International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Twelve-Volume Set: Volume 4

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: 978-0-08-044915-9 For information on all Elsevier publications visit our website at elsevierdirect.com

Printed and bound in Italy 09 10 11 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

SENIOR EDITORS Noel Castree Geography Discipline Arthur Lewis Building School of Environment and Development The University of Manchester Manchester UK Mike Crang Department of Geography Durham University Science Laboratories Durham UK Mona Domosh Department of Geography Dartmouth College Hanover, NH USA

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SECTION EDITORS Kay Anderson Centre for Cultural Research University of Western Sydney Penrith South DC, NSW, Sydney Australia Paul Cloke Department of Geography University of Exeter Exeter UK Jeremy Crampton Department of Geosciences Georgia State University Atlanta, GA USA Brian Graham University of Ulster Coleraine, N. Ireland UK Costis Hadjimichalis Department of Geography Harokopio University Athens Greece

Loretta Lees Cities Research Group Department of Geography King’s College London London UK Sara McLafferty Department of Geography University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign Urbana, IL USA Anssi Paasi Department of Geography University of Oulu Linnanmaa Oulu Finland Chris Philo Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences University of Glasgow Glasgow UK

Phil Hubbard Department of Geography University of Loughborough Loughborough UK

James Sidaway School of Geography University of Plymouth Plymouth UK

Robin Kearns School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Sciences The University of Auckland Auckland New Zealand

Katie Willis Department of Geography Royal Holloway, University of London Egham UK

Mei-Po Kwan Department of Geography The Ohio State University Columbus, OH USA

Henry Yeung Department of Geography National University of Singapore Singapore

vii

GUIDE TO USE OF THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

Structure of the Encyclopedia The material in the Encyclopedia is arranged as a series of articles in alphabetical order. There are four features to help you easily find the topic you’re interested in: an alphabetical contents list, a subject classification index, cross references and a full subject index.

1. Alphabetical Contents List The alphabetical contents list, which appears at the front of the first volume, lists the entries in the order that they appear in the Encyclopedia. It includes both the volume number and the page number of each entry.

2. Subject Classification Index This index appears at the start of Volume 1 and groups entries under subject headings that reflect the broad themes of Human Geography. This index is useful for making quick connections between entries and locating the relevant entry for a topic that is covered in more than one article.

3. Cross-references All of the entries in the Encyclopedia have been exten sively cross referenced. The cross references which ap pear at the end of an entry, serve three different functions: i.

To indicate if a topic is discussed in greater detail elsewhere

ii. To draw the readers attention to parallel discussions in other entries iii. To indicate material that broadens the discussion Example The following list of cross references appears at the end of the entry IMPERIALISM, CULTURAL See also: Colonialism I; Colonialism II; Dependency; First World; Globalization, Cultural; Hegemony; Imperialistic Geographies; Neocolonialism; Orientalism; Postcolonia lism/Postcolonial Geographies; Poststructuralism/Post structuralist Geographies; Third World. Here you will find examples of all three functions of the cross reference list: a topic discussed in greater detail elsewhere (e.g., Orientalism), parallel discussion in other entries (Imperialistic Geographies) and reference to en tries that broaden the discussion (e.g. Postcolonialism/ Postcolonial Geographies).

4. Index The index includes page numbers for quick reference to the information you’re looking for. The index entries differentiate between references to a whole entry, a part of an entry, and a table or figure.

5. Contributors At the start of each volume there is list of the authors who contributed to that volume.

ix

CONTRIBUTORS

VOLUME 1 M B Aalbers Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

J Crush University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa

G J Andrews McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

C D’Ignazio The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, Waltham, MA, USA

H Asche University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany J O Bærenholdt Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark J Battersby-Lennard University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa J Beall London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

R J Das York University, Toronto, ON, Canada J Davidson Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada C Delano-Smith University of London, London, UK V Desai Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

K B Beesley Brandon University, Brandon, MB, Canada

J D Dewsbury Bristol University, Bristol, UK

K Besio University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hilo, HI, USA

J Dittmer University college London, London, UK

M Brayshay University of Plymouth, Devon, UK

H Fassmann Universita¨t Wien, Vienna, Austria

M M Breitbart Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, USA

C Gibson University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

S Brentjes Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain

J R Gold Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

John R Bryson The University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

O Groza Universitatea Al.I Cuza, Iasi, Romania

H Buller University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

S W Hardwick University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

K A Butler University of Akron, Akron, OH, USA

M Harrower University of Wisconsin – Madison, Madison, WI, USA

K W Butzer University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA

H Hazen Macalester College, St Paul, MN, USA

S Chaturvedi Panjab University, Chandigarh, India

C Hughes Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

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` Montreál, Montreál, 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 Montreál, Montreál, 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

xiv

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 Autońoma 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 Tykkylaïnen 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, Montreál, 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´ Pantheón-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 Paéz 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

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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


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 Autońoma 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 Politećnico 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 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 Kovaćs 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-Valleé, 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` Montreál, Montreál, 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, Montreál, 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


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


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, Montreál, 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


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 Saõ 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


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


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


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

Ameńagement 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 Tykkylaïnen

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


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 Paéz 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 Kovaćs

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


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


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


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


Cellular Automata Census Mapping Chaos and Complexity Choice Modeling Complexity Theory, Nonlinear Dynamic Spatial Systems Content Analysis Cross Cultural Research Diaries (Video, Audio or Written) Discourse Analysis Ecological Fallacy Edge Effects Embodied Knowing Emotional Knowing Entropy Maximising Models Error (Propagation and Modeling) Ethical Issues in Research Ethnography Evolutionary Algorithms Experimental Design Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis Factor Analysis and Principal Components Analysis Feminist Methodologies Fieldwork First Law of Geography Focus Groups Fractal Analysis Fuzzy Set and Fuzzy Logic Genealogy Method Geocomputation Geographical Masking Geographically Weighted Regression Georeferencing, Geocoding Grounded Theory Haptic or Touch Based Knowledge Hub Network Location Hypothesis Testing Input–Output Analysis Intensive/Extensive Research Internet Based Measurement Interviews: In Depth, Semi Structured Kriging and Variogram Models Landscape Iconography Landscape Perception Language and Research Life Course Approaches Location Analysis Longitudinal Methods (Cohort Analysis, Life Tables) Markov Chain Analysis Masculinism Mental Maps Mixed and Multiple Methods Modifiable Areal Unit Problem Monte Carlo Simulation Movies and Films, Analysis of

lxvii

Multidimensional Scaling Naturalistic Testing Neighborhood Effects Network Analysis Neural Networks Oral History Oral History, Ecological Overlay (in GIS) Participant Observation Participatory Action Research Participatory Video Performance, Research as Photographs Point Pattern Analysis Polyvocality Psychoanalysis Q Method/Analysis Qualitative Geographic Information Systems Quantitative Data Quantitative Methodologies Questionnaire Survey Regionalization/Zoning Systems Regression, Linear and Nonlinear Reliability and Validity Remote Sensing Representation and Re presentation Sampling Scale Analytical Scientific Method Segregation Indices Selection Bias Semiotics Shift Share Analysis Simulation Situated Knowledge, Reflexivity Sound and Music Space Time Modeling Spatial Analysis, Critical Spatial Autocorrelation Spatial Clustering, Detection and Analysis of Spatial Data Mining, Cluster and Pattern Recognition Spatial Data Mining, Geovisualization Spatial Data Models Spatial Expansion Method Spatial Filtering/Kernel Density Estimation Spatial Interaction Models Spatial Interpolation Spatially Autoregressive Models Statistics, Descriptive Statistics, Inferential Statistics, Overview Statistics, Spatial Structural Equations Models Subalternity Subjectivity

lxviii


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.


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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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 Ameńagement 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


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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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


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.

F Factor Analysis and Principal-Components Analysis F. Wang, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Communality Proportion of a variable’s variance shared by the retaining components in principalcomponents analysis or by the common factors in principal-factor analysis. Data Standardization The process of converting a series of data to a new series with mean equal to 0 and standard deviation equal to 1. Latent Variables Unobserved variables that combine many original observed variables based on principal components analysis or factor analysis. Multicollinearity Linear relationships between two or more explanatory (X) variables that may cause difficulties in interpreting regression results. Oblique Rotation In contrast to orthogonal rotation, oblique rotation allows correlations between factors in order to achieve greater simple factor structure in factor analysis. Orthogonal Rotation This rotation uses linear functions of independent (uncorrelated) factors to reconstruct the scores on the original variables in factor analysis. Varimax Rotation An orthogonal rotation that maximizes the variance of the squared loadings for each factor, and thus polarizes loadings (either high or low) on factors for easy interpretation.

that represent the shared correlation among these vari ables. They are sometimes used together for the common objective of data reduction. Despite the commonalities, there are important differences between the two. PCA attempts to model all the variance in the original vari ables, uses the same number of components to simply transform the original data, and thus is strictly a math ematical transformation. FA attempts to model only ‘common’ or shared variance and assumes that some variance is ‘unique’ to each variable. FA uses fewer factors to capture interrelations of the original variables with some residuals, and thus is strictly a statistical method.

Principal-Components Analysis For convenience, the original data of observed variables Zk are first standardized so that variables do not depend on measurement scale and thus are comparable to each other. PCA transforms original data on K observed vari ables Zk (likely correlated with each other to some ex tent) to data on K principal components Fk that are independent from each other: Zk ¼ l k1 F 1 þ l k2 F 2 þ ? þ l kj F j þ ? þ l kK F K

Conversely, the components Fj can also be expressed as a linear combination of the original variables Zk: F j ¼ a1j Z1 þ a2j Z2 þ ? þ aKj ZK

In many applications, variables are often correlated with each other, and thus contain duplicated information to some extent. When the number of variables is high, it is also desirable to find a few latent (unobserved) variables that describe those original variables. Principal com ponents analysis (PCA) and factor analysis (FA) use fewer components or factors to represent the original variables, and thus consolidate the data for easy interpretation. For example, the term ‘socioeconomic status’ is composed of many highly correlated variables such as income, edu cation, occupation, and others. PCA and FA are used to come up with a smaller number of components or factors

½1

½2

The components Fj are constructed to be uncorrelated with each other, and are ordered such that the first component F1 has the largest sample variance (l1), F2 the second largest, and so on. The variances lj corresponding to various components are termed ‘eigenvalues’, and l1>l2>?. A larger eigenvalue represents a larger share of the total variance in all of the original variables cap tured by a component and thus indicates a component of more importance. In other words, the first component is more important than the second, and the second is more important than the third, and so on.

1

2

Factor Analysis and Principal-Components Analysis

For readers familiar with the terminology of linear algebra, the eigenvalues lj ( j ¼ 1, 2,y, K ) are based on the correlation matrix R (or, less commonly, the covar iance matrix C) of the original variables Z. The correl ation matrix R is written as 0

1 Br B 21 R¼B @: rK 1

r 12 1 : rK 2

1 y r 1K y r 2K C C C y : A y

½4

Equations [3] and [4] are sometimes termed a ‘principal components factor’ model. However, it is not a true FA model.

Factor Analysis

1

where r12 is the correlation between Z1 and Z2, and so on. The coefficients (a1j, a2j,y, aKj) for component Fj in eqn [2] comprise the eigenvector associated with the jth largest eigenvalue lj . Since standardized variables have variances of 1, the total variance of all variables also equals the number of variables such as l1 þ l2 þ ? þ lK ¼ K

Therefore, the proportion of total variance explained by the jth component is lj/K. Since the variances of prin cipal components equal the different eigenvalues, the principal component values Fj represented in eqn [2] are not standardized. For various reasons, it is often desirable and more convenient to work with standardized com ponents. For instance, factor loadings and factor scores, discussed in the next section on FA, are based on standardized components. In PCA, the number of components equals the num ber of original variables, so no information is lost in the process. The newly constructed components are a linear function of the original variables and have two important and useful properties: (1) they are independent of each other and (2) their corresponding eigenvalues reflect their relative importance. The first property ensures that multicollinearity is avoided if resulting components are used in regression, and the second property enables us to use fewer components to capture most of the in formation in a multivariate data set. In general, the first few components account for a large fraction of the total variance. By transforming the original variables to the same number of components, the PCA does not serve the purpose of data reduction. One may simply discard the less important components and keep only the first few components to achieve data reduction. If we retain only the J largest components (JoK), eqn [1] becomes Zk ¼ l k1 F 1 þ l k2 F 2 þ ? þ l kJ F J þ vk

vk ¼ l k;J þ1 F J þ1 þ l k;J þ2 F J þ2 þ ? þ l kK F K

½3

where the discarded components are represented by the residual term vk such as

FA is based on a different assumption than PCA. FA assumes that each variable has common and unique variance, and the method seeks to create factors that account for the common, not the unique, variance. FA uses a linear function of J unobserved factors Fj, plus a residual term uk, to model each of K observed variables Zk : Zk ¼ l k1 F 1 þ l k2 F 2 þ ? þ l kJ F J þ uk

½5

The same J factors, Fj, appear in the function for each Zk, and thus are termed ‘common factors’. Equation [5] looks like the principal components factor model in eqn [3], but is very different. The residuals uk in eqn [5] are unique to variables Zk (termed ‘unique factors’) and un correlated. In other words, after all the common factors are controlled for, correlations between the unique fac tors become zero. On the other hand, residuals vk, defined as in eqn [5], are linear functions of the same discarded components, and thus correlated. In order to understand this important property of FA, it is perhaps helpful to introduce the classical example used by psychologist Charles Spearman, who invented the method about 100 years ago. Spearman hypothesized that a variety of tests of mental ability such as scores in mathematics, vocabulary and other verbal skills, artistic skills, and logical reasoning ability could all be explained by one underlying factor of general intelligence (g). If g could be measured and controlled for, there would be no correlations among any tests of mental ability. In other words, g was the only factor common to all the scores, and the remainder was the unique factor indicating the special ability in that area. When both Zk and Fj are standardized, the lkj in eqn [5] are standardized coefficients in the regression of variables Zk on common factors Fj, also termed ‘factor loadings’. In other words, the loadings are correlation coefficients between the standardized Zk and Fj, and thus range from 1 to þ1. For example, lk1 is the loading of variables Zk on standardized component F1. Factor loading reflects the strength of relations between vari ables and factors. Estimates of the factors are termed ‘factor scores’. For instance, the estimate for F j ð j ¼ 1; 2; y; J ; and J oK Þ is Fˆj ¼ c1j Z1 þ c2j Z2 þ ? þ cKj ZK

½6

Factor Analysis and Principal-Components Analysis 6.0 5.0 Eigenvalue

where ckj is the ‘factor score coefficient’ for the kth variable on the jth factor. The computing process of FA is more complex than that of PCA. A commonly used procedure for FA is ‘principal factor analysis’, which utilizes the results from PCA in iterations to obtain the final factor structure and factor scores. The PCA extracts the principal com ponents based on the eigenvalues of correlation matrix R, and its computation is straightforward. The principal factor analysis extracts principal factors of a modified correlation matrix R*. Whereas elements on the major diagonal of R are 1, these elements in R* are replaced by estimates of ‘communality’ (a variable’s variance shared by the common factors). For instance, the communality of variable Zk in eqn [5] equals the proportion of Zk’s variance PJ 2 explained by the common factors, that is, j ¼1 l kj . After an initial number of factors is decided, the communality and the modified correlation matrix R* are estimated through an iterative process until there is little change in the estimates. Based on the final modified correlation matrix R* and extracted principal com ponents, the first principal component defines the first factor, the second component defined the second factor, and so forth. In addition to the principal factor analysis method, there are also several alternative methods for FA based on ‘maximum likelihood estimation’, which is be yond the scope of this article. How do we decide the number of factors to use? Eigenvalues provide a basis for judging which factors are important and which are not. In deciding the number of factors to include, one has to make a tradeoff between the total variance explained (higher by including more factors) and interpretability of factors (better with fewer factors). One may follow a rule of thumb that only factors with eigenvalues greater than 1 are important. Since the variance of each standardized variable is 1, a factor with lo1 ac counts for less variance than exists in a single variable. Such a factor thus does not serve the purpose of data reduction. Using one as a cutoff value to identify ‘important’ factors is arbitrary. A ‘scree graph’ plots eigenvalues against factor number, and provides a more useful guidance. For example, Figure 1 shows the scree graph of eigenvalues from the case study presented later in this article. The graph levels off after component 3, indicating that factors 4–11 account for relatively little additional variance. Therefore, three components (factors) are re tained. Other techniques such as statistical significance testing based on the maximum likelihood FA may also be used to choose the number of factors. However, most importantly, selecting the number of factors must be guided by understanding the true forces underlying the research issue and supported by theoretical justifications. Initial results from FA are often hard to interpret as variables load unevenly across factors. While fitting the data equally well, ‘rotation’ generates simpler structure by

3

4.0 3.0 2.0 1.0 0.0 0

5

10

15

Component

Figure 1 Scree graph for PCA.

attempting to find factors that have loadings close to 71 or zero. This is done by maximizing the loading (positive or negative) of each variable on one factor and minimizing the loadings on the others. As a result, we can detect more clearly which variable(s) make up each factor(s) latent variable and therefore label the factors adequately. These latent variables represent underlying dimensions that are combinations of many observed variables. ‘Orthogonal rotation’ generates independent (un correlated) factors, an important property for many ap plications (e.g., avoidance of multicollinearity in regression). A widely used orthogonal rotation method is ‘varimax rotation’, which maximizes the variance of the squared loadings for each factor, and thus polarizes loadings (either high or low on factors). ‘Oblique rotation’ (e.g., promax rotation) generates even greater polar ization but allows correlation between factors. As a summary, Figure 2 illustrates the major steps in PCA and FA: 1. the original data set of K observed variables with n records is first standardized; 2. PCA then generates K uncorrelated components to account for all the variances of the K variables; 3. FA generates only J (JoK) principal factors to model interrelations of the original variables; and 4. a rotation method can be used to load each variable strongly on one factor and near zero on the others for easier interpretation. In essence, PCA attempts to explain all of the variances in the original variables, whereas FA tries to explain their intercorrelations (covariances). Therefore, PCA is used to construct composite variables that reproduce the max imum variance of the original variables, and FA is used to reveal the relationships between the original variables and unobserved underlying dimensions. Despite the differ ences, PCA and FA share much common ground. Both are primarily used for data reduction, uncovering latent variables and removing multicollinearity in regression analysis. Many people consider PCA a special case of FA.

Factor Analysis and Principal-Components Analysis k variables

k variables 123

123

k

k k components

1 2 3 (i) Standardize

n

123 k variables

Original data set

n records

n records

1 2 3

(ii) Z scores

PCA

1 2 3

k

Component loadings

k

n

FA

j factors

1 2 3 j ( j < k) 1 2 (iv) 3 Factor loadings Rotation k

123 k variables

(iii)

k variables

j factors

1 2 3 k

j

Maximizing loadings on one factor

4

Figure 2 Major steps in PCA and FA.

An Illustrative Example This section uses an example to illustrate the process of implementing PCA and FA. This example is extracted from a case study of measuring healthcare access. People’s access to healthcare is not only affected by their proximity to healthcare providers (‘spatial factors’) but also by their socioeconomic and demographic characteristics (‘aspatial factors’). PCA and FA methods can be used to summarize these socio demographic characteristics of populations that influence access to healthcare. Numerous population characteristics such as age, income, and ethnicity have been suggested to affect healthcare access. These variables are often highly correlated with each other. Using PCA and FA, one can consolidate these variables into a few factors, and then map the resulting factor scores to examine spatial patterns. The following 11 variables are considered: 1. population with high health needs, including seniors of ages above 65, children of ages 0–4 and women of child bearing ages 15–44; 2. population in poverty; 3. female headed households; 4. home ownership; 5. median income; 6. households with an average of more than one person per room; 7. housing units lack of basic amenities; 8. non white minorities; 9. population without a high school diploma; 10. households linguistically isolated; and 11. households without vehicles. All the above variables are measured in percentages ex cept for median income which is in dollars. As shown in

Figure 2, the first step of the analysis is to standardize each variable to a series of z values with a zero mean and a standard deviation of one. The strong associations among these variables are shown in the correlation coefficient matrix (Table 1). Correlation coefficient values higher than 0.50 are high lighted. The table shows a clear cluster of five variables on the top that are highly correlated to each other (all cor relation coefficients higher than 0.5): female headed households, population in poverty, non white population, households without vehicles, and homeownership. Note that a higher homeownership ratio indicates a socio economic advantage and all other four variables represent disadvantages, and thus the variable ‘homeownership’ correlates with the other four negatively. In addition, we can also identify a secondary cluster of three variables (households with linguistic isolation, households with >1 person per room, and population without high school diploma), with all three correlation coefficients >0.5. This important structure of the data will be further clarified using PCA and FA. The second step is to use the PCA to help decide the number of component or factors to retain. Table 2 presents the eigenvalue and corresponding portion of variance associated with each component. Based on the PCA result, three components with eigenvalues >1 are retained, and capture 75% of total variance of the ori ginal 11 variables. The scree graph in Figure 1 also supports the selection of three components. After deciding on three factors, FA is conducted to represent each of the three factors by a linear function of the 11 variables (i.e., step (iii) in Figure 2). Table 3 shows the coefficients in the regression of factors on variables, or factor loadings, which indicate the strength of relations between variables and factors. Most variables

5


Table 1

Correlation coefficients of original variables

Variables

1

1. Female headed households (%) 2. Population in poverty (%) 3. Non white population (%) 4. Households w/o vehicles (%) 5. Homeownership (%) 6. Housing units lack of basic amenities (%) 7. Households with linguistic isolation (%) 8. Households with >1 person per room (%) 9. Population w/o high school diploma (%) 10. Population with high needs (%) 11. Median income ($)

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

1.00 0.78 0.77 0.67

1.00 0.68 0.78

1.00 0.72

1.00

0.54 0.29

0.72 0.36

0.61 0.31

0.80 0.39

1.00 0.35

1.00

0.02

0.13

0.20

0.18

0.32

0.19

1.00

0.45

0.50

0.57

0.46

0.51

0.32

0.69

1.00

0.56

0.63

0.59

0.58

0.52

0.35

0.53

0.72

1.00

0.13

0.20

0.07

0.24

0.28

0.02

0.08

0.07

0.04

1.00

0.52

0.65

0.43

0.53

0.57

0.25

0.13

0.34

0.61

0.36

1.00

Note: Coefficients higher than 0.50 are highlighted in bold.

Table 2

Eigenvalues from principal-components analysis

Component

Eigenvalue

Proportion

Cumulative

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

5.5944 1.6088 1.0138 0.8078 0.6013 0.4594 0.2544 0.2285 0.1622 0.1466 0.1226

0.5086 0.1463 0.0922 0.0734 0.0547 0.0418 0.0231 0.0208 0.0147 0.0133 0.0111

0.5086 0.6548 0.7470 0.8204 0.8751 0.9169 0.9400 0.9608 0.9755 0.9889 1.0000

Note: Components with an Eigenvalue 41 are highlighted in bold.

Table 3

Factor patterns without rotation

Variables

Factor 1

Factor 2

Factor 3

Female-headed households (%) Population in poverty (%) Non-white population (%) Households w/o vehicles (%) Homeownership (%) Housing units lack of basic amenities (%) Households with linguistic isolation (%) Households with >1 person per room (%) Population w/o highschool diploma (%) Population with high needs (%) Median income ($)

0.7918

0.2767

0.3538

0.8789 0.8204 0.8609

0.2215 0.0458 0.2030

0.1167 0.3013 0.0642

0.8238 0.4789

0.1033 0.1219

0.1566 0.1134

0.3854

0.7888

0.3820

0.7196

0.5640

0.0446

0.8129

0.3066

0.0826

0.2161

0.5576

0.7059

0.7064

0.2630

0.2994

Variance explained by each factor

5.5944

1.6088

1.0138

have the highest loading on factor 1 except for two variables: ‘households with linguistic isolation’ has the highest loading on factor 2, and ‘population with high needs’ has the highest loading on factor 3. The final step in PCA (i.e., step (iv) in Figure 2) is rotation. After rotation, the loadings are polarized (i.e., the loading of each variable is maximized on one factor but minimized on other factors) for easier interpretation. Table 4 shows the rotated factor structure by the var imax rotation. The three factors are labeled to reflect major variables captured by each factor. Note that the variance explained by each factor in the rotated factor pattern is different from that in the unrotated factor pattern. 1. Factor 1 is by far the most important factor explaining 40.40% of total variance (i.e., accounting for 54.08% of the variance explained by the three factors). This factor captures six variables: the first five have already been identified as the primary cluster of correlated variables in Table 1, and the sixth variable ‘housing units lack of basic amenities’ has the smallest loading. This factor is a comprehensive indicator of ‘socio economic disadvantages’. 2. Factor 2 explains 20.98% of total variance (i.e., ac counting for 28.09% of the variance explained by the three factors). Three variables, including linguistic isolation, load highly on this factor, forming a com prehensive indicator of ‘socio cultural barriers’. 3. Factor 3 explains 13.32% of total variance (i.e., ac counting for 17.83% of the variance explained by the three factors). It mainly captures the variable ‘popu lation with high needs’, as well as ‘median income’, and therefore, it may be labeled ‘high healthcare needs’.

6


Table 4

Rotated variable loadings on factors Factor 1. Socioeconomic disadvantages

Factor 2. Socio cultural barriers

Table 5 Factor 3. High healthcare needs

Female headed households (%) Population in poverty (%) Non white population (%) Households w/o vehicles (%) Homeownership (%) Housing units lack of basic amenities (%) Households with linguistic isolation (%) Households with >1 person per room (%) Population w/o high school diploma (%) Population with high needs (%) Median income ($)

0.9089

0.0058

0.0504

0.8662

0.1642

0.2405

0.8481

0.2153

0.0153

0.8231

0.1905

0.2699

0.6686 0.4278

0.3362 0.2703

0.3922 0.0323

0.0479

0.9561

0.0164

0.4464

0.7966

0.0631

0.5800

0.6406

0.1219

0.0316

0.1050

0.9186

0.5491

0.2053

0.5605

Variance explained by each factor

4.4436

2.3080

1.4654

Note: The highest loading of each variable on a factor is highlighted in bold.

Idealized factor loadings in social area analysis

Occupation Education Fertility Female labor participation Single-family house Minorities

Economic status

Family status

Ethnic status

I I O O

O O I I

O O O O

O O

I O

O I

Note: ‘I’ denotes a number close to 1 or 1; ‘O’ denotes a number close to 0.

American cities socioeconomic status factor tends to exhibit a sector pattern. Family status factor tends to follow a concentric zone pattern in which inner zones are dominated by single young adults and elderly resi dents, and outer zones are most occupied by families with young children. The ethnic status factor tends to form clusters, each of which is dominated by a parti cular ethnic group. PCA and FA provide important tools for summarizing social and spatial variation in complex social, economic, and demographic variables, and the methods have also been used to study cities outside the North America that display very different social patterns.

Conclusion Application in Social Area Analysis PCA and FA have been widely used in quantitative human geography for measuring complex concepts like socioeconomic disadvantage. One of the important early applications was for social area analysis, the study of social and spatial differentiation in cities. Social area analysis uses statistical methods to investigate these patterns of residential differentiation within cities. Based on a variety of demographic and socioeconomic variables measured for small areas in a city, social area analysis uses the PCA and FA to consolidate these observed variables into underlying basic constructs (factors). For instance, an idealized factor loading matrix in social area analysis may look like Table 5. Based on the table, oc cupation and education form the first factor character izing ‘economic status’; fertility rate, women’s labor force participation, and single family houses form the second factor labeled ‘family status’; and percentage of minorities makes the third factor ‘ethnic status’. Geographers have made important contributions to the social area analysis by analyzing the spatial patterns associated with these dimensions. Factor scores are mapped to show spatial patterns. Geographers in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that in many North

PCA and FA methods are primarily used for data re duction. Both seek a few underlying dimensions that account for patterns of variation among many observed variables. Revealed latent variables indicate how the original variables are combined, and thus simplify an alysis and subsequent interpretation. Major advantages of PCA and FA include more parsimonious models, sim plification of data structure, uncovering hidden patterns, and convenience for graphic displays. In most cases (e.g., based on orthogonal rotation), factor (component) scores are independent from each other, and thus avoid multi collinearity in regression analysis. However, one major challenge for PCA and FA is whether the factors or components generated by the methods are truly underlying dimensions. It is not un common to have variables that spread the loadings on two or more factors (components), leading to difficulties in interpreting the results. Like any statistical analysis methods, the quality of PCA and FA depends on data collection. Often the major factors (components) are dominated by variables that tend to measure the same element of the study object and account for majority of variances, and are susceptible of criticism of ‘garbage in and garbage out’.


Further Reading Bailey, T. C. and Gatrell, A. C. (1995). Interactive Spatial Data Analysis. Harlow: Longman Scientific and Technical. Cadwallader, M. T. (1981). A unified model of urban housing patterns, social patterns, and residential mobility. Urban Geography 2, 115 130. Griffith, D. A. and Amrhein, C. G. (1997). Multivariate Statistical Analysis for Geographers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Hamilton, L. C. (1992). Regression with Graphics. Belmont, CA: Duxbury. Rencher, A. C. (1998). Multivariate Statistical Inference and Applications. New York: Wiley.

7

Wang, F. and Luo, W. (2005). Assessing spatial and nonspatial factors in healthcare access in Illinois: Towards an integrated approach to defining health professional shortage areas. Health and Place 11, 131 146.

Relevant Websites http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/stathome.html Electronic Statistics Toolbox. http://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/subsite/wulder/components Principal Components Analysis and Factor Analysis.

Fair Trade L. T. Raynolds, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Agri-Food System The overarching arena encompassing agricultural production and subsequent activities all the way to food consumption; sometimes called the agri-food system. Alternative Trade Organization A group that purchases items from disadvantaged producers at favorable prices, transports them, and sells them directly to consumers. Certification Process by which items are assessed for compliance with previously established standards and where compliance is formally acknowledged often through a label or seal. Global North/South A set of terms distinguishing between a highly industrialized wealthy region and a less industrialized poorer region of the world, which roughly aligns along a North–South axis. Global Commodity Chain The interlocking production, processing, and distribution activities inherent in moving an internationally traded product from the point of conception to that of consumption; sometimes called a global value chain.

relation to the global market, with sales worth somewhat over $1 billion. But sales are expanding rapidly as fair trade extends into new commodities, new production regions, and new markets. In its advocacy to make global trade more equitable, fair trade forms part of the growing alternative globalization/trade justice move ment. In fact fair trade has emerged as one of the key rallying points and constructive engagements within this broad movement. Since fair trade addresses issues of inequality in ex changes between distant peoples and places, it is of central interest within geography as well as related social science disciplines. Fair trade lies at the intersection of economic, political, and social geographies and has been fruitfully explored from all these angles. Because fair trade markets and movements are centered in the agro food sector, scholarship within this domain has proved particularly insightful. In analyzing the importance of fair trade, this article focuses on: (1) fair trade initiatives, ideas, and institutions; (2) fair trade distribution and consumption; and (3) fair trade production and exports.

Fair Trade Initiatives, Ideas, and Institutions Introduction Fair trade as a concept refers to a critique of the his torical inequalities inherent in international trade and to a belief that trade can be made more socially just. In the current era, fair trade refers to a set of initiatives that challenge global inequalities and create more egalitarian commodity networks linking marginalized producers in the global South with progressive consumers in the global North. Fair trade seeks to alleviate poverty and empower producers in the global South through the provision of better prices, stable market links, and other material and informational resources. Fair trade also seeks to bolster responsible consumption practices among Northern consumers by encouraging the purchase of items that are produced and traded under more equitable conditions. At the broadest level, fair trade seeks to eliminate North–South trade inequalities. In creating alternative commodity networks fair trade joins a growing array of market based initiatives that promote social and environmental concerns through the sale of alternative often certified, commodities. Trade in certified fair trade products is relatively modest in

8

The modern fair trade movement grows out of variety of post World War II (WWII) initiatives, which have sought to challenge the inequalities of international trade and assist disadvantaged populations through a strategy of ‘trade not aid’. Initial efforts by church and development groups focused on assisting impoverished peoples by providing preferential markets for their handicrafts. Al ternative trade organizations (ATOs) were established, which purchased items at favorable prices, shipped them, and sold them to dedicated consumers. These efforts blossomed with growing Third World solidarity move ments in the 1960s and 1970s, evidenced particularly in Europe with the proliferation of ‘World Shops’. ATO initiatives were informed by popular theoretical views of the time regarding the role of unequal trade in main taining Third World dependency. Within this context, ATOs created direct trade channels eliminating exploit ative international merchants and increasing the returns to producers. A distinct new strand of fair trade was established in the late 1980s with the introduction of product certifi cation and labeling. Fair trade groups initiated this strat egy to move beyond the craft sector and solidarity shops to sell major food exports like coffee in conventional

Fair Trade

supermarkets. The move into the certification and labeling of food items was fueled by the recognition of the con tinued centrality of agro export production for poor people and regions of the global South and the rise of specialty markets in the global North for products dif ferentiated based on their social or ecological standards. Fair trade certification has been highly successful in ex panding market and production arenas. By 2004, fair trade labeling initiatives operated in 20 countries across Europe, North America, and the Pacific coordinated via the umbrella organization, the Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International (FLO). Eighteen commodities were sold with FLO labels, produced by 433 groups across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. FLO cer tification guidelines are based on a set of core require ments for producers and buyers. Fair trade producers must be organized into democratic groups of small growers or estate workers who uphold high social standards and more modest environmental standards. Fair trade buyers must guarantee payment of FLO minimum prices, pay a social premium, offer producer credit and long term contracts, and trade as directly as possible with producers. While fair trade certification resembles other labeling initiatives regulating ecological conditions in food or timber or labor conditions in garments or textiles, fair trade is the only such initiative that goes beyond establishing production standards to address trade conditions. Though the ATO and labeling strands of fair trade are distinct, an informal alliance (FINE) promotes their common interests and has forged a joint definition of fair trade. ‘‘Fair trade is a trading partnership, based on dialog, transparency, and respect that seeks greater equity in international trade. It contributes to sustainable devel opment by offering better trading conditions to, and se curing the rights of, marginalized producers and workers – especially in the South. Fair trade organizations (backed by consumers) are engaged actively in sup porting producers, awareness raising and in campaigning for changes in the rules, and practice of conventional international trade.’’ As this statement suggests fair trade operates both ‘in and against the market’, working through market channels to create new commodity networks for items produced under more favorable social and ecological conditions and simultaneously working against the conventional market forces that create and uphold global inequalities. Research on fair trade’s operation within the market focuses largely on the alternative international networks created and maintained by these initiatives. Fair trade establishes a new spatial ordering of international eco nomic relations. From a political economy perspective, global commodity chain analysis provides a very in sightful avenue for analyzing the institutional and spatial configurations, power relations, and patterns of resource distribution within fair trade networks. This approach

9

reveals the internal architecture of the relations linking fair trade producers and consumers. From a sociocultural perspective, fair trade networks are understood in more relational and fluid terms, emphasizing the ways in which diverse actors negotiate the movement of commodities and associated material and nonmaterial resources across space. Fair trade can thus be seen as a dense network of connectivity co created by locally situated, but globally connected, people, places, ideas, and things. Together political economy and sociocultural analyses of fair trade illuminate an alternative global geography, which is strikingly different from the conventional corporate driven global topography. Network analyses highlight the degree to which fair trade resembles other alternative, often local, agro food networks, which promote alternative values, practices, and institutions to ‘shorten the distance’ between pro ducers and consumers. These alternative food networks hinge on personal relations of trust and dense infor mation flows which humanize economic transactions. Rather than being abstracted from their roots, commod ities are embedded with information regarding producers’ ideas and practices and the places/spaces of production. While ATOs are able to bolster fair trade relations dir ectly via face to face interactions with producers and consumers, within certified fair trade networks transac tions are mediated by increasingly formalized rules, standards, and product labeling procedures which may threaten these alternative relations. Research on fair trade’s operation against the market focuses on the location of these initiatives within the broader alternative globalization/trade justice movement. In recent years, a number of collective efforts have emerged that coalesce around a critique of corporate globalization and a set of engagements to forge an alter native globalization based on embedded, territorially specific, social and ecological rights and values. From a social movement perspective, fair trade should be analyzed within this broader terrain. Fair trade has clear insti tutional and ideological ties with related efforts like antisweatshop and social movement union initiatives in manufacturing, and agro ecology, food sovereignty, and land reform initiatives in agriculture. What is striking about the new movement cartography is the importance of nongovernmental organizations in local, national, and transnational arenas. Nongovernmental organizations as sociated with fair trade and related initiatives have become a powerful force pressuring corporations to improve their practices and creating noncorporate alternatives.

Fair Trade Distribution and Consumption The total world market for fair trade products, including ATO and labeled sales, was valued at roughly US$1.2

10

Fair Trade

billion in 2004. Though this represents a minor fraction of global trade, this market is growing at roughly 30% per year due to mounting consumer interest and the expansion of fair trade circuits. The fair trade boom is part of a worldwide increase in conscientious and green consumption. There has been a dramatic rise in pur chases of ethical and eco friendly products across major markets in the global North. A growing body of research demonstrates the importance of consumption as a space for individual and collective identity creation and of political action. A political economy of consumption is particularly important in researching national and international food supply chains. This approach chal lenges the historically productionist focus in geography as well as other related social science fields. The political nature of consumption ideas and prac tices is particularly evident in agro food arenas where ecological and food safety threats have undermined trust in the quality and safety of conventional agro industrial production and products. Consumption of organic, local, fair trade, and other specialized food items is growing rapidly. As in fair trade, many of these new food products are certified to guarantee their special quality attributes and labeled to bring these attributes to consumers’ at tention since typically they are not visible in the product itself. While some certification and labeling efforts rep resent nothing more than a corporate face lift promoted by branders and retailers, others are overseen by com mitted nongovernmental organizations and involve a fundamental refashioning of the conventions upon which commodity networks are based. Rising consumer unease about the social and environmental conditions embedded in their purchases has fueled the market for third party

Table 1

certified products, particularly for those sourced inter nationally where distance heightens consumer concerns over production impacts and over potentially unfounded corporate ethical and ecological claims. Food commodities certified as fair trade under the FLO system account for the vast majority of the recent rapid growth in fair trade sales. As noted in Table 1, the fair trade certified market was worth over US$1 billion in 2004. Though ATO sales continue to be important largely in nonfood items and are even growing in some regions, analysis focuses on certified fair trade distri bution and consumption patterns given this sector’s much larger size and greater data availability. Europe has the most well developed and largest fair trade market, led by the United Kingdom and Switzerland. A range of fair trade products are readily available in government offices, universities, supermarkets, and spe cialty outlets. While fair trade markets are growing only modestly in some European countries, in countries like the United Kingdom sales continue to rise rapidly. North American fair trade markets are much less well developed than those in Europe. Certified products were introduced more recently, in the late 1990s, and there are still fewer fair trade products available and fewer venues which carry these items. Yet, the United States has emerged as the largest national fair trade market. The United States fair trade sales were valued at close to US$300 million in 2004, with earnings doubling each year. Fair trade labeling organizations are just beginning to get established in Pacific markets, in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Coffee, the first labeled commodity, forms the core of the fair trade system. Fair trade certified coffee accounts

Fair trade certified sales by region and commodity (2003/04) Volume (metric tons) Coffee

Tea

Cocoa

Europe UK Switzerland Netherlands Germany France Italy

2889 1550 3096 2865 2368 230

1090 36 60 156 52 10

903 275 147 343 227 346

North America US Canada

3574 648

52 6

92 54

Pacific Japan

22

8

Total b

19 895

1990

a

3473

Bananas

Total a

18 177 19 002 2610 116 829 2038

24 212 23 336 5998 4217 4059 3330

256 000 169 000 43 000 72 000 87 000 31 000

3718 738

267 000 22 000

30

3000

83 297

1 033 000

51 336

Includes sales of all fair trade labeled commodities, not just the listed core commodities. b Includes countries not listed on the chart. Source: Compiled by the author from FLO data.

Total a Value (US$ 1000)

Fair Trade

Fair Trade Production and Exports

for roughly a quarter of all earnings and is by far the most widely available product. Rising consumption of fair trade coffee is linked to the growing differentiation of products, including the growth of gourmet and organic certified varieties, and the differentiation of consumption experiences, including the ubiquitous cafe´ chains that define the upscale urban marketplace. The United States has by far the largest and most dynamic fair trade coffee market. The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Germany, and France also have substantial markets for fair trade certified coffee. Cocoa and tea are also well established core fair trade certified commodities. Fair trade cocoa has the larger market with sales concentrated in Europe, particularly the United Kingdom. Fair trade cocoa is not yet widely available in North America, though the market is grow ing rapidly in the United States. Fair trade tea sales are more modest and are growing relatively slowly except in the United Kingdom, which dominates the market. Though markets are quite small, FLO certification has also long been available for sugar. Bananas are now the second most valuable fair trade product, despite the fact that certification was introduced much more recently than in other major commodities and was not initiated until 2004 in the United States. Switzerland and the United Kingdom have the largest fair trade banana markets, and this product is widely available in major supermarket chains in these countries. The growth potential for fair trade in this popular fruit is enormous, though the distribution of highly perishable bananas is complex. Bananas represent the entry of fair trade certification and labeling into the fresh produce sector, and success in this area has spawned the launch of a number of additional FLO labeled fresh fruits like citrus, grapes, and mangoes.

Table 2

Fair trade production and exports have grown dramat ically across the global South. Bourgeoning demand in major markets has spurred the growth and diversification of fair trade exports. This growth has been fueled also by neo liberal policies around the world, which have in creased the competition in conventional markets and necessitated a search for nontraditional niche markets. Within this context, producers across the global South have sought out avenues for differentiating their products according to social or ecological attributes and where possible gaining access to circuits that can provide some semblance of security within volatile global markets. Certified fair trade agro food production and exports have grown within this context, alongside organic food, certified timber, and related sectors. While the vast majority of fair trade certified items are shipped from the global South to major markets in the global North, there are nascent national markets developing in Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, and other countries, which can provide market openings for domestic and regional producers. There are roughly 544 certified fair trade producer organizations, representing hundreds of thousands of small scale growers and farm workers, in 53 countries across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Table 2 outlines fair trade’s production geography. Latin America repre sents the clear hub of certified fair trade production with by far the largest number of certified groups and export volumes. This is perhaps not surprising since fair trade certification was developed in this region, with the initial certification of fair trade coffee from Mexico. Latin America has 187 FLO certified coffee farmer groups, which together supply 83% of all global fair trade coffee

Fair trade certified production by region and commodity (2004/05) Other a

Total

1 0

82 11 200

314 102 700

4 2100

17 1600

97 21 200

152 30 600

0 0

0 0

48 800

22 700

78 2300

20 66 000

19 4000

66 2400

211 33 100

544 135 300

Coffee

Banana

Cocoa

Latin America Certified producer groups Production volume (metric tons)b

187 24 900

19 64 700

15 1900

Africa Certified producer groups Production volume (metric tons)b

33 4400

1 1300

Asia Certified producer groups Production volume (metric tons)b

8 800

Total Certified producer groups Production volume (metric tons)b

228 30 100

a

Includes sugar, honey, other fruits and juices, rice, wine, nuts, flowers, spices, and sport balls. Since some items are not measured in tons, the other and total columns are suggestive only. Source: Compiled by the author from FLO data. b

11

Tea

12

Fair Trade

supplies. Mexico remains the region’s and the world’s largest fair trade coffee producer. Latin America is also the dominant producer of fair trade certified bananas, accounting for 98% of world supplies. There are 19 FLO certified banana groups representing both small scale farmers and workers on plantation enterprises. Latin America is also a major supplier of fair trade certified cocoa. A growing number of groups in the region are becoming involved in the production of new fair trade commodities like mangoes, orange juice, and quinoa. Africa is the second most important supplier of fair trade products with 152 FLO affiliated groups. This re gion is the largest source of fair trade certified cocoa and tea and an important producer of coffee, with Ghana and Tanzania leading the production. Yet the importance of Africa in fair trade circuits in the future looks not to be in these core commodities but in the production of newly certified product areas. South Africa has recently emerged as the region’s fair trade leader with 52 FLO registered groups and is now the world’s largest exporter of certified fresh and processed fruits, juices, and wine. Though fair trade producers in Africa are engaged in small and large enterprises, almost all of the recent growth is within the plantation sector. For small scale producers, the most direct benefits from fair trade come from the higher guaranteed prices. The importance of these price guarantees is clearest in the case of coffee where the FLO minimum price has far exceeded the world market price for most of the past 15 years. This price floor has meant the difference between survival and bankruptcy for many small scale coffee growers. In addition to protecting producers from world price slumps, fair trade provides a social premium to be invested in community projects. The fair trade premium supports critical education, health, food self sufficiency, transportation, and farm improvement projects. For lar ger enterprises, the FLO price floor provides economic security. But the social premium is much more important for workers, since this is what provides the funding for purchasing ownership shares and supporting educational, health, and housing projects. Research suggests that for both producers and workers, the most important benefits of fair trade engagement appear in the long run to come from the multifaceted informal and formal support pro vided for organizational capacity building. Though the potential benefits of fair trade for pro ducers and workers in the global South are substantial, the increased geographic spread, product diversification, and enterprise variation within certified networks makes realizing those benefits increasingly difficult. The spread of certified fair trade production across dozens of coun tries requires adjusting this model to varied local political economic circumstances. Local farmer and worker or ganizations vary tremendously as does fair trade’s fit within local social movements. There are important

synergies between fair trade and various social justice and ecological initiatives around the world. But there are also critical tensions across the global South over fair trade’s continued emphasis on export production for Northern markets, instead of local food self sufficiency goals.

Conclusions At heart, the fair trade concept refers to a critique of the historical inequalities inherent in international trade and to a belief that trade can be made more socially just. This article has focused in large part on outlining the par ameters of the recent challenges raised against neo lib eral globalization and the types of alternative material and ideological networks created by fair trade. The true significance of fair trade lies not in its albeit impressive markets, but in the extent to which this movement de stabilizes conventional market principles. Conventional capitalist markets are guided by prices that understate the full ecological and social costs of production, and thus encourage the degradation of environmental and human resources, particularly in the global South. The fair trade movement makes visible the ecological and social relations embedded within a commodity and asks that consumers shoulder the true costs of production. Fair trade shortens the distance between Southern pro ducers and Northern consumers through dense infor mation as well as resource flows. By demystifying global trade and creating more equitable relations of exchange, the fair trade movement goes further than other social or ecological certification initiatives in challenging con ventional market practices. Fair trade is without a doubt a critical component of the current and future cartography of alternative globalization. See also: Dependency; Development I; Development II; Food Networks, Alternative; Gender and Rurality; Neoliberalism and Development; Nongovernmental Organizations; Regional Production Networks; Social Justice, Urban; Social Movements.

Further Reading Barrientos, S. and Dolan, C. (eds.) (2006). Ethical sourcing in the global food chain. London: Earthscan. Brown, M. (1993). Fair trade. London: Zed Press. Gereffi, G., Garcia Johnson, R., and Sasser, E. (2001). The NGO industrial complex. Foreign Policy July/August: 56 65. Murdoch, J., Marsden, T. and Banks, J. (2000). Quality, nature, and embeddedness: Some theoretical considerations in the context of the food sector. Economic Geography 76, 107 125. Mutersbaugh, T. (2002). The number is the beast: A political economy of organic coffee certification and producer unionism. Environment and Planning A 34, 1165 1184. Nicholls, A. and Opal, C. (2005). Fair trade: Market driven ethical consumption. New York: Sage.

Fair Trade

Ransom, D. (2001). The no nonsense guide to fair trade. London: Verso. Raynolds, L. (2000). Re embedding global agriculture: The international organic and fair trade movements. Agriculture and Human Values 17, 297 309. Raynolds, L. (2002). Consumer/producer links in fair trade coffee networks. Sociologia Ruralis 42, 404 424. Raynolds, L. (2004). The globalization of organic agro food networks. World Development 32, 725 743. Raynolds, L., Murray, D. and Taylor, P. (2004). Fair trade coffee: Building producer capacity via global networks. Journal of International Development 16, 1109 1121. Raynolds, L., Murray, D. and Wilkinson, J. (2007). Fair trade: The challenges of transforming globalization. London: Routledge. Renard, M. C. (1999). The interstices of globalization: The example of fair coffee. Sociologia Ruralis 39, 484 500.

13

Renard, M. C. (2003). Fair trade: Quality, market and conventions. Journal of Rural Studies 19, 87 96. Whatmore, S. and Thorne, L. (1997). Nourishing networks: Alternative geographies of food. In Watts, M. & Goodman, D. (eds.) Globalising food: Agrarian and global restructuring, pp 287 304. New York: Routledge.

Relevant Websites http://www.colostate.edu/depts/sociology/cfats Center for Fair & Alternative Trade Studies. http://www.fairtrade.net Fair Trade Labelling Organizations International. http://www.ifat.org International Federation for Alternative Trade.

Famine P. J. Atkins, Durham University, Durham, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Coping Strategies The strategies and tactics that people employ to minimize the stress associated with livelihood crises and other events. Famine A food crisis resulting in major excess mortality and widespread severe, acute malnutrition. Food Insecurity Unavailability of food due to insufficient purchasing power, inappropriate distribution, or inadequate utilization at the household level. Livelihoods The ways in which people make a living, including various means of earning income, goods in kind, or access to resources and services. Resilience The ability of people to recover from stress and to protect themselves against future stresses. Vulnerability The degree to which a group (family or community) is likely to experience harm due to exposure to stress.

Introduction As a word, ‘famine’ is so emotive that it affirms the affectual power of language and, along with iconic images of starving children, it can change the world. An example is Michael Buerk’s BBC/NBC television report from Korem on the Ethiopian famine in 1984. An estimated 470 million people around the world watched horrified as the voice over described the scene: Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the 20th century. This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to hell on earth. Thousands of wasted people are coming here for help. Many find only death (Michael Buerk, 1984). And yet famine’s sensational headline potential can get in the way of thinking about the more general issues of malnutrition and food insecurity. Recent research on famine sees it as the extension of structural, long term vulnerabilities in society rather than as the result of unpredictable ‘acts of God’.

Definitions: The F-Word Popular definitions of famine such as ‘an increase in death rates due to regional mass starvation’ have proved inadequate for a number of reasons. First, increased mortality is not a universal feature of famines, and deaths

14

anyway are more usually the result of disease than of starvation. Second, famines are certainly limited in space but at what scale? Are food shortages in a few villages enough to declare a famine or should we reserve the term for a region, province, or a whole country? Third, famines vary in their causality and structure, so should an element of explanation be added to that of description, for instance ‘drought famine’, or should the terminology encompass ‘complex emergencies’, which may have sev eral elements, including war? Fourth, famines are time limited. Most commentators seem to agree that they last only for a matter of months, or perhaps a year or two, whereas the chronic global problem of undernourishment is a long term one affecting 800 million people, many of whom have accompanying deficiency diseases and im paired immune systems. So, is famine qualitatively dif ferent from hunger and not just the opposite of food security? Fifth, famines sometimes happen when there is food available but it is expensive or inaccessible to those in need. Finally, famine is often a symptom of broader issues of poverty and is therefore embedded in livelihood systems generally. A better definition might be ‘a wide spread, acute crisis of livelihoods’. However, such academic cavils and caveats need to be presented carefully if they are not to seem churlish. Those of us debating definitions need to remember that the politicians who control the purse strings of food aid are most clearly moved by the label famine, coupled with high media visibility. This leads to the argument some times articulated that famines should only be declared for large scale, acute events because to do so more fre quently would ‘debase the coinage’. Definitions remain difficult and controversial. Recent food emergencies, concentrated mainly in sub Saharan Africa (SSA), have shown that consensus is difficult to achieve even among non governmental organizations (NGOs), let alone between governments and inter national aid agencies such as the World Food Program (WFP). This is partly because these organizations have different, and sometimes contradictory, interests, but there are also technical issues of measurement that need to be addressed.

Measurement: Intensity, Magnitude, and Early Warning The social dislocation accompanying famines, especially when they are associated with war or disasters such as floods, often means that the measurement of consequences

Famine

is difficult. The spatial characteristics of famine, such as extent and localized concentration, are complex and usually dynamic, for instance when migration follows livelihood failure. A crisis may move from hunger to famine through a series of stages, and if the early signs can be recognized, then there is a chance that excess mortality can be averted later on. In the early stages of a famine, people’s primary goal is to avoid the loss of land, livestock, and equipment. The commonest coping strategy at this point is self imposed food rationing. Second, there is dietary change, such as the consumption of wild foods, immature crops, and even seeds. Third, families may send away some of their number, for instance children to be fed by neighbors or relatives who still have food. Fourth, taking loans or selling assets may become necessary, which may not be reversible at a later stage, followed possibly by begging or migration to locations where external support is available (food aid). The unfolding of these coping strategies is context specific, so their use as general famine descriptors and predictors is problematic. A recent de velopment is CARE/WFP’s Coping Strategies Index, which is being used for both monitoring and intervention purposes. It has been suggested that measurement should focus on intensity (Table 1) and magnitude (Table 2). The criteria (mortality, wasting, and edema (swelling due to fluid retention)) are well known indicators of food problems, although the thresholds between the various Table 1

15

categories are arbitrary to some extent. Such an approach is subject to all of the problems that afflict the meas urement of socioeconomic phenomena in space, the most obvious being scale of analysis. Famine early warning systems (FEWSs) are an aspect of measurement. The Global Information and Early Warning System of the Food and Agriculture Organiza tion (FAO) was established in 1975, and the interagency Food Insecurity and Vulnerability Information and Mapping Systems in 1996. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sponsored FEWS NET started in 1985. In addition to global FEWS, many countries have their own systems, as do the large NGOs. These provide regularly updated lists of regions said to require assistance, based upon various methods of de claring alerts. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) cartographies of famine and food insecurity have become central to these methodologies, along with satellite re mote sensing which is used to show rainfall and also to delineate areas of drought anomaly on ‘greenness maps’ of vegetation. Most FEWS products have hitherto been based on a belief that food availability decline (FAD) causes famines and the application of the methodology has been top down. However recently, livelihood mapping and food economy reports have been added, enabling grassroots needs assessments of vulnerable groups within a regional geography of zones that are homogeneous in terms of

Famine intensity

Level

Crude mortality rate (per 10 000 per day)

Wasting (%)

Edema

0. Food security

o0.2

o2.3

1. Food insecurity

0.2 0.5

2.3 10

2. Food crisis

0.5 1.0

10 20

|

3. Famine

1 5

20 40

|

4. Severe famine

5 15

440

|

5. Extreme famine

415

440

|

Livelihoods: food security descriptors Social system cohesive; prices stable; negligible adoption of coping strategies Social system cohesive; price instability, and seasonal shortage of key items; reversible ‘adaptive strategies’ employed Social system significantly stressed but remains largely cohesive; dramatic rise in price of food and other basic items; adaptive mechanisms start to fail; increase in irreversible coping strategies Clear signs of social breakdown; markets begin to close or collapse; coping strategies exhausted and survival strategies adopted; affected population identify food as the dominant problem in the onset of the crisis Widespread social breakdown; markets closed or inaccessible to affected population; survival strategies widespread; affected population identify food as dominant problem in onset of crisis Complete social breakdown; widespread mortality; affected population identify food as dominant problem in onset of crisis

From Howe, P. and Devereux, S. (2004). Famine intensity and magnitude scales: A proposal for an instrumental definition of famine. Disasters 28, 353 372. Note: wasting defined as the proportion of the children 6 months to 5 years who are below 80% of the median weight for height.

16

Famine

Table 2

The magnitude scale

Category

Phrase designation

Mortality range

A B C D E

Minor famine Moderate famine Major famine Great famine Catastrophic famine

0 999 1000 9999 10 000 99 999 100 000 999 999 Z1 000 000

From Howe, P. and Devereux, S. (2004). Famine intensity and magni tude scales: A proposal for an instrumental definition of famine. Dis asters 28, 353 372.

natural resources and livelihood profiles. This approach is based upon the insight that famine does not begin to kill people until it has destroyed their livelihoods. Spatial analysis, then, has been enthusiastically embraced by a range of institutions, and maps are regularly used in food emergencies. Since 1994, the WFP has refined its Vul nerability Analysis and Mapping to the point where it is used regularly for food aid targeting and famine relief. Baseline vulnerability and food security assessments feed data into WFP disaster mitigation programs. The scientific prediction and identification of famine has, of course, to be backed up with the political will to act upon the warning, but this has not always happened, bringing the technocratic, cartographic paradigm of fam ine relief into disrepute. The WFP rarely receives all of the funding it requires for its flash appeals (80% is the average) because politicians need incentives to act. A final aspect of measurement, retrospective dem ography, comes if mortality cannot be estimated in real time. Apart from the obvious increase in deaths, there is usually also an immediate reduction in fertility due to starvation induced amenorrhea (menstrual failure). Both are clearly visible in the population pyramid of China, which suffered a horrific famine between 1958 and 1962. Postfamine populations also tend to have a higher pro portion of girls and women than normal, for complex reasons that are probably to do with bodily resistance to stress. There are also more in the age groups 10–45 be cause of the adverse impact upon vulnerable younger and older people.

Famine: A Conceptual Genealogy The late eighteenth century argument of Thomas Mal thus was that populations (he meant working people) were at risk of famine because they expand faster than their means of sustenance. Although disproved in the nineteenth century by increased crop yields and the es tablishment of a worldwide trade in foodstuffs, this idea was recycled in the late twentieth century, when it be came a negative commentary on the ability of post colonial states in the Third World to meet the basic needs of their rapidly growing populations. There are

subsidiary, ongoing debates that global resources are somehow insufficient to accommodate further economic and demographic expansion, and that the ever growing human imprint will irrevocably damage the environment. Unfortunately for the many scholars with genuine concerns about sustainability, or who wish to empower women with regard to choices about family size, the ex cesses of the neo Malthusians have undermined the ‘too many people’ strand of thinking. Their predictions of dire consequences have often been exaggerated and their ethics questionable. Examples include the frankly reprehensible ‘Lifeboat ethics: the case against helping the poor’ (1974) of Hardin, and the triage advocated in Famine 1975! America’s decision: who will survive? (1967) by the Paddock brothers. Even the science assumed by Malthus and his followers, that famines represent a ‘check’ on population growth, is disproved by demographers. The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that fertility rebounds after famines and that numbers eventually recover. In the nineteenth century the discussion of famine was influenced by catastrophes in Ireland and India. In the former, the fungal disease Phytophthera infestans (potato blight) ruined the crops of 1845, 1846, and 1848, causing an excess mortality estimated at 1 million. The FAD for individual households (at the same time that food was being exported from Ireland to Britain), coupled with widespread evictions, caused destitution that the state only half heartedly dealt with through public works. The consequences, such as a diaspora of 2 million Irish emi grants, are well known but the recent cluster of publi cations inspired by the 150th anniversary of the ‘potato famine’ has added value through a number of powerful ‘famine imaginaries’. The Indian famines were in the Delhi region, 1860– 61; Cuttack, 1865–66; West Bengal, 1873–74; and south ern India, 1877; and various experiments with relief eventually culminated in the systematic response of the Famine Codes. These were first formulated in 1883 and went through various guises in the different provinces. In essence, they were a precursor of the modern FEWS, using a variety of indicators of food insecurity (crop failure, market prices) as triggers for preplanned re sponses, such as food for work, food distribution through handouts, soup kitchens, or relief from taxes. Under standable questioning of the motivations of such colonial surveillant biopolitics should not blind us to the con ceptual significance of this development. Ironically, although in the modern age the capacity to deal with famine has been maximized through enhanced production, better transport, and the initiation of moni toring, nevertheless the twentieth century saw the greatest number of famine deaths in history. Famine re lated mortality (not all from starvation) has been vari ously estimated, but a total of 70 million seems to be very likely (Table 3).

