the realignment of bus routes which compete directly with the railways. So far, evi dence from different cities with high public transport patronage suggests that a well integrated multimodal public transport system is crucial for public transport to be attractive vis a` vis automobiles. These attempts include the introduction of the integrated public fare collection system, transfer discount, and timetabling coordination among various public transport modes. Intermodal cash cards, such as the Metrocard in New York and the Oyster Card in London, are common in major global cities. In the case of Hong Kong, the Octopus Card is used not only as a means of payment for all mass transit modes but also at car parks, shops, and restaurants. The use of advanced travelers’ information systems based on the geographic information systems (GIS) represents another way of improving the attract iveness of the public transit system. The provision of timely and reliable public transit information is believed to enhance the attractiveness of public transit vis a` vis private cars. Land Use–Transport Interrelationship Urban form also has an important role to play in affecting the patterns of urban passenger transport. In particular, a mixed land use pattern is conducive to higher public transport patronage and shorter average travel distance. Different land uses have different traffic generation and attraction rates, which can be input into the four stage transport models. In wake of the calls for sustainable urban transport, new initiatives have been introduced in many cities to reduce the cities’ dependency on automobiles and to promote public transport and nonmotorized transport, namely cycling and walking. Though these new initiatives differ in their emphases and, hence, their policy recom mendations, they can be broadly classified as transit oriented development (TOD) and be contrasted with the automobile dependent development, as listed out in Table 1.

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From Table 1, one sees that this broad definition of TOD includes elements of the smart growth strategy, the location efficient strategy, and the walkable com munities. While these various initiatives have slightly different emphases, they all aim to reduce the automobile dependency of the community and to encourage the de velopment of a sustainable urban transport system in the long run. In particular, the smart growth strategy was first proposed as an alternative to urban sprawl. Hence, the strategy puts an emphasis on the smart use of the existing urban areas and the slowing down of the spatial expan sion of cities. The location efficient strategy likewise emphasizes the possibility of in fill development in cities, but it also puts much importance on housing affordability. Lastly, the walkable communities advocate walking as the primary mode of passenger transport in cities. In addition, it is worth mentioning that there have also been renewed interests in developing paratransit modes in the United States, as they are more flexible and adaptable to the low density and dispersed suburban ization process.

Urban Freight Transport Types of Urban Freight A discussion on the urban transport systems would not be complete without addressing the urban freight issues. In the first place, it must be recognized that the move ment of goods supports the economic vitality of the urban economy. An efficient urban freight system is essential to support the high spatial agglomeration of people and economic activities in cities. Generally, urban freight movements may be classified as intra urban goods movement and through traffic. Intra urban goods move ment is primarily associated with the wholesaling and retailing activities of the city. Most cities do not have exclusive freight railway to handle intra urban goods movements. Hence, most of them take place in the form of road transport, especially container trucks, lorries, and light goods vehicles. As a result, city center delivery and curbside loading and unloading activities often aggravate the severe urban traffic congestion. In many cities, there are restrictions for goods vehicles to enter the CBD during the morning peak hours. Off peak delivery is therefore common. In addition, recent changes in supply chain management, such as the rising importance of just in time (JIT) deliveries, lower inventory levels, and more frequent deliveries, have caused new challenges to urban freight planning and management in urban areas. In medium and large cities, the setting up of urban dis tribution centers (UDCs) and integrated freight centers (IFCs) is often worth serious considerations. Moreover, in the light of the more stringent demands on urban freight movement, more and more urban freight is being handled

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Table 1

Characteristics of automobile and transit-oriented development Automobile-oriented development

Transit-oriented development

Road network

Expressway-oriented road system with hierarchical street patterns designed to maximize traffic volume and speed.

Few expressways. Highly interconnected streets with traffic calming measures.

Parking availability

Abundant, easily accessible parking lots at low or no cost.

Parking management in force. Limited and multistory parking charged at relatively high cost.

Public transport services

Very poor and/or restricted to paratransit only.

Very good, in terms of comfort, frequency reliability, and speed.

Pedestrians and cyclists

Not friendly to pedestrians and cyclists, no pedestrian walkways on some streets.

Friendly to pedestrians and cyclists with high accessibility to all major attractions. In some circumstances, the multi-exit railway station forms a well-connected and segregated pedestrian walking system.

General land-use pattern

Segregated and dispersed land-use pattern at the urban fringe, with little in-fill development.

Dense, compact, and a balanced mixed land-use pattern around transit stops, particularly railway stations.

Housing types and density

Single-lot, single-household detached houses in a spread out manner.

A variety of affordable housing types with highrise and mixed residential and commercial buildings near the transit stations acting as the centers of towns or suburb communities. Residential density declines progressively outward.

Public and private facilities

Major city facilities, such as shopping malls, public services, schools, stadiums and other leisure venues are located at major expressway exits requiring automobile access. Large-scale single-story or low-rise retail malls away from the city center, surrounded by free parking lots.

The CBD remains the main transit hub and the center of major business, entertainment, government/institutional, and retail activities. Medium-scale retail shops on the lower floors of the commercial and resident buildings near transit stations. Schools, cafes, and neighborhood stores on the ground level of residential buildings to help create attractive street life.

Public space

Limited. Private club facilities, large private yards, and gated communities are common.

Abundant and well-planned. Provision of public parks, sports centers, libraries, and other public facilities.

From Elmwood Renaissance. (2007). Walkable vs. automobile oriented communities. http://www.freewebs.com/elmwoodrenaissance/ walkablevsautooriented.htm; Fehr & Peers. smartgrowthplanning.org: The transportation perspective. www.smartgrowthplanning.org; Reconnecting America. Reconnecting America: Center for Transit oriented Development. http://www.reconnectingamerica.org; Victoria Transport Policy Institute. (2007). Online TDM Encyclopedia. http://www.vtpi.org/.

by third party logistics companies. In the future, changes in supply chain management will continue to drive changes and innovations in urban freight movements. In addition, through traffic is important in the urban freight system of cities which serve as gateways, major manufacturing centers, and/or important transport and logistics hubs. Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Hong Kong, New York (USA), and Singapore are some notable examples. In these cities, freight transport to the ports and airports can constitute an important part of the urban transport systems. The segregation of such through traffic from the intra urban freight transport and the urban passenger transport is sometimes practiced for both se curity and traffic management reasons. Moreover, vehicle tracking technology (supported by the ‘global positioning system’, GPS) has been increasingly employed by large

logistics companies to manage their fleet. In some large countries, such as Canada, China, and the USA, long distance freight movement should preferably be carried on the national freight rail system for both environmental and economic reasons. Hence, there have been calls to encourage more freight rail movements in both the USA and Europe. Problems of Mixed Traffic In situations where on road mixed traffic (between pas senger and goods vehicles) is prevalent, several transport problems are particularly serious in an urban context. First, heavy goods vehicles pose greater danger to the other road users (particularly pedestrians and cyclists), when a crash happens. While research has shown that

Transport, Urban

heavy goods vehicles may not be associated with higher accident rates, it causes much concern because crashes involving heavy goods vehicles usually result in a higher number of casualties to the other kinds of road users than the heavy goods vehicle users themselves. Second, the transportation of dangerous goods, such as chemical wastes, petroleum, and LPG, needs careful planning to avoid critical urban transport links, tunnels, and bridges, to prevent catastrophic events in case of traffic crashes. Third, there are concerns about the higher road maintenance costs related to the use of the heavy goods vehicles, especially when they are loaded. In Germany, trucks over 12 tons have been charged on a kilometer basis since 2003 to partly reflect the more severe pavement damage caused by these heavy vehicles. Overall, it is argued that the current heavy goods vehicle charging systems do not fully reflect the extra wear and tear that these heavy goods vehicles caused to the road system. Last but not least, heavy goods vehicles, especially if they are loaded, generate higher levels of air pollution, noise pollution, and roadside vibration. These problems are particularly acute in the dense urban environment. Furthermore, the efficiency of fuel energy consumption among heavy goods vehicles is another area of concern. Currently, AFVs available in the commercial market are mainly passenger rather than goods vehicles. The tech nologies for developing heavy goods vehicles running on alternative fuels are much more complicated and less mature. Hence, the reliance of the heavy goods vehicles on diesels is unlikely to fall substantially in the near future. All of the above affect the long term sustainability of the urban transport system and raise important issues that need to be addressed by the government.

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Further Reading Allsop, R. E. (2005). Some traffic safety implications of movement of goods by road. Transportmetrica 1(1), 3 12. Banister, D. (ed.) (1998). Transport Policy and the Environment. London: E & FN Spon. Banister, D. (2005). Unsustainable Transport: City Transport in the New Century. London: Routledge. Banister, D., Button, K. and Nijkamp, P. (eds.) (c. 1999). Environment, Land Use and Urban Policy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Bernick, M. and Cervero, R. (1997). Transit Villages in the 21st Century. New York: McGraw Hill. Buchanan, C. D. (1963). Traffic in towns: A study of the long term problems of traffic urban areas. Reports of the Steering Group and Working Group appointed by the Minister of Transport. London: HMSO. Button, K. J. and Pearman, A. D. (1981). The Economics of Urban Freight Transport. London: Macmillan. Cervero, R., Murphy, S. and Ferrell, C. et al. (c. 2004). Transit Oriented Development in the United States: Experiences, Challenges, and Prospects: Transit Cooperative Research Program Report 103. Washington DC: Transportation Research Board of the National Academies. Hanson, S. and Giuliano, G. (eds.) (2004). Geography of Urban Transportation. New York: Guilford. Hau, T. D. (1992). Economic Fundamentals of Road Pricing: A Diagrammatic Analysis. Washington DC: Transport Division, Infrastructure and Urban Development. World Bank. Hesse, M. (2005). Freight Transport and Logistics in an Urban Context: Cities under Pressure of Structural Change and Supply Chain Dynamics. n.p.: Ashgate. Knowles, R., Shaw, J. and Docherty, I. (eds.) (2008). Transport Geographies: Mobilities, Flows, and Spaces. Malden: Blackwell. Loo, B. P. Y. and Li, D. Y. N. (2006). Developing metro system in the People’s Republic of China: Policy and gaps. Transportation 33, 115 132. National Research Council, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (c. 1994). Curbing gridlock: peak period fees to relieve traffic congestion. Report of National Research Council, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington DC: National Academy Press. Vuchic, V. R. (1981). Urban Public Transportation: Systems and Technology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. World Bank (2002). Cities on the move: A World Bank urban transport strategy review. Washington DC: World Bank.

Conclusions Relevant Websites Overall, the key for developing a sustainable urban transport system lies in the best possible combinations of transport and other (notably, land use) policies that meet the personal mobility needs of the people and the goods mobility needs of the economy. In all the major arenas of urban passenger and freight transport, government pol icies can play a critical role in affecting the urban transport system not only through its public transport policy but also other key public policies such as land use and planning policies. See also: Governance, Transport; Transport and Social Exclusion; Transport Geography; Transport, Public; Transportation and Land Use.

http://www.freewebs.com Elmwood Renaissance. Elmwood Renaissance: Working toward pedestrian friendly, mixed use, smart development. http://www.smartgrowthplanning.org Fehr & Peers, the transportation perspective. http://juts.janes.com Jane’s Information Group. Jane’s Urban Transport Systems. http://www.reconnectingamerica.org Reconnecting America: Center for Transit Oriented Development. http://www.smartgrowth.org Sustainable Communities Network (SCN). Smart Growth Online. http://www.vtpi.org Victoria Transport Policy Institute. Online TDM Encyclopedia.

Transportation and Land Use S.-L. Shaw, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Discrete Choice Model A mathematic model that predicts an individual’s choice based on the utility of a finite set of competing alternatives. E-Commerce Commerce conducted with electronic transactions over the Internet. Monocentric City A city with most employments concentrated in one core area. New Urbanism An urban design movement that promotes walkable and transit-oriented neighborhood designs with mixed-use land development. Smart Growth A concept that advocates policies of encouraging land-use patterns that are compact, walkable, transit-oriented, mixed-use development, and providing quality housing for all income groups. Spatial Interaction Model A model used to estimate the amount of flows between different places. Teleworking Working at home or locations other than the office using information and communications technologies. Urban Sprawl Spread of urban developments to nearby undeveloped land around a city. Virtual Mobility Substitution of electronic exchanges and online communications for physical transport activities.

Introduction In today’s society, most of us live at one location, but work, shop, and conduct other activities at separate locations. In other words, we carry out our activities at different locations to fulfill our physiological, economic, social, and other needs. The spatial distribution of these activity locations for all individuals and businesses col lectively gives the land use pattern of an area. Trans portation serves as the means to move people and goods among different activity locations. In this regard, it is evident that transportation systems and land use systems are mutually related to each other. Up to the early twentieth century, most cities were developed with compact and mixed use neighborhoods. As transportation technologies improved, urban development pattern began to change. After World War II, due to rapid growth of private automobiles and adoption of modern zoning regulations, a new urban development pattern with significant suburban growth became widespread across the

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United States and many other countries. This is known as ‘urban sprawl’, which encourages spatial separation of various activity locations and increasing dependence on private automobiles. By the 1970s, some researchers began to advocate new urban design and urban planning approaches to help reduce the negative impacts (e.g., traffic congestion, air pollution, and urban sprawl) caused by the widespread use of private automobiles. The basic idea behind these approaches is to encourage more compact and mixed use developments that encourage the use of nonmotorized travel (e.g., walking and biking) and transit systems. These urban design and planning approaches have been called under different names such as mixed land use development, transit oriented development, smart growth, and new urbanism. They all reflect an idea that a fundamental change in land development patterns may be a promising way to change people’s travel behavior and therefore change their travel patterns and reduce the automobile induced problems. Transportation and land use interaction received renewed interests in recent years due to the concept of sustainable development. Sustainable development sug gests development strategies that meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. In the United States, legislations such as the Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA) of 1990, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) of 1991, the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA 21) of 1998, and the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFE TEA LU) of 2005, all call for considerations of the likely effects of transportation policy decisions on land use in order to achieve more sustainable development plans. In Europe, concerns about sustainable development also led to many studies sponsored by the European Commis sion’s Framework Programmes to examine transportation and land use issues. One key reason that transportation and land use interaction has been an active subject pursued by geographers, planners, and policymakers is because transportation and land use policies often involve significant investments and can influence the evolution of urban development patterns.