Famine

Table 3 Years 1899 1903 1906 1913 1917 1920 1921 1927 1929 1932 1943 1943 1943 1944 1946 1957 1958 1966 1968 1969 1972 1972 1974 1974 1979 1980 1982 1983 1984 1988 1990 1991 1995 1998 1999

1901 06 07 14 19 21 22

34

44 47 58 62 70 74 73 75 75

81 85 85 85 2003 93 99 2000

17

Twentieth-century famines: excess mortality in thousands Location

Deaths

Causes

NW India Hausaland, Nigeria S Tanzania Sahel, W Africa C Tanzania Gansu and Shaanxi, China USSR NW China Hunan, China Ukraine, USSR Henan, China Bengal, India Rwanda Netherlands USSR Tigray, Ethiopia China Wollo, Ethiopia Biafra, Nigeria Sahel, W Africa Maharashtra, India Wollo and Tigray, Ethiopia Somalia Bangladesh Cambodia Uganda Mozambique Ethiopia Darfur and Kardofan, Sudan S Sudan Iraq Somalia North Korea Bar el Ghazal, Sudan Ethiopia

1000 5 37.5 125 30 500 9000 3000 6000 2000 7000 8000 5000 2100 3000 300 10 2000 100 397 30 000 33 000 45 60 1000 101 130 200 500 20 1500 1500 2000 30 100 1000 250 250 200 1000 300 500 2800 3500 70 20 98

Drought Drought Conflict Drought Conflict and drought Drought Drought and conflict Natural disasters Drought and conflict Government policy Conflict Conflict Conflict and drought Conflict Drought and government policy Drought and locusts Government policy Drought Conflict Drought Drought Drought Drought and government policy Flood and market failure Conflict Conflict and drought Conflict and drought Conflict and drought Drought Conflict Sanctions Conflict and drought Flood and government policy Conflict and drought Drought and conflict

Devereux, S. (2000). Famine in the twentieth century, IDS working paper 105. Brighton: University of Sussex.

Recent work on famines in geography and cognate disciplines can be divided into four categories. First, a dominant theme has been that of ‘natural’ hazards: fam ines associated with the destruction of crops or dis ruption of infrastructure that comes with floods, droughts, or plagues of locusts. The word natural was eventually questioned as we learned more about human impact, for instance of overgrazing upon desertification or deforestation upon floods. In the new millennium, hazards analysis has renewed in popularity due to the need to understand and mitigate the extreme events predicted to come with ‘global warming’. Second, we can identify a humanitarian turn in atti tudes to famine. The formation of Oxfam in 1942 and other international NGOs after the war was paralleled by an increasing commitment by Western governments to food aid, and the formation of the WFP by the United Nations (UN) in 1961. It is possible to be cynical about the strategic aims of food aid donors and to argue that they should pay more attention to protecting livelihoods,

but the need for short term emergency interventions remains. An interesting development of antifamine action in recent decades has been the involvement of pop mu sicians in high profile events, such as the Concert for Bangladesh (1971), BandAid (1984), and LiveAid (1985). The humanitarian theme has recently achieved greater intellectual rigor as the result of a debate on the ‘right to food’. This is already an inalienable human right under international law, recognized in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, but its practical application is still at an early stage of de velopment. In 2004, the FAO Council adopted the Right to Food Guidelines but these are voluntary. Some ac tivists have suggested that modern famines are always political to some extent and that it is therefore possible to argue legally that there are accountable parties who are liable, either for negligence or in the worst cases for genocide, requiring prosecution in the International Criminal Court. This has dramatically shifted the center

Famine

Em

Totality of rights (enfranchisement)

t

B

en

Command over food (endowments

rm we po

A

C

Class-based patterns of social reproduction (surplus appropriation)

Cl a po ss we r

em en t

Economic capability

ty er s op Pr tion a rel

of gravity of famine studies from ‘what is the cause of famines?’ to ‘who benefits from famines?’. One possible crime might be famine denial. There was no word, for instance, from China during the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) to indicate that Mao’s radical restructuring of the economy was so disruptive that it led to upward of 30 million deaths, one of the greatest famines in human history. In Sudan, on a much smaller scale, the govern ment similarly failed to acknowledge a drought related famine in 1984–85, a tragic mistake that cost a quarter of million people their lives. Third, political economy interpretations of famine have tended to look at the dysfunctional role of market mechanisms (taxes, hoarding speculation, excess profits, market failure) or at the role of class, privilege, and re pression in the global South. Increasingly, these factors have been tied into the processes of globalization, such as the terms of international trade or the geopolitical am bitions of the great powers. One of the best writers in this tradition, Michael Watts, has made a series of telling interventions. His work is especially important because of its contextual exploration of the nature of food insecurity. He has conceptualized this as a function of ‘spaces of vulnerability’ (Figure 1), based on: (1) entitlement and capability – market perturbations (economic exchange), coping thresholds (socioeconomics of resilience), and social security limitations (informal moral economies or formal welfare institutions); (2) empowerment and en franchisement; and (3) political economy – class and crisis. Watts’s conclusion is that we need a realist theory of famine as sketched in Figure 2. Political ecology is another version of this approach, representing in effect the environmentalism that was absent from Marxist geography until the 1990s. Fourth, the FAD argument, that hitherto had seemed to be the commonsense explanation of famine, was chal lenged in 1981 by Amartya Sen. He observed that famines are often documented in places where food is available. His examples were the Bengal famine of 1943; Ethiopia, 1972– 74; the Sahel, 1973; and Bangladesh, 1974. Sen’s insight was that people’s (individuals, households) access to food, their ‘exchange entitlement’, was what mattered and that this could be undermined by a failure of subsistence, a lack of bargaining power in a market, or the erosion of traditional community support mechanisms. Sen’s work was influen tial and there followed a surge in micro level empirical work that put flesh on the bones of his framework of an alysis. This has shown that contingent reality is even more complex than he had imagined. Plausible though his case study analyses are, the evidence suggests that they work because they fit a particular type of famine in a particular socioeconomic context. In SSA, where migration to large feeding centers is a common feature of food emergencies, mortality tends to be less from starvation than hygiene related infections in the camps such as diarrhea or

En titl

18

Political economy A B C

Space of vulnerability Vulnerability by lack of potentiality Vulnerability by exposure Vulnerability by lack of capacity

Figure 1 Reproduced from ‘The space of vulnerability: the causal structure of hunger and famine’ by Watts, M. J. and Bohle, H. G. in Progress in Human Geography 17, 43 67, Sage Publications 1993.

contagious diseases like cholera. Here the poor and the better off suffer together. Sen is most relevant to peasant societies with private property and some engagement with market based exchange, but less predictive for precapitalist societies dominated by common property resources or for famine under socialism. He is at his weakest when the bedrock of his theory, legal based entitlements, is flouted, as in times of civil conflict and war. Sen’s later work has argued that the presence of liberal democracy in a country is a powerful antifamine tool. The argument runs that effective political opposition and a critical media will hold governments and their agencies to account and that indifference to starvation, inefficiency in relief delivery, and the deliberate creation of famine conditions are, as a result, less likely. But does the evi dence fit? The great famine in Ireland happened under the control of UK parliamentary democracy. India is lauded as the world’s largest democracy and a miracle of multi culturalism, yet her accountable politicians have not sys tematically addressed their problem of malnutrition, with the result that 27% of the world’s hungry live in that one country. Also, 70% of the nonpregnant women in India suffer with iron deficiency anemia and 60% of preschool children have vitamin A deficiency. This is a wretched failure for the liberal developmental state. However, it is less the presence of a constitutional democracy that matters than the effective operation of institutions, cou pled with the politicization of famine in a manner that commits politicians to an ‘antifamine political contract’.

Famine

19

Structural Conjunctural Hunger-famine process

Crisis proneness I

Intensity of deprivation

Hunger-food insecurity

1 Triggers

2 Food crisis

3 Famine crisis

Crisis proneness II 4 Stabilization

Social space of vulnerability I

Hunger-food insecurity

Social space of vulnerability II

• Exposure

Wasting, disease, death

• Capacity

Migration, de-population

• Potentiality

• Exposure • Capacity • Potentiality

Asset loss impoverishment

Baseline vulnerability II Baseline vulnerability I

(Expand vulnerability) Time Concatenation of events

Resilience counter-crisis tendencies

Figure 2 Reproduced from ‘The space of vulnerability: the causal structure of hunger and famine’ by Watts, M. J. and Bohle, H. G. in Progress in Human Geography 17, 43 67, Sage Publications 1993.

New Famines Jenny Edkins has suggested that famine is ‘produced’ by modernity. It is not surprising that in the latest phase, globalization, we can see some new variants. The first is due to the erosion of capabilities and emergence of new vulnerabilities that has accompanied the AIDS epidemic. One estimate is that the economy of South Africa, for instance, is 22% smaller than it would have been without AIDS, and at least one recent famine was exacerbated by AIDS morbidity through a reduction in productive cap acity, a rise in dependency ratios, and an increase in the burden of care for the sick. Often family decision makers are affected by the disease but it is their dependants, including a generation of orphans, who are most sus ceptible to malnutrition. Second, there are hungry cities, where poor slum dwellers may not have the vegetable growing and small livestock keeping possibilities of their rural counterparts, and they are therefore vulnerable to price spikes and labor market imperfections in times of economic stress. An example that tipped over into urban famine was Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, in 1985–86. This was a famine hidden from the outside world by the government then in power, but its impact can be re constructed from demographic data. Mortality increased

especially amongst children and this coincided with a period of price instability in the staple commodity, rice. Third, although there have been benefits of global ization, ranging from an expanded trade in foodstuffs and the creation of buffer stocks against times of famine, they have often been nullified by the presence of insurgencies and civil wars in many African countries. The typical modern African famine involves a military/political di mension that may have links to international geopolitics. An example is the 1998 famine in Bar el Ghazal, Sudan. Here the production and export of oil from the south of the country was the trigger for rebel groups to object to the exploitation of ‘their’ resources and for the govern ment to reinvest in military conquest. Finally, in Iraq there have been an estimated 200 000 to 1 million deaths attributable to what Haris Gazdar has called ‘postmodern famine’. This is defined as ‘‘excess mortality in spite of protected food entitlements but due to non food crises: notably the stresses of macro shocks on relatively sophisticated health and social welfare systems.’’ Sanctions were imposed on Iraq by the UN in 1990, causing immediate problems in a country that had previously been dependent on imports for two thirds or more of its food. This was a famine, in the broad sense, in a market economy that continued to function. The key to understanding this type of famine is that a country that

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was closely integrated into the global economy suffered a severe shock when that access (export of oil in return for food and manufactures) was cut off. Although the prox imate cause was political, arguably the structure is similar to that of other economic crises, such as Indonesia (1997), Russia (1998), and Argentina (2001–02), where hunger related morbidity and mortality increased far beyond the normal. Maybe this is a glimpse of one type of future famine.

Famine Futures The first of the UN Millennium Goals is to halve hunger from 800 to 400 million by 2015. Will this step to utopia be achieved through developmentalism? The evidence since World War II has not always been encouraging but famine in its acute sense does now seem to be confined to Africa. The only recent aberration (1995–99) was in North Korea where an authoritarian and secretive regime presided over perhaps 3 million starvation deaths at a time of flood induced chaos in their fragile rural econ omy. Lest complacency about world prospects sets in, we should note three points. First, there is an industry of dire predictions about the outturn of global warming. Some of these involve a commentary about perturbations in the Asian monsoon or the spread of aridity in Africa and the Mediterranean, and the implication is of increased vulnerability in countries (such as India) that are densely populated. As the climate modeling becomes more sophisticated, a consensus is growing that the risk of famine will increase over the coming decades. Second, who will feed China? This is a question posed by Lester Brown, a well known pessimist about world population growth. He has moved on from the cruder realms of neo Malthusianism to a new position that recognizes China’s stunning economic success since the death of Mao and argues that it will need to import more and more food in order to meet rising living stan dards and to plug shortfalls in its own production. With India and other parts of the global South likely to share in this new prosperity, we are invited to wonder whether ultimately there will be enough food in international trade to prevent famine elsewhere. Both of these first two points may be contested but, third, there is no doubt that at the beginning of the twenty first century there are more people dying of malnutrition than of famine. Many of the arguments raised in this article apply equally as well to the chronic food problems as they do the acute. Given the world community’s very welcome new commitment (in prin ciple) to food as a human right, what is needed is an ethical and legal geography of the extent to which this right is being flouted, directly and indirectly, by various

stakeholders. Let us hope that the present century will be one, not just of liberal hand wringing about hunger, but of accountability for the famine crimes that are being committed everyday against the rights of the vulnerable and the powerless. In short, we need a repoliticization of famine. See also: Africa; Aid; Developmentalism; Human Rights; Plant Geographies; Vulnerability.

Further Reading Braun, J., von Teklu, T. and Webb, P. (1998). Famine in Africa: Causes, responses, and prevention. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Campbell, D. (2003). Salgado and the Sahel: Documentary photography and the imaging of famine. In Debrix, F. & Weber, C. (eds.) Rituals of mediation: International politics and social meaning, pp 69 96. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Davis, M. (2001). Late Victorian Holocausts: El nino famines and the making of the third world. London: Verso. Devereux, S. (1993). Theories of famine. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Devereux, S. (2000). Famine in the twentieth century, IDS Working Paper 105. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Devereux, S. (ed.) (2007). The new famines: Why famines exist in an era of globalization. London: Routledge. de Waal, A. (1997). Famine crimes: Politics and the disaster relief industry in Africa. Oxford: James Currey. de Waal, A. (2005). Famine that kills: Darfur, Sudan (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Waal, A. and Whiteside, A. (2003). New variant famine: AIDS and food crisis in southern Africa. Lancet 362, 1234 1237. Dre`ze, J. and Sen, A. (eds.) (1990). The political economy of hunger, Vol. II: Famine prevention. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dyson, T. and O´ Gra´da, C. (eds.) (2002). Famine demography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edkins, J. (2000). Whose hunger? Concepts of famine, practices of aid. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Howe, P. and Devereux, S. (2004). Famine intensity and magnitude scales: A proposal for an instrumental definition of famine. Disasters 28, 353 372. Keen, D. (1994). The benefits of famine: A political economy of famine and relief in Southwestern Sudan, 1983 1989. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sen, A. (1981). Poverty and famines: An essay on entitlement and deprivation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swift, J. (2006). Why are rural people vulnerable to famine? IDS Bulletin 37(4), 33 40. Watts, M. J. (1983). Silent violence: Food, famine and peasantry in Northern Nigeria. Berkeley: University of California Press. Watts, M. J. and Bohle, H. G. (1993). The space of vulnerability: The causal structure of hunger and famine. Progress in Human Geography 17, 43 67.

Relevant Websites http://www.fivims.net An Interagency Initiative to Promote Information and Mapping Systems on Food Insecurity and Vulnerability. http://www.fews.net USAID Famine Early Warning System. http://www.wfp.org World Food Program.

Fatherland/Homeland R. Kaiser, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Constitutive Outside The Others against which identities are constructed, and which is therefore incorporated within as the constitutive core all identification discourses and practices. Instrumental Constructivism The approach to collective identity formation which views it as a topdown, center-out project through which elites reshape the public into new sociospatial communities, and that tends to treat nationalization as a once-and-for-all process that results in the construction of mass-based nations. Memoryscape The complex or network of sites of memory that symbolically constitutes the homeland, and helps to ground or sediment the fiction of the nation as a natural and timeless entity rooted in the soil of the homeland. National Symbolic Landscape A landscape image that stands as the visual representation of the entire national homeland. National Territorialization The approach that views identity as a category of discourse and practice, rather than as an essentialized thing in the world; identity is understood as constituted in and through a set of discursive practices that people narrate and enact in their everyday lives. Nonessential or Post-Structural Constructivism The approach that views identity as a category of discourse and practice, rather than as an essentialized thing in the world; identity is understood as constituted in and through a set of discursive practices that people narrate and enact in their everyday lives. Primordialism The approach that views identity categories as natural, timeless essences; the dominant discourse adopted by nationalists that works to naturalize and reify nations as organic entities or beings in the world. Territorial Nationalization The nationalization of space, or the process of re-imagining a place as a national homeland, which may include mapping, constructing sites of memory, re-narrating the past of a place, and the myriad banal practices through which places are nationalized as homelands in everyday discourse.

One recent demonstration of the power contained in the word ‘homeland’ is its invocation in the United States

following 11 September 2001. In a country whose founding myths and legends emphasize immigration to a new land in search of freedom, homeland as such has not played an overly or at least overtly significant role in the construction of American national identity. Yet when an attack penetrated the borders of the US, almost imme diately, homeland talk and homeland politics rose to a dominant position in the security discourses that fol lowed. Not only through the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, but also in and through daily use in speeches and reports on national security, in academic journals and books, in school textbooks, and on the daily news and weekly television programming, representing the US as the homeland of American ness became second nature for politicians, journalists, academics, and the general public. In turn, the use of ‘homeland’ in US security discourse following 9/11 has come to dominate the English lan guage literature devoted to homeland studies. In a recent survey of the 234 volumes held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison library with the word ‘homeland’ in the title, 186 were directly related to post 9/11 US homeland security topics, and only 48 treated homeland in its other uses. A search of journal article titles showed a similar semantic capture of homeland by US security discourse. This appropriation of the word ‘homeland’ has altered the meaning of the term itself, even while its use has transformed the US into a homeland for millions of Americans. Since homeland has frequently been invoked by those seeking to secure the boundaries of national identity against outside threats posed by ‘others’, we may say that the term ‘homeland’ was symbolically deployed in the United States to restore national security after 9/ 11 – by securing state territory as homeland, the home land image could provide a security blanket for Ameri cans and American ness.

Introduction ‘Homeland’, ‘motherland’, and ‘fatherland’ are terms used to symbolize the deep emotional connectedness that people are said to feel toward their places of origin, as well as toward more geographically expansive and so cially constructed birthspaces such as national home lands. The terms themselves are saturated with power, because they contain within them cultural claims to be longing in, and to, particular places and, implicitly at least, political claims to preeminent status for in group members in such spaces. Beyond this, narrating the

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homeland as motherland and/or fatherland also helps to establish and maintain gendered ideals and social norms of behavior for members of the in group, and contrasting sets of gendered images for out group ‘others’, and so works as an integral part of governmentality. This article focuses on four aspects of the changing understanding and usage of homeland, motherland, and fatherland. First, is an examination of the reconceptuali zation of these terms in the contemporary social sciences, including their use in human and political geography. Next we consider homeland making discourses and practices in nationalism – the hegemonic source of their regulation and normalization for at least the past century. Third, the article explores the interrelationship between the three terms, and the conditions under which en gendering the homeland as motherland and/or fatherland occurs. The article concludes with an assessment of the impact that globalization and discourses of homelessness are having on representations of places as homelands.

Reconceptualizing Homeland The first thing that needs to be said is that homeland, fatherland, and motherland have not been terms that human or political geographers have paid a great deal of attention to. They do not show up, for example, in any edition of the Dictionary of Human Geography, have not been the focus of chapters or articles in political or human geography textbooks, and rarely make an ap pearance in broader geographic studies of power and place. Where we do tend to find greater attention to homeland, fatherland, and motherland is in political geographic studies of nationalism and territoriality. This concentrated treatment within geographies of national ism is reflective of the critical role played by nationalists in the discourses and practices that constitute homeland making, as well as the significance of homeland talk and homeland politics to nationalism. Academic research into the homeland group identity bond has shifted decisively during the past half century. Earlier primordialist treatments of ancestral homelands as a fundamental part of basic group identity, with their idealized sociospatial imaginary of a place for every people and a people for every place, have given way to more critical analyses of homeland claims. During the 1970s and 1980s, structural approaches rejected such primordialist claims, and sought to provide evidence for the recency of homeland sentiments felt by ethno national groups toward places more geographically ex tensive than localities. This more constructivist research perspective emphasized nation and homeland making as instrumental, political processes beginning in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the national ization and territorialization of elites, and extending to

the masses by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The development of popular homeland senti ments toward the territorial state was especially central to this instrumentalist agenda, and political and cultural elites seeking to represent the territory of the state as the ancestral homeland, motherland, and/or fatherland of the nation used textbooks and schooling, hiking and touring clubs, map making, and other popular media such as poster art and music to socialize the public toward spatial identification with the territorial state as home. At the same time, these instrumentalities were also deployed to nationalize the population. In this way, nation and homeland making were mutually constituted through the processes of territorial nationalization and national territorialization. Though closer to a critical engagement with nations and homelands not as primordial things but as historically contingent processes, this first wave of constructivist re search did suffer from two serious limitations. First, an instrumentalist framing tended to imagine a top down, center out process of nationalization and territorialization that treated the population being territorialized and na tionalized as an inert mass waiting to be reshaped, and so ignored the interactive and iterative nature of these sociospatial processes. Second, even though this approach views both nations and homelands as modern social constructs, much of the research conducted in this vein does tend to depict social construction as a once and for all process producing nations and homelands as real things that were made in the world at some point in the not too distant past. The problem here is that analysts continued to treat nations and homelands – once made – in relatively static, essentialized ways, as reified actors whose nature could be studied, understood, and predicted as such. Popular and even many academic understandings of na tions and homelands (e.g., the German, Irish, Japanese nation thinks this and feels that; Germany, Ireland, Japan believes this and acts like that) continue to suffer from this reification of nations and homelands as conjoined, unitary actors or beings in the world that can be categorized and studied in this way. More recently, the social construction of places and identities as mutually constitutive processes has focused on the discursive practices of everyday life through which nations and homelands become. This more nonessential or post structural treatment of homelands as processes of becoming and as narratives and enactments through which people emplot themselves in the places they call ‘home’ resolves the more glaring problems associated with earlier critical analytical approaches, and shifts the focus of re search attention in a number of ways. First, post structural or nonessential homeland studies investigate the dis courses through which places are represented as home lands, as well as the daily citational practices that produce homelands as material effects. This shift also focuses

Fatherland/Homeland

attention on the actors and the sociospatial stances that they take as they narrate and enact or ‘flag’ the homeland in their daily discursive practices. These first two redir ections have helped to de naturalize and de essentialize homelands, and to emphasize homelands as ongoing say ings and doings. Beyond this, post structural studies move the analytical gaze from the center (i.e., from homeland as a unifying, even unitary analytical category) and toward the boundaries that are constructed through the discursive practices of homeland making to differentiate and ex clude. This shift highlights both the centrality of the constitutive outside in the social construction of home lands, and also the fact that homelands do not grow or ganically from within or from the center out, but always materialize as a set of interiorizing and exteriorizing boundary effects. Overall, in the process of this transformation in homeland studies, the principal research question has shifted from ‘what is the homeland/fatherland/mother land?’, to ‘when is the homeland?’, and finally to ‘how are homeland images naturalized and sedimented through daily discursive practices?’. Under what circumstances do homeland discourses and practices work? That is, when do homeland talk and homeland politics resonate among their intended audiences and socially mobilize these publics? Interestingly, this new set of post structural re search questions has brought primordialism back in – al beit in a new way – since it is these more primordialist narratives and enactments of homeland that are frequently deployed in the naturalization and essentialization of

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homeland representations. However, rather than treating homelands as ancestral places of primordial groups, non essential approaches explore how the contestable fiction of blood and soil connectivity used to establish both ethno national identity and ethno territorial rootedness in the soil of the homeland is turned into the unassailable, un questioned truth by and for those becoming nationalized and territorialized. In the section below, we provide a more detailed discussion of the discourses and practices used to naturalize and sediment the homeland as the ground on which the nation is constituted.

The Discourses and Practices of Homeland-Making Places successfully represented as ancestral homelands are critical to the naturalization of nation ness, since homelands are socially constructed to provide visible, tangible evidence of nations as ancient, even timeless, fixtures on the landscape. The fiction of the nation’s primordial and organic essence is given concrete ex pression and materializes as fact in and through the homeland. Mapping and other cartographic presentations of national space are – along with censuses and museums – the chief technologies through which nations are so cially constructed and naturalized in place. Physical representations of the territorial state or other politically bounded spaces as homelands, nationalized toponyms, and bordering processes – both delimiting on

Figure 1 Cover of Eesti Atlas. The cover of this Estonian atlas uses two of the homeland representations discussed: an outlined or logoized map of Estonia, and the symbolic national landscape of Estonian-ness embedded within it. This combination promotes the nationalization of this sociospatial imaginary which helps both to localize the national and nationalize the local in the nation and homeland (Avita, Tallinn, 1996). Reproduced with permission of Avita Publishers.

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maps and demarcating on the ground – all help to ground truth the national sociospatial imaginary. Logoized repre sentations of the homeland’s boundary outline and other uses of the territorial state/homeland shape on coins and currency, stamps, flags, posters, souvenirs, and so on re inforce the geovisualization of the nation in and through homeland imagery (Figure 1). Symbolic national land scapes, whether of manicured agrarian scenes or stark and untamed nature, conjure up singular visual representations of the national homeland, ones that frequently also make their nightly appearances in folk tales and other bedtime stories. However, there is nothing natural about the choice of symbolic national landscapes, which are frequently se lected as a counternarrative to symbolic landscape images of the national ‘others’. For example: The West of Ireland came to symbolize the whole of Ireland to some Irish nationalists in the early twentieth century. Nationalist Irish writers initially developed a great interest in the region towards the end of the nineteenth century, partly because it was seen as the area least affected by the processes of Anglicization, but also because its bare and rugged landscape seemed to contrast so breathtakingly with the more pastoral landscapes through which contemporary England was imagined (Rose 1995: 91). (Figures 2 and 3).

In other words, not only are homelands always already constructed in relation to the ‘other’, even something as natural in appearance as a symbolic national landscape that represents the homeland as a rugged, unpopulated wilderness is imagined through interaction with the constitutive outside.

Specific commemorative sites, monuments, museums, and other lieux de memoire (sites of memory) all work to materialize nationalized narratives of the past in a network of memoryscapes that symbolically constitute the home land. Publics experience the naturalization and essentia lization of the nation and homeland through these sites, and these visitations take place in a wide variety of con texts. Schoolchildren regularly take fieldtrips to these places of collective memory, and also visit them virtually through textbook images and narratives, educational and popular films, and increasingly through Internet websites devoted to the production and dissemination of know ledge about these important nodes in the timespace fabric of the nation. This memory work is a crucial part of the socialization and spatialization of each generation into the nation. Special commemorative events are also staged at many of these sites of memory – typically on national holidays – during which nation and homeland are fre quently invoked. Beyond these official ceremonies, in formal cultural events such as folk festivals, concerts, plays, and more carnivalesque activities often also use sites of memory as their backdrop, and so help to naturalize and sediment nation and homeland into the public’s socio spatial imaginary through these more banal discursive practices. However, rather than seeing these sites as stable na tional anchors through which generation after generation is socialized and spatialized into nation and homeland, it is more accurate to see them as dynamically changing public narratives and enactments whose storyline shifts over time to accommodate new understandings and in terpretations of the nation homeland imaginary. Add itionally, of course, there are sites of memory that contest

Figure 2 Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, painting by Thomas Gainsborough c. 1750. This picture of a domesticated rural scene with estate owners posing before worked fields and gently rolling hills came to be identified as the symbolic national landscape of English-ness. The selection by Irish and Scottish nationalists of stark, undomesticated wilderness for their symbolic national landscapes was, at least in part, done to differentiate Irish-ness and Scottishness from what it meant to be English (see Figure 3). Reproduced with permission of the National Gallery, London.

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Figure 3 Photograph of West Ireland. Irish nationalists chose West Ireland for the symbolic national landscape of Irish-ness both because it was the region that had experienced the least Anglicization, and also because it provided such a strong visual counterpoint to the symbolic national landscape of English-ness (see Figure 2). Reproduced with permission of the photographer, Eric Zuelow.

as well as support dominant national discourses, and memoryscapes are perhaps more appropriately seen as a multilayered disjointed circuitry with many breaks in the line, patches, and switches, rather than as a cohesive network of smooth memory flows. Monuments con structed during one discursive era are at times so vio lently at odds with superceding dominant identity discourses and practices that they must be removed, as in much of the former Eastern Europe following the breakup of the socialist bloc and the emergence of ter ritorial nationalism as the dominant ideology during the 1990s. More frequently, these earlier monuments are left standing; though their positions within the memoryscape are undoubtedly transformed. This process of disjointed accretion also includes alternative sites of memory cre ated to represent subaltern understandings of the past in place. Beyond this, each visitor brings her/his own set of discursive practices through which s/he employs herself/ himself into the public narrative of nation and homeland constructed in and through these nodes. The flexibility of these shifting storylines and variable individual readings and emplotment typically occurs within the loosely bounded parameters of established nationalized norms, and is clearly a strength in that it allows the discourse and practice of nation and homeland to change with the times – becoming more or less inclusive of ‘other ness’ in the process – while seeming to remain permanent and unchanging touchstones of the nation’s timelessness. Maps, symbolic national landscapes, and sites of memory are three ways that places become homelands that in turn help to convert the fiction of the nation’s

solidity and primordial essence into fact – at least for the nationalizing public. Allegorical figures are another set of powerful images that not only represent the homeland as the nation (e.g., Mother Russia), but in doing so, also gender the homeland as fatherland or motherland. Male statues most often depict national heroes – military men, political leaders, and cultural figures – whose biographies serve as allegories of the national past. Less frequently, male images are used as allegorical figures of the nation itself. Allegorical representations of the homeland most often take a feminine form, and may be presented as map images of the territory itself as a woman (Figure 4), or alternatively, as a female statue as the motherland (Fig ure 5). Allegorical figures are also reproduced in paintings, on posters and postcards, in books, and on the Internet. In an elision of gendered identity and the gendering of place, the nationalist vision of women primarily as mothers reproducing the nation extends to motherland images as the birthplace of the nation. The motherland, therefore, is more often associated both with more rural blood and soil imagery, and also with more localized regions or places of origin, the more homely side of homeland. Those who invoke the motherland are fre quently calling on the nationalized sons – and less fre quently daughters – of the soil to love, honor, and defend the land as they would their own mothers. Not sur prisingly, then, motherland images are often used to mobilize the public during wartime, as in this World War II poster from the USSR (Figure 6). Gendering space as motherland and/or fatherland is central to any nationalization process. While nationalists

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Figure 4 Tibet as the embodiment of the demon goddess Srin mo. This image represents one form of the gendered representation of homeland in this case, the homeland as a female goddess. As legend has it, Buddhist temples anchored by Lhasa Jokhang were located in geographically strategic positions to pin her down and subdue her. From French, R. (1995). The GoldenYoke: The legal cosmology of Buddhist history. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Reproduced with permission of Cornell University Press.

Figure 5 Motherland Statue, Volgograd, Russia. The motherland statue was built to commemorate the battle of Stalingrad in World War II, and represents a grand allegorical image of the homeland as the mother of the nation to be defended. This allegory to the motherland speaks of the power of such sociospatial images to mobilize national publics, especially given the context in which it was produced a Soviet Union that, in principle, had rejected such place-identity politics in favor of socialist internationalism. Reproduced with permission of the photographer, Martha Waites.

tend to use motherland images to promote a more in ward looking, security minded public, representations of the fatherland promote a re territorialization of identity toward the paternalistic state as a national homeland that must be obeyed. Also, because motherland narratives and enactments tend to draw on a more localized sense of homeland, they help to ground nationalized discourses of place and identity in localized legends and landscapes, and in the process work to localize understandings of the

nation. Fatherland narratives evoke more masculine, martial, militarized understandings of the nation–home land relationship, and tend to connect the homeland image to politicized national space – as the territory of a state already created or a state to be – and so tend to nationalize the local. In these ways, motherland and fatherland imagery work in tandem to stitch together the sociohistorical fabric of nation and homeland by drawing in and nationalizing localized discursive practices that

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belongs here sentiment, and so place the ‘other’ to be exteriorized at the center of attention. While both gen dered aspects are always present within homeland narra tives and enactments, the balance between motherland and fatherland discourses and practices continually shifts with changing circumstances. In the United States, for example, the more prominent we here motherland dis course that followed the end of the Cold War was rapidly transformed into a much more ‘other’ dominated and exclusionary fatherland discourse following 9/11.

Homeland’s End?

Figure 6 ‘Motherland Calls!’ by Irakliy Toidze, 1941. This image was part of the exhibit: ‘‘Soviet Propaganda Posters: The Power of Art, Art of Power’’, sponsored by the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA), University of Wisconsin Madison. Reproduced with permission of CREECA. This Soviet poster from the outset of World War II speaks even more poignantly of the power of the allegorical motherland image to mobilize the public in times of war. In this poster, the motherland holds a ‘‘war oath’’, which seeks to employ this symbolic power in the name of the USSR as motherland. In one part of the oath, the soldier swears ‘‘to protect her (the motherland) courageously (muzhestvenno in a manly way), skillfully, with dignity and honor, not sparing my own blood and life for the achievement of complete victory over the enemy.’’

constitute the collective experience of becoming. Taken together, the gendering of homeland both as mother and father has helped to naturalize and sediment the linkages between birthplace and territorial state in the popular perceptions of those being socialized and territorialized into the nation and state, and so has served as a powerful instrumentality in the social construction and stabiliza tion of states as the natural containers of national identity. If motherland representations of home emphasize the sense of belonging aspect of national territoriality and focus more attention on an inward looking we belong here and nowhere else sentiment, fatherland images tend to stress a sense of exclusiveness toward the state as the national homeland, a more outward looking no one else

Today, in a certain sense, we live in an increasing con dition of homelessness, and many analysts of cosmo politanism and transnationalism have written obituaries not only for the nation state, but also for home and homeland. According to this literature, a sense of homelessness is growing, not only among people living away from their places of origin, but also as a result of alienation from those places imagined as homelands among people who have never left, as these places undergo processes of transnationalization. Identity itself is frequently depicted as deterritorialized, as something detached not only from homeland and state, but from place more generally. Do the discourses and practices that have come to be labeled globalization signal the end of homelands? In thinking through the implications of globalization for homelands, it is important to keep in mind that homelands are socially constructed through daily dis cursive practices rather than natural pregiven things in the world, and that homeland narratives and enactments are constantly changing and becoming. Similarly, it is important to see globalization as a set of discursive practices that are affecting people’s identification in a multiplicity of ways that are highly variable spatially. When seen in this light, a number of problems with the globalization as deterritorialized homelessness ar gument may be identified. First, this assertion seems to rest on a fairly simplistic equating of leaving home and homeland with the deterritorialization of identity. In many ways, this literature reinforces the naturalized, essentialist view of home and homeland – as backward looking, traditional, static, and reified places that are being left behind by the hypermobility of late modernity. Yet, as we have seen above, dynamically unfolding rep resentations of homeland symbolically and discursively connect people not only to places, but also to one an other, and serve as the memoryscapes through which knowledge of collective identities is produced. Once away, collective memories and nostalgic longing con tinually produce homeland thoughts, images and talk, as well as homeland politics. Homelands are not only

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Fatherland/Homeland

symbols and memories, they materialize through the everyday practices of those who are away just as they do for those who remain behind – both in the social net works that stretch homelands globally, as well as in the social construction of homelands in new places. Home lands – albeit in decidedly reterritorialized forms – are popping up all over the place and seem quite resilient in a globalizing world. More broadly, all identification is also a process of differentiation that is centrally about constructing, con testing, and renegotiating borders with the constitutive outside. Home and homeland – as two of the most powerful interiorizing discourses and practices through which identity comes into being – are unlikely to dis appear in a more mobile world where the processes of boundary construction and contestation between identi fication and differentiation are growing in intensity. Finally, there is a value judgment apparent in much of the globalization as homelessness literature that needs to be questioned. The term ‘homeland’ – treated in much of this literature as a holdover from the pre modern past and as the place in whose name exclusionary, even genocidal, politics are practiced – carries a strong nega tive valence. Home has similarly been treated by at least some feminist and postcolonial geographers in negative terms, as a masculine defined space of containment and control. On the other hand, diasporic identity, hybridity, and homelessness carry an equally strong positive valence – as deterritorialized life on the margins – in a kind of libratory thirdspace. While home and homeland can certainly be places of confinement, and even of ex termination, they need not be, and for many they have been places of refuge, security, and freedom, places of liberation. By the same token, living a homeless life in diaspora is, for many, not a choice freely made but is rather an imposed condition. The value of home and homeland as well as hybridity and homelessness are not good or bad in their own right, but rather are dynamic, situated, and context specific, and need to be studied as such. Understanding homelands as socially constructed through daily discourses and practices opens new possi bilities to explore both the power relations that materi alize and stabilize the homeland and its gendered forms, and also the ways that leaving home both de and reterritorializes identity as it reconfigures home and homeland as imagined places in the world. In not ac cepting homelands as things in the world but as ongoing discursive practices, we are freed to reenvision what kinds of homes and homelands we desire, and then to set about narrating and enacting them.

See also: Cultural Geography; Cultural Politics; Diaspora; Ethnic Conflict; Ethnicity; Ethnicity and Resistance, Historical Geographies of; Habitus; Heritage; Heritage and Culture; Heritage and Identity; Home; Homelessness; Human Geography; Hybridity; Identity Politics; Indigeneity; Indigenous Mapping; Mapping, Race and Ethnicity; Maps and the State; Memorials and Monuments; Memory; Nation; National Spatialities; Nationalism; Nationalism, Historical Geography of; Other/ Otherness; Place; Place, Politics of; Political Boundaries; Popular Culture; Representation, Politics of; Sense of Place; Sovereignty; State; Territory and Territoriality.

Further Reading Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage. Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities. London: Routledge. Brubaker, R. (1996). Nationalism reframed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connor, W. (1986). The impact of homelands upon diasporas. In Sheffer, G. (ed.) Modern diasporas in international politics, pp 16 45. London: Croom Helm. Diener, A. (2004). Homeland conceptions and ethnic integration among Kazakhstan’s Germans and Koreans. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Edensor, T. (2002). National identity, popular culture and everyday life. Oxford: Berg. French, R. (1995). The GoldenYoke: The legal cosmology of Buddhist history. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. (eds.) (1997). Culture, power, place. London: Duke University Press. Hage, G. (1996). The spatial imaginary of national practices: Dwelling domesticating/being exterminating. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14, 463 485. Hooson, D. (ed.) (1994). Geography and national identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Kaiser, R. (2001). Geography. In The encyclopedia of nationalism, vol. 1, pp 315 333. San Diego: Academic Press. Kaiser, R. J. (2002). Homeland making and the territorialization of national identity. In Conversi, D. (ed.) Ethnonationalism in the contemporary world, pp 230 247. London: Routledge. Morley, D. and Robins, K. (1996). No place like heimat: Images of homeland in European culture. In Eley, G. & Suny, R. (eds.) Becoming national, pp 456 480. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paasi, A. (1996). Territories, boundaries, and consciousness. New York: Wiley. Paasi, A. (1999). Boundaries as social practice: Territoriality in the world of flows. In Newman, D. (ed.) Boundaries, territories and postmodernity, pp 69 88. London: Frank Cass. Pratt, G. (1999). Geographies of identity and difference: Marking boundaries. In Massey, D., Allen, J. & Sarre, P. (eds.) Human geography today, pp 151 167. Oxford: Polity Press. Rose, G. (1995). Place and identity: A sense of place. In Massey, D. & Jess, P. (eds.) A place in the world? Places, cultures and globalization, pp 87 132. Oxford: The Open University. Smith, G., Law, V., Wilson, A., Bohr, A. and Allworth, E. (1998). Nation building in the post soviet borderlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yiftachel, O. (2001). The homeland and nationalism. In The geography of nationalism, vol. 1, pp 359 383. San Diego: Academic Press.

Feminism and Work J. Pollard, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Discourse A set of practices through which the world is rendered meaningful and intelligible, including narratives, concepts, ideologies, and signifying practices. Essentialism The belief in the existence of fixed, invariable properties (‘essences’) that define a person or entity. Globalization The increasingly international integration, connectivity, and hybridity of a range of economic, cultural, political, and environmental activities. Human Capital Theory Argues that individuals invest in their own human capital by improving their skills and qualifications for which they are rewarded accordingly. Liberal Feminism Views women and men as equal, as deserving of equal rights in economic, social, and political life, and the use of the political and legal system to secure such rights. Queer Theory Challenges essentialist notions of homosexuality and heterosexuality and understands sexuality as constructed and shifting in different historical and cultural contexts. Radical Feminism Argues that inequalities between men and women are rooted in patriarchy, a system that constructs rights, structures, and practices in ways that privilege men. Socialist Feminism Argues that there is a link between the class structure in capitalism and the oppression of women.

Definitions Feminism is a broad, complex, contested term that comprises both an intellectual and a political project that seeks to identify, understand, and dismantle inequalities between men and women. As an intellectual movement, different strands of liberal, Marxist/socialist, radical, and post structuralist feminist thought have demonstrated how sexual differentiation and the social construction of gender differences are intricately linked with questions of power. As a political movement, feminism has waxed and waned and evolved through different eras of activity and achievement. Early, so called ‘first wave’ feminists in the US and UK, inspired in part by Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and its appeal to the power of reason and equality, fought for women’s

political rights, notably the vote. A second wave of feminist activism in the 1960s fought a broader array of economic and social inequalities, including discrimin ation in the workplace and earnings inequality. This era of activism also asserted that ‘the personal is political’, that women’s rights extended to control of their bodies, their sexuality, and reproductive rights. Feminist theor ists, writers, and activists have long struggled with ten sions between competing claims around universalism (that women have common experiences of inequality and discrimination) and particularism (that women are not homogeneous, that they occupy different social, eco nomic, cultural, political, and geographical locations). Arising from black feminists’ and others’ critiques of the class and racial bases of second wave feminism, ‘third wave’ feminists have explored the diversity of women’s lives, experiences, and politics. Key to this has been an interest in the politics of intersectionality, the relations between gender and its co constitution with other axes of difference, like race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Drawing on queer theory, postcolonial theories, and post structuralist scholarship, feminist theorists have explored the signifi cance of representation, subjectivity, language, and iden tity. Many feminists now critique discourses concerning the singularity of knowledge and truth and note the partiality of projects that treat ‘women’ as an already constituted, homogeneous group or that treat ‘gender’ as a stable, social category. The philosophical, political, and theoretical diversity that now characterizes feminist thought makes it difficult to generalize its key aspirations and achievements and it is now more accurate to talk about ‘feminisms’ in the plural. Nevertheless, through their strong ethical, polit ical, and utopian impulses, feminists have sought to highlight and resist the systematic production of social difference around gender and challenge the persistence of inequalities between men and women. Work – what it is, who does it, and where – has been a key arena of struggle. There is now a vast literature on feminism and work and some excellent reviews are available. In what follows, some key feminist and geographical contri butions are highlighted.

Origins of Interest in Human Geography and the Social Sciences Just as there is no single definition of feminism, there is no single origin of social scientific interest in women’s de mands for equality that fueled feminist scholarship. Part of

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Feminism and Work

the impetus came from feminist writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, and Simone de Beau voir who identified work and class as important sites in the struggle for women’s liberation. Yet, this emphasis on work also reflected the reality that women all over the world spend the major portion of their lives working, be it paid or unpaid. The twentieth century involved a transforma tion in the economic landscapes of many economies and the gradual feminization of waged employment, especially in service industries and occupations. For many women in North America and Europe, World War II marked a turning point as they were drawn into paid work, often for the first time, on a massive scale. The demand for labor was such that traditional gender divisions of labor were swept aside, at least temporarily, as women filled jobs traditionally occupied by men in engineering, steel, autos, and other manufacturing industries. Since the 1950s in particular, a raft of social and cultural shifts and, in many places, economic necessity have driven rising female participation in labor markets in the global south and north. While it is difficult to find consistent data, most especially for many of the world’s poorest countries, Joni Seager’s Atlas of Women in the World presents a wealth of data on women’s work. UN figures reveal that in large parts of Africa and Central Europe and some parts of northern Europe, over 60% of all women were working for pay in 1999. While the overall trend has been toward rising female participation in waged labor, there is a good deal of geographic vari ation, with lower rates of female participation in Catholic and Islamic countries. In many parts of the world, women are concentrated in agriculture or informal, largely un regulated sectors like domestic service or market trading (see Table 1).

Key Contributions Contesting the Definition of Work One of feminist theorists’ major contributions to the study of work has been to critique how economics, sociology, geography, and other social science disciplines have defined ‘work’. Many social scientific analyses have equated ‘work’ with ‘paid employment’, an assumption visible in long histories of different governments’ stat istics keeping practices that define and categorize work in particular occupational and industrial classifications. Feminist scholars have argued that defining ‘work’ to include only formal waged labor represents a masculine norm and ignores a raft of unpaid, paid in kind, and informal work often performed by women, notably domestic labor and childcare. Early research on work largely ignored domestic labor because homes were not viewed as sites of work or production but rather as places where women engaged in

what were viewed as their ‘natural’ and biologically given roles of caring and nurturing. Yet this analytical and spatial separation of home and work is geographically and historically specific; it is a description that applies largely to a suite of industrialized capitalist economies after the industrial revolution. An important feminist contribution was thus to challenge the analytical separ ation of work (the public sphere) and home (the private sphere) in industrialized capitalist economies that sug gested that women’s reproductive roles either limited their work to the private sphere or else meant a ‘second shift’ in the public sphere of paid work. Feminists have sought to understand housework as a form of work, to analyze it like other forms of work, and to have it taken seriously in terms of its role in producing essential goods and services. Anne Oakley’s The sociology of housework was a major contribution that argued that unpaid work in the home could be understood in the same terms as paid work. For liberal feminists like Betty Friedan, the unpaid status of domestic labor meant that is was undervalued. Other Marxian and socialist feminists joined in what became known as the ‘domestic labor debates’ of the 1970s and 1980s and argued that homemakers were fundamental for the reproduction of capitalist social relations and, like their partners in paid work, were being exploited. The oretically, this emphasis on the household was important because it did more than simply add the experiences of women into traditional analyses; instead, it challenged prevailing approaches that explained sexual divisions of labor in terms of individual choices and argued that issues of dependence, tradition, and most especially power over resources were crucial. Key schisms in these literatures concerned the analytical status of class and gender and whether capitalism and patriarchy were conceived as a single or ‘dual system’. Politically, this scholarship highlighted the precarious situation of many married women who were full time domestic laborers and thus economically dependent on waged partners. Moreover, women’s domestic labor, unpaid and under valued, was not subject to various forms of statutory protections, like social security, redundancy pay, or un employment benefit that accompanied waged work. At various times then, this scholarship translated into de mands for wages for housework and attempts to measure the economic value of domestic labor, although this in turn created many debates about how to draw the line between work, leisure, and play in, for example, activities such as child rearing. Explaining Occupational Segregation A second contribution of feminist scholarship has been to confront and interrogate one of the most pervasive and enduring features of women’s participation in the

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Table 1

31

Women’s employment by economic activitya 1995 2003, selected countries

Country

Argentina Australia Bangladesh Bolivia Botswana Canada France Japan Kenya Mexico Norway Pakistan Russian Federation Singapore Slovenia South Africa Sri Lanka Thailand UK Yemen

Agricultureb 1995 2002 (%)

Industryc 1995 2002 (%)

Servicesd 1995 2002 (%)

Contributing family memberse 1995 2003 (%)

Women

Men

Women

Men

Women

Men

Women

Men

3 77 3 17 2 1 5 16 6 2 73 8

1 6 53 6 22 4 2 5 20 24 6 44 15

87 87 12 82 67 87 86 73 75 72 88 18 69 81 61 75 27 35 88 9

69 64 30 55 51 64 64 57 57 48 58 36 49 69 43 50 37 30 62 43

41 42 19 37 55 35

81

19

10 12 38 50 2 43

30 30 11 39 26 33 34 37 23 28 33 20 36 31 46 33 23 20 36 14

59 58 81 63 45 65

10 9 49 48 1 88

12 10 9 14 14 11 13 21 10 22 9 9 22 18 29 14 22 17 11 3

49 63 33 42 76 62

51 38 67 58 24 38

56 66 68 26

44 34 32 74

a

Defined as all employed and unemployed persons (including those seeking work for the first time), employers operating unincorporated enterprises, people working on their own account, employees, unpaid contributing family workers, members of producers cooperatives, members of the armed forces, those producing primary products (e.g., foodstuffs for their own consumption), and certain other nonmonetary activities. In principle, any such work for as little as 1 h a week is taken to define a person as economically active. Note that elements of the standard concept of economically active population may differ substantially from country to country, such as the choice of time reference period and the determination of minimum hours of work and unpaid family work, including production for own consumption. These differences may result in the undercounting of women who are economically active. Also, in most countries, the statistics of the economically active population relate only to employed and unemployed persons above a specified age, while in some there is no such age provision in the definition of economic activity. Source: United Nations Women’s Watch 2000, Table 5a Economic Activity, http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/indwm/tab5c.htm b Agriculture refers to activities in agriculture, hunting, forestry, and fishing. c Industry refers to mining and quarrying, manufacturing, construction, and public utilities (gas, water, and electricity). d Services refer to wholesale and retail trade; restaurants and hotels; transport, storage, and communications; finance, insurance, real estate, and business services; and community, social, and personal services. e Contributing family member is defined as a ‘person who works without pay in an economic enterprise operated by a related person living in the same household’ p. 354 UNDP 2005, Technical notes. Source: Compiled from UN Human Development Report (2005) International cooperation at a crossroads: Aid, trade and security in an unequal world, Table 28, United Nations, New York (http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2005/pdf/HDR05 HDI.pdf).

waged labor force, namely their segregation both vertically (in the lowest levels of seniority) and horizontally (in par ticular, industries, typically clerical and other personal service work and in some forms of manufacturing like textiles, clothing, and footwear). Men and women typically perform different jobs, in different industries, with women dominated occupations often classified as ‘unskilled’ or ‘semiskilled’, while men predominate in occupations la belled ‘skilled’. Women are also disproportionately repre sented in home work, part time work and other forms of temporary, flexible, and casualized work. For human capital theorists like Gary Becker, this state of affairs is predictable given that men are, in general, better educated and com mand higher rates of return in the labor force than women. Taking a household as the unit of analysis, human capital theorists would argue that it is rational for men to

undertake waged work and for women to perform domestic labor and if they do undertake waged work, to work part time and relatively close to home. While accounts such as these describe some common patterns, they take as given, rather than explain, prevailing gender divisions of labor. Many feminists have rejected explanations based on individual choices made in the context of family re sponsibilities. Many early analyses turned to Marxian theory for inspiration and sought to understand how women’s labor helped to reproduce capitalist social re lations. Socialist feminists sought to reconstruct Marxist theory in order to introduce analyses of male domination as a key axis of power relations, alongside class. Early Marxist and socialist feminist analyses of women’s oc cupational segregation noted the similarities in the kinds of work being performed by women in the home and

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workplace and argued that occupational segregation benefited employers in that, women’s unpaid domestic labor minimized employers’ costs of reproducing labor power and, in turn, gave employers a strong incentive to restrict women to low paid jobs (to maintain their de pendence on other wage earners for whom they perform domestic labor). As such, women were conceived as a ‘reserve army’ of labor, a disposable, underemployed group whose numbers wax and wane with the require ments of employers. Later work of labor market segmentation theorists examined the correspondence between the sexual division of labor and stable, well paid (‘primary’ sector) jobs and those more precarious, low paid jobs with high turnover (‘secondary’ sector jobs). Marxian inspired variants of segmentation theory argued that employers had a vested class interest in dividing and ruling workers, just as the working class had an interest in unity and, by implication, resisting segmentation. Yet, the difficulty faced by Marxian and other accounts of segregation is its sheer persistence and its resilience to changing labor market demographics, competition, new forms of work, and constantly shifting occupational and industrial structures. Although em ployers have an interest in ‘divide and rule’, they also have strong material incentives to substitute cheap(er) female labor for its more expensive (male) equivalent. Heidi Hartmann made an important contribution to these de bates by arguing that men’s patriarchal interests in main taining the subordination of women gave them a material incentive for supporting segmentation in the workplace. In essence, Hartmann argued that capitalism and patriarchy operated as ‘dual systems’ which articulate in different ways at different times. In addition to explaining a rationale for persistent occupational segregation, feminist scholars have sought to identify the mechanisms that perpetuate occupational segregation. This body of work has tended to look at different occupations, workplaces, and organizations to understand how work is labeled ‘male’ or ‘female’ in different contexts. Feminists’ insistence on establishing a distinction between sex as a biological category and gender as a social category has been crucial in dismant ling biological determinism as an explanation for occu pational segregation. Generalizations about women’s strength, height, or dexterity and their suitability for some, but not other occupations, have foundered on their conspicuous lack of historical, geographical, and occu pational consistency. Instead, feminists have argued that jobs are created as ‘appropriate’ for men or women, that jobs are socially constructed and maintained through practices that embody the socially accepted (and very variable) attributes of femininity and masculinity. There have been many excellent studies in this area. One particularly important contribution has been the argument that ‘skill’, a key component of job

classification, is not an objective characteristic of work, but one that is socially constructed to value highly certain kinds of work and to undervalue other kinds of work. Thus, the capacity of employers and institutions like labor unions to define job and skill categories and to shape recruitment and retention policies plays a crucial role in reproducing the segregation of men and women in the workplace. Cynthia Cockburn’s Brothers: Male domin ance and technological change (1983), presents a fascinating insight into how skilled male compositors in the British printing industry fought to maintain their skilled status in the face of technological changes that replaced their hot metal compositing with computerized typesetting. The men were retrained with new keyboard skills (often by young women) and represented themselves as skilled, experienced printers in contrast with their new female colleagues who were merely ‘typists’. Another significant suite of studies looking at the maintenance of segregation focused not on particular occupations and the social and discursive construction of particular skills or workers, but rather the manner in which firms and corporations organize and reorganize work. A classic of this genre was Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s Men and women of the corporation (1977), which argued that organizational structures and the management of bureaucracies, and not the characteristics of workers per se, perpetuates gender differences in the workplace. Kanter argued that in large bureaucracies, the need for clear communications encourages managers to opt for ‘homosociability’, to stick with familiar and common experiences. Thus, male managers in male dominated parts of organizations are likely to appoint other men to their teams at the expense of those in the numerical minority (the so called ‘tokens’). Kanter suggested that increasing the proportion of ‘tokens’ in any group was the key to changing the social dynamics of workplace groups, whatever their age, gender, ethnic, or racial composition. Kanter’s arguments generated significant debate and critique because of her focus on organizational hierarchy rather than gender, yet her work has been important in illustrating how organization and hierarchy can produce different workplace behaviors and attitudes. Some of the critiques of Kanter’s work pointed to the fact that women entering traditionally male occupations faced greater hostility than men working in female dominated sectors and thus that gender does matter, beyond the organization of work, and requires systematic analysis. Moreover, feminists like Joan Acker have argued that organizations are saturated with gendered meanings, practices, and ideologies that shape the definition of jobs, job evaluation, promotion criteria, and other managerial practices. Labor market and other institutions, in turn, reflect and reproduce masculinist values which are in stitutionalized, normalized, and taken for granted. As Robin Leidner has argued in her examination of

Feminism and Work

interactive service work in her book Fast food, fast talk (1993), one of the striking accomplishments of the social construction of gender is the illusion that gender vari ations in behavior, attitudes, appearance, and competence are ‘natural’ and not created. Leidner’s work was also part of a shift to taking seriously the embodied nature of work, particularly in the context of the growth of service work in which the characteristics and performance of workers – their appearance, demeanor, and gender identity – is fundamental to the product being sold, be it a hair cut, some fast food, or a piece of legal advice. Gender and sexuality are thus ‘performed’ in the workplace as cul turally embedded notions of masculinity and femininity shape both workers and their occupations. In this vein, Rosemary Pringle’s book Secretaries talk: sexuality and power at work (1988) made two important contributions to the literature. First, while many feminist analyses of women’s work have examined the gendering of occupations by studying male dominated manu facturing jobs, Pringle examined a stereotypically femi nized occupation. Second, she was innovative in using post structural theories of subject and discourse to weave together discursive and structural understandings of women’s work. Pringle started out by noting the difficulty in defining what a secretary is, given the vast and often ambiguous range of tasks she undertakes in different contexts. She argued that attempts to define ‘secretary’ are repeatedly driven back to stereotypical notions of ‘who she is’. She explored how three discourses – ‘the office wife’, ‘the sexy secretary,’ and ‘the career woman’ – played out in various media and everyday office life, shape and reproduce gender inequalities in the work place, leaving male embodied sexuality in the workplace largely invisible. One of the key analytical shifts and contributions here was the recognition that institutional, cultural, and structural factors, and not simply the at tributes and qualifications of individual workers, shape the gendering of employment. Feminist researchers have demonstrated that men and women do not enter the labor force with fixed and stable gender characteristics, rather gender identities and traits are assigned to workers on the basis of the jobs they do. Challenging Earnings Inequalities A third key contribution of feminist scholarship has been to translate academic scholarship into political action designed to improve women’s position in the labor force. To take the above example, occupational segregation has attracted attention from feminist scholars not only be cause of its pervasiveness and its durability but, crucially, because of its relationship with another truism of women’s work, namely their lower earnings compared to men. UN data from 2002 showed that in 27 of 39 countries surveyed – in OECD and industrializing

33

countries – women’s wages were 20–50% less than men’s for work in manufacturing (see Table 2). Scholarship has thus been used to fuel campaigns to increase women’s representation in high wage occupations, to challenge the so called ‘glass ceilings’ that constrain women’s ad vancement in organizations, and to increase wages in women dominated occupations and sectors. Feminists have argued that earnings inequalities between men and women cannot be explained solely by differences in skills, experience, and educational attainment, and scholars in economics, sociology, and economic history have exam ined the gender wage gap, how it has varied historically and spatially and its sensitivity to educational attainment, hours, ethnicity, and occupational segregation. This scholarship has in turn fueled campaigns for ‘Equal Pay’ legislation and, in the USA for example, ‘Affirmative Action’ legislation (which seeks to improve women and minorities’ access to higher paying jobs). Further links between feminist academic and political work can be seen in analyses of gendered organizations and institutions discussed above. While early attempts at equal pay relied on job evaluations to assess the ‘worth’ of different jobs, scholarship on gendered organizations ar gues that evaluation methods contain gendered biases that downgrade jobs with any ‘nurturing’ content. Thus, labor unions and other institutions have turned to look at how pay is assigned to particular jobs and, in so doing, to go some way to addressing gender bias in how different jobs are valued.

Table 2 Women’s wages in manufacturing as a percentage of men’s wages, selected countries, various years Country

Year

%

Australia Bahrain Botswana Brazil Colombia Egypt France Hungary Iran Ireland Japan Kenya Lithuania Mexico Norway Singapore Sri Lanka Thailand UK Ukraine

2002 2002 2003 2002 2003 2002 2002 2002 2001 2003 2003 1997 2003 2001 2003 2003 2003 2001 2003 2003

89 44 52 61 65 68 78 74 80 69 60 123 77 70 88 61 81 72 79 69

Source: Compiled from United Nations Statistics Division http:// unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/indwm/ww2005/ tab5g.htm.

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Feminism and Work

Feminist Geographies of Work This section focuses on feminist readings of work that embody a geographical imagination, spanning from the body to the globe. Geographers have actively engaged with feminist scholarship and sought to understand how the binary, and hierarchical, male/female has been written through the social production of space. The section includes reference to theoretically informed work which explores local and international labor markets and the gendered construction of globalization. Gendered Local Labor Markets Many economic and sociological analyses of women’s occupational segregation paid little attention to the spatialities of gendered behaviors and divisions of labor. Some of the early geographic research on gender divisions thus focused on how individuals’ daily time– space paths are shaped by domestic responsibilities and access to physical infrastructure, like transport, schools, and workplaces that shape and constrain mo bility. Studies thus focused on, for example, com muting patterns and whether different groups of women undertake shorter or longer commutes than their partners. Literatures in geography, urban studies, and planning also analyzed the rise of suburbanization and the changing spatial separation of ‘home’ and (paid) ‘work’. In addition to exploring the spatialities of daily life that shape labor markets, geographers have also drawn attention to the uneven spatial distribution of different sectors and occupations. Given the pronounced occu pational segregation discussed above, the geographies of men and women’s participation are shaped, differentially, by the growth and decline of particular types of work. Thus, Susan Hanson, Geraldine Pratt, Doreen Massey, and others have examined the gendered implications of economic change, especially manufacturing decline and the growth of service sectors and occupations, in indus trial areas characterized by unionized, male dominated jobs. Returning to the discussion about the social con struction of skill, labor process theorists like Harry Braverman have argued that as work is deskilled by employers, women would be employed as the new ‘un skilled’ laborers, replacing men. Extending some of the Marxian accounts of women’s work discussed earlier, feminist geographers argued that employers seeking to make use of divisions between workers to reduce their costs may thus be attracted to regions where there is a plentiful supply of cheap ‘green’, female (and indeed child) labor and that these workers constitute a reserve army of labor. Similarly on an international scale, lit eratures on the new international division of labor in the 1980s drew attention to the feminization of poorly paid

manufacturing work as industrialized economies in the north started to relocate labor intensive manufacturing work, like electronics assembly and garment production, to lower wage economies in Southeast Asia and other parts of the globe. Gendered Globalization Another important product of a geographical feminist imagination has been engagement with critical devel opment studies to explore the experiences of women in diverse social and geographical contexts and, specifically, the experiences of women beyond the (for the most part) privileged confines of North America, Australia, and Western Europe. This engagement entails an empirical shift in that it brings into focus the often neglected places and subjects of economic geography. More than this, however, it entails an analytical shift away from western centered knowledges that privilege capitalism, class, and globalization and toward grounded analyses of the ex periences of marginalized groups and spaces that opens up possibilities for different ways of theorizing global ization. The research on changing international divisions of labor described thus, for example, generated vigorous debate around two areas. First, there were concerns that stereotypes surrounding women’s employment – that women represented a nimble fingered, nonunionized and, relatively docile, labor force to be exploited by capitalists – again reared their head, with little recog nition of women’s agency and their capacities and strat egies for resistance. Lesley Salzinger, for example, has undertaken ethnographies of work that reveal the em bodied, performative context dependent production of gender identities in four macquiladoras in Chihuahua, Mexico. Salzinger demonstrates the variability and flexibility of gender identities and argues that women’s productivity and docility did not predate the arrival of transnational firms in Mexico, but was instead produced by firms that moved to the region. Second, however, women’s growing visibility in factory production in in dustrializing economies also fueled debate about the qualities of jobs being created and whether women’s labor force participation improved or worsened the quality of life for these women. Many analyses of women’s growing engagement with transnational nature of capitalist production – which is often in a geopolitical context of high levels of indebtedness and neoliberal structural adjustment policies imposed by western lending institutions argue that women’s participation in low paid manufacturing jobs strains household dynamics and further increases women’s workloads. These analyses drew attention to the necessity of recognizing and ex ploring the relationship between household and work place, between production and reproduction, the formal and the informal and, in essence, questioning the

Feminism and Work

supposed dominance of capitalist forms of production. An important accomplishment of feminists’ research is a broadening of analysis to acknowledge that ‘the eco nomic’ takes place not only in the factory, but also in the home, the street, and elsewhere. More recent feminist literatures on globalization ex plore issues of marginalization, displacement, and struggle through analyses of how globalization is pro ducing new transnational movements of women and children, particularly from industrializing countries in the south. Saskia Sassen has explored the links between the deteriorating economic position of different indus trializing economies and the growth of what she terms ‘counter geographies’, women’s growing involvement in alternative economies of survival based on prostitution, illegal trafficking, migration, and remittances. Inter national networks now organize the transnational move ments of women who are pushed, lured, or coerced into formal and informal work as maids, nurses, mail order brides, sex workers, and so forth. Joni Seager estimates that about 500 000 women and children are trafficked into Western Europe each year, many from China, other parts of Southeast Asia, and parts of East and Central Europe where unemployment and debt have pushed households into poverty and fueled the growth of trafficking as a profitable industry. While poorer regions typically be come source regions for trafficking, rising disposable in come in other regions fuels demand for these women and children. Research on trafficking, prostitution, and the global sex trade and on women’s mobilities as migrants and refugees thus reveals how these complex counter geographies are intrinsic to the economic, cultural, and political connections and flows which link work, eco nomic restructuring, and livelihoods in the north and south.

Debates, Intersections, and Concluding Comments Different waves of feminist theory and practice have made incisive and lasting contributions to understanding the gendered construction of work. As such, discussion of feminist approaches to work is becoming a regular fea ture in textbooks and readers in economic geography, sociology, and development studies. Analyses have moved well beyond simply emphasizing women’s (hitherto neglected) contributions to different forms of work and have expanded the definition of ‘work’ and sought to explain the social, cultural, and economic trends that have fueled the feminization of labor forces in many parts of the globe. Feminists have moved away from viewing gender as a fixed attribute of individuals and have instead identified the mechanisms, practices, and performances that construct occupations as more or less appropriate for

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(typically very variable) characteristics of masculinities and femininities. Feminist geographers have made im portant contributions to these debates by demonstrating the geographically constituted gendering of work in dif ferent sites (household, factory, office, and market) and at scales ranging from the body to international divisions of labor. More recent work on globlization demonstrates some of the complex links between women in different, yet connected, circuits of labor in the global north and south. In terms of its future contributions, feminist scholars continue to explore the tensions between women’s commonality of experiences of inequality and dis crimination and the importance of recognizing their different locations – in terms of age, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and so forth – in divisions of labor. Different feminisms will continue to broaden analyses of work, exploring the heterogeneity of women and their prac tices, paid and unpaid, which constitute their economies in diverse geographical, political, and cultural contexts. Yet, this sensitivity to heterogeneity will proceed alongside the political commitment to translate know ledge into political action. As feminists have long argued, any analysis of gender is also an analysis of power. In rapidly shifting, increasingly international divisions of labor in which women still perform the bulk of childcare and domestic labor, in addition to their other waged and unwaged work, feminist scholars and activists have im portant roles to play in the struggle for social justice and greater equality. See also: Capitalism; Development I; Labor Market; Labor Unionism; Marxism/Marxist Geography I; Political Economy, Geographical; Postcolonialism/Postcolonial Geographies; Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies; Social Class; Spatial Division of Labor; Structural Adjustment.

Further Reading Beechey, V. (1987). Unequal work. London: Verso. Cockburn, C. (1988). Machinery of dominance: Women, men and technical know how. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Fuentes, A. and Ehrenreich, B. (1983). Women in the global factory. Boston, MA: South End Press. Game, A. and Pringle, R. (1983). Gender at work. London: George Allen and Unwin. Goldin, C. (1990). Understanding the gender gap: An economic history of American women. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hanson, S. and Pratt, G. (1995). Gender, work and space. London: Routledge. McDowell, L. (1991). Life without Father and Ford: The new gender order of post Fordism. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16, 400 419. McDowell, L. (1997). Capital culture: Women at work in the city. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Feminism and Work

Pringle, R. (1988). Secretaries talk: Sexuality, power and work. London: Verso. Sassen, S. (2000). Women’s burden: Counter geographies of globalization and the feminization of survival. Journal of International Affairs 53, 503 524. Walby, S. (1986). Patriarchy at work. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Women and Geography Study Group (1997). Feminist geographies: Explorations in diversity and difference. Harlow: Longman.

Relevant Websites http://www.un.org Directory of UN Resources on Gender and Women’s Issues. http://www.unifem.org United Nations Development Fund for Women. http://unstats.un.org United Nations Statistics Division. http://w3.unece.org United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.

Feminism, Maps and GIS M. Pavlovskaya, Hunter College – CUNY, New York, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Cartographic Visualization or Geovisualization A set of techniques for representing spatial data for visual examination in a computerized environment. Epistemology Part of social theory that establishes the relationship between the knower and the known or the subject and the object. Feminist Geography Part of human geography inspired by feminist scholarship and focused on representing adequately women’s worlds and transforming research practice in accordance with principles of feminist scholarship. GIS (Geographic Information System) Computerbased technology for storage, management, display, and analysis of spatial information. Visuality Use of visual information and images in production of knowledge and other social practices.

Introduction Until recently, there was not much connection between feminism and cartography or GIS (geographic infor mation science and/or system) but today they are in creasingly intertwined. The oldest body of knowledge among the three, cartography, has a long and respected history as both the ‘art and science’ of mapmaking. It represents a unique way to communicate and understand spatial phenomena, relationships, and patterns. The meaning and purpose of mapping, however, have sig nificantly changed in recent decades due to developments both within and outside the discipline of cartography. For example, the mapping process has become computerized, virtually all spatial information is now digital, and GIS has emerged as essential when working with spatial data. At the same time, women have increased their visibility and presence in science and technology and geospatial technologies play an increasingly important role in a variety of activist movements, including that of women. Finally, feminist scholarship has led to a profound re thinking of the practices of knowledge production in social science and geography, and it has come to inform and influence the fields of cartography and GIS. The impact of feminist scholarship on mapping par allels its impact on knowledge production more gener ally. For centuries, women were missing from the practices of science as both its subjects and objects but in recent decades gendered economic, social, and cultural

analyses have become more common. Furthermore, new approaches to research have developed rooted in feminist scholarship. In geography, too, women became more visible as objects of mapping and now as mapping sub jects. Simultaneously, the rapidly growing field of GIS has had (as in other high tech fields) a contradictory impact on women. While presenting barriers to the entry of women into this field, GIS also provides feminist and other critical scholars with new opportunities for non positivist mappings. Feminists analysis of and impact on science occurred just as GIS (and computer cartography) displaced tradi tional cartography. Simultaneously, the humanities and social sciences experienced a ‘spatial turn’ expressed in the increased use of spatial and cartographic metaphors. These movements have allowed feminist scholars to ad dress the intersections of GIS technology, mapping, and cartography in a number of fruitful ways. They have examined cartography’s legacy in the production of au thority through mapping people and territories from a position of power (e.g., colonial, state, surveillance, or military). They have addressed the role that GIS plays in the continuation of these practices. They have reflected upon the professional role of women in cartography and GIS. And they have begun creating feminist carto graphies – both representational of the landscapes and metaphorical. Below, the undervalued contribution of women to both cartography and GIS will be examined and major feminist critiques of these fields shall be presented. New developments that demonstrate an ongoing engagement of feminism with GIS and practices of mapping will then be highlighted. Feminist scholars working to reclaim the power of vision and mapping by creating a range of feminist cartographies that utilize mapping in non hierarchical and non objectifying ways will be shown. In the last section, the broader impacts of geospatial tech nologies on women’s daily lives, an issue of concern for feminist scholars shall be discussed.

Women in Cartography and GIS Cartography and, more recently, GIS remain male dominated fields. Women’s entry into these professions has been limited and, often, their contribution ignored. Yet, there is a history of women in cartography that, although unacknowledged, is significant and important to recount. According to scholars Alison Hudson (head of the map division of the New York Public Library) and

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Mary Ritzlin, women have long worked in the map making trades in North America. Initially they were in volved mainly with printing (e.g., map engraving) or the map publishing businesses of their husbands, which they often ran after their husband’s death. Because most women lacked training in the mathematics necessary to construct maps and could travel only in their husband’s company, becoming explorers or surveyors themselves was difficult. However, women, as educators, are often the prominent disseminators of geographic knowledge. For example, in the nineteenth century, they authored many geography books, atlases, and histories for students and general readership. An ongoing history project that aims at recovering women’s contribution to cartography in North America has identified as many as 300 such women. Women’s overall contribution is also undervalued because so few women have been in highly skilled or leadership positions in either the cartographic pro fessions or GIS. There are complex reasons for this situation that range from having to face many challenges upon entering the field to the observed gender differ ences in spatial cognition and mapreading skills (now attributed to socialization rather than inherent ability). In most countries, women remain a minority while being trained in cartography at universities and other schools. They commonly face masculinist model of teaching that further intimidates female students. Later they see themselves as ‘intruders’ into the men’s world of geo spatial technologies. The conflict between personal as pirations (e.g., family) and the masculinist ethics of career oriented professional jobs also plays a role. Despite recent changes, GIS remains male dominated in the US and Canada; it would seem that women face the same barriers to entry that exist in the information technology (IT) fields more generally. The impact of feminism on GIS, too, was limited in the past as feminist scholars initially felt the technology was not suited for feminist epistemologies. Today, the situation is changing. Both women in the workforce and feminist ideas more directly interact with geospatial technologies. Most ob viously, women are entering the field as professionals in greater (although still small) numbers. Their very pres ence slowly transforms the profession because women’s more complicated career trajectories do not follow men’s linear career paths. Beyond this, however, is the profound change in the very practices of GIS, mapping, and related knowledge production. First, there is a growing group of academic geographers who use GIS and are inspired by feminism (both women and men). Second, feminist scholars outside geography increasingly use spatial and cartographic metaphors in their work; they seek to create new nonhierarchical and nonexploitive spaces, spaces transformed by feminist idea(l)s. Together with the growth of GIS based feminist research, they constitute

‘feminist cartographies’. Third, through access to infor mation and communication technologies and the Inter net, women who are not GIS specialists also gain access to geospatial technologies that change their daily lives. The sections below provide examples of these developments.

Feminist Critiques of Cartography and GIS Inspired by feminist critiques of visuality and power to look in Western science by Donna Haraway and other theorists, feminist geographers began by examining the role of the masculine gaze in shaping modern geography and cartography. They also drew upon post structuralist critiques of cartography as a medium of power/know ledge pioneered by Brian Harley. Geographer Gillian Rose argued that the privileging of sight and looking as a primary mode of observation – whether assisted by modern technology such as satellites or GIS or not – elevated visual examination of the landscape such that it dominated geographic fieldwork. Such visual observation is premised upon maintaining a distance between the observer and the observed (the subject and the object), the practice that produced the supposedly detached, disembodied, and objective scientist whose only passion is pursuit of knowledge. At the same time, nature and the unknown in the Western tradition have become associ ated with the feminine – both threatening and beautiful, to be tamed and adored, to be looked at and understood. Thus, a male geographer simultaneously experienced the exploration of new lands or cities as a rigorous scientist, a conquering hero, and a pleasure seeking admirer. Therefore, Rose argues, modern geographic readings of the landscape not only express class or colonial power (as demonstrated by Marxist and postcolonial critiques) but are profoundly masculinist. Furthermore, post structuralist, postcolonial, and feminist scholars revealed a particular connection be tween cartography and European imperialism. Cartog raphy sustained the imperial gaze through mapping colonized landscapes that, in the imperial imagination, were simultaneously equated with the feminine. In the words of Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, ‘‘Maps are central to colonial and post colonial projects.’’ They are ‘‘graphic tools of colonization’’ serving to make sense of the colonized spaces that are perceived empty and without meaning. The power to inscribe colonized landscapes and people with meaning is the power to establish control. ‘‘Imperialist maps not only describe colonies: they also discipline them through the discursive grids of Western power/knowledge.’’ This power was amplified by the feminization of colonized landscapes. In imperial discourses, indigenous women symbolized the


land and both women and the land became legitimate objects of colonization; both were seen as equally dan gerous and seductive and in need to be controlled and taken care of. The advent of GIS and automated cartography led to the rapid integration of mapping with other geospatial technologies and digital information (e.g., Global Pos itioning System (GPS), remote sensing, tracking devices, cellphones, digital databases, and the Internet). It soon became clear that, together, such contemporary tech nologies could also support structures of power, imperial ambition, and unrestricted surveillance practices. In addition, feminist scholars exposed the gendered nature of GIS and examined the visual power of this mapping technology. Donna Haraway has argued that satellites and other technological devices enhance the power of modern science by extending the limits of visual observation thereby making it seem more objective and disembodied. A similar observation applies to GIS. The computer enables the user to quickly access, display, and manipu late images of places and the visual excitement of GIS is magnified by the illusion of possession. As the fulfillment of the quantitative and spatial science revolution and its dreams of rational control, some have suggested that GIS may be incompatible with nonpositivist and feminist scholarship. Critics thought that ‘as is’ GIS was only good for supporting corporate and state interests as well as global imperial ambitions.

Reclaiming GIS as a Research Tool for Feminist Geographies Despite the initial powerful critiques, feminist geog raphers are now rethinking GIS instead of rejecting it entirely. A feminist geographer Susan Hanson argues that, as with quantitative methods, GIS should be reconceptualized as a technology that, despite its limi tations, can be used by women and in feminist research. Indeed, Nadine Schuurman and Gerry Pratt suggest that rather than use social theory (e.g., feminism) to distance GIS, construct it as ‘‘other,’’ we should develop mutual knowledge and ‘‘care for the subject.’’ Further, Nadine Schuurman and Mei Po Kwan argued that although the social theorists have productively applied feminist cri tiques of visual technologies to GIS, they overlooked Donna Haraway’s point that technologies are not in herently masculinist but constructed as such, and femi nists should learn to use them in an emancipatory manner. Warning that technological determinism may prevent critical scholars from using GIS, Kwan put forth arguments that GIS based visualization may be re constructed as a feminist method. In her ‘A cyborg manifesto for GIS’, Nadine Schuurman called for greater

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involvement of women in GIS. Sara McLafferty looked for the ways to link the dynamic but separate worlds of GIS and feminist geography by combining reflexive feminist methodologies with layered GIS representation of the world. Marianna Pavlovskaya demonstrated that contrary to common perceptions, GIS functionality is no more quantitative than it is qualitative, and critical geographers, including feminists, should seek new strat egies to integrate nonquantitative information and em ploy the visual power of GIS to advance socially responsible research agendas. Although relatively new, theses developments have made a significant contribution to both the fields of GIS and feminist geography. Sara McLafferty even talks about the ongoing ‘feminization of GIS’. In her view, its gen dered construction is changing toward a greater affinity with feminist practices of knowledge production. This involves a shift from feminist critiques of GIS to feminist analyses of its impacts on gendered social relations that involve gendered identities, spaces of everyday life, and women’s activism.

Feminist Cartographies Feminist engagement with cartography and GIS can be traced to several locations. First, cartography and map ping have become important metaphors in the human ities. They allow feminist artists and scholars to examine and rethink social practices and experiences in important ways. The South Asian Muslim artist Zarina works with maps to create prints of borders she crossed and that divide people (e.g., between India and Pakistan). She also creates prints of places destroyed by war. In another in stance, a feminist artist Ursula Biemann overlays satellite images with personal stories of women recruited into world sex trade to visualize ‘female geobodies’ – hidden global flows of female bodies from Southeast Asian or Eastern European countries to the countries of con sumption in Europe and North America. The Irish artist Kathy Prendergast creates maps of the female body in ways that are similar to how people map the land. Her work invokes representations of Ireland as femi nine in popular, nationalistic, and scientific discourses. While reminiscent of control and exploitation, these mappings also – as the artist attempts to do – suggest nonpatriarchal representations of both women and the land. Feminist artists also use nonpossessive mappings of the male body which subvert the primacy of the mas culine gaze and re inscribe mapping practices as non hierarchical. In so doing, they reclaim vision and mapping and reconstructs them as nonmasculinist practices. Second, feminist geographers have turned to mapping and cartography as a way to reveal gendered experiences

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at various scales. Traditionally, maps hide women’s worlds behind general population indicators but new research (and new maps) reflects their experience as well as the differences between experiences of women and men. To do this, feminist scholars use spatial data, stat istics, and spatial analysis to construct social, economic, cultural, and political landscapes that make these gen dered experiences visible. The most comprehensive ex ample of such feminist cartography is The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World by Joni Seager, now in its revised third edition. Similar to other world atlases, it provides a global overview of various socioeconomic indicators by country but in this case international statistics are compiled to show phenomena that specifically affect women in dif ferent parts of the world. It presents maps which reflect the state of women’s equality, health, political involve ment, domestic violence, lesbian rights, employment, body politics, and the other dimensions of their lives. Figure 1 is an example of a map that shows the unequal opportunities of women across the globe. In addition, mapping and GIS based analysis focusing on women and gender have recently emerged in many disciplines including health related research. Examples include using distance as a factor in calculating the ef fects of prenatal exposure to pollutants from the World Trade Center disaster; modeling the distribution of rates of HIV infection among rural pregnant women in a

region of South Africa in relation to the geography of the local road network that supports male migration; and examining a relationship between access to childcare and women’s labor force participation in the Netherlands. In this latter case, mothers living in areas with a higher number of daycare slots per 100 children were more likely to be employed. Figure 2 illustrates the very un even geography of childcare availability mapped by the researchers. Visualizing such social landscapes that shape women’s labor market experiences would not be possible without the computing power of GIS or the theoretical insights of feminism and its commitment to gender equality. Third, a group of scholars has emerged that engages both GIS and feminist social theory. To the analysis of gendered experiences, they added a feminist rethinking of the role of GIS in knowledge production. In their re search, social and feminist theory directly intersects with the analytical and visual power of geospatial technologies opening new possibilities for both feminist scholarship and GIS. For example, Mei Po Kwan has pioneered the modeling of gendered time–space geographies in a GIS environment. Drawing on Hagerstrand’s ideas, she com bined datasets that included street networks and the dis tribution of urban opportunities with data from travel diaries completed by individual women. Kwan analyzed these data using a dedicated algorithm that enabled her to

Figure 1 Unequal opportunities. From Myriad Editions and Seager, J. (2003). The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World (revised 3rd edn.). New York: Penguin Books. Reprinted with permission.


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8.2 to 35.1 (820) 5.7 to 8.2 (785) 4.4 to 5.7 (664) 2.7 to 4.4 (847) 0 to 2.7

0

(803)

50 km

Figure 2 Geographical access to childcare within 10 minutes (slots per 100 children). Calculations using data from Monitoring Agency Childcare Provision (NUK 2001). From van Ham, M. and Mulder, C. H. (2005). Geographical access to childcare and mothers’ labourforce participation. Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie 96(1), 63 74. Reprinted with permission.

model the life paths of women as embodied experience. In particular, her three dimensional (3 D) visualization of women’s daily movement through urban space takes into account the multiple stops they make (as opposed to the home–work commute of most men) and makes clear the gendering of access to urban opportunities. Furthermore, Kwan was able to account not only for the differences in uses of urban space between men and women but for differences between groups of women as well. In par ticular, her visualization has eloquently demonstrated that the life paths of African American women are more constrained compared to other women due to their rela tive economic disempowerment manifested in lower ac cess to automobiles. Marianna Pavlovskaya has used GIS to visualize the multiple economies of the daily lives of Moscow house holds based on qualitative interview data. The economic landscape revealed by the interviews included not only commonly analyzed formal and monetized economic activities such as paid employment but also informal and

unpaid economic practices such as work for cash, do mestic work, childcare, and exchanges of goods and services via social networks. W Pavlovskaya’s analysis showed that contrary to mainstream economic theories, such informal economic practices persist and, moreover, underpin the everyday lives of households in modern socialist and post socialist ‘capitalist’ economies. She has argued for the greater use of GIS in critical geographic research to advance social theorizing based upon in novative visualization techniques, the incorporation of primary data that captures human worlds not reflected in standard datasets, and the merging of qualitative data with GIS. Fourth, feminist GIS scholars have conducted re search on women’s activism that involves geospatial technologies and they also have provided GIS based scientific expertise for women’s community groups. For example, Sara McLafferty worked with a group of ac tivists from Long Island to map in a GIS the distribution of breast cancer occurrences in their communities. The

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data was collected by women themselves to make a case for the need to study the potential environmental causes of this disease as opposed to the dominant focus on in dividual risk factors. As a result, substantial government funding was secured for this research.

Geospatial Technologies and Women’s Lives Finally, there is the issue of the impact of geospatial technologies on women’s everyday lives. Broadly defined, they include not only GIS but also the Internet, location based services such as cellphones, navigation tools, and other types of communication technologies. In particular, patterns of Internet (which is an immense source of geographic information) and technology use are gen dered and the evidence suggests that the impact of geographic information accessed through these means is also gendered; although at this point little is known about how this unrestricted information is used. Furthermore, these technologies have radically transformed the everyday lives of people and the effect on women, in particular, needs further investigation. For example, these technologies change the way we work, as in the case of telecommuting and the way we look for jobs, which lead to new types of gendered employment. Also, shopping and other household chores – typically the work of women – are increasingly done using the Internet. In addition to these individual uses, the Internet has become an important means for establishing and maintaining social networks beyond local communities and extending across national boundaries. These networks continue to serve as important sources of information for women in many domains of life, including prenatal care. The communities also extend to the virtual ‘bridgespace’ that supports flows of people, capital, information, and goods between, for example, North America and South Asia by facilitating the identification of marriage partners as shown by Paul Adams and Rhina Ghose. The Internet, geospatial technologies, and information technologies in general, however, have uneven and con troversial impacts on women. The combined effects of class, gender, age, and race perpetuate the digital divide and large groups of low income, elderly, and women of color do not have access to such technologies and, therefore, are increasingly marginalized in terms of em ployment, consumption options, health outcomes, and political empowerment. The Internet also plays a crucial role in the sexual exploitation and trafficking of women and children and enables global flows of women’s bodies from Third World countries and Eastern Europe to Western Europe and North America. Another issue generated by geospatial technologies is that of privacy and surveillance in many domains

including the relationship between the state and its citizens, corporations and their employees, producers and consumers, and individuals in their own private lives. The research suggests that these impacts are also gen dered as they follow already established patriarchal pat terns. For example, women are more likely to be targeted by advertisers owing to their greater role in consumption for their households or have their movements monitored by tracking devices installed by their partners.

Conclusion In conclusion, the use of geospatial technologies and geographic information has rapidly grown in the last two decades. It is used by academics and scholars including those with a feminist sensibility, by professionals in many fields, and in the everyday lives of men and women. Digital maps and other types of geographic information are increasingly accessible to those outside the fields of cartography and GIS, including women in different professions and of different economic status, ethnic and racial identity, as well as geographic location. Feminism continues to make important impacts on mapping, GIS, and geospatial technologies more generally, but more work awaits ahead. See also: Critical Cartography; Critical GIS; Geovisualization; GIScience and Systems.

Further Reading Biemann, U. (2002). Remotely sensed: A topography of the global sex trade. Feminist Review 70, 75 88. Gilbert, M. R. and Masucci, M. (2004). Moving beyond ‘‘gender and GIS’’ to feminist perspectives on information technologies: The impact of welfare reform on women’s IT needs. In Seager, J. & Nelson, L. (eds.) A Companion to Feminist Geography, ch. 21, pp 305 321. Oxford: Blackwell. Harley, J. B. (1988). Maps, knowledge, and power. In Cosgrove, D. E. & Daniels, S. (eds.) The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments, pp 277 312. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, L. and Harrower, M. (eds.) (2005). Special Issue: Critical Cartographies. ACME: An International E journal for Critical Geographies 4(1). Hudson, A. and Ritzlin, M. M. (2000). A preliminary checklist of pre twentieth century women in cartography. Cartographica 37(3), 3 8. Kwan, M. P. (2002). Is GIS for women? Reflections on the critical discourse in the 1990s. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 9(3), 271 279. Kwan, M. P. (2002). Special Issue: GIS and Feminism. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 9(3). McLafferty, S. L. (2005). Women and GIS: Geospatial technologies and feminist geographies. Cartographica 40(4), 37 45. Pavlovskaya, M. E. (2006). Theorizing with GIS: A tool for critical geographies? Environment and Planning A 38(11), 2003 2020. Pavlovskaya, M. E. and St. Martin, K. (2007). Feminism and GIS: From a missing object to a mapping subject. Geography Compass 1(3), 583 606.


Samantrai, R. (2004). Cosmopolitan cartographies: Art in a divided world. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 4(2), 168 194. Schuurman, N. and Pratt, G. (2002). Care of the subject: Feminism and critiques of GIS. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 9(3), 291 299. Seager, J. (2003). The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World (revised 3rd edn.). New York: Penguin Books. Sheppard, E. S. (2005). Knowledge production through critical GIS: Genealogy and prospects. In Harvey, F., Kwan, M. P. & Pavlovskaya, M. (eds.) Special Issue: Critical GIS. Cartographica 40(4), 5 21.

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van Ham, M. and Mulder, C. H. (2005). Geographical access to childcare and mothers’ labour force participation. Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie 96(1), 63 74.

Relevant Websites http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awgmd7/ Library of Congress, American Women, Geography and Maps Division.

Feminism/Feminist Geography L. C. Johnson, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Patriarchy A theoretical conceptualisation of male power and control over women. Women’s Liberation Movement Emerged in the 1960s in Western Europe and North America as a political movement which defined women’s oppression as the problem, identified men as the enemy and the personal as political in a quest to achieve women’s autonomy and equality.

Introduction Feminist geography is a relatively recent discourse in human geography. Emerging from the Women’s Liber ation Movement and feminist academic interventions in the 1960s and 1970s, it has involved a critique of geog raphy – as a discipline with particular bodies of know ledge and set of research, field, institutional, and teaching practices – as well as its reconceptualization. Not only have key geographical concepts been rethought – such as class, work, mobility, migration, development, and even space itself – but feminist geographers have developed whole new subject areas – such as the home, the body, and sexuality in space – and modes of working within the discipline that are reflexive, collaborative, cross discip linary, and situated. While varying across time and space, feminist geographers are united in their concern for the importance of gender in the constitution of space and social relations, in their indebtedness to feminist theo rizing, and their commitment to understanding and ameliorating the inequitable place of women. Current debates cohere around transnationalism, economic in equality, and multiple axes of difference and identity. Feminist geographers approach these and other issues in uniquely critical, synthetic, and progressive ways that see gender as a fundamental analytical and organizing sociospatial category. The discussion which follows charts the emergence of feminist geography from particular contexts in a number of countries. It delimits three trajectories in the discourse from the 1970s – historical, spatial, and theoretical – be fore considering the significance of feminist interventions into the discipline, and some current debates and sites of innovative practice. For this latter task, the article relies on a reading of the one journal devoted to feminist geography – Gender, Place and Culture. However, before proceeding, this overview needs some qualification.

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For the very idea of writing an encyclopedic overview of a knowledge field, accepting by implication that all can be known, understood, and presented in one neat 10 000 word essay, undercuts one of the fundamental insights of feminism. In the 1980s, postmodern feminists convincingly argued that quests for the all encompassing theory or bodies of knowledge were in themselves patriarchal and suffused with modernist delusions of impossible grandeur. Such a context produces both a reluctance and ambiva lence toward the task of producing this encyclopedia art icle. Having taken it on, the implications of the critique have been integrated into the account, such that the following is necessarily selective and can never in any sense be seen as complete or final. Consistent with a further feminist insight, the interpretations presented here also need to be personally and politically positioned. So this account is by an able bodied, Anglo Celtic academic who experienced the passion and personal resonance of discovering feminism, fought the academy for the recog nition of women, and moved through a range of theoretical positions and empirical studies that were all immensely important and convincing at the time. Her personal tra jectory is not unlike many other feminist geographers: coming to socialist feminism from 1970s Marxism, over the 1980s she worked hard to make women fit into its schema in a study of the Australian textile industry while also fighting for and then teaching women’s studies in Australia. Moving to New Zealand in the late 1980s, she then embraced radical sexual politics both personally and professionally; accepted not only the insights but also the conservative politics of the postmodern turn in the 1990s to study Australian suburbia, and then engaged with the fraught politics of difference in studies of cultural capital as the new millennium dawned. Such positions do not of themselves excuse the absences in this account in pre dictable ways, for there remains agency, empathy, other identities, and an ability to traverse foreign intellectual terrains. But such a positioning does explain the high lighting of work from the edge of the Anglo American center – in Australia and New Zealand – and the emphasis on literature and debates that have appeared in English. The further focus on economic, social, urban, and cultural geographies and with Marxist, postmodern, and post colonial theorizations, arise from these academic choices and contexts, though this does not preclude an awareness of vital work in, for example, development, rural, and historical geography, or in languages other than English. Rather, it is to suggest some of the limits of scale and scope in the process of creating encyclopedias of (all!) feminist


geography – a will to power as breathtaking in its ambition as it is impossible in practice.

Emergence of Feminist Geography Feminist geography as a critical discourse has an ongoing relationship with feminism and a range of other pro gressive political movements that emerged in the 1960s. In the context of a long post war economic boom and mass higher education, there were mobilizations of young people demanding black and gay civil rights in the US, left wing reform in Europe, and an end to imperialism in the Third World. Enmeshed in movements demanding social justice, newly freed from the necessary connection of sexual activity to procreation and in the paid workforce in ever larger numbers, ‘women’ came to see themselves as a group that also experienced disadvantage. The Women’s Liberation Movement defined women’s oppression as the problem, identified men as the enemy, and the personal as political. Across Europe, England, North America, and Australasia, inspired by Marxism and radical feminism, middle and working class women mobilized to demand equal pay, an end to sexual violence, and dedicated pol icies, programs, and services for women. Middle class, primarily white women, urged and achieved a greater presence in the institutions of power. Within the academy, a few women and some men began to critically examine the demographics, contents, methods, and theories of the humanities and social sciences, including geography, to document and demand changes. As centers of political radicalism and a hegemonic Western culture, it is not surprising that it was in the US and England that the first systematic feminist cri tiques of human geography occurred. The earliest work drew not only on socialist feminist and radical feminist theorizing, but also on liberal feminist traditions to reflect differences in national cultures and an early diversity. Thus, in 1973, through the pages of The Professional Geographer, Wilbur Zelinsky documented ‘The strange case of the missing female geographer’ in the US. Acknowledging the vital trigger of the Women’s Liber ation Movement and the presence of women’s caucuses in other disciplines, Zelinsky saw geography as lagging behind, a consequence he suggested of wider patterns of sexism as well as particular institutional rules, tradi tions, and biases. His survey was followed by others in Britain, Canada, the US, and more recently in Japan, South Korea, Norway, Israel, Australia, and Germany, though such counts in what could be labeled as ‘core’ countries of Anglo American discourse are much less frequent now. In addition to the surveys of the gender imbalance within the academy, there have been overviews of publications, major conferences, and professional organizations which document and

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question the absence of women. Despite the range of sites, the timing, and the national contexts, virtually all of these surveys charted a similar pattern: of women’s presence as geography undergraduates, but then a growing male dominance in the numbers of graduate students, and finally in university faculties, on editorial boards, in mainstream journals, as keynote speakers, and as ‘eminent’ in the discipline. So in 1990, between 0% and 10% of geography professors were women across the globe, with the situation improving somewhat in some countries – such as Britain, Australia, Canada, the US – up to 20% or 30%, into the new millennium, but still not to the level of demographic parity. The political task of securing women’s equitable place within the discipline is therefore far from complete, though its urgency and prominence as an issue has lessened. In addition to the demographic absences of women in geography, there were also early critiques launched into the systematic biases in the methods, empirical work, and even the theorizations used by human geographers. Thus, Alison Hayford in the newly established ‘radical’ journal of geography – Antipode – wrote in 1974 of how women were invisible within the discipline, assumed to either have no distinct role, be subsumed by a dominant masculine order, or to be continually adjusting to that order. Building on this in the first mainstream piece in England (in the journal Area in 1978), Jacqueline Tivers argued for women’s spe cific role within urban society – as paid workers, as shop pers, and as carers – needed to be taken seriously. Four years later, Mary Ellen Mazey and David Lee, under the auspices of the Association of American Geographers, published the first monograph on feminist issues in geog raphy with their descriptive cartography of women across the US. Beginning a strong empirical tradition, Her Space, Her Place involves a series of maps and discussions which located women, documented their migration patterns along with their attitudes to and impact on the environment. This mapping of women’s place began a tradition that has been taken up in Joni Seager’s regular maps of women. Along with the use of geographical information systems (GIS) technologies, these later works engage increasingly with contentious political issues – such as Seager’s recent atlas which charts women’s status, civil rights, domestic violence, lesbian rights, literacy, and beauty cultures – across the world. Mapping the place of women, then, suggests that through such a technique, powerful political points can be made, depending on the questions asked and theoretical perspective adopted. At the time that Mazey and Lee began the process of documenting women’s presence in the US, Janice Monk and Susan Hanson wrote of the sexist bias in the content, methods, and purpose of Anglo American geography. Thus, in a 1982 article also in The Professional Geographer, they discussed studies of migration,

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development, suburbanization, and urban travel which did not consider female as well as male experience. Echoing Tivers, they suggested that subjects of direct importance or relevance to women – such as child care or unpaid work – were not deemed worthy of study, while any direct discussion of women assumed traditional gender roles. In their overview of research methods, they noted how the experiences of male respondents – as ‘heads of households’ – were often generalized to whole populations, while interview techniques further entrenched the sexist assumptions which, they concluded, pervaded the production of geographical knowledge. If the work by Zelinsky, Hayford, Tivers, Monk, and Hanson critiqued the absence of women in geography departments, research, and methods, an exchange be tween Irene Bruegel and Pat Burnett in the increasingly Marxist journal of radical geography – Antipode – was the first to systematically connect feminist politics to left wing theorizing in the discipline. Thus, in 1973, Burnett argued that existing models of urban form were static, conservative, and assumed the sexual division of labor. She saw a Marxism enlivened by radical feminism as the alternative to an approach that ignored the structural relations between class, sex, and race. In her frame work, capitalism is built upon the family, an unequal gender division of labor, and a ‘male psychology of power’. In her response, Breugel argued for a need to recenter the analysis on class and the Marxist framework, beginning a discussion which lasted for over a decade on just how socialist feminists could remain true to Marxist theoretical precepts and a woman centered, feminist politics. The earliest statements of what came to be called feminist geography therefore emerged from the Women’s Liberation Movement and from wider feminist critiques of academic knowledge and practices. Informed by the full range of feminist theorizations – including liberal, radical, and socialist feminism – a few key human geographers, women and men, critiqued the absence of women in the discipline, the ways geographical research was conducted, subsequent bodies of sexist knowledge, and left wing theorizations. Levels of activity varied, with more in the US than elsewhere, and national political traditions informing the approaches taken. Thus, a liberal feminist mapping of women predominated in the US, while Tivers brought a more left leaning approach to bear on the place of women in England, though such a position was also present in the work of Burnett and Breugel in the US. The critique of geographical know ledge, research practices, and theorizations as well as a focus on women’s distinct worlds became the mainstays of much subsequent feminist geographical work, which also maintained an ongoing debt to feminist theories and politics.

Development of Feminist Geography Charting the development of feminist geography can occur within at least three different organizing schema: an examination of the major shifts over time, theoretical emphases, and national differences. There are, of course, many other ways of mapping out the discourse – the matically, by subject matter, via approaches to space, within the subdisciplines of rural, economic, social, his torical, or cultural geography, through the work of key individuals, and so on. The approach used here is therefore an idiosyncratic one, though it does mirror at least some other summaries, personal experience, and serves to highlight important dimensions – of temporal and theoretical shifts across space. How these various developments have impacted on the discipline will be considered in a subsequent section. Time Shifts The nature of feminist geography has shifted dramatic ally over time, a reflection of changes in feminist theo rizing and politics, as well as of changes in the discipline of geography. In many surveys of the field, feminist geographers have noted a general temporal move: from a 1970s’ and early 1980s’ critique of absence and bias, to a 1980s’ mapping of women which documented their in equitable experiences, to a greater concern with differ ence, representation, and identities from the 1990s. Such shifts are well represented by work published by the Women and Geography Study Group of the Institute of British Geographers. Created in the 1970s, the group was a response to the growing level of activity on women in other disciplines and dissatisfaction with the sexist nature of geographical knowledge and the patriarchal structuring of their work environments. Agreeing by the early 1980s on the need to become more visible, in 1984 the group published the first major text book in the field – Geography and Gender: An Introduction to Feminist Geog raphy. It was a book where individual authorship was subsumed by the group on the cover but attached to individual essays. Within, feminist geography was de fined, given a history, and then used to inform work on gender in the urban environment, especially women in bingo halls and the problems women with young children faced in relation to mobility. In these studies, women were constituted as a group, differentiated by class, but basically united by an oppressive gender order which could be successfully apprehended, critiqued, and challenged by large and small scale political actions. Comparable work then occurred within the develop ment field as Janet Momsen and Janet Townsend built on the path breaking work by Esther Boserup to demand that women be considered in any study of, and also projects for, economic development. So too in urban


geography which had been interrogated through a special issue of Antipode in 1984 on ‘Women in cities’. Much work had already been done by feminists in design, planning, and architecture – such as Dolores Hayden and Gerda Wekerle – who had only documented the absence of women in their various professions but then went on to study the ways in which cities and neighborhoods in the US and England variously built an inequitable gender order into them, primarily by the separation of homes from paid workplaces, the creation of a gendered dis tinction between public and private spaces, and the op eration of transport and other service systems. This work then informed feminist geographers such as Jo Little, Linda Peake, and Pat Richardson in their 1988 study of Women in Cities: Gender and the Urban Environment. This focus on women as a relatively homogeneous group united by their gender oppression, which was the mainstay of the early Women’s Liberation Movement and work in the social sciences, was to undergo sustained critique from the late 1980s by minority women of color within Britain and the US and from those writing from the ‘Third World’. In addition, theoretical developments from within feminist and humanities scholarship raised serious questions about any notion of unified subjects and placed fractured notions of power, social difference, and issues of representation squarely onto the academic agenda. The cultural turn within geography was also registered in feminist geography as problems were in creasingly defined in cultural as well as material terms and textual analyses joined interviews and observation as vital sources of research data. Such shifts were registered in later editions of key feminist geography books; so that in their 1997 book, the Women and geography study group of the IBG RGS now focused on Feminist Geog raphies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference while the updated version of Momsen’s development tome also reflected the change in its title: Different Places, Different Voices: Gender and Development in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Not only were the subjects different – with more emphasis on diversity and differences between women – but the approaches have also fundamentally altered. In the later Women and Geography Study Group book, there is an interactive approach as readers are invited to draw their own conclusions about key issues, consistent with the authors’ approach of challenging the taken for granted assumptions of the discipline. The aim is to give multiple versions of feminist geography. So from the 1990s, studies are infused with theoriza tions that direct attention away from economic and gendered structures and centers of power toward more dispersed, representational, and identity oriented studies of difference between women. A new generation of feminist geographers emerges, such that personal his tories embedded in the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement give way to those who are reaping the gains of

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women’s inclusion in the discipline, as well as engaging with very different theoretical debates. Contemporary studies thus become more focused on gender relations than the position of women per se with as much emphasis given to the place of men as women, on the experiences of racism and sexuality as much as sexism and the complex mutual constitution of these relationships within and across space. In such moves, dominant theoretical paradigms in the discipline and across the humanities and social sciences have been vital in shaping the timing and direction of change, as well as informing their politics, which has tended to become less about public actions than discursive interventions. This trajectory has taken only slightly different forms across the subdisciplines. So, for example, Jo Little and Ruth Panelli in 2003 delimited three phases in feminist rural geography: 1. 1970s–1980s: politically motivated work that was in formed by women’s studies and focused on gender relations in rural areas, especially women’s subordin ation compared to men, and a politics that aimed for greater equality; 2. Late 1980s to 1990s: concepts focused on feminist theories and gender relations in rural areas which valorized rural women, such that equality was re placed by a focus on and celebration of gender dif ference; and 3. 1990s onward: work focused on theories and concepts within rural studies and gender studies which looked at masculinities, femininities, and ruralities, that is, multiple identities with an emphasis on difference, diversity, and change along with studies of the social construction and representation of the categories studied. Such latter work is well represented by Jo Little’s 2002 Gender and Rural Geography : Identity, Sexuality and Power in the Countryside. So too with development geography, an initial focus on Women’s Role in Economic Development informed the UN Decade for Women from 1975–85. Such research pro vided massive empirical detail and had the effect of making women in the South visible and showed how development programs impacted negatively upon them. Subsequent work focused on ‘gender relations’ rather than women and, while acknowledging differences, saw patriarchy as dominant and universal. In contrast, post modern development work argues that both approaches disempower and universalize women and thereby focuses on difference, diversity, ‘multiple identities’, and articu lations of power leading to contingent and contextual representations of gender. Feminist interventions into rural, urban, and devel opment geography are therefore comparable, up to at least 2000. After that time, from a reading of Gender, Place

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and Culture, multiple trajectories emerge: of consolidation and stocktaking, a mainstreaming of feminist theory, and concerns into geography’s subdisciplines, and an array of cross disciplinary projects which transcend preexisting categorizations. Such work draws on psychoanalytic and post structural theory and feminist theorists such as Ju dith Butler, especially her notion of performativity; Iris Marion Young and her reformulations of social justice; Doreen Massey’s view of fluid, open, and multifaceted space; and Elspeth Probyn’s ideas of sexualized and spatialized identities; as well as newer nonrepresenta tional and emotional geographies, to produce very dif ferent feminist geographies. In the new century, feminist geographers – or perhaps publishers – begin a process of consolidation and auto critique, producing a new generation of textbooks – such as Mona Domosh and Joni Seager’s Putting Women in Place and Louise Johnson’s Placebound – as well as drawing on their own history, to produce a consolidated collection of readings – such as Linda McDowell and Joanne Sharp’s Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings. The many interventions into geographical methods have also been collected into books, such as Pam Moss’s Feminist Geography in Practice: Research and Methods. In addition, within the pages of Gender, Place and Culture there have occurred regular autocritiques, as the impact of feminist ideas into, for example, rural and historical geography, as well as on the doing of geography, is assessed along with the dis course of feminist geography itself. In the process, before postcolonial questioning, feminist geography is found to be wanting in its inclusion of non English speaking authors and voices from outside of the Anglo American center. Thus, in a fine evaluation piece published to mark the tenth year of Gender, Place and Culture, the Spaniard Maria Dolores Garcia Ramon joined the Dane Kirsten Simonsen and Greek Dina Vaiou to note how from 1994 to 2005, of the 242 authors of articles and viewpoints, only 19% were not based in Anglo American universities or research centers – which included Australia and New Zealand. Authors based in the US and the UK constituted 64% of writers, while of the 320 books reviewed, only seven were not written in English (2%) and only five reviewers were non Anglo American. Subsequently publishing all ab stracts in Spanish as well as in English, with a real effort to include non Anglo Americans on its editorial board, ac cept papers in languages other than English, and as sub jects of articles and book reviews, Audrey Kobayashi could still write that feminist geography faces the ironic situation that as more studies of racism and other forms of dis crimination appear, the number of women of color doing those studies remains static and abysmally low at 2%. The shift then is from a consideration of women’s absence from the discipline and its subjects, to the absence of those from ethnic minorities as writers, teachers, and subjects of geographical knowledge. A central contemporary issue for

feminist geographers then, is ‘difference’, what it means, how minorities are constructed and confined to margins, and how this marginality can be ameliorated. As well as general books which bring the insights of earlier decades of feminist geography scholarship together, there are those which venture into the newer territory opened by these postmodern and postcolonial per spectives. Perhaps best captured in 2004 by Walid Falah and Nagel’s Geographies of Muslim Women : Gender, Religion and Space, the focus is on how difference and the complex intersections of space, identities, and power mutually constitute social groups in places. It is these subjects – of transnationalism, femininity, masculinity, cross gender bodies, the constitution of marginality, and social exclusion – newly interrogated by theoretical frames incorporating performativity, hybridity, sexualities, emotion, and differ ence which are informing current feminist geographies. In such work, women as dedicated subjects who are auto matically subject to oppressive social relations are no longer central. Rather the place of women is now a question to be explored across time and space with a progressive, liberatory politics. Such studies explore the relationship of ethnicity, race, sexuality, religion, and ability to the definition and negotiation of gendered identities across space, while also documenting and chal lenging the complex ways in which oppressive social re lations are constituted. Theoretical Orientations The preceding account has already suggested that theo retical frames have been critical to feminist geographers, shaping approaches to the discourse, to research and in forming political actions. The following theoretical transect is somewhat traditional but these frameworks have structured many of the debates as well as much of the politics and practice that make up feminist geography. While not always deliberately invoked, these frames help to make sense of the diversity and abstract underpinnings of feminist geography. Having been considered earlier, the liberal perspective is only briefly considered. While radical feminism has a somewhat marginal role to play in feminist geography, it has nonetheless been vital in heightening the issue of sexuality in the discipline. But here, most atten tion will be devoted to those frameworks that have gen erated most activity and debate – socialist feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial feminism – before the sec tion ends with speculations on where the current work is drawing its theoretical sustenance. The following theore tical orientations do not map neatly onto time and, while there are periods when one dominates over another, and times of course when, for example, the postcolonial cri tique did not exist while the frameworks do not neatly supplant each other but coexist in the present and at different locations.


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As noted earlier in the discussion of origins the earliest manifestations of feminist geography involved docu menting the absence of women within the discipline and in positions of power as well as where and how women inhabit the world. Inspired by the Women’s Liberation Movement, such approaches were indebted to nine teenth century liberal feminism in that they constructed women as a unified group, strove for women’s visibility within existing structures and discourses, and pursued a reformist politics of inclusion. The framework therefore impelled the counting and mapping of women’s lo cational disadvantage and spurred a range of measures to ameliorate these, including equal employment oppor tunity and affirmative action policies within geography departments, separate women’s organizations in national and international associations, and planning interventions to ensure the better distribution of services. Despite the somewhat dated nature of this agenda, it made a vital contribution to feminist geography; for the women’s caucuses and action it inspired, it meant that women have been appointed and promoted, while women’s issues have been legitimated in research. It meant that research could and did detail the effects of gender inequality while the constraints on women – as caregivers, housewives, and workers – via existing spatial structures, house designs, patterns of accessibility, service provision, and transport having been identified, could be reformed. Such research and action is ongoing, though it is intriguing that there are very few assessments of women’s presence within the discipline and the Gender and Geography Study Group within the Institute of Australian Geographers was disestablished in 2004. While such caucuses continue in a host of other countries and within the International Geographical Union, it is worth speculating on the future of a ‘geography of women’ in the current political and intellectual climate, one which is not only informed and for many corrupted by neoliberalism, but also inspired by a focus on culture, ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities rather than on women per se. The work conducted within the liberal feminist tra dition has been criticized for being too descriptive, with women constructed as victims of their sex roles rather than as active agents. For many, inspired by different paradigms, women are positioned within larger struc tures of patriarchal, economic, and political power. These Marxist, radical, and psychoanalytic frames offer some at least greater explanatory power as well as a more radical politics.

its focus on women as a united and oppressed group, male violence, and patriarchal culture, the impacts on feminist geography have been limited, primarily confined to work since the 1980s which considers fear and sexual violence in the city – such as by Susan Smith, Gill Val entine, Jalna Hanmer, and Mary Maynard in England, and Gerda Wekerle and Carolyn Whitzman in Canada and Australia, respectively – though the emphasis on sexuality and embodiment has inspired, if not directly informed, later work on sexuality and the body. The work by Gill Valentine in Reading detailed not only the ways in which women’s fear was constructed but also how it could inform the better design of public spaces. She documented how the elevation of public space as a site of inherent danger for women excluded them from a legitimate place and gave a false sense of safety in a far more dangerous place – the home – where most rape and violence against women occurred. Valen tine not only argued for domestic violence to receive more media attention but also offered an array of prac tical planning actions that could make public space safer for women. This approach toward the redesign of public space – echoed by many feminist planners – has had major impacts across urban planning throughout the Western world, informing the rethinking and redesign of many public spaces to ensure a better sense of safety for women. While radical feminism focused primarily on patri archal or male power and sexual violence against women, its concern with personal–political issues, such as fear, oppression, and identity, also embraced sexuality and the body. These subjects have been pursued by an increasing number of geographers who have also adopted post modern theorizations and post structuralist methods. Following the temporal trajectory already noted, there began in the 1970s and 1980s a mapping of gay spaces in some cities. In 1983, Manuel Castells identified an inner city, gay urban territory in San Francisco through the presence of gay bars, businesses, stores, and professional offices and votes for gay political candidates. He con cluded that their presence reflected a profound gender difference: where men sought to dominate and delimit space as their own, while lesbian women were more scattered and had less localized relationships and net works. Comparable studies done of other cities in Aus tralia, Canada, and England not only confirmed these patterns but also, as the postmodern critique developed, the idea of fixed sexual identities along with distinct gay geographies was challenged through the reworking of ‘queer’ and more fluid notions of sexualized identities and bodies in space.