Transportation and Land-Use Interaction Transportation and land use interaction is often described in the literature as a mutual and dynamic relationship

Transportation and Land Use

(see the inner box in Figure 1). Spatial distribution of transportation infrastructure and services shapes the accessibility levels of different locations. Different acces sibility levels then influence the land development and land use decisions. Changes in land use patterns in turn lead to new activity and travel patterns in space and over time. New activity and travel patterns will then affect the decisions on planning and design of future transportation systems, which in turn will lead to future changes in accessibility and the next round of transportation and land use interaction. In addition to the mutual and dynamic relationships between transportation and land use, many other pro cesses also influence the evolution of transportation and land use systems in an urban environment (see the outer box in Figure 1). Land development decisions are affected not only by transportation systems but also by factors such as the amount of developable land in an area, availability of utility infrastructure (such as sewer and water), regional economic trend, and local zoning regu lations, among others. By the same token, transportation investment decisions also are influenced by factors other than land use patterns. For example, advancements in information and communications technologies (ICTs), such as the Internet and cellular phones, have made teleworking, e commerce, e learning, e government, and other virtual mobility more feasible and convenient. They are expected to lead to changes in activity and travel patterns that have direct implications to future configurations of transportation and land use systems. As a result, it is important to realize that transportation and land use interaction cannot be easily isolated from other economic, technological, political, and social changes in an urban system. There are in general two ways to study transportation and land use interaction. One is through empirical studies and the other is to use models. Empirical studies can help us identify the change patterns observed in real

Built environment

Regional economy

Demographic characteristics

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world. However, we need to keep in mind that trans portation and land use interaction takes place in a complex and dynamic manner. Effects of transportation system changes on land use, and vice versa, occur at varying spatial and temporal scales. For example, con struction of a new rail transit line tends to have greater impacts around the rail stations and along the transit corridor than on the urban area as a whole. This suggests that we could reach contradictory conclusions regarding the effects of transportation system changes on land use if we have conducted empirical studies of the same urban area at different spatial scales. On the other hand, building of a new expressway may lead to immediate land use changes in one area, but a similar expressway project in another area may not induce significant land use changes until many years after its completion. The different outcomes could be due to the influences of other processes shown in Figure 1 that evolve at dif ferent rates over time in different areas. Consequently, an ideal comprehensive model of transportation and land use interaction should consider all of these processes and their mutual, dynamic, and complex relationships. In practice, a model is often based on some simplifying assumptions to make it feasible and manageable. Since empirical studies per se cannot forecast future land use and travel demand patterns, models are necessary to help us derive the forecasts.

Theories and Models Changes in transportation and land use systems are often considered as the outcomes of location choices. Land developers make decisions on where to build a residential subdivision or a commercial development. Transporta tion planning agencies must decide where to add a new rail transit line or to improve an existing highway. These location choice decisions influence each other in space

Technological changes

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Land use Transportation and land-use interaction Urban system

Figure 1 Transportation and land-use interaction within an urban system.

Public policies

Other processes

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and over time. Many theories and models have been developed to describe the relationships between trans portation and land use. In general, they can be organized into three groups based on their emphasis on influence of transportation on land use, influence of land use on transportation, or an integrated transportation and land use approach. Influence of Transportation on Land Use The earliest land use theory can be traced to von Thu¨nen’s agricultural land rent theory of 1826, which is based on a concept of balancing between transportation cost and land rent. Locations closer to market incur a lower transportation cost and therefore have a higher land rent. Under the assumptions of an isolated and self sufficient state with completely homogeneous land and one central market, von Thu¨nen’s theory suggests con centric zones of agricultural activity from the market. High value and perishable agricultural products (e.g., dairy products and fresh vegetables) are located closest to the market while low value goods (e.g., grain and live stock) are located in outer zones. Residential location theory was developed later on based on a concept similar to von Thu¨nen’s agricultural land rent theory. It suggests that people make trade offs between commuting cost and housing price when choosing their residential location. A decreasing commuting cost therefore encourages people to live farther away from the urban center and leads to population decentralization. For employment location theory, Christaller’s central place theory has been used to describe the locations of market centers. Christaller examined the urban settle ments in southern Germany to derive the rules that determine the size, number, and distribution of towns. Central place theory suggests a hierarchical development of settlements or market centers. The spatial arrange ment and size of these market centers depend on the minimum market threshold level and the range that consumers are willing to travel for goods or services. As transportation cost declines, we can expect a more dispersed pattern of larger market centers. Weber’s industrial location theory, on the other hand, focuses on goods movements rather than people movements. Weber’s theory suggests that the best industrial location is at the place where the total transportation cost of shipping raw materials and finished product is min imized. The above location choice theories are based on simplifying assumptions such as an isotropic surface, uniform transportation cost in all directions, a mono centric city, and single worker households. A funda mental principle of these theories is that agricultural, residential, employment, and industrial location choices are mainly shaped by transportation costs, which are treated as an exogenous variable. Therefore, the emphasis

of these theories is on the influence of transportation costs on land use patterns. Influence of Land Use on Transportation To address the influence of land use patterns on trans portation, the most widely used approach is the four step travel demand models, which include a trip generation step to estimate the total number of trips generated by each zone, a trip distribution step to estimate the number of trips between each pair of origin and destination zones, a modal split step to estimate the market shares of dif ferent travel modes, and a trip assignment step to esti mate the traffic flows on individual highway segments or transit route segments. The main purpose of a four step travel demand model is to forecast traffic flows in a transportation system under a given land use pattern. Land use, therefore, is treated as an exogenous variable. Various theories and models have been used over the years to implement the four step travel demand models. Earlier travel demand models used approaches such as simple growth factors, gravity models, regression meth ods, and modal split curves that focused on the prediction of traffic flows rather than on the understanding of travel decisions. In the 1970s, behavioral approaches such as the random utility theory and discrete choice models were introduced into travel demand models. Random utility theory employs a utility function with a random variable to assess the utility of competing choice alternatives. The random variable is included to reflect factors such as imperfect knowledge and uncertainties involved in decision making processes. Random utility theory has been widely adopted in discrete choice models to determine an individual’s choice among competing alternatives. Logit model is the most frequently used mathematic form to implement the random utility theory in a discrete choice model. It should be noted that a conventional travel demand model focuses on the impact of land use on transportation and usually does not con sider the feedback effects of transportation system changes on land use. Integrated Transportation and Land Use Approach A number of integrated transportation and land use models have been proposed over the years to address the shortcoming of modeling only one half of the circular relationship between transportation and land use illus trated in Figure 1. The Lowry model, which was originally developed to model spatial distributions of residential and service development, was among the first operational models to implement the transportation and land use feedback cycle. The Lowry model employs the economic base theory to simulate the interactions among

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the basic sector (i.e., export oriented employment), the nonbasic sector (i.e., employment to meet the local demands), and the residential sector. It starts with an exogenously given spatial distribution of the basic sector employment within a region. Employees of the basic sector are allocated to residential zones in the region according to a gravity model type of spatial interaction model. It then computes the incremental residential population and the additional nonbasic employment needed to serve the incremental residential population. The increased nonbasic employment in turn is allocated to different workplace zones. Workers in the nonbasic sector also require places to reside and will generate additional nonbasic employment. An iterative procedure is implemented to model this circular and cumulative process. The procedure stops when the increments of employment and population between two consecutive iterations become insignificant. The Lowry model has stimulated many other studies on the subject. In general, the theoretical approaches employed in these studies of transportation and land use interaction can be categorized into technological ap proach, economic approach, social science approach, and behavioral approach. The technological approach suggests that the growth or decline of a place is related to its locational advantages in the transportation systems. Locations with a higher accessibility level are more likely to be chosen for land development. As transportation technologies evolved over time, accessibility at different places changed accordingly. The history of rising and declining cities during the waterway dominant era, the railroad dominant era, and the highway dominant era supports this technological approach. In more recent decades, air transportation and ICTs have played an in creasingly important role in shaping the accessibility levels. Janelle’s time–space convergence concept offers a framework of understanding relative changes of accessi bility levels at different places due to technological advancements. In practice, spatial interaction models are frequently used to estimate accessibility levels at differ ent locations. Although we can calibrate a spatial inter action model to match an observed flow pattern and then use the calibrated model to forecast future changes, spatial interaction models fall short of providing a the oretical basis of explaining the change process. Agricultural, residential, employment, and industrial location choice theories discussed above fall under the economic approach. They are based on an assumption that households and firms choose their locations through trade offs between accessibility and land price. This assumption is closely related to the microeconomic concept of utility maximization. Alonso’s bid rent theory, which assumes that firms and households choose the location where the land price they are willing to pay (i.e., bid rent) equals the rent asked by the landlord, serves as

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the foundation of many land choice models. It is assumed that interactions between supply and demand lead to a market equilibrium. If we take into account other factors such as internal economies of scale, economies of agglomeration, labor force, and the shift from manu facturing based economy to service based economy, location choice decisions become much more complex than simple trade offs between accessibility and land price. Although mathematical models based on the con cept of equilibrium provide a useful method of balancing supply and demand in order to forecast future travel demands and future land use patterns, some researchers have argued that urban areas are constantly adjusting themselves to the changing environments. As a result, urban areas may be never in equilibrium. There are also social science approaches to studying transportation and land use interaction. John Adams examined cities in the Midwest of the United States and identified the changing spatial form of urban areas in relation to changes in transportation technology. He reported that spatial form of urban areas during the walking horse era (1800–90) and the recreational automobile era (1920–50) were characterized by compact and concentric form. However, urban areas developed into radial or star shaped spatial form during the electric streetcar era (1890–1920) and the freeway era (1950– present) due to developments along the radial transpor tation routes. Concentric urban form was first observed by sociologist Ernest Burgess in the 1920s. In the 1930s, economist Homer Hoyt reported a sectoral urban form as the outcome of a residential filtering process between different income groups. Geographers Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman in the 1940s identified a multi nucleated urban form that has multiple competing cen ters. Another important theoretical contribution under the social science approach is time geography developed by Torsten Ha¨gerstrand in the 1960s. Time geography examines human activities under different types of constraints in a space–time context. It emphasizes that both space and time should be considered when exam ining an individual’s activity participation and accessi bility. Space and time are connected through the concept of space–time path, which depicts the sequence of an individual’s activities at various locations over a time period (see Figure 2a). Transportation is used as the means to trade time for space since movements in physical space take time. The possible locations that an individual can reach within a given time window forms a continuous space known as a space–time prism (see Figure 2b). With the growing interests in activity based travel demand modeling and the effects of ICTs on activity and travel patterns, time geography has received increasing attention in recent years as an alternative approach to studying transportation and land use rela tionships. For example, there have been suggestions to

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v

Time

Space time path

Space (a)

v

Time t2

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t1 Space

(b)

Figure 2 Time-geographic concepts of (a) space time path and (b) space time prism.

replace gravity model based accessibility measures by space–time accessibility measures based on the time geographic concepts. The behavioral approach, on the other hand, focuses on the understanding of decision processes underlying choice behavior rather than on the prediction of out comes of choice behavior. Most operational integrated transportation and land use models are implemented as mathematic models or computer simulation models to forecast future land use and travel demand patterns. The behavioral approach seeks new concepts, theories, data collection methods, and analysis frameworks to enhance the behavioral foundations of these models. It argues that the aggregate patterns of traffic flows and urban growth are the results of individual choice decisions. It is therefore important to gain a better understanding of choice decision processes at the disaggregate level. For example, the utility maximization theory may be limited in representing behavioral processes because people also use other decision rules (e.g., a threshold rule rather than a maximization rule) to reach their decisions. In addition, utility assessment can be dynamic and dependent on the context within which a decision is made. A particular activity considered by an individual is often constrained by other activities of the individual as well as the environment (e.g., available activity time, available travel means, open hours of activity locations, etc.) when the individual makes decisions on if, when, where, and how

this activity will be carried out. Furthermore, reduced travel and telecommunication costs and additional flex ibilities gained from the use of the Internet and cellular phones have expanded our activity opportunities both spatially and temporally. How these changes affect the location choices of individuals and businesses remain an open research question.

Lessons Learned and Future Prospects We can expect that transportation and land use will remain a major policy issue as long as we continue to desire that transportation and land use policies can help us achieve a more sustainable environment. Previous studies have taught us that it may be more challenging than we think to untangle the complex and dynamic relationships between transportation and land use in order to identify effective policies leading to sustainable development. First of all, we have learned that the automobile dominant transportation system is not sustainable. The question then is how we can assess different policies in terms of their potential of leading to sustainable devel opment. Although sustainable development presents a good concept, it is not always consistent with other goals of developing a vibrant urban system. As population and economy in an urban area grow, we need to provide transportation systems that will meet the increasing demand. One solution is to increase the transportation supply with more efficient transportation systems that offer faster speed and better accessibility. Unfortunately, we have not been very successful in finding transporta tion systems that are efficient, safe, environmentally friendly, socially equitable, and in the meantime at tractive to most individuals and firms. Another alternative is to come up with sustainable land use systems that will reduce the need for travel. However, successful stories of this nature are also rare. Given that sustainable development and economic development often have conflicting goals, criteria used to judge good transporta tion and land use policies depend on the perspectives of different stakeholders and may change over time. Another important lesson we have learned is that the mutual interaction between transportation and land use cannot be isolated from many other related processes that constantly change and evolve in a dynamic and complex urban system. Contemporary urban environments are very different from the cities in the past. Most urban areas today have multiple centers along with decentral ized residential and economic activities. In addition, they are increasingly dominated by service oriented and information based economy that changes the nature of accessibility and creates a more mobile and dynamic environment to both firms and individuals. As suggested

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by Genevieve Giuliano, with the many factors affecting the location and travel choices of individuals and firms, it is difficult to identify and almost impossible to predict the interaction between transportation and land use in contemporary urban areas. We also have learned from empirical studies that efforts of implementing various transportation and land use policies to achieve sustainable development have resulted in mixed outcomes. In general, transportation policies that make private automobile travel less at tractive appear to be more effective than land use pol icies that attempt to reduce the need for travel through approaches such as mixed land use development. In the meantime, we need land use policies to create a less automobile dependent urban form in the long run. Overall, our understanding of transportation and land use interaction is still very limited. We need more comparative empirical studies that employ consistent methodology and comparable data to systematically study this subject. With regards to operational integrated transportation and land use models, many of them have been developed with various theoretical and modeling approaches to simulating transportation and land use interaction. Although significant progress has been made to enhance these models, there are many aspects of these models that can benefit from further improvements. For example, recent developments of location aware technologies such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) and information technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) now provide more efficient methods to collect and analyze detailed location data at the individual level. Coupled with research progress on activity based travel studies and time geographic studies, there is a good potential of gaining additional insight of individual location and travel choice behaviors. In addition, ad vancements in microsimulation techniques, along with the availability of high performance computers, make it feasible to represent and model many agents and processes involved in the complex and dynamic system of transportation and land use interaction that can help us assess various policy scenarios. See also: Central Place Theory; Land Rent Theory; Transport and Accessibility; Transport and Sustainability; Transport, Urban.

Further Reading Adams, J. S. (1970). Residential structure of midwestern cities. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 60, 37 62.

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Alonso, W. (1964). Location and Land Use. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boarnet, M. G. and Crane, R. (2001). Travel by Design: The Influence of Urban Form on Travel. New York: Oxford University Press. Chan, Y. (2005). Location, Transport, and Land Use: Modelling Spatial Temporal Information. Berlin: Springer. Christaller, W. (1966). Central Places in Southern Germany (translated by Baskin, C. W.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Giuliano, G. (2004). Land use impacts of transportation investments: Highway and transit. In Hanson, S. & Giuliano, G. (eds.) The Geography of Urban Transportation (3rd edn.), pp 237 273. New York: The Guilford Press. Hagerstrand, T. (1970). What about people in regional science? Papers of the Regional Science Association 24, 1 12. Harris, C. D. and Ullman, E. L. (1945). The nature of cities. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 242, 7 17. Hoyt, H. (1939). The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Janelle, D. G. (2004). Impact of information technologies. In Hanson, S. & Giuliano, G. (eds.) The Geography of Urban Transportation (3rd edn.), pp 86 112. New York: The Guilford Press. Lee Gosselin, M. and Doherty, S. (eds.) (2005). Integrated Land Use and Transportation Models: Behavioural Foundations. London: Elsevier Ltd. Miller, E. J. (2004). Integrated land use/transport model requirements. In Hensher, D. A., Button, K. J., Haynes, K. E. & Stopher, P. (eds.) Handbook of Transport Geography and Spatial Systems, pp 147 165. London: Elsevier Ltd. Park, P. E. and Burgess, E. W. (1925). The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paulley, N. and Pedler, A. (2000). TRANSLAND: Integration of transport and land use planning. Deliverable 4 of the project TRANSLAND of the 4th RTD Framework Programme of the European Commission. Transport Research Laboratory, Berkshire, England. Putman, S. H. (1983). Integrated Urban Models: Policy Analysis of Transportation and Land Use. London: Pion Limited. Weber, A. (1929). Theory of the Location Industries (translated by Friedrich, C. J.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wegner, M. (2004). Overview of land use transport models. In Hensher, D. A., Button, K. J., Haynes, K. E. & Stopher, P. (eds.) Handbook of Transport Geography and Spatial Systems, pp 127 146. London: Elsevier Ltd. Wegner, M. and Furst, F. (1999). Land use transport interaction: State of the art. Deliverable 2a of the project TRANSLAND of the 4th RTD Framework Programme of the European Commission. Institute fur Raumplanung, Univeristat Dortmund.

Relevant Websites http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pubstats.html U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration’s Electronic Reading Room. http://www.urbansim.org/ UrbanSim is a simulation model that incorporates the interactions between transportation, land use, and public policy for integrated planning and analysis of urban development. http://www.vtpi.org/ Victoria Transport Policy Institute offers an online Transportation Demand Management (TDM) Encyclopedia with information about ‘‘Land Use Impacts on Transport’’.

Travel and Travel-Writing R. Phillips, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Royal Geographical Society (RGS) Founded in 1830, the London-based RGS supported and provided a forum for explorers and map-makers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and remains Britain’s leading geographical society.

Travel, defined in Waite’s Little Oxford Dictionary as to ‘go from one place to another; make journey(s), esp. long or abroad’, has been applied to a wide variety of experi ences: daily and periodic journeys to work, shopping, pleasure trips, pilgrimages, voyages of discovery, and more. Travel writing is an equally inclusive and expan sive category, as the burgeoning travel supplements in weekend newspapers and travel shelves of bookshops testify, with their numerous accounts of and guides to travel. This entry explains why geographers are interested in travel and its literature, before defining them with ex amples from well known travel writers including Jan Morris, and some more obscure travellers such as Vic torian women emigrants. It then reviews the geographical literature on the political and theoretical significance of travel and travel writing, with reference to the medium’s special significance for constructions of gender, imperi alism, and finally class (Figure 1).

Why Geographers Are Interested in Travel-Writing There was a time when academic geographers preferred to leave travel and its literature to others, concentrating upon more specific and ostensibly more serious forms of movement and writing. In nineteenth century Britain, for example, geographers did not ‘travel’; they mounted ‘expeditions’. If they lacked the funds or the energy to do so themselves, they studied the findings of others, a select group they referred to as ‘explorers’. The Royal Geo graphical Society (RGS) funded expeditions, provided explorers with a forum in which to present findings, both orally (in the RGS lecture theater) and in printed form (in its journals, and in the contents of its reading room and map library), and awarded medals to those whose work and methods it endorsed, as shown by Livingstone in 1992. In the twentieth century, when the age of ex ploration was largely over, academic and institutional geographers devoted themselves to smaller expeditions,

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detailed survey, and cartographic work, and also to for mal regional descriptions and analyses; they continued to distance themselves from the ostensibly unscientific practice of travel and (worse still) tourism, and the popular geographical medium of travel writing. All this has changed, for two main reasons. First, it is now recognized that this narrow approach to the practice and literature of geography was exclusionary. Most ex plorers, surveyors, and cartographers were white men, funded and recognized by other white men, within the geographical and social parameters of metropolitan in stitutions such as the RGS. Women were formally ex cluded from the RGS and were expected to confine themselves to forms of writing that were considered both more feminine and ‘lower’ than those of their formally geographical counterparts. Felix Driver (1995: 411) argues that ‘‘opening up a space for excluded voices and counter traditions – extending the realm of ‘legitimate’ geographical knowledge’’ is ‘‘a necessary task for any critical history of geography.’’ The voices to which Driver alludes are not just those of women, but others excluded from the narrow frame of establishment geographies, past and present, for instance by their race, ethnicity, na tionality, religion, social class, sexuality, or age. Serious attention to travel and travel writing has emerged from a critique of the discipline, and also from broader attempts to forge more critical and inclusive geographies. Second, the recent geographical ‘discovery’ of travel and travel writing was also driven by the cultural turn within the discipline in the 1990s, which focused atten tion on representation in written and more generally textual forms. Writing, as is increasingly recognized, is central to the conception of geography. Derived from the Greek geo, meaning earth, and graphien, meaning ‘to write’, geography is etymologically ‘earth writing’, ac cording to Barnes and Duncan. Questions about words and their place in the world have increasingly been raised and discussed in human geography. In the early 1990s, Trevor Barnes and James Duncan (1992: 1) could ac curately complain that ‘‘very little attention is paid to writing in human geography.’’ This is no longer the case: in recent years geographers have become increasingly conscious of the way in which they write – the form and significance of geographical writing – and have also paid a great deal of attention not only to textual sources but also to the textuality of geography. Moreover, as this article will explain in more detail, it is recognized that geographical writing in general and travel writing in particular is not simply a neutral process of description.

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Figure 1 Canadian Pacific Steamship poster, 1963. Source: Choko, M. H. and Jones, D. L. (1988). Canadian Pacific Posters 1888 1963. Montreal: Meridian Press (1988, 75).

Introducing a book in 1999 about geographies of travel writing, James Duncan and Derek Gregory (1999: 2) stressed that travel is a politicized medium: as they put it, ‘‘travel and its cultural practices have been located within larger formations in which the inscriptions of power and privilege are made clearly visible.’’

Travel and Travel-Writing Defined Travel is best defined, not by dictionaries or literary critics, but by the protagonists and authors of travel books and articles, including contemporary and recent figures like Jan Morris, Bill Bryson, and Bruce Chatwin, and

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their historical counterparts such as Mary Kinglsey, Richard Burton, and Isabella Bird. In this section, travel is introduced with illustrations from the work of Jan Morris, before the (rather narrow) definition this affords is complicated and broadened, this time with illustrations from more obscure travellers: women emigrants and male tramps. This explains some of the characteristics of tra vel writing, and also fleshes out the contrast between this and other, more formal and conventionally scholarly geographical writing. Travel writers such as Jan Morris have a number of things in common. First, they move and write in the first person, playing down the company and prac tical assistance provided by cooks, porters, guides, and others (Figure 2). Duncan and Gregory acknowledge the popularity of ‘‘personal, avowedly imaginative ac counts of travel’’ (added emphasis, Duncan and Gregory 1999: 1). These lone travellers are modern, diluted

Figure 2 Travelers rely for assistance and guidance on local people such as this man, who accompanied the Everest Expedition in 1953. He is reading a copy of the British newspaper in which Morris’ travel journal first appeared. These dispatches were compiled in book-length form in Coronation Everest (1958). Source: Morris, J. (1958). Coronation Everest, an Account by the Special Correspondent of the Times of the Everest Expedition, 1953. London: Faber.

descendents of a ‘‘Romantic view of travel,’’ which ‘‘positions the traveller as the subject of urgent desires, impulses and inner needs’’ (Chard 1999: 213), always distancing the traveller from the herd, perhaps in order to intensify the experience, or at least to respect literary convention. Second, Morris’ travel articles and books – with titles such as O! Canada (1992), City to City (1990), and Coast to Coast (1962) – all describe voluntary travel. The ex pression of free will, curiosity, and a degree of privilege, journeys are not lavishly funded but money is never a worry, and neither generally are passports or visas. The picture of travellers as a kind of peripatetic middle class is reinforced in much of the literature on the subject, for example Cheryl McEwan’s 2000 study of women tra vellers in West Africa. McEwan pigeonholes the various travellers in terms of their class, and though not all are labelled middle class – some are aristocratic and others, such as Mary Slessor, the missionary in southern Ni geria, working class – the overall impression is that of people who, their basic needs met and often far ex ceeded, are at liberty to travel for pleasure or to pursue an interest or project. These travellers are driven, but not by necessity. Alison Blunt puts this in more nuanced terms in 1994 in her account of Mary Kingsley’s travels in West Africa, arguing that Kingsley occupied and in deed forged an ambivalent social position – on the one hand metropolitan, white, and upper middle class, a privilege that freed her to travel; on the other, feminized and excluded from exclusively masculine, higher status geographical practices such as exploration and scientific writing. In this hierarchy, travel and travel writing are accorded lower status than some more formal geo graphical practices, but higher status than others. In particular, travel is more prestigious and exclusionary than, say, tourism, which is sometimes associated with, as Chard (1999: 216) puts it, ‘‘trivial, pointless and in nocent gratification.’’ Travel writing has a similar mixed status in literary criticism. Typically, Morris’ books have done well in the bookshops, if not always with the critics. The literary establishment did once nominate her dystopian novel, Last Letters From Hav, for a Booker Prize (a prestigious literary award), but she has generally been relegated to the popular genre, to the kind of writing that is not en tirely neglected by academic researchers but is never theless beyond the scope of most literary and, until recently, geographical criticism. By beginning to take seriously the travel and travel writing of figures such as Morris, geographers have begun to throw new light on popular geographies – practices and texts – which re spond to, represent, and actively shape geographical worlds. Before considering what these studies have shown, it is necessary to broaden the way in which travel and travel writing are understood.

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Towards a Broader Understanding of Travel The preliminary understanding of travel and travel writing, provided by figures such as Mary Kingsley and Jan Morris, must now be complicated and broadened to take account of a wider range of people and practices. First, as acknowledged in the previous section ‘Travel and travel writing defined’, travel is not always as solitary as it generally appears in popular travel books. Anthro pologists James Clifford and Caren Kaplan developed the idea of collective travel, Clifford extending the term to include migration, immigration, and homelessness, Kaplan writing of travelling as a pervasive and more or less universal social condition. ‘‘For many of us,’’ she argues, ‘‘there is no possibility of staying at home in the conventional sense – that is, the world has changed to the point that these domestic, national, or marked spaces no longer exist’’ (Kaplan, 1996: 7). As a condition, travel is not always or necessarily concerned with temporary movement, with merely visiting other people and places, as it appears in Morris’ accounts. Rather, it is a way of life, one which is increasingly common but not entirely new. In the past, for instance in the British Empire, travel was a way of life for many different people, from the English colonial administrators whose careers took them between different colonies to the Kru sailors who divided their shore leave between Freetown and Liverpool. Today, according to Kaplan, travel is the apparently permanent condition of many more. As a social condition rather than an individual choice, travel need not be quite as voluntary as popular travel books imply. In contrast with Mary Kingsley, whose wealth and status enabled her to travel in West Africa for pleasure and fulfillment, many of her less privileged countrywomen had practical reasons for travel. Rather than escaping from the responsibilities and banalities of home, they were travelling in the hope of securing pos itions – mostly with long hours and little pay – as do mestic servants. Their experiences are harder to trace than those of popular authors, but archives of female emigration societies and of organizations such as the Travellers’ Aid Society (TAS) do present some valuable records of travel by ordinary people, in the form of re ports sent in by TAS workers and volunteers and, less commonly, letters sent in by female travellers and their guardians. Case histories, reported in the Society’s annual reports, acknowledged that most of its clients were young women in desperate search of work. Tim Cresswell develops the idea of involuntary travel, driven not by privilege or pleasure but necessity, in his 2001 study of American tramps. Tramps, he argues, were an underclass kept – by the hostility they met in particular places and by their constant attempts to scavenge a live lihood – in a state of motion. Cresswell argues that the

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American fascination with and sometimes hostility towards tramps speaks of a cultural ambivalence towards travel and mobility more generally. On the one hand, the mobility of tramps was seen as a threat to ‘‘respectable society’’; on the other, it ‘‘slotted quite nicely into y American national identity’’ (Cresswell, 2001: 14). In Britain and Ireland, according to David Sibley, there is less ambivalence about ‘travellers’ – those formerly known as ‘gypsies’ – whose mobility is widely regarded as a threat to those with more settled ways. Other forced travellers in clude slaves, refugees, asylum seekers, and others in exile of one kind or another, as mentioned in the writings of Bammer in 1994, and Broe and Ingram in 1989. Broadening still further the idea of travel, it is possible to think of nonhuman forms of travel: the movement of ideas and objects. Edward Said (1984: 226) argued thus: ‘‘Like people and schools of criticism, ideas and theories travel – from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another.’’ This process may take tan gible human form, as for example in Carl Sauer’s 1952 analysis of the dispersal of cultural traits from origins or ‘‘cultural hearths.’’ But the movement of ideas and objects is distinct from that of people, and is organized not around human subjects but rather transport and com munications technologies. John Law in 1986 developed this point in a study of the flows of information and goods – over long distances and through networks – that formed the basis for imperialism and arguably proto globalization in the early modern period. The idea of nonhuman movements and interactions, driven and structured by technologically defined and materially substantive net works, was taken further by Bruno Latour in 1987, whose ‘Actor Network Theory’ examined the interrelations be tween human and nonhuman agents within broad pro cesses of sociospatial interaction. A full review of this body of theory is beyond the scope of this article, but its brief mention does usefully complicate an understanding of what travel and travel writing are, while at the same time underlining the politicization of travel – the subject of the next section titled ‘Politics of travel’.