Radical feminist geographies

Socialist feminist geography

Radical feminism underpinned much of the early polit ical actions of the Women’s Liberation Movement. With

It is not without significance that one of the earliest feminist geography interventions into theory focused on

The geography of women/liberal feminist geography

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Marxist geography. For it was the early 1970s and the radical critique of the discipline’s conservatism and preoccupation with quantitative methods was just be ginning through the pages of new journals such as Anti pode. But it was to be another 10 years, however, before feminist geographers were seriously engaging with so cialist politics and concepts, drawing on socialist feminist work on paid and unpaid labor to create totally new geographies of British, Australian, and Canadian cities. The Canadian Suzanne Mackenzie set the scene in 1980 by critiquing the status quo, descriptive emphasis of the geography of women and calling for a new geography which examined how women shaped the environment via the social relations of productive and reproductive work. In the context of a vital socialist feminist movement, Linda McDowell in England pursued this approach in her historical analysis of British cities and their suburbs. Thus, she argued – following one line of socialist feminist theorizing – that production and reproduction were part of a single process which varied across space and time. She charted the development of British suburbs as the outcome of a set of historically specific, contested, and actively created relations between male and female paid work, housework, and domestic ideologies. The result of these changing social relations, she argued, was that suburbs were quite different in the 1950s compared to the 1960s and 1980s, as the nature of work and relations between paid and unpaid work, as well as ideological constructions of gender roles, altered. In a series of locality studies generously funded across the UK in the 1980s, the relationships between pro ductive and reproductive work were systematically studied by geographers, sociologists, and economists. Along with a critique of Marxist inspired studies of the capitalist labor process went a new approach to paid work, one which owed much to feminist theoretical and political interventions. Across the UK, studies of manu facturing and mining decline detailed not only the ways in which this process impacted disproportionately on men but also how it was accompanied by a growth of new industries in green field sites where women were mo bilized into paid labor. Explaining such patterns focused on how the sexual division of labor within the home, in paid work, within trade unions, and in localities was altering. Doreen Massey in her 1984 Spatial Divisions of Labour was critical to this new approach to space, labor, and gender, as she documented the fate of different in dustries, their international as well as their national and internal organization, in these terms. Working with Linda McDowell, Massey also exam ined how capitalism and patriarchy articulated to create a set of distinctive conditions for the maintenance of male dominance at various localities, be it in the mining vil lages of Northern England, the Lancaster cotton towns, in the London rag trade, or rural life in the Fens. In this

1984 essay, Massey and McDowell argued that capitalism presented patriarchy with different challenges across space which in turn shaped gender, class, and labor re lations, thereby prioritizing a key feminist term over those derived from Marxist theory. The invocation of patriarchy and its complex rela tionship with capitalism and Marxist categories became the subject of ongoing discussion within feminist geog raphy in the late 1980s. Such discussion culminated in ‘the patriarchy debate’ which raged over 1986 and 1987 in the pages of Antipode. Here then was a core feminist concept, one derived primarily from a radical feminist agenda, that numerous feminist geographers were trying to connect in some meaningful way to their Marxism and to studies of space. In their opening essay, Jo Foord and Nicky Gregson moved to reconceptualize patriarchy within a realist framework, isolating its necessary (men and women, biological reproduction, and heterosexuality) and contingent elements (patriarchy experienced at par ticular places and asserted within marriage and the nu clear family in 1980s Britain). It was primarily the consignment of heterosexuality and gender to the status of ahistorical universals that generated the most vehement responses. The intensity of ‘the patriarchy debate’ was real and typified many of the dilemmas faced by socialist feminists as they tried to reconcile Marxist and feminist concepts and political priorities. However, the urgency was to quickly dissipate as the iron curtain came down and the end of ideology was trumpeted. Before a rising cacophony of voices from minorities demanding to be heard, neo liberals triumphed across the Western world, overseeing an economy, society, and set of technologies now defined in terms of the modern and the postmodern rather than the capitalist and socialist. Feminist geographers too were increasingly engaged with these critiques and the very different approaches coming from postmodernity and postcolonialism. Feminist geographies of difference – postmodern and postcolonial

If the late 1980s was distinguished by the demise of ideology, it was also associated with global economic and spatial restructuring, as developed economies experi enced a crisis of profitability and some ‘Third World’ countries attracted huge capital investments and became massive exporters of consumer durables. The intro duction and widespread use of computer technologies in communication, production process, and for creating new consumption sites revolutionized industry and popular culture. Subsequently labeled late capitalism, New Times, postindustrial and disorganized capitalism, this shift was also typified as a move from a modern to a postmodern era. For geographers such as David Harvey and Edward Soja, the 1980s were distinguished by a more


pervasive globalization of Western economic, social, and political relations, a shift from a Fordist form of mass production toward a disorganized, flexible, or post For dist way of creating goods and a change from manu facturing to service economies dominated by relations of consumption rather than production. Accompanying these structural economic shifts went changes in a esthetics and philosophy, as accepted truths, certainties, and frameworks derived from the Enlightenment around rationality, the unified individual, and science were thrown into question. As part of this critique, in historical studies of medi cine, the prison, and sexuality, Michel Foucault argued for the importance of discourses – ways of writing and speaking by those in particular positions of power which constructed subjects and discourses – to revolutionize the ways in which not only the past but also the present was studied. The widespread application of this approach in literary, cultural, and media studies and latterly human geography demonstrated the importance of textuality, sign systems, and deconstructive techniques to the con stitution and apprehension of the postmodern world and to those who lived within it, now conceived as multi faceted and discursively constituted subjects. Such work, along with the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan and the philosophy of Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari entered feminist thinking – via such critical writers as Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, and Elspeth Probyn – with the result that desire, the sexed body, language, and culture became new priorities for feminists and feminist geographers. In addition to the textual and cultural turn in social theory, went another which was more grounded in pol itics than the academy. For the crisis of postmodern representation was also a crisis of European cultural authority in the face of critics from colonized countries and marginalized minorities. In this critical milieu, feminism was far from exempt. Thus, in the late 1980s, feminism was subjected to a postcolonial critique as its claims to universality were exposed as illegitimate. Many feminist claims and theories were exposed as focusing on and representing the voices of white, Western, hetero sexual, and middle class women. Launched by minority and colored women within the West as well as by women from Third World countries, this critique forced a re thinking and reorientation of feminist geography as well as feminism as a whole. Thus in her engagement with Feminism and Geography, Gillian Rose argued in 1993 that despite over 10 years of feminist work, it remained profoundly masculinist, as feminist work is brushed off and the place of gender in space and geographical knowledge is rendered marginal by those who refuse to acknowledge their privileged positions. The critique offered by feminists of established knowledge, research methods, and disciplines, as well as

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alternatives offered by minorities and those from (de) colonized countries, can readily be seen as part of the broader crisis of representation. However, in geography, in the analysis and theorizing of postmodernity, global ization, and late capitalism, the most ‘important’ works did not acknowledge any debt to feminist or postcolonial thinking or recognize the particular place of women in the new economic and social orders being created, be they in Third World export processing zones or in the newly restructured industries and cultures of the First World. In this postmodern era, it was to be the new tool of textual deconstruction that was to be turned upon such key works, while the complex ways in which cities, workplaces, and workforces were discursively created were to be documented by postmodern feminist geographers. Thus, in a spirited engagement with some key postmodern theorists Liz Bondi, Rosalind Deutsche, Doreen Massey, and Linda McDowell amongst others noted how David Harvey’s Condition of Postmodernity and Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies were founded on unexamined sexism and profound phallocentrism which made these books partial and deeply limited. They variously argued that Harvey and Soja constructed a view of the postmodern condition that ignored women and feminism. It was argued that both books failed to ac knowledge that patriarchy and racism were fundamental aspects of oppression within both the modern and post modern eras and that feminist, antiracist, and post colonial struggles were significant political movements in shaping these periods. Further, neither author recognized their positions of discursive power as white, heterosexual, male geographers, or acknowledged that they themselves were offering a totalizing framework rather than ac cepting that such a claim was no longer possible. Such deconstructive techniques were also central to the first solo authored feminist geography book by Gil lian Rose. Thus, Feminism and Geography goes beyond simply noting the absence of women in mainstream geography texts and traditions to implicate time geog raphy and socialist feminist geography in a set of binaries which privilege culture over nature, the mind over the body, reason over emotion, work over home, and pro duction over reproduction, and therefore men over women in a deep and formative way. Rose thereby argues for an alternative feminist geography, one which does not just reverse such binaries but goes beyond them to create new spaces for women, seen not as a unified but as a highly differentiated, discursively and politically consti tuted grouping. Other feminist geographers have joined the critical interrogation of the post Fordist and globalization frameworks. Thus, the American Julie Graham noted in 1992 how these narratives were totalizing and exclusionary and, in line with a material conceptualization of discourse,

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further argued that such ways of thinking had real political effects. For in presenting an analysis where capitalism is the only pathway and globalization the only script, any sense of agency is removed and any resistance doomed from the start. Graham joined with the Australian Kath erine Gibson to present not only a fundamental critique of this conceptualization of capitalism but also to offer an alternative economic and social vision. Thus, in 1994, Gibson Graham wrote of The End of Capitalism as We Knew it by deconstructing Marxist and postmodern theoriza tions. In this book and in their later Postcapitalist Politics, they use feminist and other liberation theorizing to con struct an alternative economics. Beginning with a general concept of labor application and the appropriation of its products to highlight sites of economic activity – such as the home, the informal sector, crime, and exchange sys tems – in First and Third World countries – they argue that these various places are every bit as vital theoretically and practically as capitalist forms of production and ex change. Just as importantly for their political project, such noncapitalist forms of production and exchange are often less exploitative, violent, and unstable and allow very different identities, alliances, and economies to flourish. Here then is an alternative feminist economic geography, grounded in a progressive politics as well as in postmodern and postcolonial theorizing, one which is discursively powerful and politically mobilizing. If geographical knowledge was thereby subjected to a new round of politicized deconstruction from the early 1990s, feminist geographers have also applied these frameworks to the analysis of cities and workplaces. Thus, in 1991, Linda McDowell engaged directly with the post Fordist regime of production, but to the analysis offered by Harvey and others, highlighted the role of women as casualized and sexualized members of the rapidly ex panding service industries. She takes this analysis further when in later research, she documents the importance of gender relations and, in particular, the construction of various forms of masculinity to the nature of London’s banking and finance sector for her 1997 book Capital Cultures. In this work, the nature of the gendered body in space becomes critical, as dress codes, demeanor, and the very nature of the work task becomes integrated into particular bodily types, activity patterns, and looks. While radical feminism had highlighted the import ance of sex and sexuality to the oppressive gender order of the 1970s, it was not until the cultural turn in geog raphy and the widespread use of deconstruction, queer theory, and the approaches offered by Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz that feminist geographers focused on the sexed body in space. Thus, in 1996, Nancy Duncan edited a book on Body Space in which a number of feminist geographers engaged with the new questions associated with postmodern research: how the cultural construction of gendered identities impacted on material spaces how

sexualities intersected with space to produce ‘the het erosexual street’, gay communities, and masculinities in various work spaces. Accepting Grosz’s arguments – drawn from Foucault – that the body carries traces and inscriptions from a range of medical, legal, and adver tising discourses, feminist geographers subsequently studied how women’s bodies move in space and how they assume particular forms through sport, weight training, or expectations associated with reproduction. Thus, in New Zealand, Robyn Longhurst’s Bodies : Exploring Fluid Boundaries detailed how, for example, the pregnant body is constructed as frail, disorderly, and transgressive to challenge the mind–body distinction not only within philosophy but also in everyday urban design. In a detailed study of Worcester, Massachusetts, over the 1990s, Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt apply a comparable framework to a place to document the ways in which class, gender, race, and ethnicity variously come together to create communities, particular home–work relationships and workforces, as well as complex individual identities. Thus, in Women, Work and Space as well as in other studies of workplaces, cities, and workforces, notions of multiple identities, decentered power structures, and the mutual as well as discursive constitution of places and people are utilized by feminist geographers to create not only incisive and insightful studies but also alternative spaces for analysis and progressive action. Such a focus on the vital role of ethnic difference in the creation and changes in places has been echoed in a host of more consciously postcolonial geographies. Emanating un surprisingly from those countries which were either at the center or on the edges of empires, work by Jane Jacobs and Kay Anderson in Australia, Canada, and England, Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose in England among many others, have transformed historical geography into a systematic interrogation of the ways in which the complex vectors of colonial power constituted not only gendered but also racialized peoples and places, be they an abandoned brewery in Perth, Western Australia, Chinatowns in Syd ney and Vancouver, or Victorian women and men travel ing across colonial Africa and India. If deconstruction offered a new tool for analysis, postmodernity a new vision of identity, and textuality and postcolonialism a very different interrogation and politics of difference, feminist geographies in the 1990s expanded well beyond the dualism of women and men to admit race, ethnicity, age, disability, nationality, religion, and sexuality into their works. Feminist geography therefore now documents how multiple axes of difference are realized in and through space. Feminist geography also draws on a broader range of social theory to better understand the research process and to inform research methods, which have shifted away from objectivist epis temologies toward situated knowledge claims and alliances.


National Differences Documenting national differences in feminist geog raphies on the one hand appears a straightforward quest, as place clearly matters to geographers! However, any expectation of major cleavages between nations flies in the face of academic traditions which ensure that only those engaged with international scholarship are pub lished and promoted, while the international job market as well as conference circuit ensures that at least those geographers with access to resources are usually highly mobile between countries. As well as a tradition of Third World countries going to the First for higher degrees, there is also a growing propensity for international col laborations, primarily between English speaking aca demics, between the First and Third World scholars and across linguistic divides. So in this increasingly globalized world, national differences in academic cultures are not fixed or pronounced. But they do exist and relate to discursive power centers which form national and local traditions, which in turn are shaped by key individuals. Alongside tendencies toward convergence, there is a differentiation to be made between the First and Third World feminist geographers as well as between those within the developed world who have English as their first language and those that do not. Thus, as noted earlier, there is a preponderance of Anglo Americans within the discourse as well as those who are part of the English speaking diaspora in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Those countries which have English as part of a multilingual tradition – usually the result of colonization – such as India, Singapore, and South Africa – attain some visibility within the mainstream literature, but for those geographers based in Europe, Asia, South and Central America, and Africa, they are truly on the edge of the feminist as well as geographical discursive spaces – a power geometry of knowledge circulation that neces sarily renders invisible much work which may well be relevant to this English language review. Within those English speaking countries that have seen published feminist geography activity, some national tendencies can be discerned. There are local intellectual traditions, centers of academic work, key individuals, and groupings as well as national traditions of enquiry and politics. Within the UK, there is a strong tradition of socialist feminist activity as well as a more recent ten dency to engage with the implication of the postcolonial critique in this once mighty imperial power. In contrast, the US has a less pervasive left wing tradition and con trasts with Canada in this respect. In Australia and New Zealand, consciously drawing on these centers, there has been significant work done not only within socialist feminism but also more recently within postcolonial frameworks from the very different position of a colon ized country.

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But there are also particular feminist geographies which emerge from the geography, feminist traditions, and particular individuals in countries. The role of key people cannot be underestimated, for they have provided not only the intellectual leadership, mentoring, higher degree supervision, networking skills, institutional, and personal support for the creation but also the shaping and sustaining of specific feminist geographies. Thus in Britain, the Women and Geography Study Group of the IBG (latterly combined with the Royal Geographical Society as the RGS IBG) as well as the presence, pub lishing prowess, and networking skills of Liz Bondi, So phie Bowlby, Alison Blunt, Jo Little, Linda McDowell, Doreen Massey, Linda Peake, Gillian Rose, Joanne Sharp, Jacqui Tivers, and Gill Valentine have been vital. These individuals have also shaped the theoretical trajectory of British feminist geography, which owes a particular debt to socialist feminist and postcolonial thinking. The par ticular bifurcated professional role of Liz Bondi as both psychoanalyst and feminist geographer has also impacted on the way in which British geography has moved from post structuralism toward nonrepresentational and then emotional geographies. So too in Canada, the role of Suzanne Mackenzie in shifting the emerging radical feminist discourse de cisively toward a socialist feminist perspective, effect ively changed the course of the discourse in North America as did the presence of Geraldine Pratt at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and Linda Peake and Gerda Wekerle at York in Toronto make these two cities real centers of feminist geography re search and practice. In the US, Mona Domosh, Jan Monk, Karin Morin, and Joni Seager have all been es sential to the ongoing presence of feminist geography, utilizing a liberal feminist framework to good effect and also by drawing on and developing other approaches to engage with fundamental issues of transnationalism for workers and migrants as well as neoimperialism by the US in Latin America. In Australia, Ruth Fincher and Katherine Gibson have been critical leaders and mentors for younger women while offering decisive intellectual interventions into economic and urban geography, while the internationally mobile Jane Jacobs and Kay Ander son have been vital contributors to postcolonial dis course around the world. In New Zealand, an ongoing commitment not only to look outward but also to forge autonomous intellectual spaces have been sustained by key individuals within very few institutions – especially Anne Magee, Robyn Longhurst, and Linda Johnston at the University of Waikato. Their work on sexuality and space and on the body in space has impacted feminist geography around the world, and they have been in strumental in networking younger women across the country to continue pushing the boundaries of feminist geography theory and practice.

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Within Europe, the picture is less clear, partly because of my own linguistic limitations, and also because the feminist geography project within particular European countries has been focused on their own economies and societies and, for some, such as Germany, has not im pacted significantly at the institutional level. So, for ex ample, there has been an emphasis in Sweden on paid work, while other Nordic countries have a particular interest in work and family relations as well as the role of the welfare state. In the Netherlands, feminist geography has connected strongly to planning, while in Spain it has engaged strongly with rural geography. In German speaking countries, a number of working groups exist which have explored a range of theoretical issues – added to by the queer emphasis of the Doreen Massey Weekend Reading Group – but feminist issues are not on the of ficial agenda of German geography and remains mar ginal, with few faculty and an ‘add women/gender and stir’ approach. Even those who see themselves as femi nists, pursue feminist studies as a background rather than a core activity. There is also a lack of institutionalized networks equivalent to the RGS IBG and IGU groups, though this facilitates informal networking. Within Asia, again, there are key individuals within particular countries and institutions – such as Hae Un Ri in South Korea and Saraswati Raju in India. In Singapore, Brenda Yeoh and Lily Kong have focused on transnational mi gration and investment as well as on the gendering of state policies, work that has clearly emerged from the particular history and geography of their island nation. National differences in feminist geography as a whole are echoed within subdisciplines. Thus, in their overview of feminist historical geography, Karin Morin and Law rence Berg discern particular national traditions – in the US, there is a focus on the frontier and work emanating from the landscape school of Carl Sauer, which provides the vital context for Vera Norwood and Jan Monk’s collection: The Desert Is No Lady. In contrast, work in Britain focuses on imperialism, leading to studies of Af rica, India, and women travelers as well as the nature of geographical knowledge as integral to and complicit in the colonial project. In this academic work feminist geographers have ef fectively entered the academy, academic journals, con ferences, and the public arena transforming the discipline of geography, including its demographics, its content, methods, and theoretical frameworks. But in highlighting the fundamental role of key individuals in particular countries, this account also notes a limitation of feminist geography – its ongoing indebtedness to relatively few scholars, who came to the cause via the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s and who are now relatively senior and secure within the academy. Men toring, supervising, publishing, teaching, and networking, these scholars are also aging, increasingly drawn into

management positions and will soon also leave their in stitutions and abdicate leadership roles within the or ganizational structures supporting feminist geography. What remains will lie in the hands of their successors, who are coming of academic age in a very different political and theoretical era, one where gender is no longer fundamental and where issues around race, eth nicity, religion, sexuality, economic inequality, identity, and emotion are now central. What is now emerging is therefore a very different feminist geography, and in the case of Australia at least, such changes have seen the demise of the Gender and Geography Study Group within the Institute of Australian Geographers and the evacuation of the category by many. This may or may not be the future for other places, especially Britain, the US, Canada, Spain, and New Zealand, where there is a crit ical mass and ongoing senior leadership, but it does highlight the vulnerability of small and ultimately mar ginal group of geographers, if not discourse.

Significance of Feminist Geography The previous transects have highlighted aspects of the long and complex history of feminist geography. It now comes to discuss more systematically its practical, dis cursive, methodological, and political significance. Practices Fundamental to the emergence of feminist geography and its earliest concerns in the 1970s and 1980s was the low representation of women – in geography depart ments, publications, research, and teaching – and women’s exclusion from geographical knowledge, along with the assumption that women were subsumed by studies of men/heads of households/humanity. Alongside such observations went a critique of fieldwork, as a highly masculinized activity. What has occurred subsequently has been the organ ization of women’s caucuses within the discipline, a growing presence of women in academic geography, and a transformation of the ways in which geographical research was conducted and geographical knowledge produced and circulated, such that a more gender aware curricu lum, staffing profile, and set of teaching and research practices have emerged. It can be safely assumed that in those places where these activities have cohered – for example, at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, at Melbourne University in Australia, at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, at the University of British Columbia and York University in Canada and at the NUS in Singapore, Cambridge and Open University in England – that the changes will be permanent and gender balances will be maintained at the graduate and faculty levels and perhaps within their national–geographical canons. In


other institutions and countries, change in practices may or may be maintained, through initiatives to work cross culturally and transnationally may facilitate the ongoing dissemination of feminist geography practices as well as discourses. In addition to these structural positions, there has been a related curriculum presence in tertiary teaching across the world, including Australia, Britain, Spain, South Korea, India, Japan, US, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and Norway. Indeed, some feminist geography has become part of the normal curriculum in most departments of geography. In addition to changes in institutional teaching and hiring practices, feminist geographers have challenged and transformed the ways in which knowledge has been generated and presented. In line with feminist practices in other disciplines, first person narrations/authorial identification have been central to the doing and pre senting of feminist geographies. But there have also been new ways of writing/personal positioning. Thus with the visibility of J. K. Gibson Graham, the Women and Geography Study Group of the RGS IBG and the Feminist Pedagogy Working Group, collaborative and collective ways of researching and publishing have been successfully developed. The place of the feminist aca demic as someone who works within and from the academy has been broadened to embrace the collabora tive agent, who actively creates academic knowledge in the process of engendering positive social change. This can be seen in the work of Gibson Graham in the Phil ippines and of Gerry Pratt’s with Philippina women in Vancouver. Discourses In addition to altering the demographics and practices of geography, feminist geographers have been critical in rethinking key terms, frameworks, and methods in the discipline. Across the subfields, feminist geographers have offered their unique perspective to ensure that historical, economic, political, urban, development, and rural geography are all not only aware of gender differ ences but are engaged with feminist theorizations. But feminist geographers have also interrogated their own work as much as that of others, such that in the 1980s’ feminist studies of fear and the journey to work came under fire from minority positions, leading to its reworking. Feminist geographers have also intervened to rethink key concepts and approaches in the discipline, including ‘development’ – to include women’s unpaid and caring labor – ‘gentrification’ to ensure that its gendered nature was acknowledged; journey to work studies which now not only highlight the gender but also the racialized and ethnic differences, and migration studies which now ac knowledge and focus on the multifaceted identities of

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those involved. These studies join other analyses of public space, domestic life, and occupational segregation where there has been a reworking from within by femi nist geographers, with a focus on patriarchal environ ments in which male and female subjectivities are formed and maintained, in order to present these spaces anew from a nonsexist perspective. Feminists have extended the theorization of ‘class’ to include not only the mode of reproduction as well as production but also other forms of labor appropriation – including paid and unpaid, ‘productive’ and invisible, apparently unproductive, such as caring labor, clerical work, secretarial work, and home based work – while feminist geographers have integrated the vital role of such social relations in place and communities to rethink the very ways in which ‘space’ is thought about and studied. In addition to the critique and reworking of existing categories and subdisciplines, feminist geographers have brought entirely new subjects and approaches to the discipline. Thus, for example, a highlighting of sexuality and space led not only to a consideration of gays and lesbians across cities, but also more recently to studies of the active negotiation of heterosexuality as well as di vergent and hybrid sexualities. Feminist geographers have also systematically examined domestic spaces – as sites of work, desire, and design – and also sexualized bodies in space – be they pregnant, engaged in body building, or negotiating taboo practices and spaces. In addition to new spaces, feminist geographers have constructed entirely new approaches, meshing feminist theorizing with other developments in geography and beyond. Thus, Doreen Massey and Linda McDowell have not only completely rethought the process of gendering work places but Hanson and Pratt have also documented how gender interconnects with and mutually constitutes home, community, and work places, while Gibson Gra ham, in their studies of alternative economic spaces, and Gregson and Crewe, on car boot sales, offer new per spectives that can and should revolutionize economics and economic geography. So, too, studies of colonial and postcolonial encounters are now highlighting the inter connection of gender, race, ethnicity, and space to illus trate how material realities, corporeal differences, and subjective understandings of place, race, and racism are mutually constructed in colonial and postcolonial settings. Methods In addition, feminist geography has been part of a sus tained reworking of research methods. Thus, from the first critiques launched by Monk and Hanson to more recent evaluations of positivist and empiricist methods in terms of their faith in objectivity, value neutrality, and

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universal applications, there has been a concerted femi nist critique and reformulation of research methods. Drawing on feminist assumptions as to the inherent value of women’s perspectives and on the intersection of the personal and the political, all methods used in the 1970s and 1980s were critically evaluated. In their place went more emphasis on qualitative approaches, which valued women’s position, the role of the researcher, and the political nature of the research transaction. In this exercise, positionality becomes a crucial di mension of any research process, while the knowledge produced was increasingly seen as partial, relative, pro visional, and grounded rather than absolute, definitive, and generalizable. Thus, in place of empirical research not only by gendered but also by relatively objective scholars, went knowledge quests by subjects, occupying particular gendered, classed, racialized, sexualized, and also dynamic positions, rendering what was known, lim ited, and bounded by these dimensions. Doing feminist geography research – as Pam Moss’s 2002 book detailed – was therefore not about adopting qualitative over quan titative methods, but about positioning the research question, the researcher, the techniques, and the re searched within complex frameworks of power and knowledge. Qualitative and other feminist methodologies have now been incorporated into the discipline along with collaborative and nonexploitative approaches to research to challenge the unequal power relations which underpin many research practices. But quantitative methods have now also been admitted to the canon if they are deemed useful as choice of method is related to purpose. Thus, research is now conducted ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ subjects, with politically positioned academics engaged in con versations and collaborations rather than observations using an array of techniques in a highly reflexive manner. Politics As a consequence of highlighting women’s absences from the discipline and conducting gender sensitive research, feminist geographers have been engaged in an ongoing political project which extended well beyond the dis cursive to involve the hiring practices of universities, the professional organization of the discipline, the operation of editorial boards, and ultimately the challenging of inequitable gender relations across a vast number of sites and countries. Feminist geography has always been far more than a discursive intervention, but integral to it has been a progressive and active politics of institutional change. From the earliest head counts of women in the dis cipline, there were organized as well as informal efforts to alter universities, geographical curriculum, and the oper ation of the profession. In addition, feminist geographers

have been active in designing better and safer public spaces, lobbying for gender sensitive and better services for women – especially transport and also child care and health services. As a discourse, then, feminist geography has always been highly political and engaged, though this has lessened with the cultural and textual turn. This po tential disengagement of feminist geography constitutes one of a number of current issues.

Possible Directions in Feminist Geography Attempting to distil current priorities in feminist geog raphy (Table 1) encounters the problem not only of understanding the present while within it, of gaining a perspective and transnational experience where time and space remain real barriers, but also of surveying a field which might well have died within Australia. But the task is made possible through the existence of Gender, Place and Culture (GPC), and it is from a reading of is output over the last 14 years that the following speculations derive. Discerning the future from the present suggests a thickening of the diversity and complexity that has always been present in feminist geography and also a new di mension has entered: namely, a willingness, even a pre dilection to transgress and easily move across established typological boundaries. Much current work published in GPC moves across genres, subjects, and frameworks. Thus, there are studies of the discursive construction of the migratory Filippina entertainers which sit readily within migration, political, feminist, and cultural geography; studies of women’s household strategies in rural Appa lachia which draws heavily on economic, cultural, and rural geography; or of the paintings of men as landscapes by women. In addition to these transgressive works, there are those which continue to explore the new terrain opened by feminist geographers, with studies of embodiment, material cultures, and First–Third World intersections of domestic labor, sex tourism, and representations. Such work focuses on the ways gender differences work within and through economic, political, cultural, and sexual differences across international space. Within this now familiar quest goes the need to better interconnect the material, corporeal, and the discursive and develop emancipatory spaces. There is a need and emergent actuality in the pages of GPC to revisit the notion of ‘oppression’ and to reexamine the processes by which black, Islamic, minority, lesbian, working class, etc., women still hold less power, are still significantly dis advantaged, and subjected to gross levels of physical and sexual violence around the world. Such (re ?)exam ination is emerging from various margins, especially


Table 1

Feminist geographies

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traditions and trajectories

Feminist geographies

Mapping women’s place

Gender relations

Multiple/intersecting identities

Feminist theoretical tradition (beliefs and strategies)

Liberal feminisms Women are potentially equal to men. Equity is possible in existing institutions Remove barriers Lobby and organize

Radical and socialist feminisms Women’s oppression by men (patriarchy). Women the focus/source of knowledge. Sisterhood is powerful/ separatism. Built on Marxist theory Prioritizes production, social reproduction, and class. Structural analysis demands structural vs. reformist solutions

Precursors/key theorists

Mary Wollstoncraft J.S. Mill, H. Taylor. Betty Friedan

Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Adrienne Rich, Susan Brownmiller, Susan Griffin, Mary Daly

Postmodern and postcolonial feminisms Individuals are now discursively constituted and embodied subjects Psychoanalytic and post-structuralist methods Imperialism is a primary constitutive process of countries, people, and discourses Need to deconstruct colonial texts and practices, document colonialism while giving voice to the colonized Michel Foucault Sigmund Freud Jacques Lacan Jacques Derrida Deleuze and Guattari Liz Grosz Judith Butler Elspeth Probyn Iris Marion Young Eve Sarkorvsky Sedgewick Edward Said Bell hooks HomiBhabha Stuart Hall Gayatri Spivak G Rose Feminism and Geography Gibson-Graham The End of Capitalism as We Knew it Davidson, Bondi, Smith Emotional Geographies McDowell Capital Culture Gender at Work in the City Blunt and Rose Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies Falah and Nagel Geographies of Muslim Women Liz Bondi Gillian Rose Katherine Gibson Julie Graham Alison Blunt Jane M. Jacobs Heidi Nast Kay Anderson Brenda Yeoh

Dolores Hayden Marx, Engels Juliet Mitchell Christine Delphy, Lise Vogel, Heidi Hartmann, Zillah Eisenstein Key feminist geography texts

Mazey and Lee Her Space. Her Place. Seager and Olsen Women in the World Atlas.

Hanmer and Maynard Well Founded Fear Valentine ‘Geography of women’s fear’, (with Bell and Binnie) ‘All hyped up and no place to go’ Women and Geography Study Group Geography and Gender Massey Spatial Divisions of Labour

Key feminist geographers

Zelinsky Mazey Lee Monk Hanson Seager Olson

Gill Valentine Mary Maynard Jalna Hanmer Doreen Massey Suzanne Mackenzie Linda McDowell

India, Indonesia, and Africa and increasingly conducted by feminist geographers working across First and Third World countries. So while feminist geography may well be in abeyance in Australia – a result of the aging, mellowing, and pro motion of key individuals as well as of very different theoretical and practical priorities by a newer generation of cultural/postcolonial/urban rather than feminist geog raphers – in most other countries, one cannot yet see an end of a gender agenda. Rather as Geraldine Pratt notes in a 2004 essay on dealing with difference in feminist

geography, various dimensions of difference are contin gent, while gender remains a fundamental organizing category with a radical feminist politics still connected to ending oppressions wherever they occur. See also: Critical Geography; Cultural Geography; Economic Geography; Feminist Geography, Prehistory of; Historical Geography; Marxism/Marxist Geography I; Marxism/Marxist Geography II; Quantitative Methodologies; Queer Theory/Queer Geographies; Rural Geography; Social Geography.

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Further Reading Anderson, K. (1990). Chinatown re oriented: A critical analysis of recent redevelopment schemes in a Melbourne and Sydney enclave. Australian Geographical Studies 28(2), 137 213. Blunt, A. and Rose, G. (eds.) (1994). Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York: The Guildford Press. Bondi, L. (1990). Feminism, postmodernism, and geography: Space for women? Antipode 22(2), 156 167. Boserup, E. (1970). Women’s Role in Economic Development. New York: St Martin’s Press. Breugel, I. (1973). Cities, women and social class: A comment. Antipode 5, 62 63. Burnett, P. (1973). Social change, the status of women and models of city form and development. Antipode 5, 57 61. Castells, M. (1983). The City and the Grassroots. London: Arnold. Deutsche, R. (1991). Boy’s town. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9, 9 30. Domosh, M. and Seager, J. (2001). Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World. New York: Guildford Press. Duncan, N. (ed.) (1996). Bodyspace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality. London: Routledge. Falah, G. W. and Nagel, C. (eds.) (2005). Geographies of Muslim Women: Gender, Religion and Space. New York: Guildford. Foord, J. and Gregson, N. (1986). Patriarchy: Towards a reconceptualisation. Antipode 18(2), 186 211. Garcia Ramon, M. D., Simonsen, K. and Vaiou, D. (2006). Guest editorial: Does Anglophone hegemony permeate. Gender, Place and Culture 13(1), 1 5. Gibson Graham, J. K. (1994). The End of Capitalism as We Knew It. Oxford: Blackwell. Gibson Graham, J. K. (2006). A Postcapitalist Politics. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Graham, J. (1992). Post Fordism as politics: The political consequences of narratives on the left. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10, 393 410. Hanmer, J. and Maynard, M. (1984). Well Founded Fear: A Community Study of Violence to Women. London: Hutchinson. Hanson, S. and Pratt, G. (1995). Women, Work and Space. London: Routledge. Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Hayden, D. (1981). The Grand Domestic Revolution. A History of Feminist Designs for American Housing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hayford, A. (1974). The geography of women: An historical introduction. Antipode 6(2), 302 305. Jacobs, J. (1996). Edge of Empire. London: Routledge. Johnson, L., Huggins, J. and Jacobs, J. (2000). Placebound: Australian Feminist Geographies. Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press. Kobayashi, A. (2006). Why women of colour in geography? Gender, Place and Culture 13(1), 33 38. Little, J. (2002). Gender and Rural Geography: Identity, Sexuality and Power in the Countryside. Harlow: Prentice Hall. Little, J. and Panelli, R. (2003). Gender research in rural geography. Gender, Place and Culture 10(3), 281 290. Little, J., Peake, L. and Richardson, P. (eds.) (1988). Women in Cities: Gender and the Urban Environment. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education. Longhurst, R. (2001). Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries. London: Routledge. Mackenzie, S. (1980). Women’s place women’s space. Area 12(1), 47 49.

Massey, D. (1984). Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production. London: Macmillan. Massey, D. (1991). Flexible sexism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9, 31 57. Mazey, M. and Lee, D. (1983). Her Space, Her Place. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. McDowell, L. (1984). Towards an understanding of the gender division of urban space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1, 59 72. McDowell, L. (1991). Lie without father and Ford: The new gender order of post fordism. Transactions Institute of British Geographers, N.S. 16, 400 419. McDowell, L. (1997). Capital Culture Gender at Work in the City. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. McDowell, L. and Massey, D. (1984). A woman’s place? In Massey, D. & Allen, J. (eds.) Geography Matters! A Reader, pp 128 147. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McDowell, L. and Sharpe, L. (1997). Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings. London: Arnold. Momsen, J. and Kincaid, V. (1993). Different Places, Different Voices: Gender and Development in Africa, Asia and Latin America. London: Routledge. Momson, J. and Townsend, J. (1987). Geography of Gender in the Third World. Albany, NY: State University of New York. Monk, J. and Hanson, S. (1982). On not excluding half of the human in human geography. Professional Geographer 34, 11 23. Morin, K. and Berg, L. (1999). Emplacing current trends in feminist historical geography. Gender, Place and Culture 6(4), 311 330. Moss, P. (ed.) (2002). Feminist Geography in Practice: Research and Methods. Oxford: Blackwell. Norwood, V. and Monk, J. (eds.) (1987). The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pratt, G. (2004). Feminist geographies: Spatialising feminist politics. In Cloke, P., Crang, P. & Goodwin, M. (eds.) Envisioning Human Geographies, pp 128 145. London: Arnold. Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Seager, J. (2003). The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World. New York: Penguin Books. Seager, J. and Olsen, A. (1982). Women in the World: An International Atlas. London: Pan Books. Soja, E. (1989). Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Tivers, J. (1978). How the other half lives: An historical study of women. Area 10(4), 302 306. Valentine, G. (1989). Geography of women’s fear. Area 21(4), 385 390. Wekerle, G., Peterson, R. and Morley, D. (eds.) (1980). New Space for Women. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Wekerle, G. and Whitzman, C. (1995). Safe Cities: Guidelines for Planning, Design and Management. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Women and Geography Study Group of the IBG (1984). Geography and Gender. London: Explorations in Feminism Collective in association with Hutchinson. Women and Geography Study Group (1997). Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman. Zelinsky, W. (1973). The strange case of the missing female geographer. Professional Geographer 25(2), 101 105.

Feminist Geography, Prehistory of S. Bowlby and J. Tivers, University of Reading, Reading, UK, and Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction In Britain, the history of feminist geography began in the late 1970s. This article is about the largely unwritten ‘prehistory’ of feminist geography in Britain. The first stirrings of concern for the geography of women seem to have taken place in North America in the early 1970s, but did not impact the United Kingdom until the mid 1970s. What did established women geographers feel about the male dominance of the discipline before the mid 1970s? Many of them, like Monica Cole and Alice Coleman, found important roles within the geographical community, and did not question the male bias of its subject content. In the early 1970s, however, a new generation of geographers began their study. They had been brought up in a post war world of growing women’s employment, when women’s education and academic achievement were becoming ac cepted among the middle classes. Feminist geography began to develop among this new generation. We start our story by outlining the state of feminism in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then discuss the intellectual and social context within which geographers in Britain were working.

It was out of such tensions and concerns that the women’s movement began. In North America and Britain, groups of women began to meet to share ideas and ex periences and to develop political demands that were expressed through a variety of demonstrations and public statements. At this period, the majority of women activists were white, educated, and middle class: as many feminists have pointed out, this resulted in later claims that the experience and oppressions of non white and working class women had been excluded from the framing of feminist politics and theory. These claims were later to result in intense debate within feminism and major changes in feminist theory and practice. However, from its inception the women’s movement was politically disparate – it encompassed a wide variety of views, from liberal rights based demands for equality to radical questioning of women’s sexuality and separatist movements. Between 1970 and 1978, the women’s movement, nevertheless, articulated seven demands: (1) equal pay; (2) equal edu cation and equal opportunities in work; (3) financial and legal independence; (4) free 24 hour nurseries; (5) free contraception and abortion on demand; (6) a woman’s right to define her own sexuality; and (7) freedom from violence and sexual coercion.

Second-Wave Feminism The so called ‘second wave feminism’ is generally held to have developed out of the Civil Rights and leftist movements that were active in the 1960s in North America, Europe, and Australasia. This was a time of increased prosperity for adolescents and young adults that encouraged a ‘youth culture’, evidenced in con sumption of new styles of music and dress, which ap proved opposition to the ideas of the older generation and sought sexual freedom, facilitated by the develop ment of ‘the pill’. The Civil Rights Movement in North America and the opposition to the war in Vietnam en couraged ideas about liberation – for oppressed colonial peoples, from racial prejudice and from outmoded social conventions. Many women who engaged in these move ments became disillusioned with the treatment they re ceived from male activists – relegated to routine work and organization, while men played the more glamorous activist and leadership parts – summed up in the image of women ‘making the tea’. Furthermore, sexual liberation often meant that women activists were expected to pro vide sexual services for male leaders as part of their delivery of ‘sexual liberation’.

Anglo-American Geography in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s The so called ‘quantitative revolution’ in geography oc curred in the 1960s in Britain and North America. A new concern to develop and use rigorous ‘scientific’ theory and methodology, adopt positivist methodology, and statistical analysis of quantitative data became widely accepted. Much of the methodological and theoretical inspiration for this approach came from neoclassical economics. As behavioral geography developed, ideas and methods from psychology were also drawn in. This was a discipline which talked about genderless ‘indi viduals’ and ‘households’ whose decision making resulted in the creation of settlement, travel, and economic ac tivity patterns that might be predicted and modeled. Other traditions still continued and alternative ideas and approaches were also in evidence. As Hanson asks us to imagine, however, this was a world in which: women’s subordinate status is vividly evident through gender differences in educational attainment (years of formal education), employment (job type, hours of

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Feminist Geography, Prehistory of employment, wages), and political power (presence/ab sence in governmental decision making positions) (y) in which geography journals and university geography curricula are practically devoid of the words ‘‘gender’’ and ‘‘women’’ and in which all instructional materials implicitly, if not explicitly, assume that all salient geo graphical actors are male. Imagine university geography teaching staffs, graduate student cohorts, and national geography conferences composed almost entirely of white men. (Hanson, 2008: 1)

Hanson describes the type of geographical education that both authors of this article received as under graduates and, in the next two sections, we tell our stories of ‘discovering feminism’ as we now recollect them. In doing so, we have struggled to re create for ourselves the intellectual and social climate of the period as well as details of times, places, and people. As many commen tators on ‘narrative approaches’ have remarked, such re call in not always accurate and we apologize to others who were there at the time if we have misrepresented or omitted events or people. Drawing on the material of our stories, we will finish with a discussion of how feminist ideas entered geography in the UK.

Sophie’s Story In 1966, I (Bowlby) left Cambridge, eager to train as a postgraduate student at Northwestern University in Chicago. At the time, the Geography Department at Northwestern was in the vanguard of the ‘new’ quanti tative geography. In my second year as an undergraduate, I had been inspired with enthusiasm for this approach by reading William Bunge’s Theoretical geography and by the ideas of Peter Haggett and Dick Chorley, lecturers in the Geography Department at Cambridge. And I was not disappointed – courses on math, economics, and stat istics, and discussions of research on Monte Carlo simulations of the spread of innovation and modeling of travel behavior seemed exciting and novel (if difficult!). It never occurred to me to question the validity of this approach or to think that geographers should pay at tention to the differences in the lives of men and women; however, I was becoming aware of some of those differ ences in my own life. Specifically, some members of staff in the Department thought that women ‘were not worth taking on as postgrads’ or that we were there to ‘catch a husband’ and some fellow male students resented being outshone by their female peers. I was angry and surprised that my, and other women’s, desire to learn and excel academically was not taken seriously (and thought their attitudes old fashioned and ridiculous). Although in my personal life I was adopting feminist principles, I knew nothing of feminist politics or theory and, certainly, it did

not occur to me to question the gender blind nature of geographical study – indeed, I had no idea of such a concept. In retrospect, I see that during my stay at North western I also encountered ideas, politics, and approaches that moved me in the direction of feminist theory. I be came more committed to left wing politics through my reactions to the Chicago race riots, the political up heavals of the Chicago Democratic convention of 1968, and the Kent State shootings in 1970. I was introduced to sociological thinking through a wonderful course run by Janet Abu Lughod. In 1971, I went back to Northwestern, from the UK, to spend a summer writing up my thesis and sharing a house with Susan and Perry Hanson, who were analyzing data for their theses from a diary study of household travel behavior in Uppsala, Sweden. This allowed them to analyze the differences in the travel behavior of employed men and women – one of the first geographical analyses that explored the implications of the gender division of labor. Back in Britain as a lecturer at Reading University in the early 1970s, I was asked to lecture on Social Geog raphy and began to read literature in urban sociology, as well as the new ideas about Marxist geography. A reading group of social scientists at Reading was exploring Marxist literature and I quickly became a convert to this (to me) new type of approach. At the same time, my experience in job hunting and at conferences had made me more aware than before of the prejudices and pitfalls facing woman academics: at one interview I was asked if I could guar antee not to have a baby before I was 35. I was fortunate in ending up in one of the rare Departments that welcomed women, and where other women lecturers were soon ap pointed. I was also introduced further to feminist political ideas by John Silk who started lecturing in the Department the year before me, and by his wife Cathy Silk. I got a grant, in 1975, from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC, a government funded public body), to extend the work I had done for my thesis on knowledge of, and access to, shopping opportunities. In this research, I surveyed each sample household’s ‘principal grocery shopper’ most of whom were, of course, women. My thesis had stemmed from an interest in mental maps and the ways in which everyday travel in the city might lead to the development of knowledge of shops and leisure opportunities. By the mid 1970s, I was beginning to re frame the problem in terms of inequality and class differences but it was only through doing this study that I became increasingly con cerned with the fact that it was ‘women’ who were doing the shopping, and began to think about the implications of inequalities in domestic labor. These ideas were given further impetus when, in 1975, Laurie Pickup came to the Department to do a thesis on women’s travel behavior and employment, supervised by Peter Hall and myself. His exploration of the then scanty literature on women’s travel


to work broadened my appreciation of feminist issues in geography. It was not until I met other people working with feminist ideas at successive Institute of British Geog raphers (IBG) conferences, from 1977 to 1979, that I became properly aware of the wealth of feminist work that had already been done in other disciplines and the geo graphical work that was underway in the United States. Some of the women I met had been actively involved in feminist politics and were better read than I in feminist analysis – notably Jo Foord, Jane Lewis, Suzanne Mack enzie, Linda McDowell, and Jacky Tivers. Many of them, like Jacky, were already working on aspects of women’s lives. It was wonderful to meet people of like mind – interested in similar ideas and political concerns, who understood the problems of being a feminist woman in a male dominated profession. We were strongly influenced by socialist feminist ideas and excited by the prospect of making a difference to geography and to the place of women academics in the discipline. These encounters led to my engagement with the Woman and Geography Study Group. This early period laid the foundations for developing my research beyond the initial focus on gen der alone, to engage with issues of age, disability, and race. The development of this later research was also aided by involvement with ReadiBus (a bus service for those who cannot use ordinary buses) and Berkshire Women’s Aid; by interaction with other feminist postgraduates at Reading (especially Jo Little, Linda Peake, and Pat Richardson); and by supervision of postgraduates who have studied a range of issues, from child care to binge drinking by young women, and extended my knowledge of feminist approaches and issues (including Gill Valen tine, Ruth Butler, Fiona Smith, Lisa Doyle and, at present, Melissa Stepney and Cheryl Nosworthy).

Jacky’s Story In early January 1977, I (Tivers) attended my first An nual Conference of the IBG, held that year in Newcastle. At this stage, I was one term into my PhD studies at Kings College, London (funded by SSRC). Only a couple of months earlier, my supervisor, Barrie Morgan, had urged me to focus on a specific topic for research from among the broad field of leisure studies, which was my main interest within geography, and had suggested that I look at the particular interests and experiences of a population subgroup. Since, at the time, I was in my mid thirties with an 18 month old son, he had proposed that I should study the leisure experiences of women with young children. It is to Barrie that I owe the original idea for the research project, which grew into the first com pleted thesis in feminist geography in the UK. By the time I got to the IBG conference at Newcastle, the topic

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had broadened into a study of the weekday activity patterns of women with young children and I was reading whatever I could find which was remotely relevant. I ‘discovered’ the work of Ann Oakley, the British soci ologist, and this opened my eyes to feminist issues for the first time, but I began to realize, with a sinking heart, that British geography had so far failed to grapple with even the simple differences between men’s and women’s lives, let alone the underlying reasons for these differences. So, it was with some despondency about my chosen topic that I found myself among only about 40 women delegates (out of about 600 delegates in total) at New castle IBG. In the queue to register I met a young woman lecturer, Bronwen Walter (now a Professor and well known expert on Irish immigration into the UK), who fell on me with undisguised enthusiasm as another woman in the male dominated place. Of greater immediate sig nificance to my research project was my meeting with three geographers from Reading University – Sophie Bowlby, John Silk, and Laurie Pickup. Each, in their own way, encouraged and challenged me. With Sophie and John, I talked about the idea of studying women, spe cifically, within the discipline of human geography. Laurie was a postgraduate student, like myself, and was researching mobility and transport issues for women. I was delighted to find that someone else (albeit a man!) was interested in women’s lives, from a geographical point of view. At the end of the conference I was warmly invited to go to Reading for further discussions at any time I would like to do so. The next few months brought further advances. I uncovered some American literature, relating to the ‘geography of women’. This mainly took the form of seminar notes and unpublished departmental papers, not easy to track down in the pre Internet era. I met Doreen Massey for the first time; she was lecturing in London, shortly before her move to the Open University. I con tacted her and requested a discussion with her. With characteristic generosity, she took me to a cafe´ and bought me lunch, and was incredibly supportive and encouraging, urging me to pursue my line of thinking and stressing its importance to geography. My field work (a large scale questionnaire survey of 400 women with young children) was conducted in September 1977 by 14 interviewers, including myself. The geography ‘frater nity’ heard about my research, probably through Barrie Morgan, my supervisor, who was a committee member of the Urban Geography Study Group (UGSG) at the time, and I was approached to present a paper at the following year’s Annual Conference, in a session organized by the UGSG. In preparation for this, I was asked to write a departmental paper, and present a seminar, at Kings College. The atmosphere within the department was supportive and professional, and did not at all prepare me

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for the onslaught of negative opinion which I was to face at Hull in January 1978. I still have the conference handbook, and it records that on the morning of Thursday, 5 January 1978, I gave a paper entitled ‘Constraints on spatial activity patterns: the case of women’ within the UGSG session ‘Socio spatial aspects of urban life’. This, I believe, was the first paper ever presented from a feminist perspective at a British Geography conference, although I was not really aware of making history at the time. I did call for the explicit consideration of women in geographical studies, but did not feel that the argument was anything other than ‘perfectly straightforward’. Despite the presence at the conference of people like Mayer Hillman and Anne Whalley, Peter Jones, John Raine, and Malcolm Moseley – all thoughtful academics who were researching household activity patterns and the transport needs of individual household members – with whom I had fruitful dis cussions, continuing long after the conference ended, my overwhelming experience of the conference was of being patronized, marginalized, and made to feel that my re search lacked validity and importance. The term ‘gender’ was not even understood by many people, as became apparent later. I returned from Hull in a bad mood, stormed into the postgraduate room at Kings College on the following Monday morning, and sat all day writing a polemical article for the journal, Area, before my annoyance and frustration had time to dissipate. Without discussing or revising it, I sent it off straight away to Jeremy White hand, the editor. To my shame, I assumed that he would reject it, and that would be another black mark against male dominated geography. But, within a very short time, he wrote back, accepting the paper for publication. It was in print within 6 months of submission – the first paper in a British geography journal to talk specifically about women. I am not particularly proud of the content – it is all talk and few facts, the editor had changed all the references to ‘gender’ into ‘sex’, without consulting me, and I felt too insecure, as a humble postgraduate, to alter the page proofs when they were sent to me. Neverthe less, it was a start. I had laid down a challenge: By accepting the household as the predominant unit of study in human geography and by neglecting the explicit study of the geography of women, geographers have implicitly accepted the existing structure of society and prevented the examination of one of the most persistent and pervasive forms of inequality in our society (Tivers, 1978a, 305).

At the 1978 Hull IBG conference, the British collective of the Union of Socialist Geographers (USG) was formed, the inaugural meeting taking place (for some reason, which I have now forgotten) in my bedroom. In the spring

of 1978, I received my first copy of the USG newsletter, containing an interesting review article by Bonnie Loyd, entitled ‘The quiet revolution in geography’. This opened my eyes to research which had already taken place in the United States on the ‘geography of women’ and to the number of dedicated courses which were already being taught there. Loyd talked about the ‘quantity of studies’ and a ‘steady stream of research’, but I felt that the focus of these studies was not on the real constraint which underlay women’s lives; and so I wrote ‘Yet another view on the geography of women’, which was published in the USG Newsletter at the end of the year. In this paper, I argued that geography had been too concerned with production, at the expense of reproduction, and that it was necessary to focus on the ‘gender role constraint’, which was both supportive of capitalism and the frame for women’s lives. By the end of 1978, I was a committee member of the IBG Social Geography Study Group, and had met both Linda McDowell and Suzanne Mackenzie. Suzanne ar rived from Canada to study at Sussex University, bringing with her a wealth of experience in feminist geography from North America. Together with Sophie Bowlby, we organized the first dedicated session about women and geography at an IBG conference, which took place in January 1979 at Manchester University. It was not an unqualified success; heavy snowfall caused a lot of problems and our principal speaker, Pat Burnett from the US, was unable to attend. Suzanne and I gave papers, hers being a review of North American work in the field, and Sophie read Pat’s paper. As I have recorded elsewhere, ‘the debate tended to descend into acrimony, with tight corners being fought by the Marxists who saw feminism as a distraction from the ‘true cause’ of socialism’. This was quite ironic, considering that feminist geography in the UK had been born, primarily, out of Marxist geography. Nevertheless, we were undeterred, and two further articles appeared in Area in 1979 and 1980, the first being Linda McDowell’s analysis of women in British geog raphy and the second, a joint article by Suzanne, Linda, and Jo Foord, which sought to extend and perpetuate the discussion on women and geography. At the 1980 Annual Conference of IBG, the Women and Geography Working Party was set up, with Linda McDowell acting as the guiding force. After some delay, during which the group was required to demonstrate the level of support for its activities, the Women and Geography Study Group (WGSG) was inaugurated in 1982. One of its first actions was to enter publishing, since there was a complete lack of material in the UK suitable for teaching feminist geography. It was decided that a textbook would be written collectively; Linda McDowell, Sophie Bowlby, and I were appointed editors. The joint editing was something of a nightmare, in the era before e mail, but


the book (Geography and gender: An introduction to feminist geography) was very well received and has become a ‘classic’ in human geography. With this book, the ‘pre history’ of feminist geography could be said to have ended, as feminism then began to be part of the ‘history’ of the discipline; increasing numbers of papers and books were published, and increasing numbers of conference sessions organized, from a feminist perspective, mainly through the auspices of the WGSG, which has gone from strength to strength in the last 25 years. As I have re corded elsewhere, ‘I am proud to have been a part of the beginnings of feminist geography, and am proud too of the movement which has grown and expanded beyond the wildest dreams of the early days’.

Concluding Thoughts Clearly, our stories provide only two glimpses of the processes that led to the early development of feminist geography. The other people we have mentioned might tell it in very different ways. But our stories demonstrate that the development of early feminist geography was not the heroic creation of a few pioneers. Rather, in many places during the 1970s, women and some men in geography began to explore the geographies of women, and in time, this led to the examination of a range of explanations for the subordination of women and to the development of more sophisticated feminist geographies. Those of us working in or entering the geographical discipline, in the 1970s, were in a social and economic environment in which ideas of equal opportunities for women, of sexual equality, autonomy, and choice were widely debated and relevant to young educated women entering the academic profession. We addressed issues drawn from our own experience and raised new questions linked to the new ways of life that women were adopting. Although some came to these questions after involve ment in feminist politics, many did not and only began to explore the wealth of feminist literature outside geog raphy after initiating their research. Despite the contribution of some men, this history also suggests how important it was for the creation of a feminist geography that women were entering the dis cipline. It was women’s interest in and experience of aspects of everyday life affecting women that led to the rapid expansion of the early geography of women and the subsequent development of feminist geographies. This reminds us of the importance of striving to ensure that the discipline is open to disadvantaged and minority groups. For example, the developments of geographies of sexuality and of disability have been led largely by people who are bisexual, gay, lesbian, or disabled. It is vital that we work to ensure openness at a time when the

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pressures of the research assessment exercise (RAE) and work intensification in universities may limit the access of such groups and the development of challenges to contemporary ideas. See also: Feminism and Work; Feminism, Maps and GIS; Feminist Groups within Geography; Feminist Methodologies; Feminist Political Economy; Possibilism.

Further Reading Bowlby, S. R. (1979). Accessibility, mobility and grocery shopping. In Goodall, B. & Kirby, A. (eds.) Resources and Planning, pp 293 323. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Bowlby, S. R. (1984). Planning for women to shop in postwar Britain. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2, 179 199. Bunge, W. (1966). Theoretical geography. Lund: C W K Gleerup. Foord, J., Mackenzie, S. and McDowell, L. (1980). Women’s place, women’s space. Area 12(1), 47 49. Haggett, P. (1965). Locational Analysis in Human Geography. London: Edward Arnold. Harvey, D. (1973). Social Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold. Hanson, S. (2008). Geography and gender: 1984 women and geography study group. In Hubbard, P., Kitchin, R. & Valentine, G. (eds.) Key Texts in Human Geography. pp 91 980. London: Sage. Hanson, S. and Hanson, P. (1974). Daily Activity Patterns of Working Women and Working Men: Are They Different? Clarke University: Mimeo. Lewis, J. (1984). Postwar Regional Development in Britain: The Role of Women in the Labour Market. PhD Thesis, University of London. Lewis, J. and Foord, J. (1984). New towns and new gender relations in old industrial regions: Women’s employment in Peterlee and east Kilbride. Built Environment 10, 42 51. Loyd, B. (1978). The quiet revolution in geography. Union of Socialist Geographers Newsletter 3(3), 30 32. McDowell, L. (1979). Women in British geography. Area 11(2), 151 154. McDowell, L. (1983). Towards an understanding of the gender division of urban space. Environment and Planning D Society and Space 1, 59 72. Pickup, L. (1983). Travel Issues in Women’s Job Choice: An Activity Based Approach. PhD Thesis, University of Reading. Relph, E. (1970). An enquiry into the relations between phenomenology and geography. Canadian Geographer 14, 193 201. Tivers, J. (1977). Occasional Paper No. 6: Constraints on Spatial Activity Patterns: Women with Young Children. London: Kings College, Geography Department. Tivers, J. (1978). How the other half lives: The geographical study of women. Area 10(4), 302 306. Tivers, J. (1978). Yet another view on the geography of women. Union of Socialist Geographers Newsletter 4(2), 25 26. Tivers, J. (1982). Weekday Spatial Activity Patterns of Women with Young Children. PhD Thesis, University of London. Tivers, J. (1997). In Women and Geography Study Group of the Royal Geographical Society (ed.) Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference, pp 36 38. Harlow, UK: Longman. Tuan, Y. F. (1971). Geography, Phenomenology and the study of human nature. Canadian Geographer 15, 181 192. Wilson, E. (1986). Hidden Agendas. London: Tavistock. Women and Geography Study Group of the IBG (1984). Geography and Gender: An Introduction to Feminist Geography. London: Hutchinson. Women and Geography Study Group of the IBG (1997). Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference. Harlow: Longman.

Feminist Groups within Geography K. M. Morin, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Feminism It has many different meanings across space and through time; therefore, we can speak of many feminisms, each with its own history, geography, and central problematic. ‘Western’ feminism typically includes: liberal feminism, which focuses on equal rights for women, especially in the paid labor force; standpoint or radical feminism, which argues for a challenge to patriarchy by valorizing feminine characteristics that have been relegated to inferior status within masculinist social norms; and feminisms that focus on difference, which take an explicit interest in the processes by which our identities as gendered individuals are produced. Feminist Group For purposes of this article, refers to an organization, society, or other group of academic geographers whose research and work advances feminist and/or gender geography, or women’s status in the discipline of geography. Gender Generally refers to the socially constructed characteristics of femininity and masculinity, or what might be called the social organization of sexual difference. In some societies, no differentiation is made between the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. In other contexts, gender is understood to be in contrast with sex, with gender referring to socially defined gender behaviors, characteristics, and identities, and sex referring to the natural biological differences between women and men. Judith Butler has argued, however, that the notion of two sexes is itself a product of the gendering process – in her words, the ‘regulatory fiction’ of two genders – and therefore, that the gendering of bodies themselves as masculine or feminine must be open to analysis. Moreover, because gender is understood to intersect with other axes of social difference (race/ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, geography, and so on), we can say that numerous gender(s) (masculinities and femininities) exist, not simply two, and that there are dominant, hegemonic ones, and subordinate ones.

Introduction In taking inventory of the organizations and societies through which information about feminist and gender geography, or women’s status in the discipline of geog raphy, is discussed, supported, and disseminated, one immediately confronts the many layers of social organ ization that limit or make possible a feminist ‘group’ in

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geography. The larger political context of feminism and the question of what constitutes an important or worth while women’s or gender issue varies considerably from place to place, as does the type of geography practiced in universities and research centers around the world. Shifts in gender politics are fundamentally relevant to the kind of geography practiced, and this, in turn, to the types of networks and communities of geographers that are cre ated, and for what purposes. The ‘waves’ or stages of women’s liberation move ments often align with the purposes and goals of feminist groups in geography. Today, we see simultaneous efforts worldwide to both improve women’s visibility and status as geographers, informed by the tenets of the mid twentieth century ‘second wave’ women’s liberation movement in the West (the struggle for equal rights for women), as well as promotion of research on women and gender that is informed by what some call third and fourth wave feminisms. The latter are underlain with new understandings about how gender and other social identities and differences are produced in the first in stance, and with social justice concerns that reach beyond ‘women’s lib’. Moreover, the capacity for like minded feminist geographers to group themselves together and share in formation via technology, conferences, publications, and so on is deeply embedded within uneven economic devel opment around the world. In addition, there are networks of significance around the world whose work contributes to feminist geography though they are not necessarily comprised of geographers, for example, in sub Saharan Africa. Even within North America and Europe where formal organizational structures for feminist geography are well developed, feminist geographers group themselves and network informally in countless ways. Within this context it should be noted at the outset that for practical reasons, this article does not include much discussion of the many feminist NGOs, informal networks, and other groups of feminists whose work contributes to feminist geography but who are not af filiated with a geographical organization or society. Let it also be acknowledged that Anglo American hegemony in the feminist geography academy, English as the lingua franca in publication outlets, the question of what con stitutes useful feminist theory for challenging material inequalities, and so on are some of the many issues that confront feminist geographers as they attempt to build a transnational feminist praxis through feminist geog raphy groups. Some feminist groups, such as the IGU


Commission on Gender and Geography, frequently bring such transnational issues to the forefront of their work, whereas these issues receive little play in others. The following outlines feminist geography groups active on the contemporary landscape. These often mirror places where gender and geography courses are taught at universities and/or where feminist geography has become a relatively mainstream branch of geo graphical research and scholarship. Active feminist geography groups can thus be noted in the US, UK, and Canada; in Spain and many Western European countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Switz erland; and in Japan. Feminist geographers in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, parts of Africa, Israel, and Brazil, among others, tend to work with like minded individuals outside of geography’s more mainstream organizations and structures.

International Groups IGU Commission on Gender and Geography The Commission on Gender and Geography of the International Geographical Union (IGU or Union Geó graphique Internationale), based in Brussels, Belgium, represents the main, if not the only, feminist geography group whose mission and purpose is international in scope. The IGU itself, designed to initiate and foster international cooperation in geographical study and re search was formally established in 1922, though Con gresses had been meeting since 1871. Of its numerous commissions and study groups, the IGU’s Commission on Gender and Geography is a group of 350–400 geog raphers from approximately 60 countries in all parts of the world. The Commission organizes several meetings each year and maintains its intellectual network through academic publications, newsletters, and its website. One of the main ways the Commission sustains international networks and collaboration among feminist geographers is through the hosting of workshops and paper sessions at IGU Congresses, as well as symposia outside the Congresses. Gender Commission partici pation in IGU Congresses began in Sydney, Australia in 1988, and since then have had a presence in Beijing (1990), Washington, DC (1992), Prague (1994), Havana (1995), Den Haag, the Netherlands (1996), Lisbon (1998), Seoul (2000), Durban, South Africa (2002), Glasgow (2004), and Tunis (2008). The 2004 Congress in Glasgow featured daily sessions organized on gender themes. Since 1989, the Commission has also co sponsored symposia outside of the IGU Congress sites in combi nation with other commissions and study groups. These include a symposium on ‘Women and work’ in Sao Paolo, Brazil, in 1991; one on ‘Gender and environment’ in Legon, Ghana, in 1995; ‘Women in the Asia Pacific

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region’ in Singapore, in 1997; ‘Beyond tolerance: social and spatial coexistence’ in 2002, in Tel Aviv; and in Rome, in 2003, a symposium on the theme of ‘Gendered cities’. Scores of other programs, workshops, and sym posia have been held in other places in other years. For the 2004–08 period, the central theme of the Commission was ‘Crossing borders’, with events held in Zu¨rich, Switzerland; Taipei, Taiwan; and Tunis, Tunisia. The ‘crossing borders’ theme focused on international mi gration and transnationalism on a global scale, among other issues. The Commission also supports international feminist geography study and research through a number of publications, including its ‘Working papers series’ (35 have been published to date), and newsletter. The Commission’s newsletter is an important venue for international communication – it reports individual and group ‘news from around the world’, lists important publications on topics in feminist and gender geography, announces programs of study and conferences and events throughout the world. Janice Monk compiles this news letter, and has done so twice a year since 1988. Janice Monk is one geographer who has made invaluable con tributions connecting feminist groups worldwide, par ticularly through her work in the IGU and as editor of the Gender Commission’s newsletter. The Commission’s steering committee is meant to include representatives from all major regions of the world, in order to foster worldwide communication and participation in geographical study and research. Monk (2007) outlines the history and current networks that have developed within the IGU Gender Commission, noting its success in making connections internationally, though questioning how and to what extent the Com mission actually fosters ‘worldwide’ communication and participation. Heaviest participation is from Europe (es pecially Spain and Italy), Anglophone North America, and the Asia Pacific, with major absences of participants from Eastern Europe, East Asia (except Japan), Africa (except South Africa), and Latin America (except Argentina). Monk emphasizes the significance of tech nology and geography’s infrastructure in any location in shaping international communication. That noted, the Commission’s website highlights the value of bringing together scholars from different parts of the world. The Canadian scholar Linda Peake notes that: [m]eeting new colleagues from all parts of the world made me too acutely aware of the stereotypical ways in which I was still thinking. It allowed me the opportunity to listen, first hand, to what non Western geographers thought of North American and Anglo European geog raphy: that it was preoccupied with theory, but more importantly, theory built upon concepts that often had little applicability to their everyday lives.

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Judit Tima´r, from Hungary, likewise noted that: [d]iscussions that showed us that some ideas worked out in advanced capitalist countries cannot be applied in other regions spurred us to rethink some terms and concepts [such as production reproduction and mascu line city feminine suburb].

Society of Women Geographers The US based Society of Women Geographers (SWG) is a professional and social organization established in 1925 by women who were accomplished explorers (Marguerite Harrison, Blair Niles, Gertrude Shelby, and Gertrude Emerson Sen). At that time, no organization existed to encourage women in geographical exploration and re search and to share women’s achievements and knowledge. The Society interprets ‘geographer’ broadly, and has grown to include women from allied disciplines such as anthropology, geology, oceanography, and ecology: its website declares that these are women who ‘love adventure y and who meet to share discoveries and adventures’. About 20% of the SWG memberships are academics. Janice Monk has written on a number of women who worked at the New York based American Geographical Society in the mid twentieth century and who held SWG offices, delivered lectures, encouraged and supported women’s movement into geography as a career, and ad vocated for women’s research to be included as geography. The Society’s organized groups are located in New York, Washington, DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Florida. In addition, members at large are distributed throughout the US and corresponding members live overseas. Meetings, held regularly during the academic year in the larger groups, provide members a forum for presenting the results of their travels or work, and a social atmosphere in which to exchange infor mation informally. The entire Society meets triennially. The Society’s records, archives, and library are main tained at its international headquarters in Washington, DC. The headquarters also houses a museum displaying the work of Society members, and bestows a number of awards for women who have made distinguished contri butions to knowledge about the world.

National Groups Subsequent discussion organizes feminist geography groups at the national scale, and focuses primarily on groups that are affiliated with larger geographical organizations. United Kingdom One of the most active feminist geography groups is the Women and Geography Study Group (WGSG),

organized in the 1970s as an informal group and then as a ‘working party’ within the Institute of British Geog raphers (IBG), the then professional organization of academic geographers in the UK. The ‘working party’ became a formally recognized ‘study group’ within the IBG in 1980s, and eventually a ‘study group’ of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS)/IBG when the RGS and IBG merged. The group’s aims are to encourage the study of the geographical implications of gender differ entiation in society and geographical research from a feminist perspective; and to encourage and facilitate the exchange of information and ideas with reference to re search and teaching in these areas. (An earlier mission of the group was to work to improve the position of women within the discipline of geography, but that was omitted from the group’s stated mission in the late 1990s.) The WGSG published their first book in 1984, Geog raphy and Gender: An Introduction to Feminist Geography, and both this one and the later one, Feminist Geographies: Ex plorations in Diversity and Difference (WGSG 1997) were published under the name of the group rather than in dividual authors, with royalties paid to the group. This was an explicit attempt to foreground the feminist value of cooperation. In 2004, the WGSG also published a CD ROM, Geography and Gender Reconsidered. The group publishes a newsletter, maintains a website, and sponsors sessions at the annual RGS/IBG conference. It also or ganizes occasional study weekends. Among other such groups in the UK is a feminist geography reading group at Edinburgh University, similar to the informal reading groups or research clusters that have evolved at many institutions worldwide. United States Two feminist geography groups are affiliated with the Association of American Geographers (AAG). The Committee on the Status of Women in Geography monitors and attempts to improve and enhance the status of women in the profession, through programs such as career counseling and mentoring. The Geographical Perspectives on Women (GPOW) specialty group of the AAG is one of the largest such groups of the AAG, with over 500 members in 2007. The purpose of the group is to promote geographic research and education on topics relating to women and gender, investigate ways in which gender is geographically constituted, and understand dif ferences between lives of men and women in different places. The group has an active listserv for communication among members, Geogfem, although as with most such lists, one need not be a member to join. GPOW publishes a newsletter, maintains a website (which links to a bibli ography of feminist geography scholarship), sponsors gender and feminist geography related sessions at the annual AAG meetings, bestows a number of awards, and


hosts receptions for feminist geographers, mostly honoring feminist geography books published during the year. GPOW has recently added an ‘international liaison’ pos ition to its board of directors in an attempt to make better connections between AAG members and feminist geog raphers internationally. A number of more loosely affiliated groups support feminist geography in the US. The National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) has a women’s special interest group that provides awards for research in geography education by women graduate students. Among other initiatives, this group helped publish the Historical Calendars of Women Geographers in 2005 and 2006. The regional women’s group of the Association of Pacific Coast geographers also provides travel grants and prizes to women students, though not solely for feminist work. Also, a number of ‘supporting women in geog raphy’ (SWIG) chapters exist across the USA, typically associated with individual universities (such as the ori ginal group at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of California Los Angeles, and Pennsylvania State University). A Canadian chapter is also active at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. SWIGs are loose associations of students, faculty, alumni, and community members who seek to promote the participation of women in academic or professional geography, via training, career development, resources networks, and through personal support. These goals are pursued through a diverse range of strategies, and operating norms vary significantly from group to group. Attempts are underway at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to create a Global SWIG network, via a listserv called ‘swig global’, designed to keep people in contact with one another and facilitate the planning of joint events. Canada Like GPOW, the Canadian Women and Geography Study Group (CWAG), of the Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG), sponsors conference sessions, social events, awards, a newsletter, a listserv (cwag@geog. ubc.ca), and a website. As a group, the CWAG also ad ministers the Suzanne Mackenzie lecture, whereby a feminist scholar is invited every 2 years to present the plenary lecture at the annual CAG conference. The stated aims of CWAG are to provide a forum for people interested in issues of access, equity, and the well being of women in geography; and for those whose re search is linked to questions of gender as they relate to class, race/ethnicity, sexuality, nation, and physical abil ity. As such, the purpose of this group has vacillated between a study group for feminist research, and a sup port and advocacy group for women geographers. In 2004, the group surveyed its members on ‘who we are and

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where we are going’. Respondents noted that members are united by shared research interests, common strug gles (such as achieving tenure), and connections to aca demia. Among other things, students noted a greater desire to participate face to face at CWAG functions, but are limited in financial resources to do so. Travel grants, low cost opportunities to connect with other members, and informational resources were sought most. Faculty responded that they maintain standing in the group ‘to keep abreast of new research, keep in touch with others in the profession, and to know who is working on what’. Connections sought by both faculty and students were noted to be personal as well as professional. Through the survey, the group also discovered that ‘female geog raphers’ feel less at home in the organization than do feminist geographers, which the former hoped could be resolved through the hosting of additional informal social events. Antipodes New Zealand/Aoteorea feminist geographers have been at the forefront of postcolonial feminist work in Anglo phone geography, reflecting the presence of issues about race, colonialism, identity, and power in New Zealand. Feminist geographers working especially in the depart ment of geography at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, Zealand, have been key to this development. In addition to their extensive contributions in feminist research, the New Zealand feminist geographers have published a number of articles about feminist geography in their country. Without the large membership base of an organization such as the AAG or CAG, feminist geography groups in New Zealand and Australia today function on a more informal rather than formal basis. There are many active feminist geographers in both places, and they informally ‘group’ themselves pro fessionally and socially. Western Europe Spain has a long standing feminist geography group lo cated at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, under the leadership of Maria Dolors Garcia Ramon. The group has an official designation as a formal research group within the university, and as such has a different organizational structure than those in the Anglophone world. The group has taken an active leadership role in feminist geography worldwide, organized an array of conferences, and published works of feminist geographers from Spain and elsewhere. The Barcelona group’s first conference was held in 1986, a regional meeting of the IGU, which was followed by many subsequent events including an international conference on feminist geog raphy in February 2006. Publication of the conference papers appears with Belgeo (2007).

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Information on the active, German language feminist geography group linking Germany, Switzerland, and Austria can be found in the digital newsletter Feminis tiches Geo Rundmail, started in Bern in 1988 and pub lished four times per year. The newsletter offers calls for papers, conference and event announcements, infor mation on degree programs, lists of publications, relevant links, and discussions of topics of interest (such as the status of gender studies at various universities). Gender and geography study groups are active in all three countries, and several articles have appeared (in English) on German speaking feminist geography and feminist geography groups. Ba¨schlin (2002) has written on the history of German feminist geography groups. There were no central or ganizing groups until 1987 when students from Frankfurt organized a feminist geography workshop, the result of which was an official ‘Working Circle on Feminist Geography’. The Circle then held its first conference in 1989 in Saarbrucken, articulating its desire for a ‘geo graphical women’s movement’. It has met at every Ger man Geography Day since 1989. Women students formed their own informal group to discuss their situation, holding meetings every 6 months, and without any for mal institutional support. According to Ba¨schlin, research projects of German feminist geographers include topics on spatial structures from which results dominance or exclusion of social groups; questions about the definition of ‘labor’ and the gendered division of labor; and social constructions of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Sybille Bauriedl outlines the debate about feminist geography in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. She notes that many of the younger German students studied in British or Scottish universities, attended the IBG conferences, and participated in its WGSG. As a result, she observes, ‘‘there was a direct transfer of the British debates into German speaking feminist geography.’’ Eventually, several subnetworks emerged among students, for example, a post structural feminist geography group, and at their initiative, reading weekends with Doreen Massey emerged between 1999 and 2004. Finally, a network of feminist geographers funded by the European Union for graduate teaching – known as Erasmus – brought an array of universities together for 9 years, 1990–98. Coordinated by Joos Droogleever Fortuijn, the network comprised of individuals from six universities in five countries (Britain, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Greece). They organized intensive courses on gender and geography each year, in Durham (1991), Barcelona (1993), Athens (1994), Roskilde (1995), Durham (1996), Amsterdam (1997), and Barcelona (1998). Fortuijn (2002) notes the problems the group encountered, however, when the majority of the materials available for the courses were from an Anglo American perspective.

In the Netherlands, other kinds of organizations sponsor feminist geography work, such as the Emanci pation Section of the national professional organization of planners – NIROV. This was an active group of female academics and professionals in geography, planning, and architecture who organized seminars and workshops, and published books and brochures, on gender issues in planning and housing. Eastern Europe Tima´r and Jelenszkyne´ (2004) document the small num ber of feminist geographers working in Hungary today (perhaps only two or three), and the absence of any for malized feminist geography groups there. One journal issue, approximately 10 articles, and one textbook chapter have been produced by feminist geographers in Hungary to date. They argue that this situation is similar to that of other Eastern European countries. One shared feature of postsocialist countries and the Commonwealth of Independent States is the strength of an applied, empirical type of economic geography, with little value attached to gender and feminist geography. One of the explanations for this is the pattern of feminism itself in Eastern Europe. Within the socialist countries, the gender equality ‘declared’ by the state made it difficult for feminism to flourish. Moreover, when women’s and gen der studies did appear in Eastern and Central Europe in the 1980s, the state sponsored version of Marxism was of little help as a critical tool. Today, feminist geography in Hungary has less interest in the body and gendered identities more typical of the West, than in the serious gender inequalities produced by the social relations of class politics produced especially during the transition from socialism to capitalism. Voiculescu and Lelea (2003) discuss the situation of feminist geography in Romania. Here again, the authors argue that it was not until after 1989 that scholars began to acknowledge that women’s and gender problems had not been solved by communism. Today, there are a number of researches published, and at least one course on gender and geography (at West University, Timi soara), but little in the way of formalized feminist geog raphy groups. Africa Awumbila (2007) outlines feminist geography in Anglo phone African countries, and argues that gender equity has been acknowledged, since the early 1990s, as key to sustainable development. Higher education courses in women, gender, and place have increased since that time, as has networking among feminist scholars and activists. In sub Saharan Africa, feminist geography and gender and geography courses primarily appear in the Anglo phone countries of Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya,


and Uganda. In Kenya, there are no organized feminist groups in geography; most feminist geographers are members of other feminist groups such as the Association of African Women Researchers. Monk (2007) overviews the importance of the IGU Commission on Gender and Geography, for developing feminist geography in Africa. The Commission held a training workshop in Ghana in 1995, for example, and two IGU Gender and Geography meetings have been held in South Africa – in Pretoria in 1995 and in Durban in 2002. There appear to be no explicitly feminist geography groups in South Africa, although many aca demics focus their research on feminist and gender geography. Other affiliated groups work on similar problems and issues, for example, the International La bour Research Group is engaged in and with feminist groups locally and regionally. Israel Blumen and Bar Gal (2006) discuss the situation of feminist geography and feminist geography groups at meetings of the Israeli Geographical Society (IGS). The first gender and geography session at an IGS meeting was in 1992; yet, today only about three individuals identify themselves with gender and feminist research, much of this is related to planning. The authors assert that the conference itself is an important node in the potential for feminist geography groups to take shape – ‘the confer ence serves as an important informal meeting place of real people’ – though the gender composition of the speakers is uneven, women speakers have significantly lower prestige than men, and gender segregation of knowledge in the various subfields of the discipline is apparent. Due to the common perception that women are more closely aligned with their social group than with each other, their marginalization as a group remains concealed. Asia The Southeast Asian Geography Association (SEAGA) does not support a distinct feminist geography group. Yeoh and Huang (2007) overview gender and geography in Southeast Asia, in the countries of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Cam bodia, arguing that the type of geography practiced in the region does not lend itself well to development of feminist geography groups. While women’s and gender studies programs and centers are vibrant in the region, geography is ‘a poorly resourced, mainly descriptive, conservative, task oriented subject valorized primarily for training teachers for school geography and producing policymakers who can contribute to national socio economic development’. Strategies to legitimize and strengthen women’s and gender studies have included the

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establishment of networks, such as the Feminist Research Network (FEMNET) in Thailand. The Association of Japanese Geographers also does not have a formal feminist geography group, but a group of feminist geographers have nonetheless been working and publishing together since the late 1990s. Partici pation in the IGU Gender and Geography Commission is also high, mainly as an outgrowth of the conference held in Seoul, Korea in 2000. According to Hiroo Kamiya: ‘‘We have tackled housing problems of Japanese single working women, socioeconomic conditions of one parent families, and women’s role in the Japanese management system.’’ The group has published Urban Space of Single Women in Japan (2004), and a recent issue of the Geo graphical Review of Japan (2006) was devoted to ‘Resi dential choices and housing problems of working women in Tokyo’. The group has also published an article in Geographische Rundschau International, and the Gender Atlas of Japan. Their common concern lies in con temporary Japanese women within the context of glob alizing world economy. Latin America Among the Latin American countries, feminist geog raphy is most alive in Brazil and Argentina, owing to the strong ties to the Barcelona group. Cross Atlantic lec tureships between geographers in Barcelona and Buenos Aires, among others, have especially nurtured the de velopment of gender and geography in Argentina since the 1990s. Feminist geography in Brazil and Argentina was shaped primarily by working class activism and local and global political economic currents, and remains situated within a type of geography that is positivist and empir ical. Special journal issues have been published and meeting sessions organized in feminist geography, but the field remains to become institutionalized in curricula and professional organizations. In Brazil, there are no feminist geography groups within the Association of Brazilian Geographers; however, feminist geographers work within a Research Group on Urban Analysis linked to the Ministry of Education’s National Council for Techno logical and Scientific Development.

Conclusion Uneven development of feminist geography and feminist geography groups worldwide is apparent. Feminist geography groups are most active where the production of research on women, gender, and feminism has become mainstream within larger institutional contexts, in uni versities, and within other geographical circles. Modest advances have been made recently by feminist geography

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groups in places where they heretofore were absent, most notably expressed through journal issues devoted to feminist geography, through courses taught in gender and geography; and through links with women’s and feminist NGOs. The diversity of feminist geography and thus the extent of formal or informal feminist geography groups reflects the tremendous diversity of ideals, practices, obstacles, and goals of geographers in various places; and these in turn must be understood with respect to the type of knowledge production valued at the local and national levels. See also: Feminism and Work; Feminism, Maps and GIS; Feminism/Feminist Geography; Feminist Geography, Prehistory of; Feminist Methodologies; Feminist Political Economy; Possibilism.

Further Reading Awumbila, M. (2007). Challenging contexts: Gender studies and geography in anglophone African countries. Belgeo: Feminist Geographies around the World 3, 261 274. Baschlin, E. (2002). Feminist geography in the German speaking academy: History of a movement. In Moss, P. (ed.) Feminist

Geography in Practice: Research and Methods, pp 25 42. Oxford: Blackwell. Blumen, O. and Bar Gal, Y. (2006). The academic conference and the status of women: The annual meetings of the Israeli Geographical Society. Professional Geographer 58, 341 355. Da Silva, S. V. (2007). Geography and gender studies: The situation in Brazil and Argentina. Belgeo: Feminist Geographies around the World 3, 371 382. Garcia Ramon, M. D. and Monk, J. (eds.) (2007). Belgeo: Feminist Geographies around the World. Heverlee, Leuven: Belgeo Geo Institut. Longhurst, R. and Johnston, L. (2005). Changing bodies, spaces, places, and politics: Feminist geography at the University of Waikato. New Zealand Geographer 61, 94 101. Monk, J. (2007). Generizando la geografıá: Personas, lugares e ideas. (Engendering geography: Connecting people, places, and ideas). Documents d’Ana`lisi Geogra`fica 49. Moss, P. and Al Hindi, K. F. (eds.) (2008). Feminisms in Geography: Rethinking Space, Place and Knowledges. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Tima´r, J. and Jelenszkyne´, I. F. (2004). Female representation in the higher education of geography in Hungary. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 28, 101 110. Voiculescu, S. and Lelea, M. A. (2003). A review of gender and geography and its development in Romania. Analele Universita˘t¸ii de Vest din TimiS¸oara, Geografie 13, 123 144. Women and Geography Study Group. (1997). Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference. London: Longman. Yeoh, B. S. A. and Huang, S. (2007). Placing ‘gender’ in ‘geography’ across Southeast Asia. Belgeo: Feminist Geographies Around the World 3, 383 397.

Feminist Methodologies D. Thien, California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Feminism A dynamic set of theories, practices, and social movements broadly committed to social change in the areas of enhancing women’s social and political status, and gender equity. Method A technique or tool used in the research process, for example, conducting interviews, administering questionnaires, or taking photographs. Methodology The overarching rationale or theory for choosing and using methods in a research process, that is, a methodological framework that describes the ways researchers do research and why. Positionality The particular context of any individual generated in diverse and uneven ways by the intersections of one’s multiple locations (e.g., social, cultural, sexual, geographical, economic, and political). Post-Structuralism A set of ideas comprising a theoretical critique of structural epistemological frameworks; a stance which encourages deconstructing unified narratives and acknowledging the diversity of multiple knowledges which may shift within and across space and time. Power Within a post-structural framework, power is understood as a dynamic process, which circulates unevenly between people and places, creating material and symbolic effects. Reflexivity Within research methodology, reflexivity is the practice of explicitly attending to one’s positioning or location, and acknowledging how this affects the research process. Relational The notion that identities (of people, places, and entities) are created always ‘in relation to’ something or someone else. Situated Knowledges The production of knowledge is understood to be interdependent with one’s particular situation or positioning, a stance which admits the existence of multiple knowledges.

Feminist Methodologies in Geography: A Brief Historical Overview Feminist methodologies encompass a range of research techniques, practices, and theoretical frameworks. Col lectively, feminist methodologies have made a major contribution to the field of geography by critiquing ontological and epistemological claims, which privilege masculinist worldviews, knowledge, and knowers;

reshaping dominant research theories and practices, bringing attention to the presence and absence of par ticular bodies, subjects, and knowledges in geographical knowledge; and highlighting critical reflexivity as an im portant research process. The use of feminist method ologies within geography is usually, but not exclusively, associated with the subdiscipline of ‘feminist geography’. Counting Women Early feminist research within geography was mainly quantitative. Influenced both by the ‘quantitative revo lution’ within geography, and second wave feminist ac tivism and scholarship, feminist researchers sought women’s equal representation both as scholars and sub jects of geographical research. Feminist geographers gathered empirical data to document women’s material experiences, map their spatial representation, and em pirically demonstrate their existence and importance as subjects of geographical research. Such feminist empiri cism is often reductively referred to as the ‘add women and stir’ strategy of early feminist revisions to scientific scholarship. Yet, in addition to bringing women into geographical focus, this feminist empirical work con tributed to an important epistemological shift: establish ing women as knowledgeable researchers. Positioning women as producers of geographical knowledge created a profound challenge to the long standing separation of rationality (ascribed to masculinity and masculine bod ies) from irrationality (ascribed to femininity and femi nine bodies) within geography’s ‘positivist’ scientific tradition, and so set in motion a significant critique of those epistemological foundations. Qualifying Gender and Space In the 1980s and into the 1990s, feminist scholars in geography shifted from the empirical mapping of women’s spatial experiences to examinations of the significance of gendered spatial divisions which work to keep women and men in particular places. For example, attention turned toward landscapes and the built environment as tangible reflections of gender on urban and work spaces. The previously predominantly quantitative body of feminist research became more qualitative, as quantitative methods which counted and categorized women were viewed as unsatisfactory for detailing the complexity of women’s everyday lives. The universal category of ‘woman’ as the foundation for feminist politics was rethought by feminist scholars, in response to critiques of feminism as a white,

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Western and middle class phenomenon. ‘Woman’ was exposed as an essentialist category, and feminist theorizing began to shift toward feminist politics underpinned by radical differences. Methodologically and substantively, with the category of ‘woman’ deconstructed, feminist scholars shifted from a strongly material set of concerns with women and their lives to a focus on more symbolic issues of gender inequalities. As geography’s ‘cultural turn’ took hold in the 1990s, a post structurally influenced agenda within geography, together with ongoing interactions with critical feminist scholarship, engaged feminist geographers in more crit ical theoretical positions and a more challenging, and increasingly qualitative methodological enterprise. Gen der as a unit of analysis was reconsidered; for example, as constructions of particular masculinities and femininities; as performative; and as discursive or textual moments. The spaces of the geographic discipline were also crit ically reexamined. Gillian Rose’s Feminism and Geography offered an important critique of geography’s masculinist claims to knowledge. This influential text develops an analysis of scientific objectivity, with its unmarked and unremarked male subjects, and exposes the resulting disguised and partial nature of what is presented as sci entific, geographic truth. This text marks a pivotal mo ment in feminist geography, because it articulates the gendered nature of geography’s disciplinary practice – a validation of earlier feminist geographers’ challenges and an encouragement for those to follow. Bodies of Influence Many contemporary feminist geographers give central weight to theorizations which acknowledge power re lations as a key aspect of gendered processes. Influenced by feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, many feminist geographers no longer consider gender as an adjective, but rather as a lively, spatial pro cess; that is, we ‘do gender’, and we do it differently through the enactment of multiple possible masculinities and femininities in our everyday practices, in our relations with others, and with the spaces of our actions, in our use of language, and use of space. These ontological and epistemological shifts have encouraged and necessitated multiple methodological possibilities for investigating gender identities for their different meanings, spatialities, and investments of power, including intersections of class, ethnicity, sexuality, and/or ability, as well as encouraging attention to bodies, emotions, and peformativity.

Feminist Theories and Geographic Practices Feminist thinkers have had a major impact on feminist methodological developments in geography. Feminist

philosophical, political, and epistemological critiques have assessed the ways of knowing intrinsic to positivist scientific research and identified a masculinist framework infused with the Enlightenment ideals, questioned con structions of authoritative representations of knowledge, and reconsidered who counts as a legitimate knower. Importantly, feminist scholars also have formulated other, valid ways of knowing. Such epistemological repositionings include feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, feminist postmodernism, situated knowledges, and relationality. Feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and feminist postmodernism are epistemological reorien tations of science famously elaborated by Sandra Harding in The Science Question in Feminism. Empiricism values experience as the only basis for knowledge. However, feminist empiricism illuminates the existing sexist biases in scientific inquiry, questioning the neutrality of what is deemed as scientifically valid experience. Methodo logically, feminist empiricism seeks to reform science by proposing the inclusion of feminist and other value sys tems as a corrective for biased scientific methods – ef fectively, to make ‘bad’ science, ‘good’. Standpoint theory advances the idea that an individual has a particular ‘standpoint’ from which s/he is able to know the world, and which gives that person epistemo logical privilege. Influential proponents of standpoint theory include Patricia Hill Collins, noted for her an alysis of Black women’s standpoint, and Nancy Hartsock and Dorothy E. Smith, both of whom build from Marxist theory to explore the consequences of evaluating know ledge from the perspective of women’s lived realities. For example, women’s labor may be invisible or incompre hensible when considered within a male biased labor analysis; however, research grounded in the perspective of women ensures their labor is counted. Standpoint theory, with its claim for knowledge con structed from a woman’s way of knowing, has proven controversial because of its implication that women form a coherent, homogeneous group. In addition, standpoint theory’s legitimacy has been tested when employed to justify privileged knowledge of a research population, for example, when women interviewing women are under stood to exploit their shared feminine experiences to manipulate female participants. As a methodological strategy, standpoint has also been questioned, for ex ample, when female researchers are presented as better qualified to interview women because all women share the experience of sexism. Feminist postmodernist or post structural theories reject the universalism presumed by standpoint theories. Donna Haraway, for example, has influentially extended the notion of standpoint in her vision of feminist ob jectivity: ‘situated knowledges’. She argues that to be situated is more complex than having a standpoint;


instead, it is key to acknowledge that any location is limited and also that knowledge is embodied, that is, grounded in real bodies. Such embodied knowledge comes from being in place, and from acknowledging the partiality of that location, rather than from claiming a special privilege or knowledge of oppression. In contrast to a structuralist emphasis on social and cultural systems of organization presided over by a disembodied master subject, this post structural ren dering of scientific knowledge questions the unity and stability of any subject. Importantly, this questions the processes of becoming a subject. Without ignoring the potentially powerful effects of deeply entrenched boundaries, such as the long standing separation of ‘mind’ from ‘body’, or ‘man’ from ‘woman’, post struc tural feminists have sought a more relational, or ‘inter subjective’ understanding of subject formation. Methodologically, this post Cartesian rethinking has made explicit the significance of spatial and embodied aspects of identity. Feminist methodologies have privil eged relationships, and as such, intersubjective or relational dynamics of knowledge production and re production are highlighted. Efforts to theorize ‘subjectivity’ have also enlivened understandings of gender and gender identity while complicating methodological endeavors. In Gender Trou ble, Judith Butler influentially proposes that the substance of gender is constituted in its very performance: gender is performative. That is, gender is not about who we are, it is not a priori, nor is gender an aftereffect of pre established identity; rather, identity is a function of so cial, cultural intelligibility, and as such, who we are always in the process of becoming in relation to (gen dered, masculinist, and heterosexist) regulatory dis courses of personhood. Considering subjectivity as a process has allowed for a thoughtful examination of how this process is both in extricable from power relations and also, as geographers such as Doreen Massey and Isabel Dyck have noted, intertwined in places; that is, subjectivity is also a spatial process. Feminist geographers Pamela Moss and Liz Bondi have each emphasized not only the specificities of particular placings, but also the oscillation of our mul tiple positionings, a series of ever shifting relational contexts within which we are variously embedded and which must be considered as part of our methodological framework. Liz Bondi emphasizes relationality in her assessment of processes of empathy and identification in interview encounters. Bondi offers the interview relation as an oscillation, a movement of meaning making, within which the interviewer moves between positions of ab sorption to ones of observation. Bondi argues that this oscillation is necessary for the creation of a ‘psychic’ space which allows the similarities and differences of the interviewer and interviewee to be realized, if mostly

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unconsciously. Rather than position emotional involve ment and analysis as mutually exclusive, the relational encounter requires acknowledgment and management of emotional content as an explicit part of the research process. The emphasis on identity as a process and as know ledge produced ‘in relation to’ an other has methodo logical implications. What are gathered as data, what ‘counts’ as knowledge, the necessarily limited possibilities for self awareness in any research encounter, and the partial quality of all information must be accounted for in methodological decisions. Reflexivity refers to the pro cess of naming or ‘locating’ a researcher’s various subject positions, as a means of acknowledging the partiality of ones’ positioning and so the limits of one’s knowledge and contribution to knowledge, and of knowledge itself. This process stands in intentionally marked contrast to historical scientific claims to objective truth, presented as a seamless, disembodied, neutral process of collecting facts. Within feminist geography research, self reflexive research has become a methodological standard. Reflex ivity is characterized by the researcher’s close self examination of how s/he shapes and is shaped by re search encounters. In particular, feminist geographers consider the effects of gender and power upon/in re search encounters, for example, on what kinds of research questions are asked, what resulting research data are gathered, and where, and how those data are interpreted. Debates about reflexivity within feminist qualitative re search range from the criticism that this practice is overly self centered to the insistence that it is a necessity of ethical research.

Feminist Methodologies in Geography: Practices and Politics Feminists in geography made early methodological in roads by highlighting what was lacking in existing geo graphical research and redefining what was suitable for study. Where data about women’s experiences were ei ther nonexistent, or buried in assumptions and mis perceptions about women’s lives, feminist geographers sought to remedy the situation. Existing data were dis aggregated to discover data on women, and data ex plicitly about women’s experiences were collected. But, encouraging appropriate and relevant data collection and management is only a partial story of feminist meth odological approaches within geography. These ap proaches reflect their feminist roots, in that feminist research has been characterized not just by ‘what’ it studies, but also ‘how’, ‘why’, and ‘where’. Feminist methodologies in geography emphasize the importance of how research is done (methods), why it is done (methodologies and epistemologies) – underscoring

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the politics of a feminist research process, and where (e.g., the ‘field’ and the academy). Shulamit Reinharz’s ques tion, ‘‘is there a feminist method?’’ can be extended to ‘‘what makes a methodology feminist within geography?’’ The emphasis is not on particular techniques, as much as it is on how such methods are used; how and why par ticular research questions are chosen; and how, why, and where feminist researchers are engaging with the mul tiple and dynamic subjects of geographic research, in cluding themselves. Although by no means limited to the following, feminist methodologies often incorporate some common themes: (1) a critical attention to issues of social injustice, (2) an agenda for social change, (3) an emphasis on ethical research relations, and (4) an ex plicitly subjective research process. Within geography, these are still present, but an additional preoccupation with the gendered spaces and places of research also affect feminist methodological choices in geography. Methods Feminist methodologies have incorporated both quanti tative and qualitative methods, with preferences which have shifted over time. In the 1990s, the bulk of feminist research within geography employed qualitative research methods. Indeed, the entry for ‘Qualitative methods’ in A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography simply says ‘‘See Feminist Methodology.’’ This qualitative slant reflects feminist geography’s sustained critique of positivist trends in geographic research which emphasize quanti tative methods designed to garner factual, testable data. Qualitative methods, in contrast, are deemed es pecially useful for gathering subjective data about per ceptions, experiences, and representations. Furthermore, qualitative methods have been seen to offer greater po tential for fulfilling feminist political aims; for example, by making space for women and their experiences, by inviting a collaborative research process, and in so doing, making a deliberate stand against the required objective distance of scientific research. This epistemological stance has been regarded as a strong ‘fit’ with feminist research frameworks which sought first to highlight women’s particular experiences in the world, then to document inequalities and their effects, and later to in vestigate the ways in which power relations, gender, and spaces intersect. Finally, qualitative methods also invite a specific, embodied awareness of the spaces and places of geographic research. The particular qualitative methods employed by feminist researchers in geography include interviews, autobiographies, oral and life histories, ethnography, participant observation, focus groups, participatory ac tion research, role play, photography, video, and critical, textual, and discourse analyses. This diversity of techni ques reflects both the range of feminist geographies and

the interdisciplinary roots of feminist research within geography. Qualitative Methods The interview, a one to one structured, semi structured, or unstructured research dialog between researcher and participant is favored as the classic feminist research technique. This qualitative method is valued for putting the production of knowledge into the hands of the par ticipant. Interviews privilege respondents’ voices, ac cording authority to their experience, rather than subjecting them to scientific scrutiny. However, as more nuanced theorizations of power have circulated, claims that the interview method straightforwardly validates women and women’s experiences have met with resist ance. Feminist researchers have probed the way in which both interviewer and interviewee do and do not have power, the multitude of ways in which power is exercised, for example, by refusing to answer questions or with holding key information, and the ways in which relations of power within any research encounter may be con cealed or revealed, accessible or inaccessible to either party. Similarly to interviews, autobiographies, life histories, or oral histories have been employed as feminist methods which gather women’s untold, unheard, or undervalued stories. Within geography, such narratives have been used as a method for reading the relationships between gender and place, for example, in feminist reorientations of specific landscapes such as the home, and as a means of placing the researcher. Narratives can demonstrate the specificity of individual lives in particular places, while also revealing the powerful effects of wider sociocultural, political, or economic forces. However, the notion of a seamless, coherent, ‘true’ account of any life has been deconstructed, raising questions of authority and agency with regard to the collection and representation of life narratives. These feminist and post structural challenges to the universality or linearity of narrative claims to knowledge have been met in part by reflexive research practices which call for an awareness of one’s own and others’ always situated positions. Ethnography encompasses a range of classic anthro pological techniques, including participant observation, interviews, and associated textual and/or archival an alysis. An ethnographic study is an in depth study of a particular group of people, usually carried out in a fieldwork context. While ethnography is not inherently feminist, the ethnographic suite of methods has been seen as a good fit with feminist aims, because these methods privilege subjective accounts, and encourage engaged dialog between researchers and communities. As such, an ethnographic approach offers an interpretative alter native to the focus on objective fact collection prioritized


in positivist research. A methodological concern is the ethnographic focus on small groups of people in par ticular places, precluding the application of research conclusions to other populations or contexts. However, many qualitative researchers willingly accept the limi tations of a small sample size in favor of the depth and richness of an ethnographic study. Additional concerns associated with ethnographic methods include issues of ethics and emotion which may arise as a consequence of the potentially intimate nature of fieldwork relations. However, feminist debates suggest that such issues arise in any research context and an explicit attention to these concerns enhances research quality. Focus groups have been utilized as a feminist method because they offer a potentially more flexible and less hierarchical arrangement than a one to one interview. Feminist arguments in favor of the focus group suggest that the larger number of participants in a focus group allow participants to engage more safely in discussions about matters of concerns to them, as opposed to in one to one conversation directed more explicitly by the goals of an interviewer. In addition, the focus group environ ment is argued to demonstrate more closely the pro duction of knowledge as a process of collective, relational meaning making, thus offering the potential for obser vation of this process in action. Participatory action research (PAR) explicitly seeks active social change through collaborative process. As a methodology, PAR is organized to respect and prioritize the knowledges and contributions of diverse research participants in all steps of the research process. Col laborative forms of research can be challenging, par ticularly in cross cultural research settings, due to differences in conceptual starting places or because dif ferent research outcomes are expected, needed, or wan ted. Seeking appropriate means for cross cultural work has required ‘decolonizing methodologies’ (a phrase coined by Linda Tuhiwai Smith in her eponymous book) in order to determine appropriate postcolonial, and antiracist methodological frameworks. However, the challenges of difficult engagements necessitate what can also be construed as the rewards of participatory re search: careful and respectful attention to the lives of others, to relationships, and to ethically sound research practice. These become ongoing reiterations of how to do collaborative and cross cultural research well. Quantitative Methods Quantitative methods are neither absent nor rejected in feminist methodologies. Quantitative methods are used in a variety of ways by feminist researchers in geography, despite the assumption that feminist research is purely or most appropriately qualitative. As the special issue of the Professional Geographer, Should Women Count?, exemplifies,

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quantitative methods are not, in and of themselves, antifeminist; rather it has been the underlying politics and the epistemological positionings of such methods within masculinist claims to objective truth which have resulted in feminist critiques. Quantitative methods em ployed by feminist researchers in geography include statistical measures, such as frequency counts and log linear models, as well as spatial analytic measures and geovisualization techniques represented by geographic information systems (GISs). Mixing Methods The use of multiple methods, known as triangulation, offers the opportunity for a thorough understanding of a research topic from multiple data sources, and also in vites validation of one source of data by another (e.g., comparing interview transcripts to survey results). As such, triangulation may be employed as a strategy to increase the validity and rigor of research. However, within feminist methodological discussions, the use of mixed methods as a means of garnering a more complete representation of reality is debated. Instead, mixed methods research offers an excellent demonstration of the partiality of any one method, and exemplifies the dynamic and multiple possibilities of geographical knowledge. A rise in mixed qualitative and quantitative methods research has followed the qualitative trend in the 1990s in human geography. The move toward mixed methods research emphasizes the respective strengths of both qualitative and quantitative research. While qualitative research can illuminate socially constructed and indi vidually lived meanings, quantitative research can high light key points of difference on a broadscale.

Troubling Feminist Methodologies in Geography Feminist geographers have strenuously and productively debated the politics and ethics of who does research, and how research is done and thought about, for whose benefit, and where. Such discussions consider the changes brought as analyses of power dynamics, and gender re lations have become more nuanced; as the possibilities and complexities of feminist research within a mascu linist disciplinary tradition have been articulated; and as the political claims of those in research processes have grown more divergent. In the process, feminist method ologies in geography have undergone rigorous (self ) examination. Researchers, by making a number of choices of in terpretation, and decisions about representation, dem onstrate the power invested in the construction and production of knowledge. The methodological dilemmas

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for feminist researchers include: how to subvert the masculinist authority invested in scholarly knowledge production, how to achieve feminist political aims within the context of scholarly expectations, and how to make space for women’s identities while challenging existing subject positions available to women. Feminist methodological debates illustrate the complexity of negotiating feminist scholarship, geographical discip linary frameworks, political engagements, and personal commitments. Feminists have been acutely conscious of the issues of power that necessarily arise between differently situated researchers and those with whom research is done, as well as from the ways in which knowledge is differently validated depending on who is producing the knowledge and about whom. Feminist geographers have been en couraged to practically address and debate these ethically complex issues of power and equality, including the adequate and appropriate representation of research ‘subjects’, the recognition that researchers are not self evidently in more powerful positions than the research participants with whom we work, what counts as whose knowledge, and the importance of a reflexive research process. Representing Research ‘Subjects’: Whose Voices, Whose Power? Respect for research participants remains a core concern in feminist methodological work in geography. In re search practices, feminist researchers continue to seek ways to respectfully acknowledge and represent em bodied identities, while remaining sensitive to issues of ethics and power, and remaining consistent with an underlying feminist commitment to social change re search. The complexities of such representations have laid bare conflicting agendas. The politics around ‘giving voice’ to those outside research roles, while also claiming an institutional, professional, or personal research au thority, epitomize the competing agendas of feminist research. Feminist researchers struggle between the desire to validate the knowledges of the ‘researched’ and to pol iticize that knowledge in political and/or academic do mains. The desire to validate women’s experiential knowledge is a historically integral component of femi nist methodologies which have a long standing social change agenda. However, this notion of affirming women’s realities as political act, evocative of second wave feminist consciousness raising activities, has been extensively critiqued. In particular, Black American feminists have expressed concern that validation of women’s experiences by academic researchers promotes White feminist agendas and de emphasizes women’s di verse representations. Despite such perceptive efforts to

question the fixity of power, and to trouble the capacity of a researcher to ‘empower’ research participants, re searchers often subscribe to an ‘empowerment’ agenda. Postcolonial, antiracist, and indigenous perspectives continue to challenge Western feminist representations and to highlight the limits of feminist epistemological challenges derived from a dominantly White Western academy. The increasing mobility of Third World women scholars and the resulting ongoing challenge to any uniform notions of researcher privilege is just one example which underscores the importance of this discussion. Whose Knowledge? The demand for reflexivity as a feminist methodological strategy has raised ethical and moral questions. To what extent should a researcher disclose personal, political, or academic alliances to research participants? Strategic concealment of personal or political details while in the ‘field’ may be practical or comfortable; however, inten tional misrepresentation raises ethical considerations, such as the possible imbalance between what is asked for and what is shared with a participant. As well, any at tempt to deliberately shape a research relationship in evitably alters the research outcomes. Sharing research outcomes with participants has become a common practice for feminist researchers; however, decisions about how to present data to a participant audience (e.g., by providing reports which are different from produced scholarly texts) raise complex questions about the pro duction of and power to control and translate knowledge. These issues of representation and translation are on going methodological considerations for the feminist researcher. Feminists in the Field(s) Geography has long privileged fieldwork as an essential and distinctive component of geographical research. The ‘field’ is the place where geographical knowledge has been discovered, often in the form of imperial conquest of colonial spaces. Feminist critiques have assessed this place as one of pernicious repetition of masculinist normative research practices which leave feminine bodies out of place in a masculine field. Fieldwork reconsidered as a feminist endeavor has been the subject of much feminist methodological discussion. In particular, femi nist researchers have challenged the gendered nature of fieldwork, the notion of the field as a clearly defined, bounded area, and the conventional distinctions such a place sets up between bodies who conduct research and those who participate or are discovered. In addition to the ‘field’, the academy, and to a much lesser extent, the classroom, have been considered by feminist researchers for their effects on where and how research takes place.


Feminist Methodologies in Geography: New Directions Feminist methodologies in geography are established enough to have achieved a certain orthodoxy; however, this remains a dynamic area of activity within feminist and human geographies. Theorizations of gender, power, dif ference, and their attendant and shifting spatialities con tinue to matter to feminist politics and feminist research practices. Current trends in feminist methodological practice in geography demonstrate an explicit focus on extending theorizations of identities and embodiment, including ‘raced’ and ‘sexed’ bodies; expanding critical geographical methodologies to consider (e.g., antiracist geographies, decolonizing methodologies, and emergent transnational identities); and incorporating both qualitative and quantitative methodologies into feminist research (e.g., into geographical explorations of affect and emotion). Identities and Embodiment Pamela Moss, an important voice in feminist methodo logical discussion in geography, puts forward the notion of ‘specificity’ as an intentionally troublesome reworking of partiality. Specificity details the ways in which bodies become specific in active relationships to other bodies and within multiple possible spaces. As a methodological intervention, specificity unsettles claims to clarity which may accompany a declared partial perspective; instead, it asserts the dynamic and multiple nature of participants’ situated locations in research settings. Methodologi cally, specificity challenges a single (partial) view of re search, of method, of methodology itself, and this has consequences for how research is presented, how the value of research is assessed, and what and how we constitute as feminist methodologies in geography. Gill Valentine also attends to bodies in considering the methodological enactment of intersectionality, a theorization of the multiple relations between social categories. She proposes intersectionality must be flexed in more than theoretical ways; instead, it must be more explicitly empirical and embodied as a means of at tending to power and inequalities. The deliberate ‘prac tice’ of intersectionality invites an attention both to bodies and the mutually constituted spatialities of lived experiences, as well as to the workings of power which lead to exclusionary or inclusionary spacings. Critical Methodologies Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies is an important text for feminist methodologists. While cred iting feminist scholarship for its profound impact on scholarship, especially regarding the consistent epi stemological critiques of positivist research traditions, Smith nonetheless ‘re marks’ the limits of the critique –

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namely, as women of color have argued since the 1970s, feminist revisioning is still bound by Western or Euro pean worldviews. Such persistent cultural orientations continue to lie beneath, and so limit feminist methodo logical endeavors. Smith urges researchers to go beyond a reflexive accounting of individually held beliefs, and in stead to take deliberate care to examine the effects of knowledge as a legitimating process, and to thoughtfully and explicitly consider whose agendas and beliefs are legitimized in any research project. To these ends, Audrey Kobayashi outlines an ongoing antiracist feminist and geographical project with methodological impli cations. She argues for activist engagement, the use of positionality as the beginnings of social transformation (not reflexivity as a merely descriptive exercise), and the acknowledgment of processes of racialization in daily practice and scholarship. Clearly, it remains critical for researchers to acknowledge and continually problematize power relations in research. Feminist methodological debates about power and gender have continued rele vance in the context of increasingly transnational iter ations of feminist research. Mixing Methodologies Mei Po Kwan and other feminist geographers have ex tended feminist methodologies in geography by collect ively offering a set of post structural, post positivist critical perspectives on GIS. Inspired by feminist theor ists, and also by qualitative analyses of emotion in geography, key elements of this feminist geographic work are the emphases on the significance of the spatial as embodied, as emotional geographies, and on the political. Simultaneously, this work reclaims the power of maps and reconfigures the epistemological underpinnings of GIS, reorienting their potential as critical, political tools for intervention and feminist critique. Enacting, Embodying, and Embracing Feminist Methodologies These diverse feminist methodological directions con tinue to raise questions about what makes methodological endeavors feminist, and to explore what constitutes the spaces of feminist research methodology with geography. This very ability to call methodological actions, enac tions, and spaces into question is a strength of feminist geographical scholarship. Feminist methodological ap proaches in geography are inspired by a collectivity of feminist scholars who demonstrate a vast capacity to diversify, an imaginative creativity for rethinking meth odological dilemmas, and a desire for the long standing social change agenda of feminist scholars. Feminist methodologists within geography continue to extend the repertoire for effective, ethical, and productive practices of feminist methodologies.

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See also: Embodied Knowing; Emotional Geographies; Emotional Knowing; Feminism/Feminist Geography; Situated Knowledge, Reflexivity; Subjectivity.

Further Reading Bondi, L. (2003). Empathy and identification: Conceptual resources for feminist fieldwork. ACME 2(1), 64 76. Bondi, L., Avis, H., Bankey, R. et al. (2002). Subjectivities, Knowledges, and Feminist Geographies: The Subjects and Ethics of Social Research. Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Davidson, J. and Bondi, L. (2004). Spatialising affect; affecting space: An introduction. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 11, 373 374. Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 3, 575 599. Harding, S. G. (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Katz, C. (1996). The expeditions of conjurers: Ethnography, power, and pretense. In Wolf, D. L. (ed.) Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork. Boulder, CO: Westview. Kobayashi, A. and Peake, L. (2000). Racism out of place: Thoughts on whiteness and an antiracist geography in the new millennium. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90(2), 392.

Kwan, M. P. (2007). Affecting geospatial technologies: Toward a feminist politics of emotion. Professional Geographer 59, 22 34. McDowell, L. (1997). Women/gender/feminisms: Doing feminist geography. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 21, 381 400. Moss, P. J. (2002). Feminist Geography in Practice: Research and Methods. Oxford: Blackwell. Moss, P. J. (2005). A bodily notion of research: Power, difference, and specificity in feminist methodology. In Nelson, L. & Seager, J. (eds.) A Companion to Feminist Geography, pp 41 59. Oxford: Blackwell. Parr, H. (2001). Negotiating different ethnographic contexts and building geographical knowledges: Empirical examples from mental health research. In Dwyer, C. & Limb, M. (eds.) Qualitative Methodologies for Geographers, pp 181 195. London: Arnold. Reinharz, S. (1992). Feminist Methods in Social Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rose, G. (1997). Situating knowledges: Positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. Progress in Human Geography 21, 305 320. Sharp, J., Browne, K. and Thien, D. (2004). Women and Geography Study Group of the RGS IBG, Geography and Gender Reconsidered. London: WGSG. Sharp, J. P. (2005). Gender and geography: Feminist methodologies in collaboration and in the field. Progress in Human Geography 29, 304 309. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London; Dunedin: Zed Books; University of Otago Press. Valentine, G. (2007). Theorizing and researching intersectionality: A challenge for feminist geography. Professional Geographer 59, 10 21.

Feminist Political Economy R. B. Sarma, Cotton College, Guwahati, India & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Economic Restructuring The process of structural transformation, from manufacturing to services. Feminization of the Labor Force It is an ongoing process through which women in increased numbers enter the labor market. Feminine A set of social attributes associated with women or female as opposed or inferior to masculinity or masculine. Human Capital Human capital can be defined as the ability, skill, or knowledge acquired by an individual. Labor An activity that can be either waged (usually performed for an employer) to gain an income or unwaged (performed usually) within the household. Nimble Fingers Thesis that argues to demonstrate that wage differentials in the market factories all over the world tend to be male biased. It also illustrates that nimble fingers are socialized skills and not naturalized. Occupational Segregation The extent to which particular groups of workers are concentrated within different occupations. Political Economy An approach that treats economics as an extension of power and politics required to study any activity that connects to the production and distribution of wealth. Power The capacity of controlling influence to do something in a specified way. Work An activity that may involve either mental or physical force or both to carry out a task or manufacture a good.

Introduction The study of the geography of feminist economics has become a central concern to virtually all branches in human geography, sociology, and beyond. In the sub discipline’s recent history, over the last two and a half decades, this study has made contentious developments. Both economic and feminist geography have had am bivalent relationships to Marxist theory and scholarship. With the publication of the stirring books by David Harvey, Doreen Massey and Neil Smith, Marxist schol arship became widely used to redefine the research frontiers of economic and feminist geography. While economic geography’s core aim is to explore and re explore the economic dimensions of the people–place relationship embedded in the dynamics of capitalism,

urbanization, imperialism and development, the pro duction of nature, restructuring, globalization and neo liberalism, the geography of feminist economics aims to study the gendered nature of economic processes, con fined largely to the issues of work and labor alongside the aforementioned processes of economic dimensions. Many feminist economic geographers have used a political economic framework to discuss the shift in the gendered nature of economic development. This article addresses the notion of work and labor that has been central to the feminist political economy.

Feminist Political Economy: Notion of Work and Labor In the nineteenth century, women’s rights advocates and writers such as Harriet Taylor Mill (1807–58) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) paid attention to the exclusion of women from economic activity and their continuous dependence on men. It was actually since the 1970s that the notion of work and labor has been a highly contested and is a wholly pressing debate within feminist geography with many different claims to what, where, and how these notions should actually be studied to signify the politics of gender. It is, therefore, essential to unpack these two notions as a concept to study the geography of feminist political economy. Marxist schol arship that has revolutionized the working class politics, while analyzing the socioeconomic system of capitalist society, has included women’s struggle for equality within this class politics. At the same time, this scholar ship has also tended to negate the significance of gender politics as an independent cleavage of this class politics. Nevertheless, in the early twentieth century, many Marxist writers such as Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) and Alexandra Kollantai (1872– 1952) averred that women’s struggle for liberation cannot be flagged as an independent cleavage; instead they fo cused on the inclusion of this struggle with that of so cialism while remaining within the Marxist scholarship. Second wave feminism that emerged in the 1960s, as a universalized and radical expression of women’s rights in capitalist societies as a result of the anti Vietnam war movement and civil rights campaign, was also inclined to Marxist philosophy as a radicalized platform to refocus on the notions of work and labor. Traditional economic geography defines an economy as consisting of only firms and markets, thereby failing to acknowledge the home economics, which is often based

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on structures of power as well as social and political relationship, embracing domestic division of gender segregated work, including the care of children, other household members, and shopping. Arguably, the activ ities of unpaid labor of the household provide hugely in the maintenance of household standards of living and to the sustainability of the overall economy. Feminists, therefore, have attacked the notion of work and divided the same into ‘remunerated work’ (employment or paid labor) and ‘household chores’ (constituted of domestic labor and child care or unpaid labor). Feminists thereby argue that the spatial structure of remunerated work is based only on the production and reproduction (or manufacture of goods and services for the market), which render invisible the tensions and contradictions making up the notion of ‘home’. Therefore, feminist economic geographers have urged an ‘add on’ and ‘count in’ strat egy to address the gendered nature of development. For example, in 1988, Waring urged adding a monetary value to the economics of unpaid domestic labor and then counting its value as a part of gross domestic product (GDP). Again, Ironmonger in 1996 has argued that the value of unpaid labor at home is approximately equal to the valuation of the goods and services manufactured for the market by paid workers. Ironmonger, therefore, urges an inclusion of this valuation of unpaid labor as gross household product (GHP). In an ideal world, however, the reality of feminizing the economy is far more complex. In 2003, Cameron and Gibson Graham urged the possibility of an alternative economy. Drawing alongside the works of many other contemporary femi nists, Cameron and Gibson Graham supported the ar guments of Waring and Ironmonger and examined the various ways, approaches, and hidden predicaments in which women face exclusion from the economy and called for the possibility of an alternative economy. Nevertheless, the key insights to the inaccurate repre sentation of the gendered nature of development lie within the spatial polity of public/private divide. Contemporary debate about the public sphere is drawn mainly from the seminal works of Ju¨rgen Haber mas. In 1989, Habermas, for example, argued that the public domain represented the citizen’s power to actively participate and debate in the political life, while the private domain represented the lack of such power. Public/private dichotomy is, of course, far more complex than this mere distinction would suggest. But much of this complexity would serve to elaborate this simple division. Its literature has expanded rapidly in recent years, diffusing to diverse regions and periods over space and time that reflects mainly on current issues, social processes, and events, such as class, democracy, anticorporate protests, and the emergence of the Internet. Feminists too have joined this project to challenge the notion of public/private dichotomy. Habermas is

criticized by the feminist school of thought. In 1989, Fraser, for instance, was criticized for overlooking the significance of the gendered and the unequal social re lationship insinuated in the actual or conceptual insti tutional segregation of the family from the market relationship or from the political. It is well documented that such a conceptual framework divulging the conflicts between women’s use of public and private space has reinforced women’s oppression. Earlier, in 1983, Gar imarnikov et al. argued that the amount of domestic labor performed by women at home, although crucial, is at the same time implicit in enabling men to devote all their energies to a competitive labor market. Arguably, the gender relations in the labor market impinge strongly on the constitution of gender relations in the family and the household. Importantly, this dichotomy has played a powerful role in the construction of gender relations. The notion of work came to be enforced spatially under the metaphorical division of public (paid work synonymous with employment) and private spheres (unpaid labor) since the Industrial Revolution that began in Great Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. The emergence of this division brought new divisions of labor between working class men and women and idealized separate boundaries for middle class men and women. The materialization of such spatial binary dualism came to be associated with that of the ‘home’ (feminine) for women and ‘work’ (masculine) for men. Arguably, the hidden politics of public/private dichotomy is rooted within the notion of power which itself is a difficult no tion to convey. Power is experienced in everyday life. In 2003, Allen tried to situate the notion of power from its spatial vocabularies to its spatial constitution. In doing so, he argues that space determines the role of power. Such tangled notion of power is generally expressed under four divisions: power over (power by men over men; men over women, that is, ability to influence); power with (power from collective action); power to (arrange to change the existing hierarchy); and power within (individual con sciousness, that is, sense of self worth and self knowledge of a person). Feminists have continued to argue that woman’s subordinated status is a universal fact. Arguably, power over features ‘home’ as a private and quiet space for women to perform unpaid labor, while ‘paid work’ is featured as a public space for men to perform paid labor. Many feminist scholars argue that increasing par ticipation of women in the paid employment accentuate the public/private distinction as fluid and blurred. Ar guably, many women empower themselves, moving be yond the power plays (‘power over’ and ‘power with’) to participate in paid employment with their ‘power to’ and ‘power within’ assets. Nonetheless, the thesis of public/ private dichotomy is discredited for being hegemonic, Euramerican, and enthnocentric. For example, many social scientists, including Momsen in 1991, argue that


this thesis fails to acknowledge the fact that in developing economies, the majority of women’s labor is absorbed into the informal sector, although they are remunerated, but such work is unrecognized in the official statistics on employment. It is well known that, since the end of World War II, there has been a steady growth in the number of women in paid employment, although spatially uneven across the globe (Figure 1). Due to the absence of statistics re garding global trend of women’s employment since World War II, only the years 1993, 1996, 2003, and 2006 are mentioned (as produced by the International Labour Office), and similarly for Tables 1 and 2, while Table 3 mentions the data only for the years 1996 and 2006. According to statistics produced by the International Labour Office (ILO), women constituted approximately 49% of the employment to population ratio in 2006, compared to 50% in 1993 – ILO’s definition of em ployment to population ratio refers to a particular economy’s capacity to absorb the working age population (generally 15 years or above). During the same period, male employment to population ratio too declined from 76% in 1993 to 74% in 2006 (Table 1). It has been observed that labor force participation rate (either in work or actively looking for a job) of younger women has decreased gradually because of their increased partici pation in education – ILO’s definition of work includes self employed, employed, employers, and unpaid family members (including unemployed women). However, adult women’s participation rate in the labor market has increased slightly. This finding reinforces the previous findings of Anglo American scholars where they argued that, in many countries, there has been a gradual increase in the numbers of married women (or women with children) participating in the labor market than there were in the past.

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Nonetheless, the picture presented in Table 1 and Figure 1 seems fudged. It does not explain the reasons for women being employed, nor does it explain the quality of jobs. Further, it fails to indicate the percentage of women actually pursuing education. Moreover, it is documented that women remain unemployed at the rate of 6.6%, which is higher than men’s unemployment rate of 6.1% (Table 2). Besides, employment to population ratios are lower for women than for men (Tables 1 and 3). However, it is well documented that the increasing incorporation of women into paid employment is re inforced by the ongoing and uneven process of economic restructuring: a shift from manufacturing to service economy. This growth is referred to by academics, in cluding economic geographers and development prac titioners, as feminization of the labor force. The feminization of paid labor, therefore, is a process by which changes in global economies and market led growth alters the demand for (and supply of) women’s paid labor in situations where new job opportunities in the growing service sector emphasize skills (such as communication and nurturing). These jobs remain typi cally ‘sex typed’, those that demand the so called ‘nimble fingers’ and female type professions with low wage, low status, insecurity, and classified as semi skilled, flexible, and mostly part time. Arguably, feminization of the labor force is accompanied by the fact that women’s share in industrial employment is much lower than that of men and has decreased over time. In the contemporary society, especially in advanced industrial economies, women are slowly gaining access to those areas traditionally dominated by men, such as the legal profession, science and technology, business, bur eaucracy and government, and more senior appointments in healthcare. Importantly, this increasing presence of

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Male

Female

Male

1993

Female 1996

Male

Female

Male

2003

Female 2006

Developed European Economic Union

Central and East Europe (non-EU and CIS)

East Asia

Southeast Asia and the Pacific

South Asia

Latin America and the Caribbean

Middle East and North Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa

Figure 1 Labor force participation rates, by sex and region (1993, 1996, 2003, and 2006). Source: Global Employment Trends for Women (2004). International Labour Office and Global Employment Trends for Women, Brief, March, 2007, International Labour Office.