Politics of Travel This section reviews geographical literature on the political and theoretical significance of travel and travel writing, with reference to the medium’s special signifi cance for constructions of gender, imperialism, and finally class. Though it makes sense to discuss travel and travel writing in the same general context, the two should be carefully distinguished. For Duncan and Gregory (1999: 5), they are necessarily connected: travel writing is the trace of ‘‘corporeal subjects moving through material landscapes.’’ But, as the eighteenth century English

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journalist, travel writer, and novelist Daniel Defoe once commented, the best travellers do not always make the best travel writers, and vice versa (Figure 3). Indeed, some of the most successful published works of travel are either free with the experiences they ostensibly chronicle, or are entirely invented. For instance, Defoe’s own bestselling travel journal, A New Voyage Round the World by a Course Never Sailed Before (1725), was a work of fiction. Duncan and Gregory are right to assert the fundamental materiality of travel writing, however, because whether nonfiction or fiction, it responds in some way to, and in turn shapes, the material world. Like other forms of geographical representation, travel writing should be understood not as the mere depiction of the world, but as part of it . This means that, as Edward Said argued in 1978, geographical represen tations are not simply copies or misrepresentations of some ‘‘original’’; more actively, they are always for something, and against or instead of something else. For instance, European representations of the Orient, ac cording to him, should not be seen as the ‘‘mis representation of some Oriental essence,’’ but rather as purposive formations, which intervened in ‘‘specific his torical, intellectual, and even economic’’ settings (Said, 1978: 273). This fundamentally political way of thinking about representation informs geographical and other recent interest in travel writing. Consequently, this sec tion concentrates not on the formal or aesthetic qualities of travel writing but rather its material and political significance. It concentrates, as Duncan and Gregory (1999: 2) put it, on locating ‘‘travel and its cultural practices y within larger formations in which the in scriptions of power and privilege are made clearly visible.’’ For instance, as explained earlier, travel was and is an important medium for the inscription of gender. Victo rian women, excluded from other geographical practices and media, were permitted to travel and write travel books, though they were expected to do so in certain ways, which were variously spelled out and hinted at in a mixture of guidebooks, women’s emigration societies, unwritten social codes, and so on. Travel and travel writing were therefore important for the reproduction of constructions of femininity and masculinity. But they also opened up space in which to contest and shift con structions of gender. Mary Kingsley’s efforts to respect conventions of feminine style were recognized by some critics, such as the newspaper reviewer of West African Studies who praised the ‘‘fresh, vigorous, breezy style,’’ which befitted ‘‘a lady y so light hearted and gay’’ (Nottingham Daily Guardian 1899, quoted by Blunt, 1994: 121). And yet, Kingsley negotiated and pushed the boundaries of contemporary femininity where she judged it possible to do so. She had gone to parts of West Africa that had not been visited or mapped by other Europeans,

and she had maintained a seriousness of purpose that contradicted the apparent frivolity of her style, making scientific observations and trading with Africans as she went. Blunt concludes that Kingsley’s travels and travel writing contested and reshaped conventions of gender, both in the colonial contexts of travel, and also closer to home. Other travel writers, in contrast, have used the me dium of travel writing to contest contemporary con structions of sexuality. For example, in 1885–86, Richard Burton used travel books and essays (as well as transla tions) to contest Victorian prudery and argued that men who had sex with men ‘‘deserve, not prosecution but the pitiful care of the physician and the study of the psych ologist’’ (Burton, 1885–86: x.209). Traversing a series of sexual cultures, accumulating a picture of diversity, he used travel writing to assemble a case against the moral universalism of his time, and for a more differentiated and sympathetic sexual culture. Kingsley and Burton both travelled in an age of em pire and were, in different ways, imperial travellers. Travel writing could, as Said (1978: 219) put it, be used to chart ‘‘geographical space to be cultivated, harvested, and guarded’’ by themselves. The relationships between travel and imperialism were and are varied and complex, sometimes subtle but sometimes – as, for example, in the work of Richard Burton – direct and crude. Burton was an outspoken advocate of racially structured imperialism. He used travel books about West Africa to argue, for example, that ‘‘the Negro’’ would be best ‘‘held to labour’’ by ‘‘better and wiser men than himself ’’ (Burton, 1864: ii.204). On the other hand, the colonial subjects of travel texts were often presented more positively, as, for ex ample, in the Canadian Pacific Steamship poster repro duced in Figure 4, though these representations could still be imperialist, legitimating colonial relationships. Imperial travel writing, in its many forms, is not confined to the past. Derek Gregory traces echoes of Orientalist texts – their colonial tropes and imaginative geographies – in the foreign policy discourse of the United States and its allies in relation to Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq. He shows, for instance, how Western travellers in Egypt continue to see their own journeys through the lens of other books, written by past gener ations, which they take with them and read along the way. This establishes continuity between travel books and travel experiences, blurring boundaries between im aginative and real travel, textual and material geog raphies. So, even though writers often try to distance themselves from their colonial predecessors, the latter remain important points of reference. Gregory (2004: 18– 19) argues that the ‘‘categories, codes, and conventions’’ of contemporary Orientalism ‘‘shape the practices of those who draw upon it, actively constituting its object in such a way that this structure is as much a repertoire as it is

Figure 3 Trave -wr t ng as fict on. A Map of the Wor d on wh ch s De neated the Voyages of Rob nson Crusoe.’ Rob nson Crusoe was a fict ona trave book, though not ent re y an mag nary one, s nce t drew upon the nonfict on narrat ve of a trave er named A exander Se k rk, and ts geograph ca sett ngs and h stor ca context were c ose y researched. Source: & Br t sh L brary Board: A R ghts Reserved (12613.bb.6).

Travel and Travel-Writing 481

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Conclusion

Figure 4 A Canadian Pacific Steamship poster advertising travel to the Orient. This poster depicts European civilization in the form of a gleaming modern steamship, contrasted with Oriental exoticism, sensuality, and primitivism, in the form of the junks and the boatman in the foreground. This image of travel animates an imaginative geography neatly divided between modern and primitive, colonizer and colonized. Source: Choko, M. H. and Jones, D. L. (1988). Canadian Pacific Posters 1888 1963. Montreal: Meridian Press.

an archive.’’ This repertoire has surfaced, for example, in Presidential speeches justifying war in Iraq, and a range of commentaries on Islam in the context of the 11 Sep tember attacks and the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan and Iraq. Addressing a joint session of Congress on 11 Sep tember 1990, on the crisis in the Gulf following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, George Bush Senior stated that: ‘‘Out of these troubled times, a new world order can emerge,’’ one in which ‘‘the rule of law supplants the law of the jungle.’’ Gregory argues that Bush’s speech revived a colonial discourse of ‘‘wild untamed spaces’’ in which ‘‘civilisation’’ was menaced by a reversion to ‘‘barbarism.’’ Though this kind of imaginative geography and, more specifically, through the inertia of its language, the past weighs heavily upon the present, and travel’s ‘‘inscrip tions of power’’ (Duncan and Gregory, 1999: 2) are reified.

This article began by explaining that geographers have paid increasing attention to travel writing because, in so doing, they are able to open up what Driver (1995: 411) calls ‘‘space for excluded voices and counter traditions’’ and also extend the realm of ‘‘legitimate’’ geographical knowledge. But this brief review of gender and imperi alism in travel writing warns that this medium should not be identified with any particular politics. Travel, not necessarily the preserve of the excluded or the dissident, can also be a hegemonic medium. Moreover, the politics of travel writing and any given travel writer or text are debatable; their inscriptions of power are never more than claims to power. Their words, like anyone else’s, may be ignored, contested, twisted, and interpreted. Burton was taken to task and contradicted by some of the people he portrayed. William Rainy, the articulate Creole barrister who once successfully prosecuted him when he was visiting Freetown, later attacked the Englishman’s representation of Sierra Leone. In an 1865 pamphlet, which he dedicated ‘‘To the African People,’’ (Rainy, 1865: 3). Rainy dismissed Burton’s travel writing. De nouncing it as ‘‘a vile national slander,’’ Rainy (1865: 5) made it clear that a travel writer could not simply say what he or she wanted and get away with it, or expect people to believe and act on what was said. This discussion of travel writing begs the question: what if anything is distinctive about the medium, whether as a form of geographical writing or a means of political intervention, or both. This question is, at very least, complicated by the eclectic and contested nature of travel and travel writing as categories – in which one person’s travel is another’s displacement, one person’s travel journal another’s exploration narrative. Still, different travel nar ratives do generally have one thing in common: to recall the Dictionary definition of travel, they describe journeys as ‘‘from one place to another.’’ At worst, as Rainy argued of Burton, the brevity of travel breeds a superficial and ill informed engagement with place. He dismissed Burton’s travel journal as the quick judgements of an ‘‘ignorant’’ and ‘‘superficial observer’’ who in a matter of ‘‘moments’’ had arrived at unsound ‘‘conclusions upon the morals, habits, and social qualities of nations’’ (Rainy, 1865: 5). At best, however, travel brings a freshness of perspective to places, which it also positions within wider frameworks of com parison and connection. A final example of travel writing illustrates this point, and with it the power of the medium. Friedrich Engels visited Manchester and the neigh boring city of Salford in 1844, and described his obser vations in a travel journal. His was very much the description of an outsider, to whom the pungent en vironmental and social condition of mid nineteenth century northern England remained unfamiliar, and re tained the power to shock.

Travel and Travel-Writing At the bottom the Irk flows, or rather stagnates. It is a narrow, coal black stinking river full of filth and garbage which it deposits on the lower lying right bank. In dry weather, an extended series of the most revolting blackish green pools of slime remain standing on this bank, out of whose depths bubbles of miasmatic gases constantly rise and give forth a stench that is unbearable even on this bridge forty or fifty feet above the level of the water.’ (Engels, 1958,1845: 60)

As a visitor from Germany he had a broader geo graphical perspective, which enabled him to locate this part of northwest England within a wider geographical, eco nomic, and political frame. Describing a particular place, which he compared and contrasted with Birmingham and other towns and cities he had recently passed through, Engels conveyed the sense that a new form of industrial society was emerging, a new set of relations between property owners and workers. With this, as his vivid geo graphical descriptions made clear, came new levels of social and environmental degradation, new forms of alienation and exploitation. What he saw was not only new to him, but also relatively new to the world, and it was precisely in his efforts to represent that newness that Engels groped towards an understanding of capitalism, which he would develop with Karl Marx in more general and theoretical terms. Engels’ travel narrative bore out the most funda mental promise of geographical description, which is for ‘‘empirical’’ writing to assume ‘‘heightened theoretical significance’’ (Marcus and Fisher, 1986: 15). It showed that, at best, travel writing need not simply depict places or passages through them, but that it may open new avenues for understanding and political intervention. See also: Colonialism I; Colonialism II; Literature.

Further Reading Bammer, A. (ed.) (1994). Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Barnes, T. and Duncan, J. S. (eds.) (1992). Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. London: Routledge. Berman, M. (1982). All That/Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster. Broe, M. L. and Ingram, A. (1989). Women’s Writing in Exile. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Blunt, A. (1994). Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. New York: Guilford. Burton, R. F. (1864). Mission to Gelele, King of Dahomey. 2 vols.London: Tinsley. Burton, R. F. (1885 1886). The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. 10 vols. Benares: Kama Shastra Society. Chard, C. (1999). Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Choko, M. H. and Jones, D. L. (1988). Canadian Pacific Posters 1888 1963. Montreal: Meridian Press. Clifford, J. (1992). Travelling cultures. In Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. & Treichler, P. (eds.) Cultural Studies, pp 96 112. New York: Routledge.

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Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cresswell, T. (2001). The Tramp in America. London: Reaktion. Defoe, D. (1719). The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (4th edn). London: W. Taylor. Domosh, M. (1991). Towards a feminist historiography of geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16(1), 95 104. Driver, F. (1995). Submerged identities: Familiar and unfamiliar histories. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20(4), 410 413. Duncan, J. and Gregory, D. (eds.) (1999). Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing London: Routledge. Engels, F. (1958). The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (first publ. 1845). Oxford: Blackwell. Frost, D. (1992). The Kru in Freetown and Liverpool: A Study of Maritime Work and Community during the 19th and 20th Centuries. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Gregory, D. (2004). The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. Hudman, L. and Jackson, R. (1999). Geography of Travel and Tourism. New York: Delman. Kaplan, C. (1996). Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. London: Duke University Press. Lambert, D. and Howell, P. (2003). John Pope Hennessey and the translation of ‘slavery’ between late nineteenth century Barbados and Hong Kong. History Workshop Journal 55, 1 24. Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Law, J. (ed.) (1986). Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. (trans. Nicholson Smith, D.) Oxford: Blackwell. Livingstone, D. N. (1992). The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise. Oxford: Blackwell. McEwan, C. (2000). Gender, Geography and Empire: Victorian Women Travellers in West Africa. Aldershot: Ashgate. McLynn, F. (1990). Snow upon the Desert. London: John Murray. Marcus, G. E. and Fisher, M. M. J. (eds.) (1986). Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Morris, J. (1958). Coronation Everest, an Account by the Special Correspondent of the Times of the Everest Expedition, 1953. London: Faber. Morris, J. (1989). Pleasures of a Tangled Life. London: Barrie & Jenkins. Ogborn, M. (2006). Mapping words. New Formations 57, 145 149. Phillips, R. (1999). Writing travel and mapping sexuality: Richard Burton’s Sotadic Zone. In Duncan, J. & Gregory, D. (eds.) Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, pp 70 91. London: Routledge. Phillips, R. (2001). Decolonizing geographies of travel: Reading James/ Jan Morris. Social and Cultural Geography 2, 5 24. Phillips, R. (2006). ‘Heterosexuality, respectability and the travellers’ aid society. Acme: An E Journal of Critical Geography 5, 163 190. Phillips, R. (2006). Sex, Politics and Empire: A Postcolonial Geography. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pratt, M. L. (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Rainy, W. (1865). The Censor Censured; or, the Calumnies of Captain Burton on the Africans of Sierra Leone. London: George Chalfont. Rappaport, E. D. (2000). Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient. New York: Pantheon. Said, E. (1984). Travelling Theory. The World, the Text and the Critic, pp 226 247. London: Faber and Faber. Sauer, C. O. (1952). Agricultural Origins and Dispersals: The Domestication of Animals and Foodstuffs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sibley, D. (1995). Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in Society and Space. London: Routledge. Urry, J. (2002). The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage. Waite, M. (1998). Little Oxford Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walker, K. (ed.) (1964). Love, War and Fancy: The Customs and Manners of the East from Writings of the Arabian Nights. London: William Kimber.

Trend Surface Models D. J. Unwin, University College London, London, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Dependent Variable The unknown quantity to be estimated in a statistical analysis. Eastings The distance east (along) from some origin point in a pair of map grid references. Field In geographic information science used to denote a spatially continuous variable, such as air temperature for which everywhere has a value. Georeference A description of the location of a point on the Earth’s surface, such as a grid reference, latitude/ longitude, or postal/ZIP code. Independent Variable The known quantities used, often in conjunction with others, to estimate the values of some unknown dependent variable. Interpolation, Spatial The process of threading lines of equal value, such as contours or more generally isolines through a field of sample numbers. Isolines Lines of equal value of the height of a continuous field. Least Squares Minimizing the sum of squares of the differences between model values and observed data, much used as a criterion in regression analysis. Leverage In regression analysis, a measure of the influence of an individual datum on the overall result. Northings The distance north (up) from some origin point in a pair of map grid references. Polynomial In trend analysis a mathematical expression of the form z b0 þ b1x þ b2y þ ? þ bnxmym. Regression In statistics, a method of calibrating models using observed data. Residual The difference between an observed value of the height of a field and the value predicted at the same point by a trend surface model. Trend Component The value predicted at some point by a trend surface model. Universal Kriging A method of spatial interpolation used when there is a change in the mean value across a field.