1006 948 53.5 50.4

Emp oyment (m ons)

Labor force part c pat on rate (%)

Emp oyment-to-popu at on rat o (%)

1052

49.6

53.0

985

1208

50.5

53.9

1130

48.9

52.4

1157

1238

76.1

80.5

1425

1507

75.7

80.5

1497

1592

1996

74.5

79.4

1661

1769

2003

74.0

78.8

1738

1852

2006

63.3

67.0

2373

2513

1993

Total

62.6

66.7

2483

2644

1996

According to LO labor market indicators include labor force participation unemployment sector and status of employment wages/earnings and education and skills Source Global Employment Trends for Women (2004) nternational Labour Office and Global Employment Trends for Women Brief March 2007 nternational Labour Office

a

2006

1993

2003

1993

1996

Male

Female

G oba abor market nd catorsa (1993, 1996, 2003, and 2006)

Labor force (m ons)

Table 1

62.5

66.6

2792

2978

2003

61.4

65.5

2896

3090

2006

82 Feminist Political Economy

5.8

Unemp oyment rates (%)

6.3

66.7 6.4

77.8 6.6

81.8 5.5

82.3 5.9

94.7

1996

6.1

108.1

2003

6.1

113.4

2006

5.6

140.5

1993

Total

6.1

161.4

1996

Source Global Employment Trends for Women (2004) nternational Labour Office and Global Employment Trends for Women Brief March 2007 nternational Labour Office

58.2

1993

2006

Male 2003

1993

1996

Female

G oba unemp oyment rates (1993, 1996, 2003, and 2006)

Unemp oyment (m ons )

Table 2

6.2

185.9

2003

6.3

195.2

2006

Feminist Political Economy 83

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Table 3

Global male and female employment-to-population ratios (1996 and 2006)

Regions

Female employmentto-population ratio (%)

Male employment-topopulation ratio (%)

1996

2006

1996

2006

46.2 46.4 68.8 55.3 34.9 41.5 20.4 58.7

49.2 44.9 64.2 55.0 33.8 47.0 24.5 56.8

65.8 64.2 81.1 80.0 80.6 76.2 68.3 79.2

64.7 62.2 78.1 77.4 78.3 74.3 69.3 77.4

Developed economies and European Union Central and Eastern Europe (non-EU) and CIS East Asia Southeast Asia and the Pacific South Asia Latin America and the Caribbean Middle East and North Africa Sub-Saharan Africa

Source: Global Employment Trends for Women (2007). Global Employment trends for women, brief, March, 2007, International Labour Office. http:// www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/stroat/download/getw07.pdf (accessed Jul. 2008).

women at senior levels, particularly in bureaucratic roles in companies/service sectors, could be perceived as a direct threat to patriarchal management structures as well as the production and (re)production of gender inequal ities in the workplace. Therefore, such trends in women’s employment patterns epitomize a significant transforma tion in their labor market behavior and positions. The feminization of the labor force in developing economies differs from that observed in Western coun tries. For instance, in developing economies, feminization is associated with a process of proletarianization, whereby the majority of women’s labor, as discussed above, is absorbed into the informal sector. This is evident in the deregulation of labor markets, a fragmentation of pro duction processes, and the creation of new areas of export orientation that demand casual (less secure), low skill, informal contracts, and ultimately low pay for most fe male labor. Further, it has been observed that although women’s share in wage and salaried work grew from 42.9% in 1996 to 47.9% in 2006, this share still remains smaller for women than for men, and nowhere near to being closed, especially in the world’s poorest regions. Over the last decade, scholars in the West have ob served gender segregation in employment and the in fluence of post structural and postmodern feminist thinking on female participation in wage labor. Con temporary feminist scholarship has seen growing em phasis of the heterogeneous nature of gendered social relations within work organizations, workplaces, and within the institution of the family. These spheres are contemplated as sites of negotiation, interaction, and conflict between social actors. In 1997, McDowell argued that in contemporary society in the West it is highly recognized that in order to conform to a particular set of gender attributes, jobs themselves are constructed so cially. However, she also explains that these occupations should not be considered as ‘empty slots’ that are re plenished by workers or as ‘gender neutral’. Instead, jobs are formulated and developed to suit either men or women.

Catherine Hakim was one of the first authors to identify and define occupational segregation by sex in the labor market. The way in which both men and women tend to be clustered in different occupations and industry sectors is known as horizontal segregation, while vertical segregation refers to the way in which men dominate the ‘high profile’ and ‘well paid’ jobs. For this, feminist eco nomic geographers have developed the framework of ‘supply and demand’ and ‘individual preference’ for ex plaining and analyzing the patterns of gender segregation in the labor market, mainly through human capital the ory. Education and training being the basic economic assets of human capital, it was seen as one of the key determinants of economic performance in 1975 by Gary Becker. Human capital implies the collection of skills, qualifications, and experiences possessed by individual workers. This approach relies on the theory that women have less human capital than men; they are paid less because of their low skills, their low investment in edu cation and training, less labor market experience, and motherhood. Importantly, the human capital theorists stressed the role of the individual agency and economic rationality in interpreting gender segregation in employment. Fundamental criticism stems from the treatment of women as a homogeneous group. From a human capital propensity, Catherine Hakim stresses instead the differ ent investments that women make in their education and career with respect to individual ‘preferences’, either as ‘home centered’ or ‘work centered’. Hakim explains that women as a group are heterogeneous, diverse, and div ided. This way, human capital theory accounts of gender segregation emphasize voluntarism by the significance of individual tastes and choices in explaining gender divi sions of labor. However, Hakim urges that a more distinct version of human capital theory is required to explain the patterns of gender segregation. Human capital theory has in turn been criticized for ignoring the structural con straints and systematic gender biases in the valuation of skills, the role of patriarchal gender relations at home and


the labor market, and other institutional factors such as employment hierarchies and recruitment practices. Nevertheless, there is a general consensus that women’s employment is segregated both vertically and horizontally. Many feminist geographers have also sought to focus on occupational segregation on the basis of lo cality studies. In India, for example, the supply of women’s wage labor is more complex as a consequence of the way marriage is used as the principal determinant of women’s social position. In the West, by contrast, the greatest single determinant of variation in female labor force participation by hours worked and occupation type is the presence of young children. Importantly, the proximity of paid work to the home and the hard con straints of everyday coordination (e.g., chaperoning children to school) play a vital role in circumscribing what opportunities are actually available to women in the way they reconcile paid employment and family repro duction work. Arguably, the causes for women’s con tinued occupational segregation emerge from either within the family or in the home, or through the practices of the workplaces.

Conclusion The geography of feminist economics has been central to initiate the notion of work and labor. Although since the nineteenth century, women’s rights activists have ad dressed women’s exclusion from the economy, it is ironic that even in the twenty first century, women’s in corporation into paid employment is spatially uneven, with diverse explanations of women’s segregated position in the labor market. Such explanation has served to le gitimate and reinforce the existence of a blurred image carrying unacceptable inequality across the globe. See also: Feminism and Work; Gender in the City.

Further Reading Allen, J. (2003). Lost Geographies of Power. Oxford: Blackwell. Allen, S. and Walkowitz, C. (1987). Homeworking Myths and Realities. London: Macmillan. Austin, A. E. and Pilat, M. (1990). Tension, stress, and the tapestry of faculty lives. Academe 76, 38 42. Becker, G. S. (1975). Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education. New York: Columbia University Press, National Bureau of Economic Research. Bradley, H., Erickson, M., Stephenson, C. and Williams, S. (2000). Myths at Work. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Crompton, R. (1997). Women and Work in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dunlop, J. E. and Velkoff, V. A. (1999). Women of the world women and the economy in India. http://www.census.gov/ipc/prod/ wid 9802.pdf (accessed Jul. 2008). Elson, D. and Pearson, R. (1981). Nimble fingers make cheap workers: An analysis of women’s employment in Third World export manufacturing. Feminist Review 7, 87 107.

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Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Garmarnikov, E., Morgan, D., Purvis, J. and Taylorson, D. (eds.) (1983). Gender, Class and Work. London: Heinemann. Gibson Graham, J. K. and Cameron, J. (2003). Feminising the economy: Metaphors, strategies, politics. Gender, Place and Culture 10(2), 145 157. Global Employment Trends for Women (2004). International Labour Office. http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/strat/ download/trendsw.pdf (accessed Sept. 2008). Global Employment Trends for Women (2007). Global employment trends for women, brief, March, 2007, International Labour office. http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/strat/download/ getw07.pdf (accessed Jul. 2008). Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Burger, T. (transl.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hakim, C. (1979). Occupational Segregation. London: Department of Employment. Hakim, C. (2000). Work Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century Preference Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hanson, S. (2007). People and place in economic geography: Learning from women’s entrepreneurship, plenary lecture. Second Global Conference on Economic Geography. Beijing, China. Hanson, S. and Pratt, G. (1995). Gender, Work and Space. London: Routledge. Harvey, D. (1969). Explanation in Geography. London: Arnold. International Labour Organization (2002). Women and men in the informal economy: A statistical picture, International Labour Organization. http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/gems/ download/women.pdf (accessed Jul. 2008). Ironmonger, D. (1996). Counting ouputs, capital inputs and caring labor: Estimating gross household product. Feminist Economics 2(3), 37 64. Jarvis, H. (1999). The tangled webs we weave: Household strategies to co ordinate home and work. Work, Employment and Society 13(2), 225 247. Latour, B. and Weibel, P. (eds.) (2005). Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Loutfi, M. F. (eds.) (2001). What Is Equality and How Do We Get There? Women, Gender and Work. Washnigton, DC: International Labour Office. Massey, D. (1984). Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production. London: Methuen. McDowell, L. (1997). Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Menon Sen, K. and Shiva Kumar, A. K. Women in India: How free? how equal? United Nations India. http://www.un.org.in/wii.htm (accessed Sept. 2008). Momsen, J. (1991). Women and Development in the Third World. London: Routledge. Rendall, J. (1990). Women in an Industrializing Society: England 1750 1880. Oxford: Blackwell. Reskin, B. and Padavic, I. (1994). Women and Men at Work. London: Pine Forge Press. Rowlands, J. (1995). Empowerment examined. Development in Practice 5(2), 101 107. Rubery, J., Smith, M. and Fagan, C. (1999). Women’s Employment in Europe: Trends and Prospects. London: Routledge. Smith, N. (1984). Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. United Nations (2003). Putting gender mainstreaming into practice, Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, United Nations. http://www.unescap.org/esid/GAD/Publication/Gender Mainstreaming.PDF (accessed Jul. 2008). Walby, S. (1990). Theorizing Patriarchy. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Walby, S. (1997). Gender Transformations. New York: Routledge. Waring, M. (1988). Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. Auckland: Allen and Unwin.

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Relevant Websites http://www wds.worldbank.org Equity and Development, World Development Report 2006. http://hdr.undp.org Gender and Human Development, Human Development Report 1995.

http://siteresources.worldbank.org Gender working towards greater, IDA (International Development Association at Work). http://siteresources.worldbank.org Women’s work and movement into the public sphere.

Fertility Y. Underhill-Sem, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Below-Replacement Fertility Low levels of fertility where the people are not producing sufficient numbers of offspring to replace the numbers who are dying. Fertility The ability to conceive and give birth. Malthusian-Inspired Theories Arguments that begin from the basis that populations tend to increase faster than the means of livelihoods to sustain them and therefore ‘preventative’ and ‘positive’ checks are needed. Examples of preventative checks are moral restraint, postponed marriage, and birth control. Examples of positive checks are war, disease, and poverty. Reproduction The various ways in which people produce offspring.

Introduction Fertility is understood most widely in geography as one of the three determinants of population change alongside migration and mortality. Everyone is born, everyone moves geographically in some manner, and everyone eventually dies. These self evident understandings how ever belie the importance of the conceptual framing of these processes, and none more so than the notion of fertility. A fertile concept, idea, or process is one that promotes further enquiry, knowledge, and understanding. Yet, within geography, connecting these understandings of fertility through research and analysis is neglected. Instead, fertility is incorporated in a routine uncritical way with the result that geographic understandings of fertility have been a taken for granted and under researched area of study in geography. A partial reason for this is that within geography there has been a pre occupation with migration as the main demographic process that distributes people spatially. This, however, overlooks the vital fact that one needs to be born to be able to first move and this fact is something that occurs in diverse ways and with far more problematic con sequences for all involved. A more complete under standing of fertility involves inquiry into a range of other areas such as reproductive practices, sexualities and embodiment, and notions of family. As with much of population geography, the analysis of fertility needs to move beyond method and concern over technique and toward being able to articulate new visions of alternatives and just futures. Advancing analysis from

the classic fertility narratives and statistical analysis of survey and census data will allow for new ways of seeing fertility that will contribute to debates in both within the discipline and also between other disciplines. For in stance, when the global mobility of domestic workers into Singapore is also understood not just as groups of women moving to care and nurture the aged and young in dis tance places, but as sexualized subjects who carry with them particular fertility potentials which change their childbearing possibilities, then it is also possible to look for new fertility patterns and their implications. For in stance, in what ways is their fertility controlled in new work places? In what ways might it appeal to have chil dren born in places where they might have new possi bilities for citizenship? And in what ways might new informal sexual relations in different places affect formal sexual relations in home countries? Similarly, with new reproductive technologies available in low fertility countries, such as Europe, the social relations between the different biological contributors to a particular pregnancy are increasingly complex and variable. In what ways are new configurations of parents affecting under standings of households and families? In what ways does the particular scale of new reproductive technologies affect analysis of small scale population dynamics? And in what ways does this produce new options for citizen ship and inheritance?

Mainstream Understandings of Fertility and Reproduction Fertility routinely refers to the way in which groups of people produce offspring. Some demographers argue that the term refers to a more refined analysis of ‘natality’ but because it is so common they prefer the less committed term ‘natality’. This framing has not, however, flowed into other disciplines like geography or anthropology that also appropriate demographic analysis. Universal assumptions about biology mean that similar measures of fertility are used in nonhuman populations such as plants and animals. In human populations there are many measures of fertility and each one attempts, at increasing levels of ‘accuracy’, to represent the rate at which a population is growing by relating the number of live births to a specific population and time period. Unfortunately, even identifying a live birth is difficult, let alone how many there are. The simplest is the ‘crude birthrate’ which represents the number of live births in a given year divided by the number of people in that population in the middle of the

87

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year. Slightly more refined and commonly used measures include ‘general fertility rates’ (the number of births divided by the number of women of childbearing age), ‘age specific birthrates’ (the number of births divided by the number of women in a given age group), and ‘total fertility rates’ (the sum of age specific birthrates over all ages of childbearing). More sophisticated measures in clude ‘completed fertility rates’ which show the fertility progress of a cohort through the childbearing years and ‘age specific birth probabilities’. The former provides some insights into historical shifts in the timing of childbearing and the latter provides for the calculation of population projections. The variability of fertility among subgroups of a population means the more sophisticated or refined measures of fertility specific to age, marriage, and other social and temporal measures are increasingly important. Further, because of the total absence or unreliability of records about birthdates or total populations in many parts of the world – especially in the demographically largest and fastest growing parts of the economic South such as sub Saharan Africa and China – continual efforts are made to develop the best techniques to estimate fer tility rates. Despite continued and often justified skepticism as to the accuracy of fertility rates, they are still ubiquitously used and are relevant for comparative accounts of progress toward social equity. All fertility rates have time and spatial dimensions and should be used carefully, with due regard to the assumptions and methods of data manipulation, the comparative analysis of fertility rates provides a useful representation of change. For this reason it is useful to calculate fertility rates, refining them as best one can, but keeping in mind that they are often a crude tool for analyzing more complex processes. Closely related to the notion of fertility is the term ‘reproduction’ or the extent to which a group of people are replacing themselves by natural processes. The term ‘reproduction’ has a wider scope than the term ‘fertility’ and is defined demographically as the act or process of producing offspring, giving birth, bringing forth offspring, producing, yielding, making, manufacturing, working, and/or creating unity. Used in demography and popu lation studies, including population geography, this term is often limited to the biological event of producing ba bies. It clearly has a wider meaning linked to the pro duction of human beings and is the focus of a range of social sciences, especially those interested in class dif ferentiation. The main problem with this concept is that like ‘fertility’, biology tends to be treated as an un contested universal that takes agency away from people, especially women. Central to the shortcomings of these mainstream conceptualizations of fertility and reproduction is the unproblematic treatment of the body as exclusively a biological given. Bodies are now accepted as being both

biologically configured and also socially and culturally constituted by places and people. This provides for nu anced analysis of the complex layering of meanings how groups and individuals produce offspring.

Reconceptualizing Fertility: Of Epistemologies, Bodies, and Desires Interest in fertility within demography is matched by a similar long standing interest within anthropology in documenting ethnographic accounts of childbirth in different places. However, in the process of documenting the many different cultural interpretations of the ‘uni versal’ process of birth, it becomes clear that childbirth is as different as the overlapping and frequently contra dictory discourses that are used to describe it. For ex ample, in the English speaking world, it is not unusual to hear fathers to be saying ‘we are pregnant’. Clearly, there are solid grounds for reconceptualizing another epi stemological position from which to interrogate notions of fertility. Population geographers have only recently begun to consider the implications of an epistemology in which demographic events and processes are socially constructed and therefore partial. Following the work of feminist anthropologists and demographers, population geographers need to consider how ‘places’ construct bodies so that they are not simply understood as a bio logical given. To do this requires a research process that combines critical ethnographies and geographies with statistical analysis. There is a potent sharpness of an epistemology based on feminist theorizing of the body because it requires the precise analysis of the ‘marking’ of unmarked’ categories. Thus, fertility analysis would require consideration of what precise body is being represented in mainstream fertility analysis. An embodied analysis would give cor poreal form to the otherwise abstract definitions and by doing so would subvert taken for granted understandings whose privileging has suppressed other ways of knowing. This is likely to include other discursively constructed realities such as the existence of ‘specialists’, ‘sorcerers’, ‘deceased ancestors’, and even God. Placing the analysis of fertility within specific historical places gives ex planatory preference to the complex interplay of struc tural features like the dynamics of social, cultural, and political issues. Thus, a study of fertility would not simply focus on the event of the birth of a child but would also examine how the mother and the others are involved in the talk about the child, the pregnancy, and the birth. In this way, fertility can be understood as re lating to not only bodies as biological constants but also bodies situated in historical processes in particular places. This requires looking beyond the ‘total fertility rates’ by also examining the discursive processes that constitute

Fertility

the body. This approach opens up the possibilities of looking at the discursive practices that constitute other fertile bodies such as, for instance, the bodies of trafficked women, of sexually active people who live with physical impairments, disabilities or chronic illness, or women living in isolated villages in the economic South. The intersections and interrelationships of material and discursive fields in relation to bodies and places are critical places from where the analysis of fertility can expand. Even when one begins to capture the workings of communities and family groups, enmeshed in the overall agreements as to the aim of particular fertility outcomes, there will be different gendered versions. For instance, the reasons for women wanting children and especially sons in some places is not so much to maintain lines of male descent but also to provide comfort and loyalty in one’s daily life. These fertility desires and sentiments last as long as the mothers and caregivers do, but they play an important part in understanding the otherwise contra dictory fertility practices

Repoliticizing Fertility: Abortion, International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) Fertility studies in geography are an important route into working with contemporary social justice issues around women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. Abortion remains a controversial and complex issue that incorporates moral positioning and political irresponsi bility in ways that threaten overall development in the economic South. In some places, such as the United States and the Caribbean, this is combined with in creasing use of the morning after pill, ‘virgin clubs’ (i.e., young people committed to saving sex for marriage), and the return of the big white wedding to recast societal norms around families and households. In other places, such as the Sudan, and Central African Republic, death and chronic illness as a result of continually unwanted pregnancies – often in places of civil war and disasters with the subsequent displacement of domestic life – also have the effect on shifting social norms around families and households. So too has the effect of HIV/AIDS with a growing number of deaths to young adults and espe cially women threatening to radically alter notions of family and household because different members of the household become the ones whose fertility is most sought after – especially young uninfected girls. Combined with culturally abhorrent practices such as female genital mutilation, sex work, and the cross country adoption of the girl child, the examination of fertility from a geo graphic perspective is sorely wanting.

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On the global policy arena, the ICPD in Cairo in 1994 was a huge shift away from the demographic targets of population processes toward upholding sexual and re productive rights. But the decennial international popu lation conferences reflected more than this. These conferences (Bucharest in 1974, Mexico in 1984, and Cairo in 1994) had all concerned themselves with the fertility of women – especially from the economic South. Over time the debates moved from Malthusian inspired theories that targeted family planning in 1974 to neo Marxist inspired theories of economic development in 1984. However, in 1994, the relationship between demographic theory and population policy, especially as it concerned women’s fertility, witnessed another ideo logical and political shift. The more explicit gender focus of the Cairo Program of Action argues that the em powerment of women is the way to reduce gender and other social inequalities. Few fertility studies within geography pick up this framework with an apparent comfort in sticking to conservative gender agendas and continuing to work on the science rather than the politics of fertility research. This reluctance will stifle the rec ognition by policymakers of geographic thinking as providing useful research based policy. While few geographers have actively engaged with the ICPD process, many more have taken on issues concerning HIV/AIDS and new reproductive technologies. Closely linked to patterns of mortality, the analysis of HIV/AIDS provides fresh insights into the ways in which fertility intersects with the mortality of sexually active populations. Reduced fertility due to shifts in traditional partnering patterns, biochemical reactions from medication, and changing sociocultural values over sexual reproduction (e.g., polygamy, slavery, bride stealing, and sexual traffick ing) are issues that are experienced and embodied in very diverse places and hence provide huge possibilities for new approaches to fertility analysis.

Conclusion The traditional assumption that groups of people are best understood when they are studied as collective outcomes of individual population actions is no longer the way to analyze fertility in geography. New approaches to ana lyzing fertility might begin by mapping or recording patterns of fertility using standard demographic techni ques. However, other texts need to be incorporated into the analysis. This is not just because it is highly likely that standard techniques cannot capture complex human processes, but also because there is greater access to new texts. If an equivalent investment was directed into sup porting research using these new texts as has been in supporting the analysis of census and vital statistics, the future looks bright for an invigorated geography of

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fertility. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights in, for in stance, anthropology, history, and literature, will ensure researchers are fully cognizant of the limitations of par ticular texts or measurements. Patterns of fertility are not just the result of biological processes, but they also cap ture more complex and interesting social, cultural, and political processes that create subjects such as adopted children, orphans of war and HIV/AIDS, and children conceived by in vitro fertilization. These new subjects do not just appear but are created through differences in time and place; so we can expect many more new subjects to emerge, and much more, therefore, for geographers of fertility to think about. See also: Census Geography; Migration; Pregnancy and Childbirth.

Further Reading Bailey, A. (2005). Making Population Geography. London: Hodder Educational.

Graham, E. (2000). What kind of theory for what kind of population geography? International Journal of Population Geography 6, 257 272. Greenhalgh, S. (1996). Situating Fertility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jordan, B. (1993). Birth in Four Cultures. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press. Neumayer, E. (2006). An empirical test of a neo Malthusian theory of fertility change. Population and Environment 27(4), 327 336. Palmore, J. A. and Gardener, R. W. (1994). Measuring Mortality, Fertility and Natural Increase: A Self Teaching Guide to Elementary Measures. Honolulu: East West Population Institute. Ram, K. and Jolly, M. (1998). Maternities and Modernities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Riley, N. and McCarthy, J. (2003). Demography in the Age of the Postmodern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shyrock, H. S. and Siegel, J. S. (1976). The Methods and Materials of Demography (condensed edition by Stockwell, E. G.). New York: Academic Press. Sporton, D. (1999). Mixing methods in fertility research. Professional Geographer 51, 68 76. Underhill Sem, Y. (2001). Maternities in out of the way places: Epistemological possibilities for retheorising population geography. International Journal of Population Geography 7, 447 460.

Festival and Spectacle M. Duffy, University of Melbourne, Carlton, VIC, Australia & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Community A social network of interacting individuals, usually concentrated in a defined location, although this definition is challenged by the rise in use of telecommunications and cyberspace. Event Tourism The systematic planning, development, and marketing of festivals and special events as tourist attractions, catalysts, and images builders. Post-Structuralism Movement of thought in various fields (e.g., literary criticism, cultural studies, sociology, psychoanalysis) which developed out of, and was a response to, French structuralist thought of the 1950s and 1960s. Post-structuralism envisages a ‘subject-inprocess’, arising within a space that is plural, multiple, and constantly destabilized, and where identity can no longer be defined in ‘essentialist’ terms such as class or gender. Social Capital Those characteristics of social structure or social relations that facilitate collaborative action and, as a result, enhance economic performance.

Historical antecedents of contemporary events are found in religious pilgrimage, the feast days of saints, and carnival. These events are explicitly geographic activities; connecting places through the devotees’ or pilgrims’ pathways across regions, countries, and continents, and also in the ways in which specific cultural landscapes are constructed around certain places and activities. Origins in Traditional Cultural Practices (Folk, Rural, Urban) Historically, traditional cultural practices were connected to religious or pagan celebrations. Concepts of time and place as part of a cycle of destruction and regeneration ensured that particular activities relating to community survival, such as planting and harvesting, were under taken correctly. The importance of a fertile earth in pagan communities also led to elaborate practices asso ciated with certain places, dates, and even hours of the day, for example, celebrations around the summer and winter equinoxes. Remnants of such fertility rites can be discerned in some contemporary carnival activities. Public Space and Public Culture

Overview of the History of Festivals and Spectacles The structure and role of festivals and spectacles in the contemporary world have their origins in religious celebrations and public cultural practices. Many such religious events continue today, attracting both devotees maintaining centuries old traditions, as well as tourists seeking to experience some notion of an authentic ‘other’. These historical forms are important in creating and maintaining communal bonds to particular places, re inforcing social hegemony through symbolic practices, and controlling potential aggression or challenges to authority by providing an emotional outlet. Even so, any such public displays of conformity may hide transgressive and subversive messages, as the activities of carnival demonstrate. Origins in Pagan and Religious Events Festival and spectacle have been conceptualized in social anthropology as events apart from that of the secular and everyday. Such events can be traced as a derivation or continuation of pagan and religious celebrations and rituals, with an emphasis on the struggles between the sacred and profane realms of society.

Public space is a highly contested space. The social and spatial relations that occur within this sphere serve to constitute and regulate identity through categories such as race, class, gender, and sexuality. Although public space may be an arena of open debate and social inclu sion, it is also a site of social exclusion. Yet festivals may also provide opportunities for addressing problems em bedded within a community’s social relationships, either through official broadcasting of issues, or through un official challenges and subversive activities. Liminal or everyday practices?

Festivals and spectacles formalize space, time, and be havior in ways that distinguish these events from every day events. Although strongly connected to the rhythms of daily life, they bring groups and communities together in order to mark out particular religious, sociopolitical, and historical affiliations. In this way the festival supports notions of boundedness to particular place(s) and people, internal coherence, and the relative unity of the group. These notions of coherence are created through a heightened sense of belonging brought about by rituals and associated symbolic practices. Thus, these events are an important means of framing and representing the relationship between people and place, communicating

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relatively coherent ideas about social order, albeit one of acceptance or challenge. Ritual and Symbolism Ritual may be understood very broadly as a set of formal behaviors within a specific context of time and place, outside that of the everyday. Understanding the purpose of ritual ranges from Durkheimian notions of binding people together; the Freudian psychoanalytic position that such practices are symptomatic of unresolved neuroses; or that ritual practices express the symbolic meanings embedded within social and cultural structures. Festival conceived as a ritual practice thus simultaneously maintains traditions while allowing the possibility of change and difference. Liminality and communitas

Social anthropology has provided two concepts – those of ‘communitas’ and ‘liminality’ – significant to under standing the role of the festival and spectacle in historical and contemporary life. ‘Communitas’ refers to a sense of social interrelated ness – a spontaneous feeling of connectedness and be longing that arises out of involvement in a communal event. These strong, yet often transient, feelings of at tachment to others can operate across different social vectors such as class, ethnicity, or gender, important in constituting strong social bonds. Important to the processes of sociality are an event’s associated rituals, which can lead participants to a state outside that of the everyday, of in betweenness or am biguity, to a state of liminality. The liminal period tem porarily suspends conventional social rules, so opening up a space of potential change, exemplified in anthro pological literature by ceremonies of initiation. Liminal events are understood to offer some contact with the sacred or divine, and hence facilitate the individual’s transformation into a full participant of the community or group. Some argue that truly liminal events can only occur within small scale, integrated, or indigenous soci eties. However, contemporary performative events such as the modern Olympics are understood by some re searchers as deliberate responses to contemporary feel ings of alienation and instability. The ritual practices and pageantry of these large scale events offer the possibility of a reconnection to the profound, and so a re emergence of what has been called ‘neoliminalty’. Spectacle and parade

The high degree of visual display and theatricality of spectacle draws on pageantry and fanfare as a means to create a sense of belonging. As Debord argues, spectacle is an illusion, a collection of images that mediates social relationships between people, so bringing about a sense

of unification. Feelings of belonging to place may be constructed through positive feelings of celebration or the negative emotions of fear. In either case, spectacle is an effective means of social control, and the social elite who control such events exert a strong influence in the social realm and within popular consciousness. Parades are a popular and effective means of con structing spectacle and its ideological intent (Figure 1). Geographic analysis has demonstrated how the use of particular motifs, such as iconic or symbolic images of national belonging, help constitute a ritual space and ‘imagined community’ of belonging. Moreover, studies of the movement of bodies and parade motifs show how public space is territorialized, thus reiterating or re aligning public space within particular notions of state and community. However, spectacles and parades are also a means to challenge or subvert such hegemonic prac tices, their symbolic and ritual aspects intimately linked in the political, social, and economic processes of com munity and place. Carnival

Strongly associated with Lent in the Catholic Church’s calendar, carnival (or more commonly Mardi Gras) is a secular festivity, with some anthropologists arguing that carnival is perhaps the oldest of all Western pagan fes tivals still observed. Carnival permits the inversion of normal societal order, allowing the expression of powerful emotions and impulses normally repressed in everyday life. Bahktin argues that the ambivalent nature of carnival – its simultaneous use of abuse and praise, its images of death and birth – are fundamental to con tinuity and renewal. Carnival is, therefore, understood as a paradoxical social process, both reinforcing partici pants’ sense of their place within society (in classical Marxist class struggle terms), but also a means of re affirming fragile social bonds, dramatizing and re inforcing collective ideas about society, as well as being a release for repressed feelings of frustration. What is sig nificant is that carnival and the carnivalesque activities that take place in the public arena are the community’s own representations and performances of common goals and shared values, rather than a framework imposed on the community by its civil and religious leaders. Festivals and Spectacles as Community Building Processes Concepts of ‘place’, ‘community’, and ‘belonging’ have been addressed extensively in geographical and socio logical literature on festivals. One of the focuses in geo graphical studies has been on the underlying assumption that festivals function as community building activities, be that of a community with a long established con nection to a particular place, one that has had a more


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Figure 1 Parade, Swiss Italian Festa, Daylesford (Australia) 2006. During the period of the festival, the space of the event is marked out through visual and aural signs, for example, in the use of flags, banners, masks, and certain genres and styles of music. (Photograph by Michelle Duffy.)

recent migration and settlement, or one that differs in some way from the dominant group. Such events are a means to express and celebrate core values of a particular community, with representations of community identity mediated through distinctive cultural artifacts and ac tivities, such as music, food, and folk dancing. Creating notions of belonging

Underlying the focus on a celebration of community is the view that social cohesion is the event’s necessary goal. The official discourses of those controlling the festival are used to produce an official ‘imagined’ community, which the festival is then planned to address. Celebrating days of national importance, parades for national or sporting heroes, festivals that celebrate the culture and history of particular ethnic groups – all such activities respond to the politics and social dynamics of belonging. As recent cultural geographic studies demonstrate, the framework of the festival transforms disparate individuals into col lective abstractions – community, nation, even race – through engagement of the senses, by inducing action, and giving access to knowledge and experience of these public events. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of taste as a marker of social position, feelings of belonging or alienation are

articulated through esthetic discourses which differen tiate individuals and social groups through practices of consumption. In turn, cultural capital confers status on an individual who recognizes and consumes particular esthetic products, such as art, music, literature, theater, or even sport. Yet the transitory nature of the event – the brief en counters and exchanges occurring within the festival space – produces different and often conflicting con figurations of identity, place, and belonging. Festivals are, therefore, complex sites for localness and belonging, celebrating diversity and connections beyond that of the locally defined community. One example of this para doxical creation of community and belonging is that of the multicultural festival. The goal of such a festival is to create a site in which potentially divisive differences are reduced and feelings of belonging are heightened. Not surprisingly, tensions arise where certain ideals of com munity diverge from those of the everyday, heterogenous lived experiences of people. Moreover, once entered into the public realm, events such as spectacle, carnival, and festival become part of the public culture, and those who have organized the event may lose control over what then happens in this domain. This leads to a paradox; these events function as a form of social integration and

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cohesion while simultaneously they are sites of sub version and protest. This paradox is the source of such an event’s sociospatial and political significance. The roles of emotion, embodiment, and cognition in community and place

With the advent of post structuralism in human geog raphy, much attention has been given to the project of mapping the subject, and, more recently, the affective and embodied processes that constitute subjectivity in ways that lie outside of language. These affective and cognitive processes are significant to feelings of being ‘in’ or ‘out’ of place. Festivals and spectacles are structured so as to produce certain responses which then give rise to feelings of belonging. Our emotional responses to such events therefore help foster social capital in that we are en couraged to develop strong emotional ties to other par ticipants, to an imagined community and its connection to ideas of place. In this way, festivals are important in social strategies seeking to address the growing sense of alienation and insecurity felt in public space, or in places with diverse resident groups. Recent studies in cultural geography on the role of music have been an important means of accessing and examining our emotional and affective responses and the part they play in the constitution of identity and com munity. Music is an important representational practice, with lyrics, instrumentation, and style evoking images of particular places and identities (Figure 2). Music is also an experiential process, and this opens up the possibilities of understanding the role of immediacy and presence in creating social and spatial relationships. Place, identity, and belonging are constituted in the very acts of people engaging with the musical performance. However, music has the potential to reconfigure the festival as a site of subversion, playing against the meanings ascribed by the festival’s official framework.

Festivals as Subversive Practices The community building processes of festivals, and the very powerful symbolic forms used to mark out rela tionships between identity and place, also make festivals contested sites of identity, community, and belonging. Different sections of society utilize the festival structure so as to present, constitute, and celebrate particular values, lifestyle choices, and identities. Participating in festival activities enables the participant to reaffirm membership to a particular group. The festival therefore provides a means through which people can advocate or contest certain notions of identity and ideology. Particular festivals (pop festivals such as Glastonbury, or 1990s technodance parties) may raise issues around notions of community control, perceptions of public

Figure 2 Street scene, Brunswick Music Festival (Australia). While entertaining participants of this street party, the resident performers of the local Spanish restaurant create a ‘Spanish’ soundscape through song, instrumentation, dance, and costume. (Photograph by Michelle Duffy.)

nuisance, and environmental damage because of as sumptions about the genre of music performed and its assumed audience. On the other hand, strong opposition and a sense of moral panic with regards to such festivals reflect a wider privileging or exclusion of certain social groups, such as youth. The use of cultural and per formative strategies within festivals therefore challenges notions of identity, community, and belonging, con tinuing the traditions of inversion exhibited in carnival. Geographic research has explored the ways in which the festival subverts the everyday functions of public space. The use of symbols such as banners, posters, and clothing marks out the site of the event, permitting certain forms of behavior that would otherwise be unacceptable, such as demonstration of homosexual affection, overtly political shows, or simply talking to strangers (see Figure 3). Yet this also raises contentious issues over definitions of the public and private realm, and how particular identities may come under closer surveillance.


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Festivals and Tourism

Figure 3 ChillOut, Daylesford (Australia). The main street of a rural country town is remade and reclaimed through particular images associated with queer culture. (Photograph by Michelle Duffy.)

Yet, activities once understood as subversive can also become part of the mainstream. One such example is the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, originally a march in support of gay rights and a challenge to the violent homophobia of 1970s inner urban Sydney. Continuing to support and promote the gay and lesbian community, this event is now a very successful tourism event, not simply in economic terms – for example, in 1998 the event was estimated to have generated AU$99 million (although it has recently encountered financial dif ficulties) – but, as some argue, in a growing acceptance of homosexuality. Fringe festivals are another form of response to mainstream cultural practices. Deliberately popular events, in contrast to the arts festivals they are often paired with in the festival calendar, the fringe festival, such as Canada’s Edmonton and Winnipeg Fringe Festivals, reclaims public space for forms of public culture. These subversive practices reorganize the rationalized spaces and activities of the everyday, pro viding new opportunities for increased interaction be tween individuals, and so a renegotiation of social identities and everyday practices.

Recent geographical studies have explored how the fes tival has become an increasingly important strategy for both rural and urban regions as a means to initiate eco nomic renewal. Festivals help create and promote par ticular cultural landscapes that are then readily incorporated into the tourism industry. Festivals help create and consolidate certain place images and their associations with leisure and educational activities (as places of adventure, or relaxation, or heritage, and so on) or with industries closely associated or even developed for that specific place (gourmet trails and vineyards have become popular contexts in which an annual festival event may be located). Effective tourism promotion through these events can increase the number of visitors to a particular locality, and the revenue generated is very important to the local economy. An increase in numbers attending a festival can provide business opportunities for the locale, showcasing the expertise of the host community, and thus generate interest in potential investment. Yet the popularity of the festival as an economic sa vior, particularly for regional areas, has in some instances meant a lessening of connection between event and place as entrepreneurs, local businesses, and communities seek to tap into this bourgeoning market. While festivals do construct and reinforce the reputation of the locale, as well as anchoring tourism economies and associated in dustries in place, the resources and any profit are not always effectively redistributed towards the smaller centers. Moreover, such events can exacerbate the ways in which people and resources are concentrated within urban centers at the expense of more peripheral lo cations. Although hallmark and mega events hosted in urban locations associated with sporting activities, such as the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup, are understood as important revenue sources, most are not profitable. Their presence can also increase pressure on urban infra structure and resources as the population increases for the period of the event. Place Marketing

Economic Underpinnings There has been a dramatic increase in the number of festival events in the last decade. One key reason for this is that festivals are recognized as a means to make a unique and valuable contribution to a commu nity’s culture, attracting local, national, and even international audiences. Festivals can be important sources of revenue for communities, and have therefore become key components of economic development strategies for cities, rural towns and regions, and even countries.

Festival and special events can be important motivators of travel, not only for the event itself but also in that it contributes to the place’s range of tourist attractions, fa cilitates media coverage for the destination, and promotes awareness of the destination for future visits. Government and nongovernment institutions and organizations draw on a range of factors – cultural planning, leisure, lifestyle sampling, the so called creative industries – to influence the branding of a particular place as a desirable destination for investment and expenditure. Event tourism, and in creasingly the importance of the festival within this, has become a significant means of assisting such strategies of

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economic development and place regeneration. Mega events, such as the Venice Biennale or the arts festivals associated with the summer Olympics or Commonwealth Games, serve to construct and reinforce the reputation of certain places as significant sites within global economic and cultural networks. The role of place branding is very important. Per ceptions play a significant role in the tourist/consumer’s attitude and use of, and hence the value attributed to, place. Festivals commodify traditional narratives, tradi tions, and the presentation of cultural products such as music, dance, pageantry, visual art, and theater, in order to construct and promote the uniqueness of a place or community. In some instances, such as the Edinburgh Festival, the festival itself becomes a tourist destination in its own right.

Impacts on the Sociocultural and Natural Environments The rise of new tourism – a particularly Western phe nomenon and including a diverse range of forms such as ecotourism, green tourism, responsible tourism, heritage tourism, and cultural tourism – corresponds to transfor mation within a Western society characterized by heightened levels of anxiety. In this secularised society, Nature has become the repository of wholesomeness, valued for its implied critique of contemporary consumer society. Festivals are often promoted as a more benign component of this new tourism, with limited impact on the sociocultural or natural environment. For example, the Woodford Folk Festival, held outside of Brisbane (Queensland, Australia), includes within its program scheduled sessions and workshops about the environment and sustainability, as well as activities such as tree planting, as a means to counter its negative environ mental impact. However, festivals do have considerable impact on the environment. They often involve a con siderable number of people located in a small geo graphical location for a relatively short period of time, and success is equated with maximizing the number of visitors with the assumption that this will generate higher revenue. This in turn raises other related issues such as traffic control and congestion, noise, crowding, and dis ruption to everyday life. Recent studies in tourism have sought to examine and determine the impact of festivals on the environment, measuring such factors as the stress on endangered spe cies, key resource consumption, environmental planning, and reviewing the effectiveness of environment pro tection measures. In response to these issues and con cerns, calls for more sustainable forms of tourism practice have also been directed at festival organization and management.

Impact on Culture Besides being important in terms of economic benefit for communities, the festival is also significant in ways that are seen to add to the value of everyday life, such as in the promotion of community participation, the en hancement of community creativity, and the fostering of community well being. These factors are important in helping maintain cultural networks and traditions given the concerns about the globalization of culture, while opening up links with the broader community. The search for authenticity: Memory, history, and nostalgia

In terms of heritage tourism, cultural or cultural heritage festivals have become a major focus, and notions of au thenticity are intimately intertwined with such a festival’s success. Tourists seek an authentic experience, and in the framework of authenticity, the festival and its associated cultural products are defined as authentic or inauthentic depending upon whether these are made or performed by local people according to traditional practices. Yet festivals framed around notions of ethnicity or culture, as well as the so called multicultural festivals, are often criticized for their superficial dealings with the concepts of identity, culture, and diversity. It has been argued that these festivals often present rather limited views of community and identity, and the emphasis on costume, food, and music is only shallow representations of the complexities of cultures. Such festivals are also criticized because they seem to ignore practical appli cations to issues of social justice, such as economic se curity, access, or equity. Health and well-being of communities

Festivals are important in that they can demonstrate how symbolic notions of social justice are translated into the material and social spaces of the residents of local council. They have come to be a popular form of showcasing local government and other nongovernmental organization responses to the need to instil a sense of social cohesion, given the culturally diverse communities that characterize much of contemporary life. On the other hand, such festivals also provide opportunities for various minority groups to express and even challenge their difference to the mainstream. Festivals are also important sites of cultural recovery and education, not only within the specific ethnic or cultural community, but also to noncommunity members. The importance of this more specifically intangible heritage is recognized in UNESCO’s commitment to assisting communities with the maintenance of their cultural practices. Other foundations and organizations also recognize the need to help maintain cultural prac tices, and the benefits of a festival framework with which


to do this. For example, the Yothu Yindi Foundation supports the annual Garma Festival of Traditional Cul ture, a festival celebrating the culture of the Yolngu (the Aboriginal people of northeast Arnhem Land, Australia) that is also a forum in which Australian Indigenous and non Indigenous people may come together for cross cultural learning.

Future Directions in Research Current human geographical research into festivals has drawn on a range of theoretical and methodological ap proaches, including psychoanalysis, nonrepresentational theory, and geographic information system (GIS). Pro ductive areas of future study draw on these and other quantitative and qualitative methods so as to examine such diverse issues as belonging, exclusion, migration, economic regeneration, as well as a more nuanced an alysis of community creation. See also: Affect; Anthropology and Human Geography; Belonging; Community; Cultural Capital; Difference/ Politics of Difference; Economic Development, Rural; Emotional Geographies; Emotional Knowing; Environmental Policy; Identity Politics; Performative and Embodied Mapping; Place, Politics of; Popular Culture; Public Space; Public Spaces, Urban; Queer Theory/ Queer Geographies; Race; Religion/Spirituality/Faith; Representation, Politics of; Resource and Environmental Economics; Sexuality; Sound and Music; Soundscapes; Tourism; Tourism, Rural; Tourism, Urban; Youth/Youth Cultures.

Further Reading Bahktin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his world, Isowlsky, H. (trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Debord, G. (1995). The society of the spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Getz, D. (1991). Festivals, special events, and tourism. New York: van Nostrand Reinhold. Gibson, C. and Connell, J. (2005). Music and tourism. Clevedon: Channel View Publications.

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Jackson, P. (1988). Street life: The politics of carnival. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6, 213 227. Jago, L. and Shaw, R. (1998). Special events: A conceptual and differential framework. Festival management and Event Tourism 5(1 2), 21 32. Kong, L. and Yeoh, B. (1997). The construction of national identity through the production of ritual and spectacle. Political Geography 16(3), 213 239. Ley, D. and Olds, K. (1988). Landscape as spectacle: World’s fairs and the culture of heroic consumption. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6, 191 212. MacAloon, J. (1984). Olympic Games and the theory of spectacle in modern societies. In MacAloon, J. (ed.) Rite, drama, festival, spectacle: Rehearsals toward a theory of cultural performance. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 248 280. MacCannell, D. (1979). Staged authenticity: arrangements of social space in visitor settings. American Journal of Sociology 79(3), 589 603. Marston, S. (1989). Public rituals and community power: St Patrick’s parades in Lowell, Massachusetts 1841 1874. Political Geography Quarterly 8(3), 255 269. Stallybrass, P. and White, A. (1993). Bourgeois hysteria and the carnivalesque. In During, S. (ed.) The cultural studies reader, pp 382 390. London: Routledge. Thrift, N. (2003). Performance and y Environment and Planning A 35, 2019 2024. Turner, V. (1984). Liminality and the performative genres. In MacAloon, J. (ed.) Rite, drama, festival, spectacle: rehearsals toward a theory of cultural performance, pp 19 41. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Zukin, S. (1995). The cultures of cities. Cambridge: Blackwell. Willems Braun, B. (1994). Situating cultural politics: fringe festivals and the production of spaces of intersubjectivity. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12, 75 104.

Relevant Websites http://www.garma.telstra.com Garma Festival. http://www.ifeaeurope.com International Festivals and Events Association Europe. http://www.ifea.com International Festivals and Events Association (USA). http://www.crctourism.com.au Sustainable Tourism, Cooperative Research Centre (Australia). http://www.mardigras.org.au Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras. http://www.unesco.org UNESCO, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. http://www.world tourism.org WTO, World Tourism Organisation.

Feudalism and Feudal Society H. Bradley and M. Taylor, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Limerick, Republic of Ireland & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Feudalism A postmedieval construct developed to describe a system of devolved political, military, social, and economic control from a king or lord to a vassal in the Middle Ages. Feudal Society A military-based society, dominated by a system of reciprocated relationships, between a lord and his vassal. This relationship centered on personal fealty, service, and protection. It can also describe a hierarchical social order which emerged in Europe in the ‘Middle Ages’ based on the legal subjection of the peasantry by a landholding elite. These landholding elite were protected, sustained, and reinforced by their domination of the political and judicial systems together with the economic mode of production. Fief A gift, usually land but on occasion an annuity or public office, granted by a lord to his vassal in return for military, judicial, and administrative services and homage. A fief was originally granted for the lifetime of the vassal only. By the tenth century it had become hereditary. Fealty The loyalty owed by a vassal to his lord on becoming his ‘man’. An oath taken by a vassal in which he promises to protect his lord’s military, economic, and political interests. Homage A feudal ceremony in which a vassal submits to his lord and promises to show respect and be his ‘man’. Lordship Position or authority enjoyed by a feudal lord or the geographical area within which a feudal lord controlled the political, military, social, and economic landscapes. Manor A subdivision of a lordship with social, economic, administrative, defensive, settlement, and judicial functions. Primogeniture A system of inheritance found in feudal Europe, whereby land was deemed legally indivisible and could, in the first instance, only be passed from the father to the eldest son. Vassal A person under the protection of a feudal lord to whom he has promised homage and fealty. It is also the name given to the holder of a fief. In return for the granting of a fief, the vassal is obliged to attend the lord’s court, administer the lord’s justice, serve in the lord’s army, and promise homage and fealty to his lord. Vassalage A feudal contractual relationship found among the upper classes in feudal Europe. It was a system whereby a free person (vassal) voluntarily accepted the overlordship of another (lord) in return for

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the granting of a fief. Both parties entered into a feudal contract. The lord promised to protect the vassal and his family and settle disputes in return for homage, fealty, and military and personal services. A vassal could enter into a contract with more than one lord; this practice was known as multiple vassalage.

Introduction Feudalism is an elusive concept and considerable ambi guity exists in how it is defined and subsequently em ployed by academics. This article discusses the meaning of the term feudalism and evaluates its impact on medieval society. The key characteristics of feudalism are identified and discussed. These include: vassalage; hom age and loyalty to lord; the granting of fiefs; hierarchical society, land tenure, and the devolution of public power into private hands; and military tenure and service in arms in the form of the knight’s fee. Definitions and theories associated with feudal society, such as ‘feudal revolution’ and ‘feudal mutation’ are presented. The temporal and spatial impact of feudalism on the land scape is also discussed. Particular reference is made to the impact of feudalism on the social, military, economic, and settlement landscape in the county of Limerick, Ireland. Finally, the end of feudalism is outlined. As a term, feudalism is derived from the French word feódalisme, which originated from the Latin word feodum. Over time it has been coupled with terms such as feudal system, feudal regime, feudal law, feudal mode of pro duction, feudal society, feudal monarch, feudal lordship, feudal revolution, and feudal mutation, to name but a few. The term is, therefore, difficult to define precisely. The French historian, Bloch, maintained that nearly every medieval historian understands and defines feu dalism as he/she pleases. Economic historians, for ex ample, place great emphasis on the exploitation of land and tenants by landholding classes. Social historians examine the dependency on vassalage and the fief. Constitutional historians study the exaction of taxes and the enforcement of the law. For others, the term has become synonymous with tyranny and oppression. In its simplest format, feudalism describes a system of devolved political and economic control from a king or lord to a vassal. It describes the political and social structures, whereby landowning elites governed ordinary people. It is said to have originated in the area between the Loire and Rhine rivers, in the ninth and tenth centuries, in

Feudalism and Feudal Society

response to barbarian invasions and the resulting inability of the Carolingians to assert their authority and protect their vassals. From there it is said to have gradually dif fused into Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. The feudal system centered on vassalage, homage, and the fief. Vassalage and homage were not however new institutions. The term vassus makes its first appearance in the sources in the Merovingian period in reference to a minor court official. It is however used with greater currency from the end of the eighth century to the eleventh century. During this period, it came to describe as a freeman in the service of his lord. In return for the granting of a fief, the freeman or vassal entered into a binding contract with the king or lord by agreeing to be his ‘man’ and perform certain military, administrative, and personal services. The vassal, for example, was obliged to render ‘aid and counsel’ to his lord. This in volved supporting the lord in all internal and external political and legal disputes and rendering him aid if necessary. These personal obligations or services could, over time, be modified but could not be set aside. In return, the lord offered his vassal protection. Homage also has its antecedents in the Merovingian period and refers to a public ceremonial act where the vassal knelt unarmed before his lord, laid his hands in his lord’s, and promised to be his man. A fief could take many forms. It could, for example, be given as an annuity or allowance, granted by the lord to his vassal following a successful military campaign. It could also have involved a vassal taking up public office in his lord’s administration. More often than not, how ever, it was centered on a piece of land, which was granted to a vassal. Initially, the fief was granted only for the lifetime of the vassal, but by the tenth century it had become hereditary, on the condition that the new vassal swore homage and fealty to the lord. Only in extreme cases, where the vassal was disloyal, died without an heir (escheat), or his heir was a minor (wardship) did the land revert back to his lord, and in some cases only on a temporary basis. The permanency of tenure, based around the fief, ensured the continual expansion of the feudal system and the confidence of its lords. Primo geniture, whereby the fief became indivisible and passed to the oldest son, on the death of his father, became the preferred method of inheritance. As a result, family lin eage attained greater prominence than the extended kinship unit.

The Study of Feudalism and Feudal Society The Belgian historian, Ganshof, centers his definition of feudalism on a legalistic and military explanation. In his definition, he places great emphasis on the possession of

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landed property (fief) and the role it played in defining social relationships between lord and vassal and lord and peasantry. He describes feudalism both as a form of so ciety and as a body of institutions. When dealing with feudal society or his own preferred term the ‘feudal re gime’, Ganshof identifies a number of innate character istics. These included, first, an emergence of personal dependency in society, which was hierarchical in nature, with knights occupying the upper stratum. Second, it included a subdivision of the rights to property. Third, a graded system of rights to land created by the subdivision of property, and finally, devolution of powers normally associated with a state, to a ‘hierarchy of persons’ at the local level. Ganshof ’s study clearly advocates the union of fief and vassal. The lord–vassal relationship quickly became a land based one – a vassal was granted a tract of land in return for service. The holder of the fief became a vassal of his lord, rendering him homage and fealty. The relationship between a lord and his vassal was a personal one and entered into freely, by both parties, while the relationship between the lord and his peasantry was viewed as impersonal and coercive in nature. This cre ated a hierarchical society, based on a paradox of equity and inequality and differing rates of dependence to the feudal lord. Central to this hierarchical society were the key institutions of vassalage, homage, and the fief. These institutions regulated the lord–vassal relationship, while also preventing social mobility among those denied vassal privileges. Ganshof ’s definition is in line with the British historian, Maitland’s, earlier definition. Like Ganshof, Maitland emphasized the legalistic aspects of feudalism, emphasizing the role, which the fief, vassalage, military service, and the judicial system played in maintaining the feudal system. Others, such as the American scholar, Stephenson, view feudalism primarily as a political phenomenon centered on a military tenurial system. While the motives for the creation of feudal holdings varied both spatially and temporally, the resulting feudal institutions provided a very practical, simple, and stable means of localized government in an age of political instability. Feudalism could also be seen as a system of localized government where the primary relationship was between lord and vassal as opposed to ruler and subject. Bloch expands on the legalistic and military de scription by incorporating sociological dimensions. For the most part, his definition included most of the fun damental elements of feudal society as opposed to simply the lord–vassal relationship and its associated features. These included (1) a subject peasantry, (2) use of a ser vice tenement (fief) instead of a salary, (3) the emergence of a class of specialized mounted knights who became more powerful than centralized institutions, (4) emer gence of ties of obedience and protection which bound the elite in society – vassalage, (5) fragmentation of

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authority leading to disorder, and (6) survival of other forms of association, for example, the family and the state. Of primary concern was the resultant society which feudalism fashioned. According to Bloch, feudal society was not simply an upper class phenomenon but rather one that was centered on lords and vassals and lords and peasants. The ensuing society was stratified both polit ically and socially and the resulting system was one of appropriation and exploitation. This is disputed by others who limit the definition of feudal society to those who controlled society. Central to Bloch’s definition was the issue of societal continuity. Marx, in his stage or epochal model of societal de velopment viewed feudalism as simply a stage in the economic development of a given society. For him, the feudal mode of production was an essential component in the progression toward a socialist system. The feudal mode of production succeeded the classical and preceded the capitalist mode of production. At its very heart, feudalism was a system of exploitation, whereby the peasantry were exploited economically, through the ex traction of the surplus, by the landowning classes. For many medievalists, this definition is too broad as it could include any society with a privileged landholding class and a dependent peasantry. Others prefer to view these economic practices of exploitation as part of the manorial system, and hence the term manorialization is used to describe the economic arrangements which existed be tween the lord and the peasantry based around the spatial unit of the manor. While these classical definitions of feudalism are still utilized, many modifications have emerged. Criticism has centered on their spatial, temporal, and structural spec ificity. There can be no doubt that the impact of the feudal system varied both spatially and temporally and appeared in various different guises, at different times, across the European landscape. It appears to have been most advanced in France and Germany in the tenth and eleventh centuries, where public authority was ineffect ive and where members of the aristocratic class main tained a personal grip on power and authority. While all vassals ultimately held land from their king, the king was often unable to enforce his authority. Bloch defines this initial period as the ‘first feudal age’. This period was characterized by the individualism of lords and the spontaneous growth of basic feudal institutions. During this period, kings effectively lost control over their realms with the formation of independent local sei gneuries. The situation, however, changed during the late eleventh century, the period termed by Bloch as the ‘second feudal age’. This period was characterized by a reaffirmation of sovereign authority, through the re claiming, by the king, of core public functions, for ex ample, the administration of justice and the issuing of legislation. This was evident in England in the mid

twelfth century. This period also witnessed a controlled systematic spatial expansion of feudalism into Central, Eastern, and Western Europe. This was necessitated by, among other things, population growth and the lack of land based opportunities for younger sons of aristocratic families due to the laws of primogeniture in the feudal core. In these newly acquired territories, kings ensured that grants of land were only given to their loyal fol lowers. In all these landscapes, regional variations existed and the system was adapted to suit unique situations. The very flexibility and pliability of the system was perhaps one of its greatest strengths, in particular in frontier lo cations in Wales and Ireland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, respectively. Some scholars, for example, the British historian Maitland, have suggested that feudalism had the poten tial to manifest itself differently across the European landscape. In his work on English feudalism, he high lighted the potential for spatial and temporal variations in the effectiveness of the feudal system. He states that feudalism in France was radically different to the feu dalism encountered in England and that feudalism of the eleventh century was very different to that practiced in the thirteenth century. He claims that the English land scape did not experience the development of a classic feudal system. Ganshof also recognized the spatial limi tations in his study, which concentrated primarily on the Carolingian Empire to the detriment of England and Italy. Feudalism could, consequently, be seen as more a method of organization and as such no static definition should be applied; rather, recognition should be given to the fact that like other political systems, it was constantly developing and had the ability to adapt to changing situations. Feudalism should, therefore, be viewed as a response to a particular stimulus, that is, the decay or weakening of a highly organized and centralized political system in the Carolingian Empire in the tenth and eleventh centuries. According to some historians, this weakening in cen tralized authority resulted in a feudal revolution. The presence or absence of a feudal revolution is a debatable issue in medieval studies. This revolution is said to have come about as a result of a geopolitical shift in power in medieval Europe. It originated in the collapse of the Carolingian Empire in the tenth century and the re sulting weakening of public centralized authorities. This initiated structural changes in the geography of power in medieval Europe. With the weakening of centralized authority, private power bases, focused on the exploi tation of the local landscape, emerged. The establishment of these new territorial or seigniorial lordships, armed with the apparent authority to rule localities, together with the multiplication of knights and their castles have been described as the feudal revolution. These lordships and their lords became the new leviathans or


powerbrokers in feudal Europe. Some scholars, in pre ferring the use of the term mutation as opposed to revolution, proposed that the process involved changes at a political and cultural level and the emergence of dominant small scale forms of organization. The stability of centralized power and the judicial system which en forced it in the pre eleventh century was viewed as the direct antithesis of the instability witnessed in the same institutions in the eleventh century. The French historian Duby was the first to suggest this revolution in his classical study of the Maˆconnais in France. In this study, Duby describes the breakdown in public order in Maˆconnais, which occurred during the years 980–1080. His study inferred that discontinuity with the past was the key, and the end result was an abrupt change in the character of society. Other scholars have since advanced on the work of Duby by expanding on the significance of the feudal revolution to include not just the judicial institutions of change, but also the mechanism or vehicle of that change – the territorial seigniorial lordship and its violent characteristics. Vio lence in tenth century society was not new. What had changed, however, was the way in which violence affected lordship and social relationships, in particular between the lord and his peasantry. Violence was exploitative in nature, enforcing its will on the powerless in society. At its core was the quest for status and power. Violence and its changing nature had the ability to mold a new order of power. Lordship was predatory in nature and was seen as a means to an end. The key to public authority lay not in the holding of public office but in the possession of land as represented by the fief or lordship. Land was, however, a finite resource in the Middle Ages, hence, the expansion of lordship, in particular the exploitative or tyrannical variety, into unchartered territories, on the fringe of feudal Europe, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Violence, as a means to an end, to christianize or civilize other cultures and religions was deemed justifiable and acceptable in the circumstances. The disruption, how ever, occurred when the violence of lordship could no longer be contained. The potential spatial influence of this feudal revo lution or mutation has also been disputed. Barendse ar gues for the existence of a feudal mutation in world history. His feudal mutation model depicts feudalism both as a useful term in world historic analysis and as a process which left an imprint on vast areas of Eurasia from the tenth to the thirteenth century. He identifies three essential criteria in his feudal mutation model. First, an increase in peasant productivity as a result of an increase in agricultural productivity, colonization, and trade. Second, the emergence of a mounted aristocratic class intent on expanding their power and authority to the detriment of the peasant classes. Third, changes in sociopolitical structures as a result of changes in both the

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nature of power and how it was expressed. The feudal process, therefore, centered on the subjugation of the peasantry by a military aristocratic class. This military aristocracy were more powerful than any existing central institution and for that reason they had complete control over all aspects of peasant life. The resulting system was, therefore, not unique to feudal Europe. Accordingly, he maintained that European feudalism was just a de centralized variant of a world historic system. For medievalists, this definition is too broad and if used, the term loses any real analytical usefulness for the study of medieval Europe.

The Characteristics of Feudal Landscapes The American geographer Sauer suggests that each culture has the ability to create its own cultural land scape. This cultural landscape can be influenced by, among other things, the dominant ideology of the time. In the case of medieval Europe, feudalism represented the dominant ideology. The British geographer Dodg shon was one of the first to question whether feudalism created its own unique landscape and whether the feudal institutions of fief and vassalage created unique spatial patterns, which differentiated landscapes in the Middle Ages from earlier kin based landscapes. Feudalism, through the spatial unit of lordship and the social unit of vassalage, was used as a device of govern ment, or as the mechanism by which the king or lord controlled diverse territories within his jurisdiction. Vassalage, while it originated as a purely social rela tionship was transformed into a social–spatial relation ship, with vassals of the king granted both land and lordship in return for fealty and military service. This, according to Dodgshon, was the paradox that was feu dalism. It required power to be concentrated in the hands of a king, but in order for the king’s control to filter down to the lords and in turn to the peasants, the king had to devolve power to his vassals through grants of land. Lords, in turn, subdivided or subinfeudated their lands among their tenants, thereby duplicating the feudal sys tem on individual manors. An example of this can be seen in the context of the medieval lordship of Ireland where the king subinfeudated lands to his loyal followers in return for their loyalty and military service. These lords in turn further subinfeudated lands to their loyal fol lowers, an example of which can be seen in the twelfth century Limerick landscape (see Figure 1). As a result, power became socially and spatially regulated at various different scales. Feudalism, therefore, anchored the relationship be tween the lord and vassal to specific blocks of land. The land held was spatially regulated within the territorial

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Estremoy Esclon and Ioleger

Limerick Owney Grean

Adare Oconyll & (Askeaton and Croom Rathkeale) h

Shanid

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Fontimel

1176 Grant to Adam de Hereford, the cantreds of Oconyll and Bruree 1185 Grant to Theobald Walter Owney Grant to Philip de Barry of the cantred of Ardagh 1180s Grant to Gerald Fitz Maurice of the cantred of Ocarbry Desmond Granted to Fitz Stephen and de Cogan No information for these cantreds at this stage

Natherlach

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Figure 1 Twelfth-century land grants by cantred in the county of Limerick, Ireland. From Taylor, M. (2007). Anglo-Norman Settlement in Rural County Limerick 1175 1321. A Geographical Analysis. Unpublished MA Thesis, Department of Geography, Mary Immaculate College.

framework of the lordship and manor. The lord’s place in the social hierarchy was based on the size of his land grant and the nature of his tenurial relationship with his overlord. Lordship represented the spatial basis of feudal power in the Middle Ages. It defined a spatial area within which the feudal lord had feudal rights. However, not all lords or lordships were equal in status or power, and therefore a hierarchical system of lordships emerged. This hierarchical system was subsequently mirrored in geography of the manor. (See Figure 2.) The social landscape: The feudal landscape was socially regulated. People were locked into a particular place in society with little opportunity for social or geographical mobility, in particular from the bottom up. The rela tionship between the lord and his free tenants differed. It was hierarchical and was interlinked with the tenant’s tenurial relationship and his social standing in manorial society. Generally, the greater the amount of land a tenant held, the higher his social status. Social status was also based on the type of service owed to the lord. Those free tenants who attended the manorial court or ‘did suit’ were of a higher social status than those free tenants who were rent paying. The land divided among the tenants was measured in a variety of ways and the payments due

to the manorial lord differed according to the status of the tenant. The military landscape: The feudal system of land holding was centered on the need for localized military defense. As a result, a lord was granted land in return for military service or knight’s service. A tenant who held land by knight’s service was obliged to either serve in person in his lord’s army or provide the services of a knight to serve in his lord’s army. When the military needs of the lord became more specialized, for example, in Ireland in the twelfth century, this was commuted to a money payment, usually d20 a year, called scutage. The knight’s fee as a unit of measurement was intended to express the potential value of the unit of land in terms of the military service it might be expected to yield. As the purpose of military tenure was the creation of a garrison, the size of a fee depended on the security of its location. The core of the fief was centered on the location of the castle. Castles symbolized feudal lordship and fur nished upon the lord the means to control people through the garrison of mounted men that were housed within. The castle was a military innovation that was a real, but importantly not an absolute, part of the feudal landscape. Castles were seen as instruments of defense


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1 1 1 7 7

2 7

5

6

6

4

3 7

6 6 1 0 10 Scale in miles Civil parish boundary Cantred boundary Manor No evidence of manor in existence in the early thirteenth century

1 = Manors of William de Burgh 2 = Manors of Theobald Walter 3 = Manors of Thomas Fitz Maurice 4 = Manors of Gerald Fitz Maurice

5 = Manors of Maurice Fitz Gerald 6 = Manors of Geoffrey de Mariscio 7 = Episcopal manors

Figure 2 Thirteenth-century manorial landscape in the county of Limerick, Ireland. From Taylor, M. (2007). Anglo-Norman Settlement in Rural County Limerick 1175 1321. A Geographical Analysis. Unpublished MA Thesis, Department of Geography, Mary Immaculate College.

and of territorial control. They gave families of the noble class a specifically located center of power, a family seat which they would defend at all costs. In this way, the localized feudalized landscape became personalized. A castle could take on many forms. In medieval Ire land, the earliest feudal fortifications were earthen motte and bailey castles. These provided for the localized de fensive needs in the early stages of the colonization of Ireland. Many of these were replaced in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries by masonry castles. The position of an individual manor within the overall social hierarchy in Ireland was often reflected in the location and type of castle constructed on these manorial lands. For example, the major lords built large and impressive baronial castles in the center of their manors which catered to the ad ministrative and defensive needs of their lordships. The lesser manorial lords constructed smaller castles which catered to the needs of a more localized landscape. The resulting hierarchy of castle structures mirrored the so cial hierarchy of the lordship (see Figure 3). In the past, castles were often studied in isolation from the settlement pattern around them. They are now more correctly viewed as just one component of that settle ment pattern. This can be seen in the many functions of the castle. Apart from being a defensive stronghold and

residence of the lord, a castle was also the administrative and judicial center of the lord’s manor and held the manorial court. Ironically, a stone castle could com municate a number of messages which included power and authority on the behalf of the lord and fear and alienation on behalf of his dependent tenants. A castle was an indicator of wealth, of power, and of endurance. The construction of a stone castle was symbolically im portant as it indicated that the lord’s intentions were long term; they were there to stay. The economic landscape: The theory that feudalism created its own landscape can be seen in the spatial or ganization of the feudal manor. The manorial structure provided the institutional framework for the lords and the free tenants to organize and administer their terri tories. It was the manorial structure which allowed feu dalism to reach down to the ordinary person in society. The importance of the manor to the success of feudalism should, therefore, not be underestimated. Dodgshon outlines how through the manorial structure the relations between the king or lord and his vassals were set down firmly in space, and in turn the relations between the vassals and their free tenants were anchored to specific blocks of manorialized land. There was a high degree of uniformity in the spatial organization of a manor. The

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Castleconnell

Carrigogunnel

Limerick Caslan Uilchin? Ballysimon

Portnard

Tomdeely

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Castle Robert Askeaton Glin

Caherconlish Raheen

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Figure 3 Twelfth thirteenth century defensive structures in the county of Limerick, Ireland. From Taylor, M. (2007). Anglo-Norman Settlement in Rural County Limerick 1175 1321. A Geographical Analysis. Unpublished MA Thesis, Department of Geography, Mary Immaculate College.

manor was divided into two sections: the demesne land for the lord’s own use and the land rented out to the lord’s tenants (see Figure 4). In this way, the land became increasingly economically viable. The settlement landscape: Feudalism created a new framework for both rural and urban settlement. According to the Irish geographer, Graham, the settlement landscape evolved from the requirements of feudalism, in particular its military, political, and economic needs. In Ireland, the emergence of manors facilitated the creation of a new layer of nucleated settlement on the landscape, which differed considerably from what had preceded it. This can be seen principally in the spatial organization of the feudal manor, where relations between the crown and his lord and the lord and his tenants were set down in land. Settlement of the manor varied temporally and spatially. Some manors developed greatly and became a focus for settlement. Defensive structures such as motte and baileys and stone castles were built at manorial centers. Many of these manorial centers with their defensive, religious, economic, administrative, and residential functions at tracted more settlement and grew into manorial villages. Their central focus was on the defensive structure and the church (See Figure 5). Many of these settlements were also granted borough status. This involved the granting of

certain privileges on a group known as burgesses. In Ireland, these privileges were generally modeled on the Breteuil charter of the Normandy town of Breteuil sur Ilon. It granted the settlement a certain status and would have been an inducement for further settlement. Some of the boroughs would not have developed further. A number, however, would have developed into towns. As a result, nucleated settlements became the norm, for ex ample, the planned villages of Eastern Europe or the towns of Anglo Norman Ireland.

The End of Feudalism The point at which the feudal system ceases to exist is shrouded in controversy. By and large, it is dependent on how feudalism is defined. If a political definition is ap plied and feudalism is seen to be dependent on the de centralization of authority, then the reemergence of centralized power, through the instrument of the terri torial state in the fifteenth century, signals the end of the feudal system. On the other hand, if feudalism is viewed as simply a stage in the economic development of a given society, the introduction of the capitalist mode of pro duction in the sixteenth century signals the end of the


Kilderry

Kilderry

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Drominycarra

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Glenogra

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Killorath

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Figure 4 The internal organization of the manor of Glenorga in the county of Limerick, Ireland. From Taylor, M. (2007). AngloNorman Settlement in Rural County Limerick 1175 1321. A Geographical Analysis. Unpublished MA Thesis, Department of Geography, Mary Immaculate College.

feudal system. Conversely, if a definition of feudalism centers on the suppression of the peasant classes by the aristocracy in France, then the French Revolution of 1798 defines the exact moment when feudalism was con demned to the history books. While a definitive definition of the term feudalism may remain elusive, the key institutions of the fief, vas salage, and homage are central to all definitions. However one defines the term, there can be no doubt that feu dalism remains a very useful analytical tool which allows geographers to compare and contrast varying landscapes and cultures in Europe in the Middle Ages. See also: Field Systems and Enclosure; Geohistory; Historical Geographies, Rural.

Further Reading Barendse, R. J. (2003). The feudal mutation: Military and economic transformations of the ethnosphere in the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. Journal of World History 14(4), 503 529. Bartlett, R. (1993). The Making of Europe. Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change 950 1300. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bisson, T. N. (1994). The feudal revolution. Past and Present 142, 6 42. Bloch, M. (1961). Feudal Society, 2 vols. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Secondary settlement node

Nucleated settlement node Castle Church Ringwork Borough Mill Houses Moated site

Parish of Glenogra Demesne lands Free tenant land Betagii land Lands not mentioned in the extent 0

Primary settlement node

Cahirguillamore

Crean Crean

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0

1 mile

Figure 5 The settlement geography of the manor of Glenogra in the county of Limerick, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From Taylor, M. (2007). Anglo-Norman Settlement in Rural County Limerick 1175 1321. A Geographical Analysis. Unpublished MA Thesis, Department of Geography, Mary Immaculate College.

Brown, E. A. R. (1974). The tyranny of a construct: Feudalism and historians of medieval Europe. American Historical Review 79, 1063 1088. Butlin, R. (1996). Historical Geography. Through the Gates of Space. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coulborn, R. (ed.) (1963). Feudalism in History. Connecticut, CT: Archon Books. Dodgshon, R. A. (1987). The European Past: Social Evolution and Spatial Order. London: Macmillan Education. Dodgshon, R. A. (1998). Society in Time and Space: A Geographical Perspective on Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duby, G. (1980). The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined. London: University of Chicago Press. Ganshof, F. L. (1952). Feudalism. London: Harper & Row Publishers. Herlihy, D. (1970). The History of Feudalism. New York: Walker. Hilton, R. (1990). Class Conflict and the Crises of Feudalism. New York: Verso. Hollister, C. W. and Bennett, J. M. (2001). Medieval Europe: A Short History. London: McGraw Hill. Le Goff, J. (1988). Medieval Civilization. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Mac Lean, S. (2007). Review article: Apocalypse and revolution: Europe around the year 1000. Early Medieval Europe 15(1), 86 106. Maitland, F. W. (1968). The History of English Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reuter, T. (1997). The ‘feudal revolution’. Past and Present 155, 177 195. Reynolds, S. (1994). Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sauer, C. (1925). The morphology of landscape. Geography 2, 19 54. Stephenson, C. (1941). Medieval Feudalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Field Geographies D. Abbott, University of Derby, Derby, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary The British Survey Movement This movement emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century both in the UK and the USA. In a ‘movement’ which included several thousand amateurs and professionals, many ‘regional surveys’ based on ‘scientific’ methods were undertaken mainly by sociologists (but also by those now known as human geographers) on ‘fact finding’ missions. These were based on specifications of survey designs published in several pamphlets and articles by people such as Geddes, Victor Branford and Le Play House. Challenges to the positivist nature of the methodology which emerged in the late 1950s and then 1960s eventually saw the disappearance of the ‘movement’. Le Play Society It was formed in the UK in the1920s, originally through study groups that developed around sociological issues such as social finance and credit for social needs. Eventually, geographers too began to participate in organised tours and fieldwork (Le Play tours) that were undertaken to carry out regional surveys around these issues. Soon, there was a need to separate out the study and travel focus, and a breakaway society, Le Play Society, was formed focusing solely on student tours or fieldwork. Standpoint Theory With its roots in feminist discourse, began as a critique of ‘rational’, ‘objective’ methodologies and explanations. Standpoint theorists consider knowledge derived from this as biased to Western cultures and male perspectives which altogether present a limited picture of the world. They thus argue for knowledge that derives from multiple perspectives, a knowledge that takes into account communications which take place in a wider context and allow real voices to come through, for example, those of women in poverty. Situatedness/Posionality Arguments are about the production of wider knowledge through the development of a methodology that is capable of relating to the context and position of actors within diverse settings. Feminist geographers, for example, have studied ‘work’ and ‘home’ as locations of situated knowledge for women. Others have considered race and patriarchal contexts in discussing post-colonial positionalities of historically colonized peoples.

Epistemological discourses such as those that have emerged from women’s studies (particularly feminism)

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and development studies have, however, shown geog raphers that there is a need to challenge the power as sumptions embedded in the whole process of research, including methodological choices that can include or exclude. By tracing these discourses and using examples from these two disciplines, this article demonstrates how contemporary geography has taken on board some of the new methodological approaches that have thus tran spired. In turn, this has enriched geographical enquiry, which is now, much as the subject itself, seen as a social construct requiring critical reflection and challenge.

Introduction Often students are attracted to geography because it promises them exciting opportunities of ‘fieldwork’ both at home and abroad. Teachers too see fieldwork as es sential in teaching geography and this is reflected in the definitive geography curricula of many higher education institutions all over the world. However, what constitutes ‘the field’ and defines ‘fieldwork’, fieldwork practices, and field methodologies has been fiercely contested, par ticularly in recent times. An old fashioned, ‘traditional’ view is summed up, for example, in the following quote: Field work is essentially personal observation and re cording; it brings reality to geographical study; it helps the geographer to acquire his all important under standing ‘eye for the country’; and thus it enriches his descriptive and explanatory powers. I would say that an essential part of the training of a young geographer is for him to choose some small accessible unit area that at tracts him; acquire a pair of stout boots, perhaps the geographers first item of equipment, study in the area itself the association of physical and human conditions which there prevail, and in fact give the area its indi viduality; and record the information he collects in a series of original maps. (Monkhouse, 1955 in Desylers and Starr, 2001, p. iv)

There are many suppositions underlying both the meaning of geography and geographical fieldwork in this quote. These include that fieldwork is about ‘going out there’ in all types of weather, that it involves collection and recording of information from a small and accessible geographical area, and that the geographer is a man, entering a tough terrain, being prepared for the mascu line worlds of geographers. As hinted in the first paragraph, in recent years however, particularly since the 1960s, all these

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suppositions have been challenged through a long and ever growing debate starting with the very premises of geography as a discipline, and what constitutes its ‘fields’, leading onto the nature and meaning of ‘fieldwork’ and how best this can be done. Geographical ‘fields’ are no longer viewed as accessible small area studies, as sug gested in the Monkhouse quote above, or ‘fieldwork’ as based on ‘objective’ quantifying and mapping of ‘facts’. Rather, contemporary geographers may argue that ‘the field’ occupies political and social spaces around us in our everyday locations, whether on our doorsteps or at a global distance. These ‘expanded’ fields can be accessible or not, in distant places or not, and visible or not. If anything, in doing ‘fieldwork’, we need to look beyond the visible in order to discover geographical meanings and human use of physical and social spaces. This requires a rethink of methodological and ‘field work’ practices which go beyond the ‘objective’ and ‘distant’ methods of mapping boundaries of the physical ‘geographical terrain’ to the recognition of the ‘social terrain’ where power relationships embedded in the daily politic define how maps are shaped . For example, the might of the British Empire was often portrayed to school children through (dark pink or red) colonial maps that juxtaposed Britain as the center of the world – a notion that has of course since been turned upside down by projections that have centered on others, for example, Peters projection centering on Africa. This article dis cusses these points further by giving a brief insight into some of the arguments that have shaped debates on contemporary field geographies. It particularly draws on two perspectives which take the notions of power and powerlessness as their central tenet, that is, a feminist one and a postcolonial one. It is suggested that these per spectives have reframed the meanings of geographical investigation, calling for a ‘subjective’ return to ‘the field’ which allows geographers to ‘explore’ the real stories of power relationships that define the use of space and place, in contrast to supposed neutral political spaces of ‘distant’ fieldwork as illustrated by the quote at the start of this section.

Exploring ‘the Field’ It could be said that the ‘traditional’ model of the ‘field’ as something out there waiting to be discovered and re corded scientifically is associated with Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), the founding father of field studies. Humboldt was a Prussian naturalist who ex plored and wrote about much of Central and South America. He is famous for his diverse activities which include an extensive collection of plant, animal, and mineral specimens which he acquired during his travels; the extensive mapping of northern South America; and

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the recordings he made of scientific phenomena such as altitudinal and observed astronomical events. Within the context of, and opposition from, divinity and religious based explanations dominant at the time, Humboldt championed ‘scientific reasoning’, an explanation that was also to influence Darwin’s Origin of the Species published soon after his death. However, as Doreen Massey has pointed out, Hum boldt’s methods of ‘scientific’ investigation immediately drew criticism, for instance from Georges Cuvier (1769– 1832) who carried out his naturist anatomical studies in the dissection rooms of a museum in contrast to Hum boldt’s exploration led field research. In comparing the desk based work of a ‘sedentary naturalist’ who is able to minutely examine single objects with that of an explorer who takes a ‘broad brush’ look at the natural environ ment, Cuvier questioned the true location of science. Is this indoor or outdoors? Where can superior knowledge be gained, in natural habitats or through desk based anatomical studies? Cuvier’s questioning led to what Massey identifies as a definitive moment, shaping ques tions of epistemology, spatiality, and the general nature of science for geographers as it essentially asks where ‘the field’ is located, and how ‘fieldwork’ should be carried out. Echoes of similar questions are evident in con temporary debates on ‘the field’, continuing since the Victorian times when the sons of the rich (Humboldt was a baron and women ‘explorers’ all but invisible) could discover exotic locations and attempt to provide a sci entific rationale for geographical phenomena. Questions include key issues of the distance of locations as well as the ‘objective’ distance between the researcher and those researched; knowledge gathering; and appropriate ‘field’ methodologies including how best to represent the ‘en counters’ in the field in order to seek the ‘truth’ and represent accurately. In fact, over the years, there has been much batting to and fro over these questions with increasingly sophisti cated philosophical argument regarding various facets of ‘the field’ and ‘field’ practice. For instance, there has been much criticism of earlier influential geographical prac tices of ‘viewing’ the other from a distance as exemplified by Patrick Geddes who stood on the ‘Outlook Tower’ he established in 1892 in Edinburgh (Scotland), talking and pointing at a height. This teaching technique has, of course, been replaced with other interactive methods today, yet it remains a familiar method for many geog raphy teachers in British schools. Another example is the fondness for ‘objective’ survey methodologies practiced in British schools and universities, the influence for which can be traced to at least a hundred regional fieldwork ‘expeditions’ that were carried out by the Le Play Society in Britain between 1930–60 in order to ‘scientifically’ collect data, identify causation, later utilized to feed into prescriptive policies.

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The need for distance and ‘objective’ disengagement from ‘the field’ that is exemplified above has come under much criticism since the 1960s. This is partly due to a broadening of the discipline itself. Contemporary geog raphy, particularly human geography, has seen a major shift in recent years from an awkward attempt to fit into a ‘scientific’ world of physical geography shaped by sci entific tools, techniques, and justification. It is now a much wider discipline, crossing boundaries with several other disciplines such as ethnography, anthropology, sociology, and media. In fact, in the mid 1980s, as methodological boundaries between other disciplines and contemporary human geographies became blurred, geographers such as Eliot Hurst have been provoked in questioning the very existence and future of geography as a subject per se! Apart from this crossing of interdisciplinary bound aries, the 1960s political/societal movements, such as the global women’s and black movements, challenged geo graphical assumptions of ‘fieldwork’, assumptions built around power relationships that either misrepresented or left out the real voices of people who were marginalized or on the edges of society. This challenge was fierce and vocal. It began to question the historical and material positioning of geographical explanations. For instance, for the millions who were on the receiving end of geo graphical explorations, the story was different. The Royal Geographical Society, which was founded in 1830 within the context of British colonialism, relied on geographical ‘explorations’, mapping of boundaries, and hierarchical classifications of ‘darker continents’ and ‘darker races’ helped to legitimize forced rule over millions. As Kobayashi and Peake in citing Livingstone suggest, ‘‘the strongest of imperial geography’s metaphor was that of the moral climatic idiom,’’ which by naturalization of racial differences according to climatic classifications placed those of the ‘dark races’ at the bottom of geo graphy’s terrain. ‘The field’ is then a complex political arena which spreads beyond a distant, accessible location ‘out there’. It is in fact where power relations between the researcher and the researched are played out, whether these are defined by class, race, and/or gender. To get into what lies beyond the surface, and to understand how power shapes space and place, requires less distancing and more engagement with ‘the field’, and a constant search for more appropriate, inclusive methods of enquiring into the relationship between physical environments and human interaction. In this it is important to understand the historical and social contexts within which we ne gotiate ‘the field’. For instance, as the anthropologist Johannes Fabian suggests, time differentiates and trans forms how we view ‘the other’. African people, for ex ample, within the context of historical missionary practices during the ‘discovery’ of Africa were often

viewed as ‘savages’ ready for religious conversion. Global political awareness over time has forced a transformation of such derogative stereotyping of many who were caught up in the story of colonialism. This article discusses further the point that ‘the field’ is a political arena through a review of a feminist critique that has defied the androcentricism (consciously or otherwise fixating on the male as the center of the world) and distancing of the whole research process in seeking a return to ‘the field’ where ‘subjective’ engagement can be celebrated. This is followed by a review of development methodologies that have equally strongly attempted to include the invisible ‘voices of the poor’ that have pre viously been lost or dismissed in historically racialized spaces of a postcolonial world.

A Feminist Return to ‘the Field’ As suggested earlier, one of the reasons for focusing on a feminist perspective on ‘the field’ is that, particularly since the 1960s, feminists have made a huge impact in redefining the disciplinary boundaries and understanding of geography. Feminist intervention in geography has to be understood within the context of an exciting, optimist women’s movement of the 1970s when feminist literature (such as Kate Millet’s 1970 Sexual Politics, Simon de Beauvoir’s 1978 The Second Sex) brought politics into the personal, questioned public spaces, patriarchal structures and the world of work (as with Anne Oakley’s 1972 The Sociology of Housework, Maria Mies’ 1986 Patriarchy and Accumulation at a World Scale), paving paths toward direct collective actions (e.g., with the UK Greenham Common Women’s Peace camp 1981–2000). An important strand of feminist intervention at the time has been the questioning of how we ‘find out’. Feminists argued that the processes of enquiry are es sentially embedded in gendered power relationships, well summarized in a book entitled Doing Feminist Research. This book showed how all processes of research, starting with what is included on research agendas, right up to the end process of publication reflected a male bias of power in universities and other teaching institutions. In turn, this meant that only the research that met the criteria of a dominant male rationality received status and visibility, whereas other important topics were simply left off the agenda or dismissed/sidelined through a questioning of methodological significance. By the mid 1980s, such challenge to the andro centrism of research processes led to a severe and intense attack particularly on the rational, ‘objective’ scientific methodology of ‘the field’. An example is Lloyd’s argu ment that the notion of ‘ideal rationality’ is embodied in seventeen century ideals of manhood rather than those of humankind, as evident in the philosophical assumptions

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of Descartes and Spinoza. Thus, feminists argued that knowledge in modern Western culture is verified pri marily through men’s experiences. Any ‘truths’ generated are therefore based on a limited knowledge of reality in which they circumvent or bypass the real conditions, and the ontological foundation of gender, race, class, and culture. For instance, in apartheid South Africa, was the ‘truth’ the story that of the segregated black housemaid living in poverty in Johannesburg or that of a well to do white ‘madam’ for whom she worked? Writers such as Nancy Hartsock and Susan Harding in 1986 and 1987 therefore argued for a feminist stand point, the framework of which is a nonandocentric, nonidealist methodology that is contextually grounded, and enables a differing understanding of social relation ships of power and powerlessness. For example, in the author’s own work with poor women who make meals for migrant workers in the horrendous and vast slums of Mumbai, her ‘field’ was located within the context of the extreme poverty and vulnerable lives and livelihoods of the slum dwellers. Within this unpredictable and harsh world, there was no neat methodological fit. The author was also so disturbed by what she saw, it was impossible to stay at an ‘objective’ distant, as a woman researching circumstances of other women. A feminist standpoint gave her the confidence to adapt methodology to the particular context and to use subjectivity and feelings as evidence. Standpoint theory, as with other politico ontological questions, drew much criticism, particularly from women who saw their boundaries of oppression as defined dif ferently. This included black and Asian women, lesbians, and women from the ‘Third World’ whose daily reality was shaped through race, color, homophobia, and poverty. This, they argued, was very different from the often privileged and ethnocentric backgrounds of Western academic women. This argument came home to the author sharply during the research she mentions above. While, for instance, she shared her role as a wife or a mother with the women in the slums, there was no comparison between the advantageous background in which she carried out these roles, with those of the wives and mothers from lower caste, poverty ridden back grounds who struggled daily just to feed their children. Over the years, debates on a feminist standpoint and difference have become very complex and refined, giving rise to further subdebates such as on positionality and situatedness which have led to alternative understandings on space, place, and scale. The range is wide and stret ches from microlevel local studies, including body mapping and gendering of everyday spaces, to macro level studies on interconnectedness between regions, nations, and global linkages, supported by feminist geographers such as Massey, McDowell and Sharp, and Bell and Valentine. As we go into the twenty first

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century, dominant questions include those of identity and place, especially with those who have ‘no place’. This includes the millions of displaced around the world through conflict, through global capitalist restructuring, through environmental destruction, and through re ligious fundamentalism that undermines women’s pos ition in society. Feminist epistemological discourses that began as a challenge to male power, scientific rationality, and ‘ob jectivity’ have therefore turned a full circle. Instead of a ‘distancing’, feminist standpoint celebrates subjectivity, thus demanding a return to ‘the field’ where the ‘truth’ tells the real story behind the lives of the ‘researched’ rather than a partial one. For instance, which is the partial and fuller truth behind infant mortality rates in the slums of Mumbai? Is it through the ‘distant’ census records of infant mortality, or is it through the grief displayed in a mother’s story, which will inevitably draw a ‘subjective’ researcher into her life, particularly if this researcher is a woman and a parent herself ?

A Postcolonial Return to ‘the Field’ Like the feminist paradigm, those whose ‘fields’ are the worlds of post 1950s developing and transitional econ omies, question the value of ‘Western’ field practices and methodologies within very different and highly complex social situations of poverty. While a major issue for ‘field’ studies in development (which is a branch of geography specializing in mostly ex colonial economies as above) has also centered on a methodology that engages rather than distances the participants, a primary starting point of the discourse is whether ‘fieldwork’ should be done in the first place, particularly by researchers from the ‘West’. Underlying this dilemma is the acute awareness of how a colonial hegemonic ideology has represented the ‘other’ (evident in many, often erroneous, anthropological studies of tribes and ‘darker’ races as discussed earlier). Development practitioners and academics share ‘the field’ of time and space, not even a full century apart, between ‘field truths’ that fed the colonial imagination, and research that counts toward poverty alleviation based on meaningful cultural interactions. Fear of the intrusive nature of fieldwork, fear of exploitation, and fear of re inforcing patterns of power and privilege underpin the conflict that is so created. Therefore, since the 1980s, a very rich discourse has emerged on the ethical dilemmas of development especially from ‘postdevelopment’ critics of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, who question devel opment intervention of any type led from the ‘West’. One such is Escobar who argues that the debates around ‘development’ that have emerged from the West are re inforcing the legitimacy of Western ‘experts’ (such as

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World Bank consultants), and undermining local people and indigenous knowledge. Related to this is the realization that ‘fieldwork’ (on which ‘experts’ feed) continues to either misrepresent or underrepresent the needs of people in developing countries, particularly marginalized people. Therefore policy and practice, which are integral to the develop ment agenda, have at best left out those who are most burdened by poverty and inequality, and at worst subject them to bad development projects that have further im peded progress. Two influential, groundbreaking inter ventions came from Boserup who pointed to the omission of gender and women’s significant contribution from a development analysis, and Chambers who argued for an inclusion of local voices in research through a partici patory approach. Participatory approaches are about development from ‘below’ rather than ‘above’, informed by knowledge of those who are at the receiving end of it, rather than ‘ex perts’ whose knowledge is remote. Theoretically, this enhances a fuller knowledge base and empowers grass roots participants through the research process as they gain confidence in identifying their problems and de signing solutions. Participatory methodology as both theory and practice has thus allowed development studies to break away from the traditional mold of the ‘objective’/ expert researcher and the subject/respondent. Embedded in this is a recognition that quantitative information (e.g., surveys, census, baselines) is useful as background or complimentary data, but the real information about people’s lives and livelihood comes from qualitative re sponses, the oral histories, the untold stories, case studies, and an understanding of the subjective where research responses are of prime value. Since participatory approaches have generated much interest from many disciplinary strands, there are several textbooks on how to actually conduct participatory re search. There is also much critique on its idealism and limitation, for example, that these approaches are still a little more than another information technique and that participation is not always equal. Nevertheless, partici patory approaches over the years have increasingly demonstrated that research roles are actually integrated with goals of development. This is because the ‘field’ is where researchers intervene in social processes that shape other people’s lives and culture. How that inter vention is carried out requires introspection and critical reflection, particularly as the history of development is littered with examples where well meaning, but un critical initiatives have left local people worse off. Be cause of this, critical reflection aims to include as many stakeholders involved in the process of development as possible so that the knowledge base of progress can be extended. Extended knowledge thus informs wider de bates and policy decisions with lesser margins of error. In

the process, participants can expect to be further em powered in shaping their own futures rather than be dictated ‘from above’. In recent years, the idea of participatory ‘fieldwork’ has taken on new meanings in what has become known as ‘action research’. Action research relies on ‘field’ activity that brings together a number of stakeholders who share interests in generating an outcome. These stakeholders can include a range of local people, voluntary or funding agents, academics, and development practitioners, all of whom share a wealth of acquired lived knowledge and are best placed to generate lived theories of how to ne gotiate action in ‘the field’. Action research is, therefore, that which is generated through both lived and critical knowledge amassed by stakeholders who act together to challenge and change their own circumstances in a manner which will generate sustainable, grassroots development. An example of this is a women’s farming project (The Banjundling Women’s Vegetable Garden) in the Gambia where women farmers, local activists, interested volun teers, and the author herself as an academic have come together to develop initiatives on how to generate in come by diversifying crops. The women farmers have lived knowledge of the soil, farming techniques, and cropping, while local activists, that of internal marketing and sales, and the author, as an academic, has skills which help with funding applications or writing up of reports. In this way, a differentiated group of people shared action over a farming project that over the years has generated income for some 150 previously displaced women farmers. It is important to note that action research is often a lengthy process which is not always smooth. For instance, in the above example, the project took some 10 years to establish itself and there were many trials and errors during this time. It is also important that the project remains sustainable and can build capacity to teach others at a grassroots level. Action research therefore has a social aim in that ideally this should empower the participants. In the example given above, the women farmers involved in the original project have now helped to establish another nine such projects. They have also learned to negotiate for more land, enter markets, and diversify into animal husbandry. Action research also has a political aim in that it initiates change in power re lations. For example, women in the Gambia work the land but mostly do not own any. They live in a fairly patriarchal society, often in polygamous marriages. Par ticipation and working collectively has given them strength to address some of these structural biases that affect their daily struggle. Discourse around developmental ‘fieldwork’ has therefore attempted to decolonize understandings based on historical colonial power relations which have

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presented European knowledge as central. It takes lived knowledge of people at grassroots level as its mainstay in ‘the field’. Development geography remains concerned with questions of ethics, representation, historically tan gled relationships, and methodological significance. However, at the end of the day as development is about action, full engagement with ‘the field’ where lived ex perience and knowledge create action that betters lives is of central importance.

Conclusion Contemporary geography no longer exists as knowledge of lists, classifications, and worldly facts – acquired by traipsing around in muddy boots, mapping, and mea suring of a vast expanse of homogenized space of the ‘conquered’ world. The geographical field in the twenty first century is much stretched since the 1960s Pattison definitions of the four traditions of geography, that is, geometrical boundary mapping spatial tradition, the area studies tradition, the man–land tradition, and the Earth science tradition. The geographical ‘field’ is now understood as vast, being further extended through globalization and inter connectedness through real and virtual worlds. This has meant that difference within spaces and cultures has be come increasingly apparent while at the same time globalization has brought new questions in relation to power. Within this, ‘fieldwork’ remains an important part of geography, and lends it some distinct identity. However, as the feminist and developmental geographers have ar gued, there is a need to engage actively in ‘the field’ in order to open up knowledge and spaces that have often remained invisible through a search for distancing and ‘objectivity’. See also: Developmentalism; Feminism/Feminist Geography; Fieldwork; Participatory Action Research; Postcolonialism/Postcolonial Geographies;

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Quantitative Methodologies; Regional Geography I; Spatial Science.

Further Reading Abbott, D. (2007). Doing ‘incorrect’ research: The importance of the subjective and the personal in researching poverty’. In Thomas, A. & Mohan, G. (eds.) Research Skills for Policy and Development: How to Find Out Fast, pp 208 228. London: Sage. Bonnett, A. (1997). Geography, ‘race’ and whiteness: Invisible traditions and current challenges. Area 29(3), 193 199. Boserup, E. (1970). Women’s Role in Economic Development. London: Allen and Unwin. Chambers, R. (1983). Rural Development: Putting the Last First. Harlow: Longman. Cloke, P., Cook, I., Crang, P. et al., (eds.) (2004). The changing practices of human geography: An introduction. In Practising Human Geography, pp 1 32. London: Sage. DeLyser, D. and Starrs, P. (2001). Doing fieldwork: Editors’ introduction. The Geographical Review 91(1 2), January April. Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Harding, S. (ed.) (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. New York: Cornell University Press. Harstock, N. (1987). The feminist standpoint: Developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism. In Harding, S. (ed.) Feminism and Methodology, Social Science Issue, pp 157 180. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Katz, C. (1994). Playing the field: Questions of fieldwork in geography. Professional Geographer 46, 67 72. Kobayashi, A. and Peake, L. (2000). Racism out of place: Thoughts on an anarchist agenda for geography in the millennium. Annals of American Geographers 46(1), 73 80. Livingstone, D. (2003). A brief history of geography. In Rogers, A. & Viles, H. (eds.) The Student’s Companion (2nd edn.), pp 257 286. Oxford: Blackwell. Massey, D. (1995). Spatial Divisions of Labor: Social Structures and the Geography of Production (2nd edn.). New York: Routledge. McDowell, L. and Sharp, G. (eds.) (1997). Space, Gender and Knowledge: Feminist Readings. London: Arnold. McNiff, J. and Whitehead, J. (2006). All You Need to Know About Action Research. London: Sage. Nast, H. (1994). Women in the field: Critical feminist methodologies and theoretical perspectives. Professional Geographer 46, 54 66. Roberts, H. (ed.) (1981). Doing Feminist Research. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Valentine, G. (2001). Social Geographies: Space and Society. Harlow: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Field Systems and Enclosure J. Chapman, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Enclosure (Sometimes Inclosure) Legally, the division of communal land, or any land subject to common rights, between the various partners. The land did not necessarily have a physical boundary, though this was normally the result. Field System The manner in which the land of a community is organized and run. Furlong A bundle of strips with a constant orientation. Hitch Crop A crop grown on part of a field which should normally have been left fallow in that year. Levant and Couchant An arrangement whereby only stock which could be supported on the right-owner’s other land during the close season were entitled to be kept on the common. Partible Inheritance The division of property equally between the (usually male) co-heirs. Stint The number of animals an individual could keep on the pasture or waste. Strip (also Selion) The smallest unit of occupation in a field. In Northern Europe, typically long and narrow.

Introduction Though field systems and enclosure have been a specific research interest of historical geographers, their legacy has profound significance for modern landscapes and the structure of modern agriculture. Whether holdings are consolidated or fragmented, the efficiency of field size and shape for modern agriculture, and even rural social structures, owe much to the details of past field systems and the way in which enclosure was carried out. Research during the second half of the twentieth cen tury established a broad, if not universal, consensus on a theoretical explanation of field systems, though the details of local variations and the timing of their emergence re main to be determined. On the other hand, the methods, dating, and social impact of enclosure remain contro versial, notably in England where the central government left the process largely in the hands of local communities.

Field Systems The term ‘field systems’ could theoretically be extended to include the latifundia and hacienda systems which historically dominated much of Mediterranean Europe

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and Latin America, and in which estate owners worked large areas of land with a paid labor force but let out tiny plots to tenant smallholders. Similarly, it might be ex tended to cover the situation common in communist Europe, whereby the land was split between state farms (run by the state with paid labor), collective farms (leased by the state to ‘farmer shareholders’ who worked the land cooperatively), and private plots (farmed by smallholders for their individual benefit). More normally it is re stricted to the community controlled systems which developed throughout much of Europe during the Middle Ages. These show an almost infinite range of local variations, and many lack one or more of the classic features, which may be summarized as follows: Common Fields In the classic open field system the arable land of the community was divided into three large fields. Individual holdings consisted of many strips (a hundred or more was not unusual) theoretically scattered evenly through the fields, though in practice often irregularly distributed (see Figure 1). The strips were normally organized into furlongs, and bundles of furlongs made up the fields. Cropping patterns were controlled by the manorial court, and in Northern Europe typically involved a three course rotation of wheat and barley, with a fallow year to allow the fertility of the land to recover. A two field system occurred on many poorer soils, and multifield systems existed in many communities (see Figure 1). Rotations, too, were subject to variations, the furlong sometimes acting as the rotation unit. Some courts allowed different crops within a single field, or permitted a hitch crop on the fallow. The fallow field was used by the landholders for pasturing their stock, as were the other fields after the harvest. Open fields and common fields were theoretically different, the latter being subject to the communal con trols and rights mentioned above, whereas the former were not. Legally the landholders in the former were merely involved in a mutual agreement not to exclude each other from their specific strips, and this carried an implied right to withdraw from the system unilaterally. In practice the distinction between the two was often un clear, and disputes arose when one party attempted to withdraw. Common Pastures Common pastures played a vital role in ensuring ad equate fodder for the stock. They were often restricted to


TANGMERE Pre-enclosure

Gaston Field

West Town Field East Field

Hill Field

Towney Mead Field Common fields Lands of George Osborne Parish boundary

Ham Field

0.5 km

Withies Field

Figure 1 A typical scattered holding before enclosure: Tangmere, Sussex.

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plow animals, usually oxen and horses. These pastures were normally strictly controlled, their use being con fined to those who held land in the fields, with a specific stint assigned to each individual. Common Meadows Common meadows provided hay for supplementary feed, and were normally held in strips like the open fields. Local custom determined how many hay crops should be taken before the meadow was thrown open as a common pasture. In many areas the holdings in the meadows were redistributed on a regular basis, the partners drawing lots to determine which strips they would hold in a given year. Such lot meadows survived locally well into the nineteenth century. Common Wastes Common wastes (commons) were significantly different. While individuals held specific pieces of land in the fields and meadows, and known shares in the pastures, common wastes were frequently subject to a whole range of overlapping rights of indeterminate extent. The lord of the manor owned the land, but was not legally entitled to interfere with the rights of others to use it according to custom. These included the right to graze animals, and the right to take fuel in the form of wood, turf, or peat. The right to take stone for repairs to buildings, walls, and roads was normal, and other rights existed in particular communities. Use of the common wastes caused much conflict. The detail of the rules varied, but only the owners or tenants of land in the community, together with the occupants of certain ancient tenements and anyone with a specific grant from the lord, had a legal right to use the common. In practice, stewards often turned a blind eye to un qualified locals collecting fuel or keeping poultry there. The principal problem arose from the keeping of stock. Many larger commons were unstinted; others re lied on the ‘levant and couchant’ rule. Commons could thus become overstocked, not least because of the pos sibilities of fraud. The normal seasonal buying and selling of stock made the levant and couchant rule difficult to enforce, and complaints about owners passing off some one else’s stock as their own were frequent. The Distribution of Field Systems This has been studied in far greater detail in some areas than in others, but the broad pattern in Europe is clear. The classic form of the open field system was found in a wide band across the North European Plain from northeast France to parts of the former Soviet Union, stretching as far south as the Massif Central and the Alps, and north into southern Sweden. In Britain it occupied a distorted triangle with an apex in County Durham and a

base from Dorset to West Sussex. This system was closely associated with large nucleated settlements. The situation in Southern Europe has been subject to differing interpretations; Dion emphasized its enclosed and individualistic nature, Bloch its communal aspects. Modern thinking has tended to support the latter, while recognizing the widespread significance of old enclosed land. In this interpretation, irregular open fields, subject to a degree of communal control but lacking the rigidity of the northern system, were a frequent feature. The fields were subdivided, though typically into roughly rectangular plots rather than long strips, a difference attributed to the type of plow. The heavy plow, or caruca, plowed deeply, but was awkward to turn, so long strips were advantageous: the light weight aratrum of southern Europe stirred only the surface layers, thus preserving moisture, but cross plowing was needed, so a roughly square plot was preferred. The use of the fallow field for pasture varied from area to area, but communal pasture rights over the waste were widespread. In contrast to Northern Europe, rights were often open to those with out a holding in the communal arable. In the northwestern fringes of Europe, from north western Spain to northwest Scotland, a further system existed. Isolated compact farms were frequent, but many communities had a single common field. This was held in strips and received all available manure, enabling it to be cropped every year. This arable was sometimes sup plemented by taking in a different portion of the waste each year, the crop relying on the accumulated fertility built up by the pasturing stock and by the ash produced from burning the natural vegetation. In this form the system was known as the infield–outfield system. Tradi tionally a 7 year cycle was used for the outfield, though much depended on the quality of the land. Theories of Origins The origins of these systems have been much debated. Gray in English field systems regarded the systems which he identified in Tudor England as being completely separ ate, seeing irregularities as evidence of a decline from an earlier perfect pattern. He offered an essentially ethnic/ tribal explanation, distinguishing the infield–outfield and related systems as Celtic, the Midland open field system as Germanic, and the irregular East Anglian system as a consequence of the Danish invasions. This explanation appeared to fit the Continental evidence available at that time. In France, for example, the open field area of the northeast coincided with the area of greatest Germanic influence, Brittany showed the expected Celtic influence, and the more southerly areas could be attributed to the strong Roman influence. Subsequent research undermined this explanation, as investigations produced increasing numbers of systems in


the ‘wrong’ ethnic areas, making it impossible to explain these away as chance survivals of ethnic enclaves. Fur thermore, research on the Medieval and earlier periods failed to find the ‘perfect’ systems which Gray had predicted. Thirsk offered an alternative explanation, whereby systems show an evolution from a more individualistic toward a more communally controlled arrangement, propelled by population pressure but constrained by environmental factors and contemporary technology. If partible inheritance was operating, a rising population would lead to diminishing farm size and hence the need either to reclaim more land or to increase productivity from the existing area. The former could only be achieved at the expense of the waste, which played a vital part in supporting the stock. Any consequent reduction in stock numbers might result in smaller quantities of ma nure, which, spread over a larger area, could result in total arable production actually falling, thus upsetting the balance of the system. Fallowing offered an answer, since stock could graze on the fallow, maintaining numbers while simultaneously resting and manuring it. However, long narrow strips made this impossible without communal agreement on cropping arrangements, since otherwise stock could damage crops growing on adjoining strips. Where only two major field crops were grown, the optimum solution was to create three large fields, one of which could be left fallow each year in rotation and thrown open to the stock of all the partners. However, this would involve a wholesale reorganization, since otherwise anyone with land largely within the fallow field would be unable to sustain themselves during that year. How and when such a reorganization took place has itself been the subject of academic debate. Authorities such as Campbell have produced evidence of imposed reorganization from above, for example, by the lord, and highly regular systems might imply this. However, there is also evidence of periodic redistributions, with the partners drawing lots to determine their holdings, much as in the lot meadows. This system continued well after the Medieval period in parts of Scandinavia, where it was known as solskifte, and there is similar evidence from elsewhere, for example, Northumberland. In this explanation, the observed distributions repre sent stages in a process of evolution, with the system failing to advance to the next stage where the environ mental limits were reached or where, as in northern Scandinavia, population pressures were never high enough to require further adjustment. Thus individual block farms, single small communal fields, and the in field–outfield system would be associated with areas of limited agricultural potential – uplands, and areas of impoverished soils such as the north German heaths or the Brecklands of East Anglia. A fully developed three

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field system would occur only where local soils could maintain productivity with limited fertilizer input and a recovery period of 1 year in 3. The thin chalk soils of east Yorkshire and Lincolnshire would sustain yields only if fallowed every other year, hence the prevalence of two field systems, the cropped field being subdivided between the two crops. Though this explanation is now the most widely ac cepted, ethnic factors seem to have played some part. The peculiarities of the systems in Normandy have been attributed to the influence of the Scandinavian invaders, and it has been argued that the oddities of the East Anglian systems owe their origins to Danish lordship over a subjugated Anglo Saxon peasantry.

Enclosure Reasons for Enclosure The open field system and its variants were essentially geared to subsistence, aiming to ensure the necessary minimum for survival each year. Pressure for its abolition occurred when maximum productivity was the aim, and thus when farming became strongly market orientated. The timing varied greatly from place to place, and often became a source of tension within a community as some saw opportunities for market exploitation where others did not. Beresford, for example, argued that enclosure in England in the later Middle Ages was driven by the major landowners’ desire to remove the open fields and their small peasant proprietors to exploit the market for wool. Some central governments took a leading role, for eco nomic, political, or strategic reasons. The royal govern ment in Prussia encouraged holding consolidation as part of the modernization of the state from the 1770s on. Others were concerned at a reliance on food imports, and threats to public order from escalating food prices. The 1801 General Inclosure Act in Britain arose from such fears during the Napoleonic Wars. Kjaergaard has argued that many open fields in Denmark became unsustainable due to declining fertility, and that there was no option but to enclose, an argument which might apply to many other areas. Methods of Enclosure The methods of enclosure varied greatly according to national and local laws and customs, and were affected by the type of land involved. Though the literature often concentrates on the abolition of open and common fields, common wastes frequently contributed a larger acreage. The distinction is of considerable importance, since the former was concerned with the consolidation of holdings in the existing farmed area (see Figures 1 and 2), while the latter was a reclamation movement, intended to in crease the area of intensively farmed land, and not

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infrequently increased fragmentation, since the new land might not adjoin the owner’s existing holdings. Many countries of Europe treated the two processes separately, concentrating first upon the fields, which were seen as a serious impediment to productivity. The urge for waste

enclosure was often driven by improvements in agri cultural techniques and the introduction of new fertil izers, which in many countries had little impact before the mid nineteenth century. Some central government intervention was aimed at one aspect, only, of the

TANGMERE Parliamentary enclosure

Allotted to George Osborne Other land enclosed Enclosed land exchanged

0.5 km

Figure 2 The same holding after re-distribution at a Parliamentary enclosure.


problem, leaving a legacy of a half completed process. In France the right to withdraw unilaterally was enshrined in law in 1793, but effective action to consolidate hold ings did not begin until after World War II. In the Netherlands state sponsored consolidation was not completed until well into the second half of the twentieth century. Sweden went through a series of stages, passing a law permitting enclosure in 1749, and following this in 1757 by one reducing the number of plots in the solskifte. Finally, in 1783, an act enshrined the idea of consoli dation of holdings into a single plot. Enclosure took place over a long period, even over lapping with the creation of new open fields in the same system. Much followed the Black Death of 1347–49. Though few villages seem to have been lost as a direct result of the plague, the death rate allowed a redistri bution of population, either voluntary as tenants sought better holdings left vacant elsewhere, or compulsory, as lords evicted the survivors in order to create large commercial farms. In either case the vacant land was reorganized into compact units and common rights vanished. Enclosure was extensive during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This might be instigated by peasant communities themselves, as in several German states where they could apply to the local prince for permission to reorganize, or enforced from above, as in parts of southern Sweden, where lords carried out the reorganization, dispersing the tenant farms from the village to new enclosed compact farms. In parts of Eng land, Lincolnshire, for example, there was widespread enclosure by agreement, often using external referees to carry out the consolidation of the land and division of the commons. Enclosure in England and Wales The most comprehensive attempts at enclosure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occurred in Eng land. These have been intensively studied, and have provoked great controversy over motivation and results, though much of this has focused solely on Parliamentary enclosure, and on the classic Midland open field parishes in the eighteenth century. There is an assumption in some of the literature, sometimes explicitly stated, that other means of enclosure ceased to be of significance by the later eighteenth century when enclosure by private act had become firmly established. This is a gross over simplification. While little of the Midland core was enclosed without an act after about 1730, elsewhere non Parliamentary means might form a high proportion of the total, exceeding the Parliamentary total in Hampshire and Sussex, for example. The means of enclosure may be classified into three: Parliamentary, formal agreement, and informal means.

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The first required an individual Act of Parliament or a Parliamentary Order under the General Act of 1845 and its subsequent amendments. Conventionally, agreements quoting the General Acts of 1836 or 1845 as their au thority are also regarded as Parliamentary. Formal agreements required the unanimous consent of all par ties, and were a written record either of the division of the lands as agreed, or of an agreement to abide by the decisions of the appointed referees. ‘Informal methods’ are discussed below. Parliamentary enclosure affected about 25% of the land area of England, and 11% of Wales. Of this, 35% consisted of open field, 58% of common and waste, and the remainder of common meadow, redistributed old enclosures, and pieces of intermixed land. The pro portions varied enormously from county to county, Wiltshire being closest to the national average. The first enclosure act is usually given as Radipole, Dorset, in 1604, but Arthur Young, the agricultural writer, regarded Ropley, Hampshire, in 1709 as the first genuine one. The movement picked up pace in the 1720s and 1730s, but the mean date tended to become later the further from the Midland core, ranging from the 1760s in Leicester shire through the 1810s in the West Riding and Wiltshire to the 1850s in East Sussex and Cardiganshire. Before passing an act, Parliament required a level of support of, variously, two thirds or three quarters, but calculated by acreage owned rather than number of in dividuals, allowing one major landowner to override the opposition of many smaller ones. However, tenants or smaller landowners were not necessarily hostile, and many acts faced little if any formal opposition. They were needed because one or more parties could not legally sign a binding agreement, for example, because they were minors or tenants for life. Criticism has been leveled at the fairness of the commissioners who allocated the land, and there are some well documented cases of dishonesty, but these appear to be the exception; most worked fairly and honestly within the law as it stood. Small land or right owners generally got their proportionate share. The main losers were those who may have made use of the commons, but who had no right to them under the law. The amount of non Parliamentary enclosure during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is not accurately known, though there is ample evidence of its significance in areas as widely scattered as Hampshire, Lincolnshire, and Cumberland. A recent estimate suggests that it contributed at least a third of all enclosure in England during this time and that this ‘‘may ultimately prove to be an underestimate’’ (Kain, Chapman and Oliver, 22). Even the amount enclosed by formal agreement is dif ficult to ascertain, since many have been lost, and others give no acreage. The proportions of field and common are equally obscure. Field enclosure should have been easier, since everyone owned known pieces of land, but

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Dorset, for example, used agreements almost exclusively for commons. An agreement, rather than an act, normally greatly reduced the costs, and smaller landowners had a stronger bargaining position, since unanimity was required. Ob viously pressure could be brought to bear: the Crown agent in Norfolk threatened leaseholders with non renewal, and all opponents with the extra costs of an act, if they continued to resist. Nevertheless, many agree ments show favorable treatment for less wealthy indi viduals, for example, by exempting them from all costs. Informal enclosures involved various processes of varying legality, and left little direct documentary evi dence; often the only evidence is that a field or common existed at one date and had gone by another, sometimes with a considerable chronological gap. One process was unity of possession, landowners gradually acquiring all land and rights by allowing tenancies to lapse and buying out freeholders. Lords could also legally enclose parts of the common, providing sufficient was left for the right owners, though wrangling over what was sufficient was frequent. Unilateral withdrawal of one’s land from a common field, a legal grey area, was another. Finally, much enclosure was undoubtedly illegal. Individuals simply encroached commons, fencing in parts of them and denying access to others. This was a source of much hostility in some Midland areas, where commoners saw an essential part of their economic welfare being diminished, though in upland areas where commons were very large it was often accepted without protest. Recent evidence suggests that consolidation of fields often took place at tenant level. Tenants renting whole furlongs or fields from the various owners could ignore communal restraints, though technically these still exis ted. The intermixed ownership vanished later as owners sold up. In summary, the process of enclosure was far more complex than is often suggested and general theories about its origins, motivations, and results need to be approached with great caution. What applied to a Par liamentary enclosure of fields in a Midland parish in the

1740s might have little relevance to a moorland en closure in 1800s Yorkshire, or to a piecemeal enclosure in 1860s Sussex. See also: Agrarian Transformations; Feudalism and Feudal Society; Historical Geographies, Rural; Peasant Agriculture.

Further Reading Baker, A. H. R. and Butlin, R. A. (eds.) (1973). Studies of field systems in the British Isles. Cambridge: University Press. Chapman, J. (1987). The extent and nature of Parliamentary enclosure. Agricultural History Review 35, 25 35. Chapman, J. and Seeliger, S. (2002). Enclosure, environment and landscape in southern England. Stroud: Tempus. Dahlman, C. J. (1980). The open field system and beyond: A property rights analysis of an economic institution. Cambridge: University Press. De Moor, M., Shaw Taylor, L. and Warde, P. (eds.) (2002). The management of common land in north west Europe, c.1500 1850. Turnhout: Brepols. Gray, H. L. (1915). English field systems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kain, R. J. P., Chapman, J. and Oliver, R. R. (2004). The enclosure maps of England and Wales, 1595 1918: A cartographic analysis and electronic catalogue. Cambridge: University Press. Kerridge, E. (1992). The common fields of England. Manchester: University Press. Kjaergaard, T. (1994). The Danish Revolution, 1500 1800: An ecohistorical interpretation (trans. D Hohnen). Cambridge: University Press. Neeson, J. M. (1993). Commoners: Common right, enclosure and social change in England, 1700 1820. Cambridge: University Press. Rowley, T. (ed.) (1981). The origins of open field agriculture. Beckenham: Croom Helm. Thirsk, J. (1966). The origin of the common fields. Past and Present 33, 142 147. Turner, M. (1980). English Parliamentary enclosure. Folkestone: Dawson.

Relevant Websites http://hds.essex.ac.uk The Enclosure Maps of England and Wales, 1595 1918, AHDS History.

Fieldwork F. J. Bosco and C. M. Moreno, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Field/Field Site A singular location traditionally marked off in time and space where a researcher operates. From a critical perspective, the demarcation of the field is fuzzy and unstable. Politics of Fieldwork The questions and issues arising out of the uneven relations of power existing between researchers and research subjects in the field. Positionality The recognition that a researcher always operates and produces knowledge in relation to multiple relations of difference, such as gender, ethnicity, class, age, and sexuality. Reflexivity The process of critically reflecting about oneself as a researcher. Situated Knowledge The knowledge marked by the context in which it is produced and the partiality of the knowledge producer.