(contour type) map, we can express this using the notion of a mathematical function of the general form given in zi ¼ f ðxi ; yi Þ

½1

This defines what is known as a scalar field, and relates surface height (z) at a location i, to its position in space specified by a pair of (x, y) coordinates. In the notation of eqn [1], f is simply some as yet unknown function. If we knew the form of the function, specification of a location in space by its (x, y) coordinates would be all that was needed to give a predicted value for the surface height at this point. By way of illustration, suppose that the spatially dis tributed variable is altitude above sea level, and that the (x, y) are the northings and eastings grid coordinates of the base map. Although this uses the height of the land surface, it is important to realize that the z values could be almost any spatially distributed phenomenon that is continuous, for example, temperature, or rainfall. In human geography we frequently imagine that variables of interest are spatially continuous, as, for example, in the concepts of population density and potential. For ground height, the familiar contour map is a graphical way of specifying the linking function, f, but in geographical information systems fields are often specified and rep resented in other ways, for example, by regularly or ir regularly distributed point samples, polygons, or a network of triangles. These methods and graphical con structions are used in preference to specification of some regular mathematical function for two reasons. First, al most always the function will be complex, incapable of being expressed by any simple mathematical form and, second, in many applications we want our representation of the field to ensure that heights are always correct. On a topographic map we expect the contours to be in their correct positions, such that the mapped surface ‘honors’ all the available height information. In these circum stances, the usual approach taken would involve some form of spatial interpolation to create a contour map representation of the field.

Trend Surfaces and Their Residuals Introduction: Representing Scalar Fields In circumstances when a spatially distributed variable either is, or can be assumed to be, continuous across space, such that it is possible to draw an isoline

484

In contrast, a trend surface deliberately generalizes such a field into its major feature, or trend, defined as any systematic change that extends smoothly and predictably from one map edge to the other. Geographic examples of such systematic trends might be the dome of atmospheric pollution over a city, the dome in population density over

Trend Surface Models

485

a city, a north–south trend in mean annual temperatures, and so on. All that a trend surface analysis does is to define and fit surfaces to observational data by specifying a simple mathematical form for the function using conventional least squares regression. Since it is unlikely that any such relatively smooth mathematical function will correctly reproduce all the observed data heights, it follows that there will be local departures from the trend, called re siduals. Mathematically, we denote this division of any height on a scalar field into a trend plus/minus a residual as in eqn [2]: zi ¼ f ðxi ; yi Þ7ei

½2

That is, the surface height at the i th point is made up of the fitted trend component, f (xi, yi), plus or minus a re sidual, or error, ei. It remains to examine possible forms for the function, f, and the details of how the fitting is accomplished. The first issue we have is to decide on is the appro priate functional form for the trend, since there is an enormous range of candidates. The simplest trend surface imaginable is an inclined plane, or linear trend surface, specified as in zi ¼ b0 þ b1 xi þ b2 yi þ ei

½3

This sort of trend might be assumed to be a reasonable model for a simple, regular change in the value of some variable across a region of interest. To calculate values for the trend part of eqn [3], we need to know the coefficients b0, b1, and b2 together with the coordinates of points of interest. For this linear function, the coefficients have direct, physical interpre tations as shown in Figure 1. First, b0 represents the height of the surface at the map origin, where xi ¼ yi ¼ 0. The second, b1, is the surface slope in the x direction and the third, b2, is the same in the y direction. The linear trend surface is the shaded inclined plane passing through a series of data points, each shown as a circle. Some of the observed data points, those colored white, lie above the trend surface and so have a positive error or residual, while others, shaded gray, are below the surface and so have a negative residual. Having specified and computed a trend surface, we have two spatial distributions of interest. In some work it might be the hypothesized form of this trend that is of interest. In others, interest could center on the distri bution and size of the local residuals. From the previous equations, it is obvious that these can be calculated from: ei ¼ zi

ðb0 þ b1 xi þ b2 yi Þ

½4

That is, the residual at each point is given by the dif ference between the observed surface height at that point

Figure 1 A simple linear trend surface.

and the value predicted by the fitted surface. Maps of residuals are a useful way of exploring data to suggest the operation of strictly local processes on the variable of interest. Although it is the simplest of the functions that might be used to specify a trend surface, the linear model is limited. No matter how the values of the b coefficients are changed, the result is always a simple inclined plane threaded through the observational data. If geographical theory leads us to expect a different shape then other more complex surfaces can be fitted. Exactly the same technique is used, but, as we will see, the calculations become extremely lengthy. Suppose that we wish to create a trend surface that specifies a dome or trough like trend. The appropriate function to use is a quadratic polynomial, giving the model specified by: zi ¼ f ðxi ; yi Þ ¼ b0 þ b1 xi þ b2 yi þ b3 xi yi þ b4 xi2 þ b5 yi2 þ ei ½5

This is still a trend surface, but there are now six co efficients, b0 to b5, to be found and, instead of an inclined plane, it describes a tilted surface that has been warped along one axis giving a dome or trough like surface. In some of the literature this type of surface is referred to as a polynomial of the second order. Notice that no addi tional information has been provided, all the new terms in this equation are manipulations of the original (x, y) data. Addition of further terms specifies ever more complex surfaces of 3rd, 4th, etc. orders, but in practice these have seldom been used. Other types of surface, including os cillatory ones specified by a double Fourier series and surfaces in three dimensions specified by (x, y, z) lo cational coordinates, have also been experimented with. Whether any of these more complex trend models can be matched to appropriate geographic theory is doubtful. The danger is of ‘overfitting’ the trend surface. In fact, if we have n observations to fit, it is almost always possible

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to get a perfect fit by introducing the same number of coefficients.

Fitting Trend Surfaces The second issue concerns how, once defined, such sur faces are calculated. Returning for illustration to the linear model of Figure 1, it should be apparent that different choices for the coefficients b0, b1, and b2 will specify dif ferent trend surfaces and hence different values for the associated residuals. The decision as to which is the best combination of values is made using the least squares criterion of goodness of fit in which the specific function chosen for the trend must minimize the sum of the squared residuals from the trend. This is the standard criterion used in ordinary least squares multiple linear regression. As we have noted, a linear trend surface is thus exactly the same as a conventional multiple linear re gression in which the dependent variable is surface height, z, expressed as a function of two independent variables, the locational coordinates (xi, yi). The addition of terms to create a dome or trough like quadratic surface, as in eqn [5], simply adds an additional three (xi, yi, xi2, and yi2) supposedly independent variables to the regression equation. It is easily shown that the vector of required co efficients, b, that provides the least squares solution for the forms given in eqns [3] and [5] can be found from the matrix equation: b ¼ ðXT XÞ1 XT z

½6

In this, the matrix X is given by: 2

1 x1 6. . X¼6 4 .. .. 1 xn

3 y1 .. 7 7 . 5

½7

yn

The surface height, z, is the dependent variable, whose values form the column vector z and the solution vector, b, contains our required coefficients, b0, b1, and b2 for eqn [3] for example. To fit alternative models, all that needs to be done is to change the definition of this X matrix. Thus for a quadratic, we would solve eqn [6] using a 6 column X matrix of the form: 2

1 x1 6 6 .. .. 6. . 6 6 X ¼ 6 1 xi 6 6. . 6 .. .. 4 1 xn

y1 .. . yi .. . yn

x1 y1 .. .

x12 .. .

xi yi .. . xn yn

xi2 .. . xn2

3 y12 7 .. 7 . 7 7 7 yi2 7 7 .. 7 . 7 5 yn2

½8

The so called sums of squares and cross products matrix,

XTX, is now 6 by 6, its inverse (XTX) 1 is harder to find, and the vector of coefficients, b, now has six values, b0–b5. As the number of coefficients to be calculated increases, so do both the amount of arithmetic involved and the chance of error. In practice it would be unusual to go further than using the squares or cubes of the locational coordinates and the calculations are almost always done by computer. During the 1960s a number of authors published elaborate programs, often in the FORTRAN language, specifically to calculate and map trend surfaces and their residuals. Nowadays, it is much easier to use standard statistical packages, such as Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) or MINITAB, to do the basic calculations. The ability to calculate and map trend surfaces is included in many geographic information systems. However, workers tempted to fit polynomials with very many terms using commercial off the shelf software should be aware that eqn [6] can in some cir cumstances be hard to solve using a digital computer whose word length is fixed. This arises both from the size of the numbers involved when very high powers of the x and y coordinates are used and from linear dependence between the rows of the matrix XTX, which makes the inverse, and hence the solution for b, very unstable to small changes in the input data.

Some Statistical Issues The above exposition has considered trend surface analysis from a strictly mathematical viewpoint, neglecting the fact that a statistical interpretation is also appropriate. In stat istical terms the process described above uses some ob served values of the field, zi , at a series of locations (xi , yi) to estimate a set of unknown coefficients, b, defining a specified trend surface that in the least squares sense best fits these data. Clearly, it would be useful to have some measure of how well the surface fits these observed data. This is provided by comparing the sum of squared residual values for the fitted surface to the sum of squared dif ferences from the simple mean for the observed z values, called the percentage reduction in sums of squares. This quantity is better known as the coefficient of determina tion used in standard regression analysis and is given by the square of the coefficient of multiple correlation, R2:

R2 ¼ 1

Pn 2 e Pn i 1 i 2 ¼ 1 zÞ i 1 ðzi

SSE SSz

½9

In this, SSE is the sum of squared errors and SSz is the sum of squared differences from mean. The statistic in dicates how much of an improvement the fitted trend

Trend Surface Models

surface is, compared to simply using the data mean to predict unknown values. In almost all applications of the method, the observed data will be a sample taken from an underlying continuous field of surface heights. It follows that the coefficients, b, although calculated by a defined mathematical procedure, can also be viewed as least squares estimates of some unknown population parameter values, which are denoted using the Greek characters as the vector b. The question that naturally arises is to what extent these values are statistically significantly different from zero, which would indicate that in the population there is no trend of the type specified in the fitted model. As in conventional multiple linear regression, whether or not this fit is statistically significant can be tested using an F ratio statistic F¼

R2 =df surface ð1 R2 Þ=df residuals

½10

In which dfsurface is the degrees of freedom associated with the fitted surface, equal to the number of coefficients used, less one for the base term b0 and dfresiduals is the degrees of freedom associated with the residuals. This is the total number of observed data points, n, less the number of coefficients in the fitted equation. Formally, this is a test of the null hypothesis that the population parameters are all equal to zero: H0 : b0 ¼ b1 ¼ b2 ¼ ? ¼ bn ¼ 0

½11

The alternative is that one or more of the parameters is not zero: H1 : not all b ¼ 0

½12

If the computed value exceeds the tabulated of F, the null hypothesis is rejected in favor of the alternative, and it is inferred that there is evidence of a real trend of the specified functional form in the real field. A complication that arises in the use of higher order, polynomial models is that they include many more terms in the model and many more parameters to be estimated. Here the ap propriate question to ask at each step is whether or not the additional terms contribute significantly to the def inition of the trend. This is done by taking the difference between the surface fitted and that of the next lower order, divided by the difference in degrees of freedom between the two, dividing this in turn by the mean square due to the residuals of the higher order surface. The resulting F ratio thus allows a test of the significance of the added terms. If these tests reveal that the null hypothesis cannot be rejected, that there is no significant trend in the data, several explanations might be adduced. One possibility is that there really is no trend of any sort across the surface. Another is that there is a trend in the underlying surface

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but that the sample size, n, is too small to detect it. Yet another is that the wrong functional form has been spe cified for the trend. Calibration using least squares makes some assump tions about the data that in practice might be hard to sustain. It is simply impossible to solve eqn [6] if the number of observed data values is less than the number of coefficients in the trend specification, thus setting an absolute lower limit on the sample size, n. If formal statistical testing is appropriate, then n also sets limits on the number of degrees of freedom associated with the residuals, and hence the applicability of the F ratio tests. However, because we are dealing with spatial data two issues that are present, but often hidden, in conventional nonspatial least squares regression become very evident. The first is that when mapped there is a tendency for surfaces of order higher than the linear to give pro nounced and unwelcome edge effects in which predicted values can be very high or low along the margins of the area over which sample values have been used. When possible, many workers will protect against this by forming a buffer region around the area of interest into which these effects can be concentrated and then ig nored. The second, related, effect is for individual, isol ated data points to have excessive influence on the form of the fitted surface, a phenomenon that in conventional regression analysis is called their leverage. In general, the leverage of a datum increases away from the center of the mapped area and is most for points at the very edges of the distribution. Such points may, or may not, be well fitted, but it is wise to be aware of their potential influ ence on both the form and fit of any trend surface. Formal calculation of the leverage exerted by each data point has been shown to be a very useful diagnostic in analyzing such effects. Finally, calibration using least squares also makes the usual assumptions about the unknown error terms in the underlying population, which are assumed to have con stant variance over the entire studied area, be normally distributed, and independent of each other. It is the in dependence assumption that is the most troublesome, since in a very large number of applications this will simply not hold and will be evidenced by the phenom enon of spatial autocorrelation in the residuals. If spatial autocorrelation is present, there is some remaining spa tial pattern in the observed data that has not been properly modeled by the fitted surface. The wrong model for the trend has been fitted. Autocorrelation in the re siduals also means that in significance tests the effective degrees of freedom is less than assumed, which in turn leads to computed F ratios higher than they should be and thus a greater chance of committing a Type 1 error, that is, of inferring a statistically significant trend when one cannot be justified. As with conventional multiple linear regression, statistical purists might well argue that

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the analysis and associated tests are flawed, but the fact remains that in numerous applications the results of trend surface analyses that have broken these assump tions have been found to be scientifically useful.

Applications in Human Geography Trend surface analysis was introduced into geography from its origins in geology, and especially stratigraphy where it was used to model the depth of specific rock horizons of interest, or variations in quantities such as mean grain size within a formation. In physical geog raphy it was used to study large scale spatial variations in, for example, rainfall and atmospheric pollution. It has also been used as a means of locally estimating the gra dient of the land surface, the skiers ‘fall line’, by fitting linear or quadratic surfaces to the values in a kernel around each point and then computing both the magni tude and direction of the maximum slope through that point. Similarly, low order trend surfaces are routinely used to remove ‘drift’ in the method of spatial inter polation known as Universal Kriging. There are a number of reasons why trend surface an alysis has been less effectively used in human geography. Probably the most important is the fact that, unlike physical geography in which such analysis is the norm, human geographers only seldom attempt to model spa tially continuous fields. Instead, the objects of interest tend to be discrete points (e.g., a factory marked with as its z value the output or number of workers), lines (e.g., a railway network, also marked with the frequency of ser vice), or areas (e.g., a census tract, marked with its popu lation voting in a particular way). In no sense are these objects samples of some underlying real, continuous phenomenon. At first sight this limits the applica bility of trend surface models in human geography, yet there have been several ways by which this has been cir cumvented. Consider, for example, that we have some strictly discontinuous information that relates to discrete points across a region such as the number of workers in a series of factories distributed around a city. In no sense is there a continuous field of factory employment across the region. However, effectively ignoring the problem, work ers have fitted surfaces to such data and argued that the results provide a useful separation of a spatial trend from purely local effects. An alternative, used in the same case, has been to argue that these data are a sample of what in some sense is a potential for employment (indeed, this can be formalized in the notion of a population potential). Others have noted that, although the individual objects are discrete, it is possible to conceptualize continuous surfaces of their spatial density and thus to apply these types of surface models to them. Where the objects of interest are

discrete areas, such as census tracts, workers have applied the trend surface method using as the locations of their dependent variable some sort of reference points such as the centroids of the areas involved. Provided the areas are uniformly small and that there is a large number of them across the region of interest this seems legitimate, but it is a device that should be used with extreme caution. Finally, experiments have been undertaken in which surfaces have been generated through discrete, binary (0/1, yes/no), point valued data. By definition, fitting such surfaces cannot use ordinary least squares methods. Instead, a logit model approach is taken using different methods of esti mation for the coefficients and the resulting predicted values are interpreted as probabilities of a specified binary response across the region. In conclusion, trend surface analysis has been a much used and abused technique, but it remains one that is useful in spatial statistical analysis. See also: Edge Effects; GIScience and Systems; Maps; Quantitative Methodologies; Regression, Linear and Nonlinear; Spatial Autocorrelation; Spatial Interpolation; Statistics, Spatial.

Further Reading Bailey, T. C. and Gatrell, A. C. (1995). Interactive spatial data analysis. Harlow: Longman. Chorley, R. J. and Haggett, P. (1965). Trend surface mapping in geographical research. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37, 47 67. Davis, J. C. (2002). Statistics and data analysis in geology (3rd ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Norcliffe, G. B. (1969). On the uses and limitations of trend surface models. Canadian Geographer 13, 338 348. O’Sullivan, D. and Unwin, D. (2003). Geographic information analysis. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Unwin, D. J. (1975). An introduction to trend surface analysis. CATMOG, 5, Norwich, Geo Abstracts. Wrigley, N. (1977). Probability surface mapping: A new approach to trend surface mapping. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 2, 129 140. Wrigley, N. and Unwin, D. (1987). Towards a general theory of control point distribution effects in trend surface models. Computers and Geosciences 13, 351 355.

Relevant Websites http://www.wun.ac.uk/ggisa/elearning.html Global GIS academy comprehensive introduction to regression methods. http://www.spatialanalysisonline.com Simple regression and trend surface modeling. http://www.kgs.ku.edu Trend surface analysis. http://www.geog.ucsb.edu Trend surface analysis, basic concepts.

Triangulation A. Nightingale, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Methodological Framework A framework for gathering and analyzing information within a research project. It links together conceptual or theoretical ideas with the methods used. Participant Observation A method of data collection used in qualitative research to gather information on daily practices. The method involves active participation in activities with research participants in order to gain insight into those activities and the social dynamics surrounding them. Positionality The position from which a researcher views the research objectives. It generally refers to various aspects of a person’s social status including gender, race, class, educational level, etc. It also includes factors that create bias or a particular perspective. Postmodern Theories A body of conceptual thought that developed out of critiques of structuralism. It most often includes the idea that knowledge is not fixed or independent, multiple truths can coexist, and that meaning is a contested process created in context. It causes a shift from searching for causes to questions about how things happen. Validate The process by which research methods are evaluated for the extent to which they reflect the research questions asked. Validation in quantitative methods involves the calculation of statistical errors, whereas in qualitative methods validation methods include cross-checking or triangulation with other methods; theoretical saturation, or the point at which no new information is gained; and adherences to a code of conduct believed to ensure accurate results such as avoiding leading questions.

Triangulation Triangulation is an analysis technique used in multi method research designs. Many research projects utilize more than one data collection method, leading to the development of different datasets. Datasets might be those collected from a quantitative survey or participant obser vation, for example. The results from the datasets are analyzed independently, but they also need to be com pared to each other in some way. How they are compared depends on the methodological framework used. Trian gulation is one technique to combine datasets, and three

different kinds of triangulation can be distinguished: convergence, complementarity, and divergence or dis sonance. These three kinds of triangulation are discussed in detail below. Triangulation is a term that was borrowed from sur veying, where it refers to the collection of different compass bearings (usually three, hence triangulation) in order to pinpoint a location on a map. In research, there is no fixed number of datasets that need to be compared, although in many cases, researchers will use two main datasets. The datasets are compared for convergence, complementarity, and divergence. If the results lead to the same conclusions, then the methods help to validate each other. Some researchers will also use triangulation to validate results by comparing the results from different observers of the same phenomenon. In other words, it is a form of cross checking.

Convergence Triangulation has most commonly been used to ensure that methods were done properly and the data are ro bust by looking for convergence in the results. A re search project that has used participant observation and interviews, for example, would check that responses given in interviews are consistent with observations made by the researcher. If the two datasets agree with each other, they are said to converge. This kind of val idation requires that researchers believe that the methods will produce the same kind of understanding of reality. If the question is about forest harvesting prac tices, for example, it is assumed that there is a set of forest harvesting practices that can be discussed and observed and that verbal accounts and practices will mirror each other. In this kind of understanding, if the datasets do not converge, then the quality of the data is drawn into question and the researcher would seek to discover the error. This is an important point, as in other kinds of triangulation the lack of convergence would signal theoretical errors or be treated as new data rather than data collection errors. Convergence can also be sought when comparing quantitative and qualitative data. In these instances, often a quantitative survey will be used to validate the results of qualitative interviews, or more rarely, the other way around. Again, this kind of analysis assumes that the two datasets are evaluating the same phenomenon and will produce the same kind of knowledge about that phe nomenon. Similarly, when looking for convergence of

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results from two different observers, the assumption is that the results are independent of the observer and re peatable; therefore, a lack of convergence would signal problems with the data collection.

Complementarity Convergence is the most common form of triangulation but two other methods of triangulation also need to be highlighted. As mentioned above, triangulation for con vergence assumes that the datasets produce the same picture of reality. Theoretical developments in the social sciences since the 1970s, however, have challenged the idea that knowledge production is so straightforward. Instead, these theories focus on the importance of the positionality of the researcher when analyzing research results. In this kind of paradigm, datasets may not pro duce the same understanding of the phenomenon under investigation and therefore triangulating for convergence is not appropriate. Some theories propose that un observable phenomenon or structures shape observable phenomenon and therefore the results from two different kinds of datasets may not perfectly converge. Other theoretical paradigms go further and contest the exist ence of one truth and rather propose that truth is situ ated depending on the observer – these are often called postmodern theories. Therefore, datasets would not be independent of the research context and as such not necessarily repeatable. In both instances, researchers would not expect convergence. Rather they may look for complementarity. Complementary triangulation seeks to produce a fuller picture of the research questions by combining information from different methods or different ob servers. In this kind of analysis, quantitative and quali tative datasets can be combined together. The results are not expected to be the same, but rather to make sense in relation to each other and to help create a fuller picture of the research problem by creating more complete in formation about a topic. Commonly, this kind of analysis will use a phased methodology, where researchers will use one method in order to have a background under standing for another kind of data collection. For example, a quantitative survey might be used to collect statistical information on a population in order to then conduct in depth qualitative interviews with people from groups identified by the survey. Similarly, qualitative interviews might be used to help develop questions for a quantita tive survey. The analysis of the first dataset thus informs the development of the second dataset. Complementary triangulation does not necessarily need to be phased, however. In fact, triangulation is often used to understand a research problem more fully by using datasets both of which provide similar information.

To return to the forest harvesting example, a researcher may use a quantitative survey, participant observation, and interviews, to gather information on harvesting practices. The survey would be designed to gather in formation on quantities of harvest and the range of practices used, while the participant observation would try to understand how harvesting practices are imple mented on a day to day basis and the interviews to get descriptions and people’s feelings or beliefs about har vesting. All of these provide important information about harvesting, some of which would be expected to con verge, but a lot of it would be complementary. For ex ample, the interviews may help to explain why some households harvest less than others, a finding that was revealed by the survey. Here, the important methodo logical issue is that triangulation is not only trying to validate the methods used, but rather is used to enrich the analysis. If complete divergence was the result, then the researcher may draw into question the validity of the methods as some convergence is expected, but it is not the only purpose of comparing the datasets.

Divergence Divergence of datasets presents a different set of meth odological challenges. When triangulation is used within a research project that assumes the different methods used are providing information on the same phenom enon, then divergence indicates problems with the data. Using the above example, the researcher would check that how they asked questions in the harvesting survey were tested properly to ensure respondents understood what was asked if the results diverged dramatically from the qualitative interviews. Many researchers who work with postmodern the ories, however, are interested in how knowledge itself is produced and thus find complementarity, dissonance, and gaps between datasets interesting. In this kind of meth odology, the researcher would not necessarily expect convergence or even complementarity but rather would seek to interrogate the implications of both consistency and inconsistencies between datasets. The inconsistencies do not signal problems with the data collection but rather problems with the theoretical assumptions behind the object of research. In the forest harvesting example, dis sonance between the interviews and participant obser vation can provide important insights into which practices people are willing to publicly disclose (record on a cassette) and which they choose to keep more hid den. This may provide important information on people’s willingness to cooperate with a management plan. In cases where there is no management plan to contest, it is also possible that people are not conscious of all the harvesting techniques they use or the importance of

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them. In this case, dissonance can provide insights into which aspects of harvesting are considered most im portant to the participants. Here, theoretical assumptions about why people chose to reveal certain aspects of their harvesting practices would need to be carefully exam ined. It would also signal the need to collect more data to help verify if the new theoretical assumptions are more accurate. Methodologically, the important issue is that the gaps and silences between datasets are used as data in themselves and interrogated to produce a richer picture of the research questions. Finally, a few researchers use dissonance to present different understandings of a phenomenon. This is not considered triangulation, as the datasets are deliberately not compared, but rather their divergence is held in a creative tension to highlight issues around the production of knowledge.

Studies That Have Used Triangulation Many geographical studies use triangulation. A common way is to look for convergence between interviews and participant observation. For example, a study of a wildlife management area and associated community manage ment schemes in Botswana used in depth, semistructured interviews as the main method, complemented by ob servation, participation in activities, and secondary sources. Thus, the different methods employed all lent insight into the dynamics of community management. Triangulation of the methods was primarily designed to help validate the interviews (convergence) and perhaps add some new information (complementarity). There was no overt attempt at analyzing any areas of dissonance or inconsistencies between the datasets. This study in combination with another study, also used a variety of other methods to understand the overall situation, but the triangulation strategies employed were primarily to look for convergence and complementarity. Other ways of using triangulation are also evident in the geographical literature. A study of community for estry in western Nepal used oral histories and aerial photo interpretation to build an understanding of his torical forest change. Importantly, in this study the pur pose was not to validate the oral histories with the aerial photo interpretation, but rather to treat them both as equally valid ways to understand forest change. Thus, when the oral histories indicated that forests had im proved significantly and the aerial photo interpretation showed only slight improvement, this dissonance be tween the datasets was explored. By analyzing the dis sonance between datasets as a new form of data, the study was able to better explain how the participants under stood ‘forest conditions’ to be both the ecological con ditions and the management arrangements. In other

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words, the use of triangulation was able to demonstrate how the participant’s world view did not separate the social from the ecological. The comparison of these two datasets also lent insight into how particular parts of the forest were more important than others, something which the interviewees had been reluctant to express. They had an interest in retaining control over the entire forest and therefore were careful to emphasize in interviews that the entire stand was all equally important. Yet the aerial photos and participant observation demonstrated that not all parts of the forest were used regularly. Certain parts were more important for the gathering of resources used daily, such as firewood and leaf litter, while other parts were preferred for timber and the more remote parts were rarely used. Thus the dissonance between the datasets lent insight into which parts of the forest are the most valuable, at least in the short term. This kind of analysis was also consistent with the theoretical aims of the project which sought to interro gate different forms of knowledge. Working from the literature, the study was interested in how different kinds of methodologies helped to reveal different understand ings of the world. The aerial photos thus provide one way of gaining knowledge of the forest while the oral histories provide another. Triangulation then was used analytically to explore the ways in which both methods can produce only a partial understanding. Combining them produces a richer picture but researchers need to be careful of assuming triangulation can produce a ‘complete’ picture. See also: Postmodernism/Postmodern Geography; Quantitative Methodologies; Questionnaire Survey; Reliability and Validity.

Further Reading Denzin, N. K. (1988). The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods (3rd edn.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Denzin, N. K. and Lincoln, Y. S. (eds.) (1998). Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Erzberger, C. and Prien, G. (1997). Triangulation: Validity and empirically based hypothesis construction. Quality & Quantity 31, 141 154. Krueger, R. A. (1998). Analyzing and Reporting Focus Group Results. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Nightingale, A. (2003). A feminist in the forest: Situated knowledges and mixing methods in natural resource management. ACME: An International E Journal for Critical Geographers 2, 77 90. Robson, C. (2002). Real World Research (2nd edn.). Oxford: Blackwell. Rocheleau, D. (1995). Maps, numbers, text and context: Mixing methods in feminist political ecology. Professional Geographer 47, 458 466. Shurmer Smith, P. (2002). Methods and methodology. In Shurmer Smith, P. (ed.) Doing Cultural Geography, pp 95 112. London: Sage. Silverman, D. (2000). Doing Qualitative Research: A Practical Handbook. London: Sage Publications.

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Twyman, C. (2001). Natural resource use and livelihoods in Botswana’s Wildlife Management Areas. Applied Geography 21, 45 68. Waysman, M. and Savaya, R. (1997). Mixed method evaluation: A case study. Evaluation Practice 18, 227 237. Yin, R. (1994). Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Relevant Websites http://www.sociology.org.uk Sociology Central: teaching notes. http://www.voicewisdom.co.uk Voice Wisdom: triangulation in qualitative research.

Tropical Geography M. Power, University of Durham, Durham, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Eurocentrism The privileging of European culture, beliefs, values, and religions, to the extent that these have been naturalized, often through imperialism. Genealogy Through genealogical study, Michel Foucault examined how discourses and social practices manifest the limitations of traditional historical study; the process discloses the human power plays of domination, imposition of order, subjugation, and struggle through resistance. Modernization Modernization theory is a socioeconomic theory, encompassed within ‘development theory’, which highlights the positive role played by the ‘developed world’ in modernizing and facilitating progress in ‘underdeveloped’ nations, often contrasted with ‘dependency theory’. Orientalism Edward Said’s term for an entire discourse through which the colonial ‘other’ is represented by the West as subordinate, thus providing an intellectual foundation for material domination. Postcolonialism This term refers to a variety of theoretical positions and historical conditions associated primarily (though not exclusively) with the aftermath of colonialism. Postcolonialism seeks to critique Western ways of knowing and traditions of thought. It also involves a retracing of the impacts of colonial processes with a particular concern for marginal or subaltern peoples. Tropicality ‘Tropicality’ is a term that refers to the potent Western discourses (which were deeply implicated in colonialism) that construct non-European otherness in environmental terms.

Introduction The concept of ‘the tropics’ has been seductive, powerful, and enduring. Whether considered a sublime landscape, malignant wilderness, or the endangered site of en vironmental conflicts, the tropics are largely a construct of American and European imaginations. European ideas about the tropics that developed as a result of explor ation, conquest, and colonization from the fifteenth century onward were very diverse, however. Images of the tropics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were conveyed through drawings, paintings, photographs, literature, and travel writings. From the earliest

photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races to depictions of disease in new tropical medicines, there were thus multiple practices through which the tropics were known, practical and bodily, as well as intellectual and discursive. The term ‘tropical’ is still routinely at tached to a whole range of issues, everything from resorts to beaches, from rainforests to rainstorms, from urban ization to soils. ‘Tropicality’ on the other hand is a term that refers to the potent Western discourses that con struct non European otherness in environmental terms and is therefore deeply implicated in colonialism. The identification of the northern temperate regions as the normal, and the tropics as altogether ‘other’ – climatic ally, geographically, and morally – demonstrate that the tropics was a conceptual and not just a physical space. Tropical nature is here produced as ‘other’ where through the prism of climate, acclimatization, and disease the temperate world is seen as the environmental ‘norm’ against which the tropical world is perceived and evaluated. As we shall see however, discourses of tropi cality were highly ambivalent, with ‘the tropics’ seen in both positive and negative terms (as a space of abundance and fertility, as well as of poverty and disease). By the beginning of the nineteenth century it was commonplace to proclaim that the luxuriance and heat of the tropical zone made its indigenous peoples wild and indolent and therefore ill equipped to harness the natural riches of the tropical world or to become ‘civilized’. In many ways a false singularity was ascribed to the tropics as ‘other’ where climate was used to make sense of cultural dif ference and in the process to project moral categories onto global space. The notion of a ‘tropical geography’ has a somewhat complex history through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and became more formalized and more widely recognized after World War II. The French geographer Pierre Gourou (1900–99) was one of its most famous exponents, but there were also important American, British, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish geographical formations of ‘tropicality’ (although there were also many skeptics who disagreed that this consituted a separate branch of the discipline at all). Tropical visions and representations extended far beyond particular national research schools and traditions, while debates about tropical geography drew in contributions from geog raphers based in a wide variety of locations. Work on the genealogy of tropical geography is still in its infancy, but longer term histories of tropical science, travel, and medicine have been a fertile area of research. To date,

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more attention has been given to celebrated traveling naturalists such as Charles Darwin or Alexander von Humboldt (who once described himself as ‘made for the tropics’), and there has also been more work on tropical nature, the role of European scientific institutions and global networks in shaping the emergent fields of tropical botany, tropical medicine, and tropical climatology. From 1953 new possibilities began to emerge for the publi cation of geographical scholarship on the tropics with the creation of the Malayan Journal of Tropical Geography. Pierre Gourou’s The Tropical World (an exemplary text in tropical geography) was also published in English in the same year. A distinct field of geographical enquiry had thus begun to emerge, supported by new conferences, journals, and funding possibilities. In a way, the notion of the tropics was crucial to the very creation and pro fessionalization of the discipline of geography, imbuing it with a sense of itself as a ‘sternly practical science’. The notion of tropicality was also bound up with the devel opment of other disciplines such as anthropology, med ical science, and natural history. Geographers thus ‘invented’ or constructed areas and regions of study that would concentrate their ‘expertise’ – frequently in the service of colonial rule and hence many geographers did shape colonial practices in tropical spaces. Geographical practices and knowledges thus provided a set of lenses through which the tropics were known, understood, and represented. What began to emerge was a new spatialized domain of intellectual enquiry and imagined con structions of otherness around which crystallized a dis tinctly ‘modern’ set of truths, assumptions, and hierarchies. In order to problematize the notion of ‘the tropical’ in geography it is firstly necessary to open a historical enquiry into the term and its enrolment in a variety of scientific, aesthetic, and political projects.

Orientalism, Geography, and the Tropics Western colonial projects were, despite being far from homogenous, partly based on an imagination of the world that legitimized and supported the power of the West to dominate ‘others’. By representing other societies as ‘backward’ and ‘irrational’, the West and Europe in par ticular construct themselves as ‘mature’, rational, and objective. Here the notion of the tropics was invented alongside a range of other constructs (e.g., ‘the Orient’) such that certain societies are envisioned as ‘other’ and different from Europe or the ‘West’. This difference was often seen as something which could be interpreted and represented by rational, even handed social scientists in a supposedly ‘purely objective’ and ‘scientific’ manner. The tropics then can be understood as an imaginative geography, as a particular kind of Orientalism (following the work of Edward Said) or as an imperial vision of

particular places and subjects (that displaces other voices) which had important material consequences. As land scapes of desire, the tropics were understood as a domain of largely untamed nature that served, by contrast, to demonstrate the moral and material ‘superiority’ of northern climates, civilizations, and ‘races’. For Said, the discourse of Orientalism transcends individuals or insti tutions and represents a kind of collective archive of images and statements. In an important way this provided a common language for knowing a particular region and its peoples. ‘The Orient’ was thus established in the European geographical imagination as an image, an idea, a personality, an experience, thereby reinforcing a sense of ‘difference’ between ‘the Orient’ and the rest of the world. Europeans sought knowledge about the Orient and through their Orientalist discourse they produced particular forms of domination, inventing the authority and legitimacy to subjugate and oppress non Western peoples. The concept of the tropics illustrates that Eur ope possessed more than one sense of otherness with the tropical seen as a twin to the temperate: the opposite of all that was civilized, modest, and enlightened. What we are concerned with then, following this recasting of Said’s Orientalism, are the Eurocentric discourses which enframe the ‘tropical world’ and the way they ‘contain’ and ‘nor malize’ them through a certain kind of discursive he gemony. Through such discourses, acceptable ways of speaking about and representing the tropics are estab lished which have been powerful and enduring. In the nineteenth century, the tropical was enfolded within racial imaginaries, especially in debates about the prospects for white settlement, ‘degeneration’, evolution, and ‘races’ that were rendered ‘scientific’ by the cloak of Darwinism. Geography participated in this via studies of climate and land use, rendered through theories of ‘de terminism’ and ‘possibilism’. Despite the many oppor tunities presented by colonial possessions and emerging debates about colonial development, few British geog raphers had worked overseas by 1939. Prior to 1945 it was geographers in a number of other European countries who first began writing tropical geographies. In France much research focused on Southeast Asia through the work of geographers like Pierre Gourou. In each case the connections between geography, geographers and empire were always close (even if this was not always acknow ledged) as the maintenance of European empires created a number of new opportunities for geographical research. Most of this work was conceived of as part of the quest for ‘enlightenment’ and more scientific knowledges of colonial territories with rich potential for further colonial progress and development. Particular geographical ideas, to do with land use and agrarian change, population growth and mobility and environmental conservation, run through much of the early thematic approaches of these kinds of geographies. At the end of World War II

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many geographers could easily and immediately see the case for ‘colonial geography’ (geography in the service of colonialism) and were consequently often uncritical of the impact of colonial rule on indigenous societies. Some geographers even dedicated large sections of their texts to ‘colonial achievement’ and (in general) viewed colo nialism as something of a material success. World War II was a key turning point in that it had led to much wider, unexpected, and in some cases involun tary foreign travel by geographers. A number of British geographers such as Charles Fisher (who was posted to Singapore) and B.H. Farmer (who served in India, Ceylon, and Singapore) found themselves in the service of the military (often the Royal Engineers or sometimes the Inter Services Topographical Department) and even in some cases became prisoners of war. Other geographers worked in England for the Naval Intelligence Division (NID) that produced a series of geographical handbooks intended to provide commanding officers in the Navy with information on countries they might be called upon to serve in. These handbooks were widely drawn upon by the first generation of post war British geographers (many of whom were returning from war) and served to inspire geographers to enter the brave new world of re construction in the colonies and the newly independent states of India and Pakistan in particular. The idea of ‘geography militant’ is important here: many tropical geographies were written by former military personnel and in some cases former prisoners of war and they were inspired by war experiences and geographical handbooks produced by military institutions. Each expedition and exploration of the tropics or its constituent parts also often represented a kind of militarized crusade dedicated to progress and modernity, the realization of ‘tropical potential’, and to the enlightenment of tropical spaces.

Tropicality, Regional Geography, and ‘Development’ The curiosity aroused by war travels and experiences, coupled with the provision of new funding opportunities to conduct research overseas, thus began slowly to in crease the interest of geographers in other, distant worlds. Additionally, the emerging notions of underdevelopment and underdeveloped areas, in conjunction with the cre ation of new national and international development agencies, also provided a stimulus to geographical re search. Geographers soon staffed new universities in the colonies such as the University College of East Africa, University College of the Gold Coast, and the Uni versities of Ceylon, Colombo, and Malaya in Asia. In France and Germany the end of World War II also cre ated a new wave of geographical research on the tropics, among which Pierre Gourou’s work was particularly

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influential. Gourou offered a powerful framework for geographical writing, which impacted on the post war work of a number of European geographers. Gourou’s texts in many ways tell us as much about a collective northern centered, even Eurocentric, worldview as they do about the ‘tropical world’ they seek to depict. Gourou devoted considerable attention to tropical diseases, soils, plantations, and population densities, the importance of scientific knowledges for tropical ‘development’ and the potential for white settlement and the relations between lesser and greater civilizations. Echoing the ideas of nineteenth century philosophers, Gourou sees the West as the epitome of ‘civilization’, with India and China in secondary roles and the rest more or less outside history – the subjects of ‘tropical geography’. The influence of physical factors predominates in many tropical geographies in a way that frequently ver ges on environmental determinism. Climates rather than capitalism impoverish the people of the tropics in these accounts. New technologies and new agricultural tech niques were seen as the way forward for rural economies in tropical regions. Where colonialism is seen as relevant the focus is on white settler states like Rhodesia and the needs of white colonists, rather than with indigenous stories and experiences of colonial rule. For the next 25 years after the end of World War II numerous bulky, regional geographies of the non Western world were published by geographers like Dudley Stamp, stimulated in large part by the naval handbooks. Although more information was available for post war ‘regional geog raphy’, there was limited methodological or theoretical progress (methodology was largely intuitive and few at tempts were made to elaborate a theoretical context). As such, a great deal of this work was characterized by a ‘dreary’ descriptive nature or by a deadening stylization. The regions selected for study were not pre given and there were no formal rules for recognizing, defining, delimiting, or describing the region or its broader pos ition within the imagined ‘tropics’. Some of these in herent contradictions meant that by the end of the 1960s (and in the context of a move to more quantitative techniques) this kind of regional geography had become increasingly unpopular. Debates revolved around whether regional synthesis was a valid academic study given the tendency to divide the world into unique and seemingly unrelated chunks and the tendency not to seek to identify more general laws governing progress and ‘development’ in all regions. These kinds of simplified images of difference, which assumed away much of the geographic variation within the world, became less popular partly because (despite being very normative) they offered no immediate ethical and socially responsible solutions to social ills. For some geographers, what was lacking was a dedicated special ization by area. Thus the implication was that work

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conducted before the early 1970s was characterized by a lack of specialization and depth, by an unsatisfying un reality. Area specializations were also to become in creasingly important during the Cold War. A lack of area experts to inform policy was identified by the Armed Forces during the 1940s as World War II came to an end. In the 1950s six area studies associations were formed in the US as social scientists took up the mantle laid down by President Truman’s injunction to reach out to the ‘backward’ regions of the world. The post 1945 creation of area studies centers in some Western countries was intimately bound up with Cold War geopolitics and impacted upon a wide range of social sciences. Geographers soon became active in many such centers, and also found roles in newly established ‘schools of development studies’. Some critics had fundamental objections to the very conception of these area studies centers, arguing that they had been ‘colonially conceived’ and that the appropriate centers of Asian or African studies should be in Asia or Africa. Thus specialist research into ‘backward’ regions began to increase in volume as more disciplinary generalists entered the debate around the crude classification of ‘Third World’ studies. During this early period of the Cold War then, development and area studies programs became in creasingly initiated by US state security discourses, which began a certain kind of relationship between scholarship and policy making, centered on discourses of ‘development’ and ‘modernization’. These attempts could thus be viewed as designed to produce knowledge that would enable the maintenance of political control over societies that threatened the institutional capacities of certain states.

The Degeneration of Tropical Geography Pretensions of ‘modernizing’ tropical regions structured many of the early post war assumptions about modernity and how to progress away from conditions of under development. This way of viewing non Western regions began to break down and degenerate after 1945 with the widespread desire to overcome European notions and idioms of imperialism such as ‘the white man’s burden’, the ‘civilizing mission’, and the idea of ‘civilization’. In this way social scientists in various different Western countries began to adopt much less avowedly procolonial notions of ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ and began to engage with more radical streams of social theory. Add itionally, these geographers (perhaps more than many of their contemporaries) were influenced directly by de bates and publications in other associated disciplines (such as economics, sociology, anthropology, and the emerging fields of development studies and international relations). Not surprisingly, much of the geographic

scholarship of the 1950s and 1960s was framed by some variant of modernization theory, or the presumption that processes of modernity were shaping indigenous insti tutions and practices. Many geographers interested in Africa sought to model modernization surfaces and at tempted to map patterns of modernity by charting the diffusion of indices of modernity (such as schools or mailboxes) through the settlement pattern. This work at best raised only limited questions about the legacies of colonial transport systems or the character of African urbanism. The more influential work was increasingly focused on ‘modernization’, seen less as a tropical phe nomenon and more as part of a ‘universal’ process of ‘development’. Many of the contributions to what was becoming known as ‘development geography’ still lacked any major theoretical undercurrents however and often concentrated on broad, traditionally defined, questions. During this time the number of geographers based in the South began to increase, in countries like Nigeria, for example, partly as a consequence of the establishment of new universities. These geographers had an increasingly important impact on the formation of national develop ment policy (particularly in the area of planning) from the late 1960s and early 1970s onward. As the numbers of geographers from non Western regions began to increase, the theoretical impoverishment of development geog raphy was soon brought into stark relief. Major shifts in development thinking were thus beginning to influence researchers in a number of disci plines and the way they viewed the hallowed ‘develop ment process’. In the 1960s this began to change the nature of the discipline as geographers were propelled into a heightened state of social awareness by political and economic events around the world. Dependency theorists like Andre Gunder Frank had begun to offer popular structuralist explanations of the causes of ‘underdevelopment’ and the idea of development as ‘economic growth’ had been subjected to radical critique by theorists who sought to locate the production of dependent relations within the structure of the capitalist world economy. These shifts in development thinking during the 1960s and 1970s had a profound impact on geographers, particularly after the establishment of the radical journal Antipode in 1969, which soon began pub lishing important articles about geography and uneven development. This journal was founded, upon principles of radical geography, by a group of faculty and students at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1969. In the United States many of these geographers met from 1967 at the annual geography conferences, but the dis cipline of geography in the US was slow to respond to their radical discussions, dominated as it was until the early 1970s by ‘the quantifiers’ and a kind of ephemeral spatial science. The philosophical and theoretical foun dations for this radicalism were found in the work of

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Marx, which radical geographers began to engage with more and more in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Instead this work called for a critical approach, ar guing that most of the geographers of the Western world had been educated in the ‘liberal’ ethos that development is a necessity. In this way many geographers criticized the modernization approach for its reassertion of the primacy of the ‘American–European experience’ and argued that it was important to remember that other regions had different trajectories. Whilst these interventions were pointing to other directions that would only emerge more fully in the 1990s amidst debates about ‘post colonialisms’, ‘postdevelopment’, and (alternative) ‘mod ernities’, the critique of geographies of modernization proved effective. By the 1980s, renditions of ‘develop ment geography’ could not credibly ignore power re lations, dependency, and imperialist legacies. At the same time, ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’ were increasingly being seen as multiple, hybrid, and heterogeneous. Radical geographers had pointed to resistance, dis juncture, and difference amidst the enduring power re lations of domination and dependency.

Conclusions Much of the geographical work on issues of development in the early post war period was either a more or less direct link to tropical geography, or part of the vanguard of positivism and quantification. Notwithstanding some work on geographies of modernization that gave this a special character, the legacy of descriptive tropical geography and its association with determinism and other passe´ modes of geographical thought and analysis has proved enduring. As the 1960s moved on and revo lutionary pressures in the South accelerated (epitomized by the insurgencies in Vietnam and the Portuguese col onies and the lurch into Mao’s ‘cultural revolution’ in China), some radical geographers began to embrace them, years before a wider development geography (or indeed wider human geography) was recast as ‘radical’. The interventions of radical geographers were beginning to show that the prescriptions issued to ‘tropical’ and ‘backward’ countries on how to ‘catch up’ were not a neutral, rational enterprise that was untouchable, but rather something that was very much caught up with the strategic political interests of the US during the Cold War. For a few short years development geography was infused with the sort of spatial algebra and ‘mathematical mystification’ then driving the ‘new geography’, and some development geographers did begin to map out the op timistic logic embodied in the linear stage theories of the modernization school. However, this marriage of statistics and space was short lived as it became apparent that this

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perspective was blind to the historical reproduction of systems and processes of inequality. In many ways con ventional understandings of the emergence of spatial science and other subdisciplinary areas of geography are interesting for all the places not included (e.g., Africa, Asia, or Australasia). Thus standard histories of the dis cipline focus on the movements of texts, ideas, and in dividuals between key nodes in Europe and North America but focus much less on the making of the dis cipline in Ibadan or Durban, Singapore or Rangoon (for example). Even the brief and partial account offered here indicates the consequences and merits of beginning to take into account the margins in histories of twentieth century geography. Unravelling the history of dominant ideas of the tro pics reveals a process of circulation in which plants, people, and ideas migrate from one part of the world to another. Thus an understanding of Western modernity and its economic, cultural, and political geography can be creatively ‘deepened’ by engagement with the norms of what are usually scripted as its margins. Considering the role of marginal or peripheral spaces and peoples in allowing geographers to represent the world and its changing political and economic systems can therefore enhance the story of tropical and later development geography. More work on the geography of the idea of tropicality is also required. This involves greater atten tion to the ways in which European conceptions of the tropics may have been shaped by interactions with in digenous peoples and places. Typically the story of tro pical geography has focused largely on white, male, Western academics and much less has been said about the role of women or non Western geographers in shaping debates in geography about the tropics and development and in defining the nature of its methods and agendas. Thus there remains considerable scope for more sus tained and direct engagements with feminist readings of the history of these subdisciplinary specialities and with ‘postcolonial’ approaches to thinking about the col laborations and ‘partnerships’ that were formed between Western and non Western geographers in the new uni versities of Africa, Asia, and Latin America from the 1960s onward. Additionally, it is worth recognizing that in the formulation of European visions of the tropical world experiences of disorientation, uncertainty, and novelty had their place. It is necessary then to understand how geography and geographers created a space in which only certain things could be said or even imagined about tropical ‘others’. It is this notion of the unique and distinctive space(s) and processes of the tropics that is the ghost of development geography today. Those geographers who specialize in what are known as ‘peripheral’ areas are often seen (even today) to belong to some distant relative of the discipline, to area specialities, which mark their contributions out

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from other parts of geography. Thus many themes of interest to contemporary development geographers (e.g., globalization, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism) should also be seen as fertile grounds for subdisciplinary inter action. Many of the academic researchers who went to study the ‘problems’ of the tropics located themselves in what we might refer to as the realm of the ‘nonproblem’. In this way they located themselves in privileged epi stemological positions outside the problems they studied. Thus, few geographers saw themselves as implicated in colonialism and the underdevelopment they sought to write about and map. With the radicalization of geog raphy in the 1960s and 1970s geographers began to adopt different and more critical ways of looking at colonialism and its legacies in the ‘Third World’. In trying to excavate the genealogies of tropical and development geography, it is therefore necessary to understand the geopolitical, economic, and social traumas of decolonization. The biographies of geographers involved in the rad icalization of the discipline during this period can act as a mirror to disciplinary (and other) histories and the study of movements, places, and departures and as a counter point to the more familiar big stories (metanarratives). There is a danger however of representing this radical ization of geography as a straightforward and simplistic undertaking when actually it was a slow process given the ‘ostrich like’ behavior of some (liberal) geographers who buried their heads in the sand and refused to engage with politics or the politicization of geography. Thus, writing in 1977, one radical geographer, Keith Buchanan, noted how the term ‘development’ had become a ‘dirty word’ and how geographers were increasingly seeking to build critiques of the generation of ‘formula fixated’ and ‘model making technocrats’ based in the ‘white North’. What was important about the work of radical geog raphers was that earlier, descriptive geographical ap proaches to tropical areas were taken to task for the way in which they sought to ‘explain away’ the supposed backwardness of tropical zones in an apolitical fashion which was at core, deeply racist and shot through with the language of earlier imperial endeavors. Rather than an objective, detached intellectual endeavor, schol arly discourses on tropical regions, and ‘development’ were imbued through and through with the imperial

representations that preceded them. The concept of the tropics while not always geographically accurate (any more than the terms ‘Non West or the South’), thus re calls a telling complex of metaphors, assumptions, and representations inherited from the empire. See also: Eurocentrism; Modernization Theory; Orientalism; Third World.

Further Reading Arnold, D. (2000). ‘Illusory riches’: Representations of the tropical world 1840 1950. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21(1), 6 18. Bowd, G. and Clayton, D. (2005). French tropical geographies: Editors introduction. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 26(3), 271 289. Buchanan, K. M. (1977). Reflections on a ‘dirty word’. In Peet, R. (ed.) Radical geography: Alternative viewpoints on contemporary social issues, pp 6 30. London: Methuen and Co Ltd. Claval, P. (2005). Colonial experience and the development of tropical geography in France. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 26(3), 289 303. Driver, F. (2001). Geography militant. Oxford: Blackwell. Driver, F. and Martins, L. (eds.) (2005). Tropical visions in an age of empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Driver, F. and Yeoh, B. S. A. (2000). Constructing the tropics: Introduction. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21(1), 1 5. Farmer, B. H. (1973). Geography, area studies and the study of area. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 60, 1 15. Farmer, B. H. (1983). British geographers overseas, 1933 1983. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 8, 70 79. Forbes, D. K. (1984). The geography of underdevelopment. London: Croom Helm. Gourou, P. (1940). La Terre et L’homme en extreˆme Orient. Paris: Armand Colin. Gourou, P. (1953). The tropical world, Laborde BD (trans). London: Longman. Livingstone, D. (1992). The geographical tradition: Episodes in a contested enterprise. London: Blackwell. Peet, R. (1977a). Introduction. In Peet, R. (ed.) Radical geography: Alternative viewpoints on contemporary social issues, pp 1 4. London: Methuen & Co Ltd. Power, M. (2003). Rethinking development geographies. London: Routledge. Power, M. and Sidaway, J. D. (2004). The degeneration of tropical geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94(3), 585 601. Pratt, M. L. (1992). Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. London: Routledge. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. London: Penguin. Schwartz, J. and Ryan, J. R. (eds.) (2003). Picturing place: Photography and imaginative geographies. London: I B Tauris.

Tuan, Y.-F. T. Cresswell, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Topophilia Specifically the love of place. More generally, the emotional connections between human beings and the physical environment.

Tuan, Y.-F. (1930–)

Yi Fu Tuan was born on 5 December 1930 in Tientsin, China. He was the son of a Chinese diplomat who formed part of a small middle class cohort of well educated and well travelled men in China at the time. In 1941 his family moved to Australia and Tuan attended an English speaking school modeled on an English public school. In 1946 the Tuan’s were posted to London. Yi Fu Tuan was admitted to Oxford in 1948. In 1949 the People’s Re public of China was established and the Tuan family – supporters of Chiang Kai shek’s Republic of China (Taiwan) – found themselves effectively exiled. In 1951 Tuan moved to Berkeley to begin his postgraduate career. Here he was exposed to the work of, among other people, Carl Sauer. He received his PhD in 1957. Tuan’s first

academic job was at Indiana University (1956–58). This was followed by stints at the Universities of Chicago (as a postdoctoral fellow in statistics), New Mexico (1959–65), and Toronto (1966–68) before arriving at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1968 where he was to spend 15 years before moving to the University of Wis consin–Madison in 1983. In 1985 he became both Vilas Research Professor and John Kirkland Wright Professor. He retired in 1998 and became Professor Emeritus. Tuan’s early interests were in desert landforms and, particularly in pediment formations. His first published paper was ‘Types of pediment in Arizona’ which was published in the Yearbook of Pacific Coast Geographers in 1954. This was followed by the first of many book length manuscripts, Pediments in Southeastern Arizona, in 1959. Tuan’s interest in desert landscapes was far from simply scientific, however, and from a very early point in his career he began to ruminate over the esthetics of the desert (a landscape he was later to confess a deep and abiding affection for in his 1999 autobiography, Who Am I : An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind and Spirit). Interspersed with scientific writing on pediments was a paper on the ‘Use of simile and metaphor in geographical description’ published in the Professional Geographer in 1957. Highly unusual at the time, this work signaled the future dir ection of Tuan’s work. By the mid 1960s Tuan’s published work had taken a decidedly reflective and humanistic turn including papers published in the maverick geographer J. B. Jackson’s influential journal Landscape. During his time in Toronto Tuan developed a dis tinctive and original voice in geography, ruminating on philosophical issues of environmental perception that would lead to some of his most influential writing. His paper ‘Geography, phenomenology and the study of human nature’ published in the Canadian Geographer in 1971 was one of the key moments in the development of ‘humanistic geography’ in the 1970s. Along with geog raphers such as Anne Buttimer, Edward Relph, David Seamon, Donald Meinig, and David Lowenthal, Tuan – inspired by the philosophical approaches of phenomen ology and existentialism – sought to counter an overly scientific and quantitative spatial science (then hege monic) with a more human centered approach focused on what it is like to be a human in the world. The human senses (not just sight), emotion, imagination, and feeling were all central to this endeavor. Tuan’s two most influential books were published in the 1970s – Topophilia in 1974 and Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience in 1977. In these books Tuan

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revealed the depth of human attachment to the world. The term topophilia describes the various emotional at tachments between human beings and the natural world. It is this attachment that Tuan would later point to as the central issue for all of geography in his paper ‘A view of geography’ in 1991. Here, he described geography as the story of the Earth as the home of people. For Tuan, the central term is home – a word which, to him, describes the way people make the world meaningful and become attached. This attachment is also apparent in Space and Place where place is defined as a center of meaning and field of care – a pause in an endless field of space. This definition exceeds conventional notions of place as lo cation or locale and suggests that place can be found at all scales from a favorite chair to the whole planet as seen from space. This definition of place has become hugely influential in human geography and well beyond. Phil osophers, artists, performers, and literary theorists, as well as social scientists have drawn on and developed the notion of place defined by Tuan. It is his most important contribution to geography. In these books and earlier papers Tuan developed a unique writing style that re flects on philosophical issues while remaining accessible to a large, educated lay audience. The sense of connection between people and world continued to inspire Tuan’s work. In Dominance and Af fection: The Making of Pets (1984) Tuan prefigured later work inspired by Michel Foucault by reflecting on how humans twist the natural world into recognizable form through simultaneously dominating it and having af fection for it. Examples include pets, gardens, and water. In Passing, Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, Culture (1993) Tuan considers the role of esthetics in the re lations between people and place. He notes that even the most dull, utilitarian, and functional object (a drainpipe or a paper cup) has been made human by the addition of some small decorative motif. This he sees as evidence for the central role of esthetics as a driving force for human life – in many ways more important than even food and shelter. Most recently Tuan has considered his own life as a Chinese boy who became a well known cosmo politan Chinese American scholar in his autobiography Who Am I (1999). Here he reflects on his love of geog raphy (his ‘salvation’) born in the deserts of the American Southwest as well as the emptiness he perceives at the heart of his personal life. His collection of letters, Dear Colleague: Common and Uncommon Observations (2002) re veals Tuan at his most unbuttoned and unconventional. Many of the themes of his work are succinctly sum marized in Place, Art and Self (2004), an essay accom panied by photography that considers the role of the arts (from painting to dance) in developing the attachment

between self and place. This book continues his dedi cation, noted in the final line of Space and Place to ‘in crease the burden of awareness’. During his career Tuan has received numerous honor and awards including the LaurZˇat d’Honneur of the International Geographical Union, the Cullum Geo graphical Medal of the American Geographical Society, and the Journal of Geography Award of the National Council for Geographic Education. He is a fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Association for the Ad vancement of Science. He has been a John Simon Gug genheim Fellow, a Fulbright Hays Senior Scholar to Australia, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Uni versity of California at Davis, and Harry Lyman Hooker Distinguished Visitor at McMaster University, Canada. In 1992 he was awarded the title of Best Professor by the Wisconsin Student Association. The author of 16 books and numerous papers and contributions, his work has been translated into eight languages. See also: Humanism/Humanistic Geography; Literature; Phenomenology/Phenomenological Geography; Place; Sense of Place; Space I.

Further Reading Tuan, Y. F. (1957). Use of simile and metaphor in geographical description. Professional Geographer 9, 8 11. Tuan, Y. F. (1971). Geography, phenomenology and the study of human nature. The Canadian Geographer 15, 181 192. Tuan, Y. F. (1974). Space and place: Humanistic perspective. Progress in Geography 6, 211 252. Tuan, Y. F. (1974). Topophilia: As Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Prentice Hall. Tuan, Y. F. (1976). Humanistic geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 66, 266 276. Tuan, Y. F. (1977). Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tuan, Y. F. (1984). Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tuan, Y. F. (1989). Morality and Imagination: Paradoxes of Progress. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Tuan, Y. F. (1989). Surface phenomena and aesthetic experience. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 79, 233 241. Tuan, Y. F. (1991). A view of geography. Geographical Review 81, 99 107. Tuan, Y. F. (1991). Language and the making of place: A narrative descriptive approach. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81, 684 696. Tuan, Y. F. (1993). Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, Culture. Washington, DC: Island Press. Tuan, Y. F. (1999). Who Am I? An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind, and Spirit. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Tuan, Y. F. (2002). Dear Colleague: Common and Uncommon Observations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tuan, Y. F. (2004). Place, Art, and Self. Santa Fe, NM: Center for American Places and University of Virginia Press.