Introduction: Fieldwork as a Method of Geographic Inquiry Fieldwork typically involves the collection of primary data through a variety of means. The practice of geo graphic fieldwork can range from the collection of data through systematic observations of places and landscapes and inquiry based on predesigned research instruments, such as surveys, questionnaires, and structured interviews to more open ended, interpretive, and intimate forms of inquiry, such as participant observation, ethnography, focus groups, the collection of life histories and partici pant diaries, other types of listening strategies, and even some forms of archival research. Surveys and structured questionnaires given to particular populations are typi cally associated with the fieldwork practices of quantita tive and positivistic human geography, while systematic observations of landscapes can be positioned in the fieldwork domain of traditional, regional, and cultural geography. In both cases, such ways of doing fieldwork are considered to be more detached approaches to data collection in which the researchers remain in control of the questions asked and the features recorded and map ped. On the other hand, more participative approaches to fieldwork such as ethnography place the researchers in more intense contact relative to the research subjects. Ethnography and other participatory methods of field work are typically associated with more contemporary

and critical approaches in human geography, including Marxism and feminism. However, no philosophical tra dition is necessarily linked to a particular way of doing fieldwork. For example, feminist geographers conduct surveys and collect both quantitative and qualitative data through fieldwork, yet the final research product can still be feminist and critical; the same (or the reverse) can also be the case regarding the association of particular phil osophies of geography with particular fieldwork practices. Regardless of the way in which fieldwork is conducted, the majority of human geographers today acknowledge the subjectivity of fieldwork inquiry. No single method of conducting fieldwork provides unmediated, unbiased, and privileged access to the topic, place, and people under investigation. Presently, human geographers rec ognize that researchers play a defining role in the con stitution of the field as a site of inquiry, in the act of recording and interpreting geographic observations and information, in the transformation of such observations and information into geographic data, and in the trans lation of fieldwork data into a final written product that follows certain accepted (though also dynamic) academic conventions. Overall, the current literature in human geography suggests that fieldwork is as much an ana lytical, technical, reflexive, and interpretive endeavor as it is a social, relational, political, and emotional one. The practice of fieldwork in human geography has evolved in relation to broader philosophical changes in the discipline and together with a widening of the scope of inquiry of human geography. As human geographers embrace ever more diverse subjects of study from a number of philosophical and theoretical perspectives, the nature of geographical fieldwork continues to change, reflecting current scientific, sociopolitical, technical, and moral issues. To begin with, there are more geographic fields in which to conduct fieldwork than ever before. Presently, fieldwork in human geography ranges in set tings and scales of analysis from the urban to the rural, from the city to the neighborhood, from the village to the agricultural field, from the mundane to the exotic, from the home to the workplace, and from the corporeal, emotional, and affective to the virtual spaces of the Internet and the media landscapes of television and cinema, to name but a few. Moreover, contemporary human geographers embrace the notion that geo graphical fields are no longer somewhere ‘out there’ to be explored by a detached researcher/observer who is re quired to leave a place of work to begin fieldwork – and then return home or the office to write about findings in

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the field. It is now common to hear geographers assert that one is always already in the field. This assertion has done away with the notion that it is possible to separate and bound the field ‘out there’ in space and time, and furthermore, hints at the notion that the boundaries that separate scholars and their subjects of study are also difficult to delineate. The last three decades of fieldwork in human geog raphy have seen a dramatic change in the ways human geographers approach the ‘doing’ of fieldwork itself. Particularly relevant has been the recognition of the role of the geographer’s positionality (i.e., the geographer’s own and personal location in the field, and in a place, in relation both to self and to others) in the generation of geographic data and knowledge. This change also has been described as a transition from geographers being in a position of detached, disembodied, and neutral ob servers and recorders of facts and data about people and places to one in which geographers recognize their own positions of power in the context of social relations and the partiality and subjective nature of the data collected in the field and of the knowledge generated through the practice of fieldwork. In the field, the geographer is never fully inside or outside; as many have argued, in the field, the geographer occupies the spaces of betweenness. In sum, geographers confronted with the prospect of doing fieldwork today are presented with the challenging tasks of thinking about what precisely fieldwork is (and how is it defined), how to conduct fieldwork, and how to conduct oneself in the field (given the recognition of our own positionality), and how to deal with the relations between the constitution of the field and the constitution of the self.

The Evolving Contexts of Fieldwork in Human Geography From Explorations to Simulations The concept and practice of fieldwork have had a long, somewhat contested, history in the development and evolution of human geography. Vestiges of fieldwork as we know them today can be traced all the way back to the European ages of navigation and exploration during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. These periods were marked by the development of new travel and shipbuilding technologies as well as advances in navigation and cartography. These developments assisted European nations in their search for new trading routes, trading partners, natural resources, and trade goods. The importance of these early explorations in the develop ment of geography as a discipline should not be under estimated. European exploration not only led the way to encounters of far off people and places, but also gave rise to the need to map previously unexplored seafaring paths

and lands. Throughout this time, the thirst for explor ation and the power of mapping proved to be the mainstays of Western society and part of the defining characteristics of early geography. The emergence of geographical societies in Europe, North America, and even South America continued promoting geography through exploration and fieldwork. By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the discipline of geography solidified its presence across European and American universities. The activities of professional organizations altered the development and importance of field research and field data in geographic research. The challenge put to many regional geog raphers was to develop more refined mapping, surveying, and descriptive techniques. In the United States, a not able geographer in the early twentieth century was Carl Sauer, who claimed geography a ‘‘science of observation.’’ Sauer set out surveying and performing numerous re gional descriptions of the Earth’s natural and cultural landscapes. Methodologically, he argued that the best way for geographers to know the Earth’s surface was to go out, perform on site investigations, and meticulously describe what they saw. These sentiments were most evident in his seminal 1923 paper ‘Morphology of land scape’ and his 1925 article ‘The survey method in geography and its objective’, where he outlines that re gional studies in geography should be part scientific and part holistic, but always field based. Many regional geographers regarded the field as their primary source of data, but others felt that the obser vation and description of landscapes and regions pro duced discrete and particularistic geographies. Over time, the focus shifted and geographers moved away from the regional approach, finding more applied ways to use their field data, such as informing governmental policies on land use issues. With the rise of positivistic geography and spatial science in the 1950s and 1960s, regional geography was criticized for its lack of scientific rigor. There were also rumblings from quantitative geographers that Sauer’s survey approach was merely an adventure in sightseeing. In response, human geographers began to pursue quantitative research platforms consisting of nonfield and secondary data sources analyzed through statistical methods and modeling. This movement away from field research did not last for long, however. During the late 1960s, behavioral geographers reincorporated field methods into their scientific and mostly positivistic research toolkit. Behavioral geographers pursued be havioral experiments outside the laboratory; the idea was to control conditions in the world as if it were the la boratory. Thus, behavioral geographers used field simu lations to collect real world data (even if it was controlled) and to measure and generate scientific laws about human behavior, spatial learning, and decision making, spatial knowledge, and spatial cognition.

Fieldwork

Finding and Questioning Meanings in the Field During the 1970s, with the advent of humanism in geography, a new type of geographic fieldwork, more participatory in nature, took on a much more prominent role. Humanism drew much of its theoretical toolkit from phenomenology. As such, fieldwork at this time moved away from being an experimental spatial scientific ven ture in search of laws to a qualitative and interpretive one in search of cultural and spatial meaning. Humanist geographers practicing fieldwork turned Sauer’s cultural landscapes into layered social texts describing people’s lives, and pursued hermeneutic interpretations. Human ists emphasized the subjectivity of both the geographer and the observed phenomena. Research questions turned from the land to the people. Field research became a more intimate way in which to be with people and learn about how people assign meaning to the social relations and places that make up their lives. Humanist geog raphers believed that in order to understand the world, research needed to be more geared toward trying to understand how people perceive the world. Humanists were also interested in the social and spatial construction of fieldwork, and as a result brought forward important discussions that questioned the experience of space, place, and landscape that were shared by geographers and others they sought to study. To get at this type of experiential information, human geographers began employing more refined uses of qualitative research methods in their fieldwork. Human geographers also borrowed from other discip lines, such as anthropology and sociology. For example, in anthropology, Branislaw Malinowksi’s notion of ‘being there’ (in his case, among the Trobriander Islanders) brought about a fundamental shift in the way in which social scientists working in far off places, including human geographers, practiced fieldwork. Malinowski’s notion of ‘participatory fieldwork’ challenged the Sauerian School that believed surveys of cultural land scapes should be done through detaching oneself from the landscape they studied. For Malinowski, the only way to come to a more holistic understanding of a culture or place was to live among the ‘natives’ and ‘places’ for a duration of time. Malinowski’s ‘going na tive’ not only speaks to the importance of long term field research projects and first hand participatory ob servations, but also opens an important dialog about researcher positionality as well as discussions about the importance of objectivity and what that means to the practice of field based research. Also in anthropology, Clifford Geertz took Malinowski’s notion of eye/I wit ness accounts in field research toward a ‘thick de scription’ approach where the goal for the ethnographer is to engage with and describe the minutiae of daily, mundane, cultural, and place based activities.

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The eruption of postcolonial theory in the late 1970s (from the work of Edward Said and others) also forced some human geographers to move beyond the relation ship between methodology and representation in their fieldwork. Initially, postcolonial thinking showed field work as an active extension of the discipline’s colonial thinking and put forth a challenge for human geog raphers to be more introspective about the power rela tionships embedded in their research. This included critically examining the role of power and ethics in the production of information and knowledge emanating from their research. In doing so, human geographers took on serious discussions of power, ethics, and represen tation in connection to fieldwork. These included examining the language and methods human geographers use, the motivations and sources of funding for their work, as well as the nature of involvement that research subjects have in fieldwork design and practice. The contention was that fieldwork, or the embodied act of documentation, interpretation, and articulation of the world, has the potential to take away people’s rights to their own history, land, communities, as well as their ability to problematize and come up with solutions to their own problems. In many ways, postcolonial thinking dismantled the long held Western belief that in order to save the world, human geographers needed to speak for the world and control it. Postcolonial thinking still plays an important role in the evolving context of fieldwork in human geography today. It raises serious questions about the ownership of field research and the need for field researchers to examine the social, economic, emotional, environmental, and political impact that fieldwork has on the people and places they study. While not always met with open arms, it forces many field researchers to be more caring and responsible in their work and seek out alternative and more collaborative approaches. Fieldwork as Politics and the Politics of Fieldwork Much like the humanist and postcolonial inspired geographers, Marxist geographers have radically altered the way in which geographers have come to understand the importance and practice of fieldwork. Marxist geog raphers are keenly aware of the injustices generated by a world that privileges capitalist relations and profit mar gins, and thus study and often interpret field sites as hegemonic landscapes of domination and oppression. For Marxist geographers, fieldwork can be a means to un cover injustices and to bring about social change; in this case field sites can be landscapes of resistance. Because Marxism is inherently a political project that is aimed at imagining and creating a more just social world that goes beyond exploitative capitalist relations, Marxist geog raphers see fieldwork as a method of engagement for

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social activism. For instance, Marxist geographers have recently shown an interest in engaging with social movements, particularly anticapitalist and antiglobaliza tion movements, throughout the world. This interest is a prime example of the meshing of their political concerns with fieldwork practices. At the same time, other Marxist geographers advocate more involvement with issues of economic injustices that are more local and embedded in the material conditions of daily life of disempowered people in the Global North, who may just happen to be co workers, friends, or neighbors. For example, Marxist geographers have argued that even the universities where geographers work can be the sites for fieldwork research that works for social change if geographers engage with the struggle of lower paid workers (such as maintenance crews, janitorial personnel, and other workers who per form essential tasks that allow for universities to func tion) for better wages and job protection. Together with Marxism, feminism has proven to be one of the most important philosophies from which human geographers have rethought the practice of fieldwork, though the relations between Marxists and feminist geographers have been many times strained. A main and enduring concern of feminism regarding fieldwork is an examination of how gender relations and other differences, such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, and (dis)abilities, shape field practices and the politics of field research. Feminists also are concerned with critically analyzing the conditions that enable the production of knowledge in the field. One of the initial tasks of feminist geographers regarding fieldwork was to challenge the masculinist notion of objectivity that surrounded most research in human geography. Epistemologically, mas culinism is related to ways of knowing that uncritically define objectivity through a hierarchical separation be tween researcher and research subjects, and an associ ation with positivistic thinking and practice that relies on detached observation and empiricism. Feminists call these ways of thinking and practicing science masculinist because of their association with the dominant subjects of modern social science, which for most of the twentieth century were embodied by white, heterosexual, and bourgeois males. Regarding fieldwork in particular, feminists argue that traditional fieldwork practices in human geography, such as those written and practiced by Carl Sauer and his followers in the earlier part of the twentieth century, were masculinist because they placed the observer at a hierarchical distance from the subject of study – a higher vantage point. From that elevated vantage point, the geographer (unmarked, but assumed to be male) could observe the world as it is and through his ‘objective’ and ‘detached’ observations reveal the land scape’s hidden order. Feminists have been critical of this type of traditional way of surveying landscapes as a masculinist way of conducting fieldwork and seeing the

world. In addition, they have leveled criticism on other more critical human geography approaches, such as Marxism, because of their neglect of issues of gender, race, and sexuality in geographic research, and their privileging of places of production as sites for research (e.g., the factory floor) over other sites, such as the home, where issues such as family work and family care can be studied in the context of, for example, female, unpaid work. Feminist geographers also see fieldwork as a political project that is is much about interpreting social change as it as about effecting social change – here, feminist geographers come closer to the aims of Marxist geog raphers. Because both feminism and Marxism are con cerned with larger structures of social oppression, such as class and patriarchy, Marxist and feminist geographers have also clarified that conducting fieldwork often in volves broader motivations than the study of a single site. Along these lines, both Marxist and feminist geographers have worried about the limitations of purely interpretive field research, because they understand that the processes that structure class, gender, racial, and even sexual re lations operate at multiple scales. Both Marxists and feminist geographers have pointed out that there are important methodological implications resulting from this move: geographers who focus on the intricacies of the local (i.e., the site of fieldwork) should not lose track of the impact of broader, nonlocal social relations and processes in their research projects. To the political aims of fieldwork that they share with Marxist geographers, feminists also add a concern with the politics of fieldwork, here coming closer to the re search concerns and intentions of postcolonial thinkers. This concern includes not only attention to the power relations between the researcher and the researched and the conditions that enable the practice of research and the production of knowledge in the first place, but also to the politics of representation surrounding fieldwork (i.e., the challenges posed by being in the field and speaking with and for others who many times are in unprivileged positions of power relative both to dominant structures in society and to the researchers themselves). The critical attention that feminism grants to issues of difference, positionality, and reflexivity in fieldwork have led feminist geographers to cast doubt on the insider status of anyone in the field (including women) and even to question the researchers’ own right to speak for others. Along these lines, feminist geographers directly linked the practice of fieldwork in geography to broader debates surrounding the politics of representation in con temporary postmodern and critical social and cultural theory. Engagement with this debate made some geog raphers question their ability to represent others through fieldwork, regardless of how reflexive and critical it is, and some suggested even retreating and withdrawing

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from social research altogether. This challenge, however, has also encouraged geographers to establish greater connections with the communities, people, and places that they study, enriching fieldwork based social research. Through fieldwork, feminist geographers continue at tempting to break down the boundaries between aca demics and the people that geographers want to represent. Along these lines, feminist geographers have been actively pursuing more democratic forms of field work practice. Such democratization of fieldwork and field knowledge involves, for example, presenting the research subjects with the texts produced by geographers’ experiences in the field to ascertain participants own opinions about the geographers’ interpretations. Other geographers have experimented with different and more accessible forms of writing that are attuned to different audiences beyond the academy, such as community groups and activists. Finally, and in tandem with the political orientation of feminism, some geographers have connected their academic research to the actual practices of political activists who work for social change.

Conclusion: Some Present Challenges for Fieldwork in Human Geography In recent years, not only has the practice of fieldwork changed in relation to a wider theoretical engagement in human geography, but precisely because of that engage ment the study of fieldwork itself has enjoyed increased attention as well. Critical discussions have surfaced in relation to the constitution of geographical fields, how they are produced, how human geographers come to know/understand, affect, and are affected by them. Moreover, the thinking and practice of fieldwork in human geography have not remained tightly bound to any one philosophical tradition. Rather, geographers’ engagement with different philosophies over time has helped produce new hybrid forms of field practices and new geographies to investigate – witness, for example, the recent emergence of research on emotional geog raphies and the attention paid to the emotional and af fective fieldwork, a move that cannot be understood without reference to the interactions between humanist, feminist, and post structural thinking in geography. The critical discussions of recent years present geographers with invaluable knowledge regarding field work that would not have been available just a few decades ago. At the same time, human geographers are confronted with new challenges regarding fieldwork in the not so distant future. There are still some uncharted fields that pose new questions and require more reflection and more action. For example, there have been some good discussions lately about the privileging of the tex tual over the visual in fieldwork. Most of the techniques

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involved in field based research involve verbal exchanges, and result in textual information, but more and more geographers are engaging with visual methods in field work, from the production of video diaries with partici pants to the production of films as the final output of field based research. While visual methods are enjoying increasing attention in human geography, there is still the question of whether the final work of field based visual research and interventions, such as a movie or a docu mentary, is considered a valid academic (and scientific?) endeavor, an issue which goes right back to questions regarding the production of knowledge and the politics of fieldwork. Finally, some geographers have recently argued – rightly so – that fieldwork in human geography has been defined, at least implicitly, in terms of the co presence of bodies, that is, we have privileged bodily presence and bodily experiences in the practice of fieldwork. But new questions are arising about the possibility of fieldwork through electronically mediated communications, in particular through the Internet and the World Wide Web. Not much has been written in human geography re garding human geographic research of online and cyber communities, but there are ample opportunities to move research forward along these lines. For example, recent developments in the area of emotional geographies pose new questions about the role that emotions play in re search conducted in virtual fields/spaces. At the same time, researching online groups and cyber communities present new practical, methodological, and ethical chal lenges to human geographers wishing to engage with participants who seem so close and, yet, could be phys ically very distant – but again, not necessarily so. For instance, there is the issue of conducting fieldwork from one’s own office, from home, or from a cafe´ with Internet access, and the possibility of creating a new generation of ‘armchair geographers’, albeit in a completely different way than those who were called armchair geographers in the 1960s. Does this matter or does it make a difference, given that geographers already agree that we are always in the field and that the boundaries of the field are always fuzzy and contested? Furthermore, there is the issue of overt or covert research when dealing with online com munities. For example, does a geographer join an online community, perhaps through a chat room, and identify himself/herself as a researcher and engage with partici pants in a kind of cyber participant observation – which in turn can be either active or passive? Or does the re searcher assume a new cyber identity (a practice very common in the online world of chat rooms and cyber communities) and actively participate in the online life of a group in a kind of cyberethnography? Just thinking about these two issues (and there are many more) poses incredibly powerful questions regarding the ethics of research in human geography, in particular regarding the

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overt/covert and passive/active distinctions in field based research. Moreover, besides the important personal and professional ethical considerations, there are insti tutional issues arising as well, specifically regarding re quirements about informed consent and others that have been put in place by institutional/ethical review boards as a way to protect research participants in situations of unequal power relations. In sum, these are just some of the new questions and challenges that present geog raphers with an opportunity and requirement to keep redefining fieldwork as one of the central methods of geographic inquiry. See also: Content Analysis; Cross-Cultural Research; Discourse Analysis; Embodied Knowing; Emotional Knowing; Ethical Issues in Research; Ethnography; Feminist Methodologies; Gender and Rurality; Heritage; Participatory Action Research; Situated Knowledge, Reflexivity.

GR (Geographical Review) (2001). Special issue on doing fieldwork. The Geographical Review 91(1 2), iv XX. Marcus, G. E. (2002). Beyond Malinowski and after writing culture: On the future of cultural anthropology and the predicament of ethnography. Australian Journal of Anthropology 13(2), 191 199. Nast, H. J. (1998). The body as place: Reflexivity and fieldwork in Kano, Nigeria. In Nast, H. J. & Pile, S. (eds.) Places through the body, pp 93 116. London: Routledge. PG (Professional Geographer) (1994). Special issue on women in the field: Critical feminist methodologies and theoretical perspectives. The Professional Geographer 46(1), 54 102. Powell, R. (2002). The sirens’ voices? Field practices and dialogue in geography. Area 34(3), 261 272. Pratt, G. (2000). Research performances. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18(5), 639 651. Rose, G. (1997). Situating knowledge, positionality, and other tactics. Progress in Human Geography 21, 305 320. Rundstrom, R. A. and Kenzer, M. S. (1989). The decline of fieldwork in human geography. The Professional Geographer 41(3), 294 303. Sauer, C. (1924). The survey method in geography and its objectives. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 14(1), 17 33. Sauer, C. (1925). The morphology of landscape. University of California Publications in Geography 2, 19 54. Sundberg, J. (2003). Masculinist epistemologies and the politics of fieldwork in Latin Americanist geography. The Professional Geographer 55(2), 180 190.

Further Reading Cultural Geographies (2003). Special Issue on Field Cultures. Cultural Geographies 10, 251. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Crang, M. (2003). Qualitative methods: Touchy, feely, look see? Progress in Human Geography 27(4), 494 504. Cupples, J. (2002). The field as a landscape of desire: Sex and sexuality in geographical fieldwork. Area 34(4), 382 390. Driver, F. (2000). Editorial: Fieldwork in geography. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 25(3), 267 268. England, K. (2006). Producing feminist geographies: Theory, methodologies and research strategies. In Aitken, S. & Valentine, G. (eds.) Approaches to human geography, pp 286 297. London: Sage.

Relevant Websites http://www.emporia.edu/socsci/fembib/ Gender in Geography Bibliography: K, Department of Social Sciences at Emporia University. http://www2.glos.ac.uk/gdn/disabil/fieldwk.htm Projects: Fieldwork in Geography, Earth, and Environmental Sciences Higher Education Curriculum, The Geography Discipline Network (GDN). http://www.uvm.edu/~mcope/QRSG/index.html Qualitative Geography Specialty Group’s Qualitative Research Bibliography, Meghan Cope, Qualitative Research Bibliography, Department Of Geography, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

Film C. Lukinbeal, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Crisis of Representation Refers to the debates in the late 1980s and early 1990s which challenged the centrality of mimesis in geography. Mimesis is the belief that absolute realism through representation is possible. Cultural Economy Refers to sectors of the economy which produce culturalized goods laden with symbolic meaning. With regard to film, it relates to an approach where the focus is on the geographic processes and practices of production, distribution, and consumption. Cultural Studies Broadly relate to the study of cultural texts, whether literary or nonliterary, and how these texts constitute or challenge meanings of culture, society, identity, and social–spatial practices. With regard to film geography it can relate to performative logics, scripting, ‘ways of seeing’, and hermeneutics. Hermeneutics It is the study of theories and methods for interpreting any cultural texts, whether in the form of a book, film, or landscape. Relativism As it relates to film geography, it refers to the idea that any individual ‘reading’ of a film text is only one interpretation among an infinite number of interpretations.

Introduction During the last quarter century there has been a pro liferation of articles and books on film geography. Al though approaches vary considerably, recognition of the need to increase our understanding of the power of film in the production of meaning, identity, culture, and economy are generally shared. Geographers began examining broader ramification of the media is the book Geography the Media and Popular Culture and Place Images in Media. According to Burgess and Gold, popular media is important to geography because it mediates social knowledge, reinforces ideological constructions of the status quo, and is an active agent of hegemony. In Place Images in Media, the essays focused on addressing the production of meaning and the role of filmmakers in the depiction of place. Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle was the first book by geographers to focus strictly on film. This collection of essays offers a diverse array of ap proaches to film, ranging from semiotics, literary theory, film criticism to transactionalism. More recently, geog raphers have engaged the role of film as it relates to the city, mobility and identity, pedagogy, the audience, landscape, political geography, economic geography, and

the frontiers of cinematic geographies. This article pro vides an overview of this burgeoning subfield, and to do so, it explores the roots of film geography as it relates to humanistic and Marxist criticism toward the dominance of quantitative and regional geography in the 1960s to 1980s. Then, it also examines how the ‘cultural turn’ and ‘crisis of representation’ affected geographic engagement with film in the early 1990s. Finally, it frames a discussion of current film geography research through the use of the categories ‘cultural studies’ and ‘cultural economy.’

Roots of Film Geography – Humanism and Political Economy In J. K. Wright’s 1947 presidential address to the Associ ation of American Geographers, he developed the idea of ‘geosophy’, or the study of everyday texts and images found in ‘‘books of travel, in magazines and newspapers, in many a page of fiction and poetry, and on many a canvas’’ (Wright, 1947: 10). While the term never caught on, the idea that geography should expand its purview and ex plore the terra incognitaes of popular texts and images was well before its time. It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that humanistic and Marxist geography began to challenge the dominance of regional and quantitative geography. While these approaches differ greatly, both saw quantitative and regional geography as insufficient when it came to explaining issues of ideology, agency, imagination, perception, and power relations. According to Buttimer, humanism in geography strives to restore a human element to a field where sci entific objectivism has dominated. In his often cited lines, Wreford Watson argued quite succinctly for a humanistic approach. Not all geography derives from the earth itself; some of it springs from our idea of the earth. This geography within the mind can at times be the effective geography to which men adjust and thus be more important than the supposedly real geography of the earth. Man has the particular aptitude of being able to live by the notion of reality which may be more real than reality itself. (Watson, 1969: 10)

Early forays into media, text, and representation by humanistic geographers focused on literature and paint ing rather than popular culture and film. By ignoring popular culture, Burgess and Gold argued that it gave geography the appearance of being an elitist pursuit

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wherein popular culture was not worthy of inquiry. One notably exception to this is the work of J. B. Jackson whose influence on humanistic geography via landscape studies encouraged geographers to examine everyday items like film and popular culture and its impact on vernacular landscapes. In the now classic book, Interpretations of Or dinary Landscapes, Donald Meinig examined the role of cinema in forming three American symbolic landscapes. He suggested that the cinema was an ‘‘unprecedently powerful propaganda medium’’ that aided the spreading of the idealized image of California’s suburbs to the nation and the world (Meinig, 1979a: 171). From this perspective, cinematic representations create and perpetuate symbolic landscapes. Meinig suggested a starting point to under standing how landscapes become symbolic may lie in inventorying their depiction in Hollywood’s Golden Age (1920s to 1950s). He believed that such an inventory of sets and backlots would allow for ready inferences, and act as a foundation for understanding how cultural meanings are appropriated onto specific landscapes. The newer manifestations of humanism are discussed later in this article, but first attention turns to the roots of the polit ical–economy approach to film geography. A central component to Burgess and Gold’s book was Marxist and other political economy approaches to film texts. Burgess and Gold (1985: 1) argue that ‘‘the media have been on the periphery of geographical inquiry for too long.’’ They argued that media research in geography was polarized with Americans using ‘‘ycognitive and social psychology for both theory and methodology’’ (Burgess and Gold, 1985: 7) and Europeans employing critical theories that engage ideological, social, and economic praxis. While this is a generalization of academic trends of the time, Kennedy and Lukinbeal argued that this sim plification missed an important distinction between be havioral and environmental perception research. Where the former focuses more on quantitative and reductionist theories and methods, the latter is rooted more firmly in qualitative humanistic analysis. In the 1980s and 1990s, transactionalism, a branch of cognitive psychology and environmental perception, provided a useful framework to engage transactions between individuals and media land scapes, film structure, and rhythm, and person–environ ment relations within a film’s narrative. Early political economy approaches drew from Marx ism and the Frankfurt School to examine the role of ideology within representations. Revealing the spatial di mensions of hidden ideologies and power relations, as well as contesting realism in documentary films, are key aspects of this early work. Natter and Jones essay on Roger and Me attacks all three by first arguing that Michael Moore’s is more objective than most filmmakers, in that he clearly states his ideology and lets the viewer decide how to deal with it. They contrast how public space versus private space is reified by class, race, power, and economics.

Cultural Turn and the Crisis of Representation In the late 1980s, as cultural studies experienced a ‘spatial’ turn, geographers began experiencing a concomitant ‘cultural’ turn. New theories around the concept of post modernity placed an importance on space and spatial activities, and in geography, made the discipline reappraise how we conceptualize the concept of culture. According to Aitken and Zonn (1994: 2), postmodernists see little dif ference ‘‘between ‘real life’ and ‘reel life’,’’ and because of this ‘‘cinematic representation needs to be a key part of geographic investigation (Aitken and Zonn, 1994: 2).’’ Films are not merely images, but rather actively re construct our daily lives. According to Denzin, films are social texts that connect an individual’s life world with the larger ‘‘textual cultural systems which create and impose their meaning on everyday life’’ (Denzin, 1991: 150). ‘New’ cultural geographers emphasized nonmaterial cultural formations, like film, in their analysis. In contrast, Sauer School and Marxist geographers have traditionally emphasized material cultural formations. This distinction led to the ‘crisis of representation’ debate which centered around mimesis or the belief that an accurate represen tation of the world is possible. Harvey argued that ‘‘in the final analysis’’ film is ‘‘a spectacle projected within an enclosed space on a depthless screen’’ (Harvey, 1989: 308). For Harvey, material conditions should always be privileged over representations, a normative belief in much of academic geography. The belief is that film is a re presentation of an absolute material reality that pre exists, and as such it is a secondary rather than primary source of spatial data, information, knowledge, and wis dom. To contest this normative belief with its privileged position of material space, new cultural geographers and post structuralists stressed the importance of represen tations and how they play an active role in producing and reproducing reality. Lukinbeal argued that the backlash of these debates was to link film to the negative end of each binary, consigning it to the fringes of cultural geography re search. Dixon and Grimes suggest that the distinction between ‘reel’ and ‘real’ is an arbitrary binary lacking analytical power, and these binaries constrain our potential knowledge on film. Furthermore, a focus on representation occludes the other possible lines of film geography inquiry.

Cultural Studies and Cultural-Economy Approaches Current research in film geography can be loosely grouped into two categories: cultural studies and cultural economy. These categorizations are used as a pedagogic

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devices rather than as immutable structural classes. In reality, research in film geography elides these categorical differences. A cultural studies perspective explores how film, space, and meaning are mutually constituted when it comes to phenomena, such as cultural identity, race, gender, and sexuality, and even concepts, such as the city and geopolitics. Some cultural studies approaches have sought to move beyond textual readings of film. Along these lines, Carter and McCormick (2006) argue that while research on film focuses on representational ana lytics that ‘‘rehearse or disrupt particular discursive codes and scripts’’ it also ‘‘involves a consideration of how they amplify the passage and transition between affect and emotion (Carter and McCormick, 2006: 236).’’ In short, the affects of film extend beyond interpretation and subjectivity because it is a ‘‘matter of the production and circulation of affects prior to yet also providing the grounds from which distinctive intensities of feeling emerge (Carter and McCormick, 2006: 240).’’ Rather than querying the representational logic of a film’s in ternal properties, a focus on affect seeks to show how film amplifies and modulates affects across broader cultural spaces and practices. Carter and McCormack postulate four different ways in which to engage geopolitics through film. These methods are emblematic of boarder engagements by geographers on film and are thus worthy of our attention. The four methods include performative logics (discussed above), scripting, ‘ways of seeing’, and hermeneutics. Scripting relates to how codes and signs are articulated in a film’s narrative. Frequently, stereotypes are used in film to encapsulate larger perceptual generalizations about people, social groups, social practices, and places. Stereotypes are not neutral, but rather, frame a dominant group’s perspective as ‘natural.’ As Dixon and Zonn (2005: 92) point out, when ‘‘the meaning of an idea or object becomes commonly accepted, we have what Barthes calls a ‘myth,’ that is a construction that is taken for granted, or necessary.’’ Research from a humanistic perspective has frequently sought to examine how scripting affects our perception of place. For instance, Hausladen and Starrs essay shows how the film noir genre scripts ambiguity and impermanence onto a laby rinthian geography of Los Angeles. ‘Ways of seeing’ is a frequently invoked phrase when it comes to the concept of landscape. According to Carter and McCormack, (2006: 232) when applied to film, the phrase is a ‘‘matter of the production and reproduction of particular logics of perception.’’ In seeking to expose how film develops and reflects particular ways of seeing, Godfrey examines the role of the filmmaker in shaping the representational character of nature–culture relations in the Amazon. He found that films made by First World directors framed nature as either pristine wilderness or as chaotic terrae incognitae for colonization. In contrast, a

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Brazilian filmmaker presents a variegated representation of a country mediating between the needs of develop ment, modernization, and traditional Brazilian values. Hermeneutics focuses on the interpretation of cultural texts and their context with regard to other texts, prac tices, and conditions. This has been the dominant mode of inquiry in film geography, because of its flexibility with regard to how films can be interpreted. However, it is susceptible to criticism through the issue of relativism. Relativism relates to the fact that any textual interpret ation is relative to the interpreter’s particular viewpoint. Thus, any film could have countless ‘readings’ performed upon it. The use of hermeneutics in geography was an outgrowth to the crisis of representation, because it aided in questioning the mimetic belief of film as a re presentations of reality, and also, in that it granted equality to all forms of cultural texts, whether cityscapes, landscapes, books, music, or film. It is through this ap proach that film is conceived as a discursive formation, in that its meaning and existence is interwoven through representation, social practices, social formations, and economic activities. A cultural economy approach centers on film as part of an industrial complex responsible for creating cul turalized goods laden with symbolic meaning. According to Scott, (2005: 3) ‘‘the cultural economy can be broadly defined as a group of sectorsythat produce goods and services whose subjective meaning, or, more precisely sign value to the consumer is high in comparison with their utilitarian purpose.’’ Like the other approaches, this one is not cohesive, but rather includes traditional structuralist economic geography and political economy perspectives. An excellent example of a political econ omy approach to film is found in Global Hollywood 2. Miller et al. (2005: 5) posit that ‘‘unlike textual reductionists, we do not assume that it is adequate to interpret a film’s internal qualities or the supposed ‘positioning’ of mythic spectators.’’ They suggest that structures of meaning (via cultural studies) and economic structures do not have to be treated as mutually exclusive. Similarly, Macdonald argues that: yall cinema is produced and consumed in a highly interconnected global industry of capital, personnel, and ideas, and that film discourse, everything written or said about film, is an integral part of the production consumption matrix. As such, geographic analysis must derive from the underlying economic, cultural, and aesthetic process of this communication and entertain ment medium. (Macdonald, 1994: 27)

The cultural economy approach brings to light film’s triple ontology: film as an affective agent in the circu lation and amplification of ideas, behaviors, emotions, and logic; film as a representational and discursive

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formation involved with meaning production and re production; and film as an economic commodity involved with the global production, distribution, and con sumption of an industrial complex.

Conclusion Geographic research on film is a new and growing en terprise. Research can be broadly characterized by cul tural studies and cultural economy approaches. Work from humanistic geography has focused on how our perception of place, our ‘way of seeing’ and the symbolic, scripted meanings appropriated onto place are influenced by film. Work from the political economy perspective has sought to uncover the naturalized ideologies and spa tialized myths presented in film. The crisis of represen tation attacked the centrality of mimesis within geography. According to Duncan and Ley (1993: 2) mi mesis is ‘‘the belief that we should strive to produce as accurate a reflection of the world as possible.’’ Following this debate, hermeneutical engagements reconstituted the textual metaphor allowing film to become an essential component of geographic research. According to Aitken and Dixon, anti essentialist epistemologies, or those that do not believe in mimesis, have taken this one step further by ‘‘yemphasizes the fact that objects do not exist in a vacuum; instead, they are given meaning through the actions and thoughts of people’’ (Aitken and Dixon, 2006). Research on the cultural economy of film con textualizes it within an economic, historical, and indus trial framework. Current research seeks to address the industrial complex of production, distribution, and con sumption, and its role in globalization. According to Miller et al., (2000: 15) ‘‘Los Angeles culture and New York commerce dominate screen entertainment around the globe.’’ People around the world are flooded with Hollywood’s cultural products and their web of signs, images, and commodities that reinforce the capitalist– patriarchal–Western hegemonic dominance. Recent en gagements by geographers have sought to move away from Hollywood by examining Third Cinema, French cinema, Vancouver, Hong Kong, and other national and regional cinema complexes. Clearly, all approaches are valid lines of inquiry and cross pollination of ideas from different approaches will surely prove to advance future research in film geography. See also: Popular Culture; Visuality.

Further Reading Aitken, S. (1991). A transactional geography of the image event: The films of Scottish director, Bill Forsyth. Transactions: Institute of British Geographers 16, 105 118.

Aitken, S. and Dixon, D. (2006). Imagining geographies of film. Erdkunde 60(4), 326 336. Aitken, S. and Zonn, L. (eds.) (1994). Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film. Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers. Burgess, J. and Gold, J. (1985). Place, the media and popular culture. In Burgess, J. & Gold, J. (eds.) Geography the Media and Popular Culture, pp 1 32. New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc. Buttimer, A. (1990). Geography, humanism, and global concern. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80(1), 1 33. Carter, S. and McCormack, D. (2006). Film, geopolitics and the affective logics of intervention. Political Geography 25, 228 245. Clarke, D. (ed.) (1997). The Cinematic City. New York: Routledge. Cresswell, T. and Dixon, D. (eds.) (2002). Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Denzin, N. (1991). Images of Postmodern Society. London: Sage. Dixon, D. and Grimes, J. (2004). Capitalism, masculinity and whiteness in the dialectical landscape: The case of Tarzan and the Tycoon. GeoJournal 59, 265 275. Dixon, D. and Zonn, L. (2005). Confronting the geopolitical aesthetic: Fredric Jameson, the perfumed nightmare and the perilous place of Third Cinema. Geopolitics 10, 290 315. Duncan, J. and Ley, D. (1993). Introduction: Representing the place of culture. In Duncan, J. & Ley, D. (eds.) Place/Culture/Representation, pp 1 21. New York: Routledge. Escher, A. (2006). The geography of cinema A cinematic world. Erdkunde 60(4), 307 314. Godfrey, B. (1993). Regional depiction in contemporary film. Geographical Review 83(4), 428 440. Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Jancovich, M., Faire, L. and Stubbings, S. (eds.) (2003). The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption. London: British Film Institute. Kennedy, C. (1994). The myth of heroism: Man and desert in Lawrence of Arabia. In Aitken, S. & Zonn, L. (eds.) Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, pp 137 160. Totowa, NJ: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers. Kennedy, C. and Lukinbeal, C. (1997). Towards a holistic approach to geographic research on film. Progress in Human Geography 21, 33 50. Lukinbeal, C. (2004). The map that precedes the territory: An introduction to essays in cinematic geography. GeoJournal 59(4), 247 251. Lukinbeal, C. and Arreola, D. (2005). Exploring cinematic landscape. Journal of Cultural Geography 23(1), 1 2. Lukinbeal, C. and Zimmermann, S. (2006). Film geography: A new subfield. Erdkunde 60(4), 315 326. Lukinbeal, C. and Zimmermann, S. (eds.) (2008). The Geography of Cinema A Cinematic World. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Lukinbeal, C. and Zonn, L. (eds.) (2004). Cinematic geographies. GeoJournal 59, 247 333. Macdonald, G. (1994). Third cinema and the third world. In Aitken, S. & Zonn, L. (eds.) Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, pp 27 46. Totowa, NJ: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers. Meinig, D. (ed.) (1979). Symbolic landscapes. In The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, pp 164 192. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meinig, D. (ed.) (1979). The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, T. (2000). Hollywood and the world. In Hill, J. & Gibson, C. (eds.) American Cinema and Hollywood: Critical Approaches, pp 145 155. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, T., Covil, N., McMurria, J., Maxwell, R. and Wang, T. (2005). Global Hollywood 2. London: BFI Publishing. Natter, W. and Jones, J. (1993). Pets or meat: Class, ideology, and space in Roger and Me. Antipode 25, 140 158. Shiel, M. and Fitzmaurice, T. (eds.) (2001). Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Storper, M. and Christopherson, S. (1987). Flexible specialization and regional industrial agglomeration: The case of the US motion picture

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industry. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77(1), 104 117. Scott, A. (2005). On Hollywood: The Place, The Industry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Watson, W. (1969). The role of illusion in North American geography: A note on the geography of North American settlement. The Canadian Geographer 14(1), 10 27. Wright, J. (1947). Terrae incognitae: The place of imagination in geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 37, 1 15. Zonn, L. (1984). Landscape depiction and perception: A transactional approach. Landscape Journal 3(2), 144 150. Zonn, L. (ed.) (1990). Place Images in Media. Savage, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers. Zonn, L. (ed.) (2002 2003). Teaching cinematic geographies. Journal of Geography 101, 228 270.

Relevant Websites http://www.aetherjournal.org Aether: The Journal of Media Geography. Started in 2007, Aether is a new online journal solely dedicated to media geography. http://www.kcl.ac.uk BA in Geography with Film Studies, Undergraduate Programmes, Department of Geography, School of Social Science and Public Policyat King’s College London. http://www.public.asu.edu/Bclukinbe/cinema.html Chris Lukinbeal’s Cinematic and Mediated Geographies webpage. A resource for those pursuing research in the subfield. http://www.eidc.com Entertainment Industry Development Corporation. This is the non profit corporation that does film permitting in Los Angeles. Their website provides production data for the greater Los Angeles area. http://www.pbs.org Frontline’s ‘‘The Monster that Ate Hollywood’’: Excellent overview of

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the economic logic of the ‘‘New’’ Hollywood; Frontline’s ‘‘The Merchants of Cool’’ Great charts which break down the media conglomerates and their holdings; Frontline’s ‘‘The Persuaders’’ While focused on advertisement, it highlights key concepts of cultural economy and discusses integrated production advertisement in films and TV. http://memory.loc.gov The American Library of Congress’ Online Motion Picture Collection Excellent resource of early actuality films from around the U.S. and world; The Life of a City: Early Films of New York, 1898 1906 (First collection: Online Motion Picture Collection); Inventing Entertainment: The Motion Picture and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies (Second Collection: Online Motion Picture Collection). http://www.afci.org The Association of Film Commissions International. If you are wondering what filming occurs in your area, the best place to start is with your local film commission. http://www.imdb.com The Documentary: Backstory: Cleopatra: The Film That Changed Hollywood. The film charts Hollywood’s transition from vertically integrated to a disintegrated complex through the epic film Cleopatra. http://geography.sdsu.edu The Geography of Film Theater, Department of Geography at San Diego State University. Has not been updated since 1998, but still provides a resource for those interested in research in film geography. http://www.IMDb.com The Internet Movie Database. This is an excellent resource that references most film and television productions. Under their advanced search options, one can use ‘‘location’’ as a search criterion. Locational attribution is very well done and full of cross references. http://www.library.yale.edu Research Guide in Film Studies, The Film Studies Site at Yale: Yale University Library. Excellent place for those starting research on film.

Finance, Historical Geographies of M. Purvis, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction In common with the rest of the discipline, historical geography has until recently paid little overt attention to the development of financial systems and institutions. Yet finance has been vital in both facilitating and encouraging the societal and environmental transformations that are historical geography’s established concerns. Attention to financial history, for its part, reveals the value of a geo graphical perspective. The evolution of monetary sys tems cannot be divorced from the challenge of time– space coordination and the aspiration to extend eco nomic and social connections over ever greater distances. This apparently universal challenge has, however, in spired complex geographical variations in monetary forms, commercial institutions, and the conventions of financial dealing.

Using Money Money’s Core Functions As a means of displaying wealth early money often served ends that were as much cultural and religious as they were economic. Most accounts, however, focus on its utility as a means of payment and a unit of account. Money both constitutes a common scale against which all things can be valued, and embodies that value. It thus removes the constraints of direct barter, facilitating more complicated exchanges over greater distances. Money also allows value to be stored, so that payment received for goods sold, including an individual’s own labor, need not be spent immediately. In facilitating trade money has, in turn, encouraged a division of labor and geographical specialization in production that have been key drivers of economic growth. Exploring the Consequences of Monetization Profound social and cultural changes have also been linked to increasing money use. Theorists including Marx and Simmel stress money’s role in the rational ization of modern social life. For Marx, monetary transactions render exchange impersonal, eroding social bonds and deepening alienation. Moreover, monetary expressions of value help to conceal the origins of goods, including the exploitation of nature and labor involved in their production. In turn the pursuit of monetary

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wealth and the access to goods which it promises be come an incentive to the continued sale of labor, per petuating its exploitation. Money thus determines a society’s moral attitudes, social relationships, and the status of individuals. By contrast, Simmel sees the loosening of social bonds as potentially liberating. However, he too warns that the apparent freedom of choice conferred on the consumer by money can be disorientating and that the pursuit of money may threaten moral order. These ideas imply that money’s impact will be identical wherever it penetrates. Its increased use is thus seen as advancing spatial integration, reflecting both increased trade and common socioeconomic values. But in its lack of historical and geographical specificity such theory is at odds with monetary development in practice. This has been based not on the establishment of a single, universal currency, but on a multiplicity of money specific to par ticular times and places. What constitutes money, the use made of it and by whom, the meanings it conveys, and hence its societal impacts may all vary between specific contexts. Money, Territory, and Trust This understanding of money as place bound, as well as space transcending also accords with recent reassess ments of its social foundations. Money may change the character of social relations, but to discharge its eco nomic functions it must circulate within a population. This requires that individuals feel a shared confidence in the authenticity of a specific currency, even when its value is ostensibly confirmed by the worth of the com modity from which it is constituted. Originally such confidence rested upon personal knowledge and trust within a social network. Most such networks were spa tially constrained, setting limits to the extent of ex change. Over time successful dealing itself extended networks of trust, allowing currencies to be used more extensively (Figure 1). Wider currency use came ul timately to rest on trust in the authority of state and banking institutions to maintain its value as a means of payment. In time institutional authority itself could become a sufficient guarantee of a currency’s worth, facilitating the issue of fiduciary money, that is, forms, including paper money, lacking inherent commodity value. Yet the remit of even the most powerful insti tutional guarantors remained spatially circumscribed, often by state boundaries.

Finance, Historical Geographies of

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Figure 1 Principal currencies of late medieval Europe. Source: Spufford, P. (1988). Money and / its Use in Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Map 32; p 294.

The Evolution of Financial Systems Currencies and Commodities Many objects and commodities – including shells, cattle, and salt – have historically served as locally specific primitive moneys. Metallic money often prevailed, however, as trading systems became more complex. Use of irregular lumps of precious metals gave way to standardized rods and ingots, and ultimately to coins. Most early mints were small and served only a localized area. However, consolidation of territorial authority by individual rulers both enabled and required establish ment of a standard currency valid throughout the realm. Currencies’ fortunes were thus linked to those of their political sponsors, while currency design became a ve hicle for expressing a regime’s power. Expansive regimes enlarged the area across which their currency circulated, often displacing weaker alternatives. State activity itself encouraged the growing use of money, through the dis tribution of pay to armies and officials and by demanding tax payments in coin.

Yet economic growth exposed coin’s limitations. Its production was vulnerable to fluctuations in bullion supply. Moreover, state financial management and long distance trade were difficult and dangerous while pay ment required large scale transportation of coins or ingots. The intrinsic worth of the gold or silver contained in high value coins allowed some to be used in inter national payments, but dealers and financiers faced a confusing mix of coins of uncertain authenticity. New financial instruments and institutions were therefore necessary to increase money supply, and to enable funds to be transferred efficiently across distance and between currency areas. Banking Increased coinage use highlighted the role of money changers, who served traders by exchanging foreign coins for local currency, and the state by distributing new issues to replace worn and mutilated coins. Gradually, some changers began to act as bankers, accepting cash deposits

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and granting loans. These new deposit banks increased the availability of commercial credit. They also extended the money supply, making loans in excess of their coin re serves, in the expectation that they would not face de mands for the simultaneous withdrawal of all cash deposits. Such business required increasingly sophisticated financial management, including written records of clients’ accounts. From this developed facilities for customers to transfer debits and credits directly between accounts. Banks also opened accounts with each other, enabling transfers between institutions and across distance. The new services offered convenience and enabled increased business to be conducted without requiring comparable growth in the coin supply. Transferable deposits – bank money – thus further extended money supplies. Activities, particularly trade, requiring long distance money transfers and currency exchange prompted par allel developments in merchant banking. This allowed exchange contracts, particularly bills of exchange, as written records of entitlement to payment to be substi tuted for transportation of coin or bullion. A merchant incurring a trading debt could purchase a bill of exchange from a banker in his local vicinity, to be dispatched to a distant creditor in lieu of coin. The recipient collected his money by selling the bill to an equivalent local banker. Exchange rates were set to yield a profit for the bankers who offset flows of debt in opposite directions against each other and settled any remaining imbalances. Such bills both eased fund transfer, and increased money supply because of the delay between their sale and re demption. Initially this reflected the time taken in carrying bills between urban centers. Payment times became standardized, however, and bills were used to extend credit for purposes other than long distance trade. Paper Money, National Currencies, and the State Bills and other promissory notes were one basis for the development of paper money. Rather than being re deemed by the recipient, right to payment could be re assigned, so that bills became a transferable means of settling debts. Deposit banks were a further source of paper money. Notes were initially deemed to have value because they were exchangeable on demand for a stated amount in coin. The promised payment, however, came to be indefinitely postponed, further distancing money supply from bullion reserves. This was not a wholly positive development. Problems of exchange resurfaced where many different local banks issued notes. Without central control excessive note issue could ruin individual banks, undermine wider financial confidence and fuel inflation. State regulation frequently followed, with the right to issue notes being reserved for the state central bank. The design of such notes often also assumed an

increasing political importance; their portrayal of iconic landscapes and national heroes being intended to foster popular identification with the state through use of an explicitly national currency. The remit of the modern state has extended to control over interest and exchange rates, and the transfers of funds between territories. Today, however, state authority is subject to growing challenge. Major financial insti tutions constitute an international network not easily regulated by individual states, while information and communications technologies allow funds to be moved with increasing speed and ease. Geographical Contrasts: Europe and China No simple outline can capture the complexity of mon etary evolution in practice. The sequence above broadly reflects European experience, beginning with the emer gence of coins during Classical Antiquity. However, subsequent developments were neither consistently pro gressive nor geographically uniform. In Western Europe coinage use temporarily diminished from the fifth cen tury AD as trade and urban activity declined following the retreat of Roman imperial authority. After fitful be ginnings from the seventh century, monetary systems achieved renewed stability by the tenth century. Only at this stage did coin production become firmly established in Northern Europe. The foundations of modern finan cial services were laid from the twelfth century, as sus tained commercial growth prompted innovations in banking. Paper money entered increasing use from the sixteenth century, with many state banks asserting a monopoly over its issue during the nineteenth century. The era of state financial control which this ushered in reached its height in the decades after World War II. Although contemporary international financial sys tems owe much to Europe’s experience, other global regions displayed their own distinctive path of monetary evolution. In China, for example, lacking ready sources of gold or silver, the imperial state issued paper money in substantial quantities as early as the twelfth century. Use of coin in trade and tax payments consequently dimin ished through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Confidence in paper money declined, however, as its supply grew excessively during the sixteenth and seven teenth centuries. Uncoined silver and foreign silver coins thus came to be used in substantial transactions. Petty commerce continued to employ low value bronze coins, the demand for which grew during the eighteenth cen tury as the market economy penetrated rural China. Hybridity in Monetary Systems: Rural–Urban Contrasts Most monetary systems also exhibited some degree of hybridity, as different forms of money were used for


particular purposes, or in specific contexts. As the Chi nese example indicates, different types of money were frequently used in wholesale and retail transactions. Evidence from early modern Europe also shows that the extension of a monetary economy did not readily elim inate barter. Rural money use, in particular, was often seasonal. Coins entered the countryside in payment for harvest, providing the means to pay taxes and rents, and to purchase goods from urban dealers. This spending meant, however, that coins left rural communities rapidly and at other times exchange frequently reverted to barter. In some remote areas this seasonality survived into the twentieth century. Barter was not unknown in urban contexts, but here coinage use was year round. Low value coins and petty credit serviced the bulk of trade, which was small scale and localized. The distinctive needs of major wholesale traders, however, prompted innovation in banking, the uneven diffusion of which closely re flected geographies of long distance trade. European Banking and Trade: Italian Innovations and Influence As the initial focus of the enormous trading expansion experienced in thirteenth century Europe, Northern Italy was also at the forefront of developments in deposit and merchant banking. From origins in cities including Genoa, deposit banking had spread to trading centers across Italy, Southern France, and Spain by the late thirteenth century. Diffusion – often through Italian initiative – to commercially less sophisticated regions north of the Alps chiefly followed during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But here deposit banking pros pered only in the largest commercial centers, including Bruges, Antwerp, and Cologne. In Scandinavia and Central Europe the limited concentration of commercial activity in specific urban centers restricted demand for deposit banking. The foundations of merchant banking were laid by partnerships, originally family based, established in North Italian cities, including Siena and Florence, from the mid thirteenth century. The largest of these de veloped international networks of branches and cor respondents in the principal trading centers of the Mediterranean and along the main north–south arteries of trade linking Italy with the Low Countries (Figure 2). Most partnerships had interests in trade and manu facture, but the growing scale of commerce encouraged some to specialize in financial services, including the insurance of vessels and goods in transit, as well as banking. Initially, the main northern outposts of this merchant banking network were the great trade fairs of the Champagne region in France. Subsequent develop ments were linked to other fairs, including Geneva and Lyon, and to growing commercial communities in Bruges

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and Antwerp. Even in the fifteenth century, however, northern cities lacked merchant banking facilities to match those of Italy or other Mediterranean centers, including Montpellier and Barcelona. East of the Rhine banking development lagged still further. Yet by the sixteenth century German cities, including Augsburg and Nuremberg, which lay astride the principal eastern route for north–south trade in Europe, were challenging Italian control of international finance. Funding the State European rulers were also amongst the clients of medi eval Italian bankers. A role in papal finances – including the transfer of income from across Europe to the papal treasury – provided leading banking houses with lucra tive business and substantial funds for investment. Loans from Italian bankers also helped to fund the political ambitions of English, French, and Spanish monarchs. As paymasters for military and diplomatic campaigning, bankers thus exercised an influence upon the political map. Yet their own fortunes were vulnerable to the dis ruptions of war and the nonrepayment of political loans, both of which contributed to Italian banking’s decline.

Capital Markets and Flows Meeting Business Needs: Small-Scale Capital Mobilization Premodern commerce and manufacturing was pre dominantly small scale, its modest demand for capital being met from savings and the reinvestment of profit, sometimes augmented by family money or the creation of business partnerships. Bankers and moneylenders pro vided only short term credit to fund particular transac tions. Long after the onset of Industrial Revolution in eighteenth century Britain small family operations and private partnerships still constituted the vast majority of businesses. Any additional capital required was chiefly secured through personal contacts or the local client networks of intermediaries such as bankers and attorneys. Capital flows from countryside to town, funding trans port infrastructure and urban construction as well as industry, were thus predominantly intraregional. Even in the early twentieth century there were active stock ex changes in some 20 British provincial centers. Creating Capital Markets: Funding Enterprise and the State Only a handful of major businesses required more ex tensive investment. Amongst the earliest were companies trading with the Americas and East Indies founded in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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Peruzzi company branch Medici bank branch Peruzzi & Medici branch Peruzzi agency Medici agency

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Figure 2 Italian commercial finance in medieval Europe: the operational networks of two Florentine companies. The pattern of branches and agencies reflected the interlinked functions of the Peruzzi and the Medici companies as merchants and bankers. Sources of original data: de Roover, R. (1948). The Medici Bank: Its Organization, Management, Operations and Decline. New York: New York University Press. Hunt, E. S. (1994). The Medieval Super-Companies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The efforts of the promoters of the Dutch East India Company of 1609 to sell shares in their business – yielding purchasers a corresponding proportion of its profits – were credited with establishing a pioneering capital market in Amsterdam. Most early capital markets, however, dealt chiefly in government securities. This reflected the translation of war loans and other advances to European states into permanent national debt from the seventeenth century. Rather than loans being repaid, creditors were rewarded with interest as a long term source of income. Shares in national debt thus became tradable commodities and markets grew as escalating military and administrative expenditure prompted rising state demand for funds. Trade in government securities was instrumental in the rise of eighteenth century London as Europe’s principal capital market and in the growth of smaller markets elsewhere in Europe and the US. During the nineteenth century, such trade became international, with London, Paris and, latterly, Berlin emerging as

dealing centers for foreign government bonds. From the 1840s railway shares became a second focus of trade, boosting growth in London, Amsterdam, and Paris, and in emerging markets including Brussels, Frankfurt, Milan, New York, and a host of smaller centers. The popularity of railway shares – born of expectations of a safe return – and the proliferation of limited liability joint stock companies gradually encouraged greater dealing in other business shares during the later nine teenth century. In Britain and the US most were owned by wealthy individuals. But across continental Europe, major banks – some expressly established as vehicles to promote economic growth – became substantial indus trial stakeholders. Bank investment in production also had an international dimension. For example, the Parisian arm of the Rothschild banking empire – itself a transnational entity that embodied Jewish financial prowess – acquired interests including metal mining in Spain and New Caledonia, and Russian petroleum production.


International Investment: Impacts at Home and Overseas No other European state could, however, rival the scale of British overseas investment. By 1914 Britons held foreign assets worth d4 billion, confirming London as the primary focus of international capital flows. Overseas investments were particularly directed toward Europe and European settled territories, including substantial interests in the US and Latin America (Figure 3). As at home, most money was invested in government bonds and railway shares, funding the development of transport infrastructure, urban utilities, and housing. Much of the remainder flowed into agri culture, mining, financial services, and commodity trading. The causes and consequences of the export of Euro pean capital have been widely debated. Its impact was arguably greatest in European settled territories where the extension of capitalism engendered unprecedented societal and environmental transformation. The con tinuing underdevelopment of the global South can also be linked to its partial and inequitable integration into world trade as a result of the penetration of European capital. Marxist scholars, in particular, have argued that European economies postponed domestic crises by

exporting surplus capital, without regard for its de structive impacts on the non European world. Yet capital exports were not necessarily advantageous if they led to a shortfall in investment at home, as may have begun to happen in late Victorian Britain. Debate about the logic of Britain’s international in vestments has highlighted some of its likely domestic ef fects. Overseas agricultural interests and investment income allowed nineteenth century Britain to import in creasing quantities of cheap food. This eroded domestic agricultural prosperity, changing rural landscapes, and ac celerating rural–urban migration. The relative decline of British industry after mid century may also have been hastened by a lack of investment in innovation and new technologies. In contrast, overseas investment reinforced the wealth of a tiny minority, concentrated in London and Southeast England. Their dominant share of investment earnings, totaling d200 million annually by 1913, was a major stimulus to the expansion of a service based econ omy centered on the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ of London’s financial sector. This regional prosperity contrasted with the stagnation of much provincial industry, reinforcing perceptions of a north–south divide in wealth, social status, and political influence.

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Figure 3 British overseas investments 1865 1914 total capital called up (in d000s). Source of original data: Davis, L. E. and Huttenback, R. A. (1986). Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860 1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Financial Centers An Elite of Cities Primacy within international financial networks has his torically been claimed by remarkably few cities. Florence and Bruges achieved initial prominence in Europe. Antwerp, however, emerged as the financial center for an early modern European economy increasingly linked to Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade. During the seven teenth century primacy passed to Amsterdam. Nine teenth century London, in turn, became the focus of a worldwide financial system. All these cities maintained their status as financial centers for some time after the commercial and industrial eclipse of their national economies. Contemporary London thus retains much of its international importance, despite the twentieth cen tury rise of New York and Tokyo as global financial centers. Networking within the City and Beyond The functioning of major financial centers necessarily rests on the construction of extensive external links. In formation and communications technologies – including the telegraph and telephone in the nineteenth century and computer based systems in the twentieth century – have proved vital in facilitating flows of funds and commercial intelligence. Equally important, however, are the localized links forged through social and professional interaction – often almost exclusively masculine – within a specific urban milieu. Geographical proximity has helped to cement powerful alliances, for example, be tween the financial and political elites frequently found together in capital cities, and to sustain the regular round of trading in financial markets. An expression of the enduring importance of internal networking for the financial community is the clustering of activity in particular urban districts. Originating in an era when deals were struck face to face, this spatial concentration remains evident in the contemporary City of London, New York’s Wall Street, and many smaller financial centers (Figure 4). Stress continues to be placed on access to information and trust deriving from personal interaction as a basis for doing deals. Combined with the pull of key institutions this has limited relocation, even in the face of soaring property prices and instantaneous communications. Urban Financial Districts: The City of London The location of London’s financial district changed little during the city’s international rise. Anchor points were provided by the Royal Exchange on Cornhill and the adjacent Bank of England. But these sixteenth and seventeenth century foundations were themselves sited

in an area that had housed the London offices of Italian merchant bankers in the fourteenth century. The modern financial district that emerged in the seventeenth century contained a diverse population, including suppliers of legal services, news, and entertainment. These various activities were frequently intertwined, as in the taverns and coffeehouses of the city, which were places for deal making and information exchange, as well as recreation. Some such premises became associated with particular trading activities, giving birth during the eighteenth century to Lloyd’s insurance business and the London Stock Exchange. This locational segregation of specific activities became more marked during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most stockbrokers’ offices came to cluster around the Stock Exchange, while major bank headquarters were concentrated in Lombard Street close to the Clearing House through which their mutual debts were discharged daily. During the nineteenth century the City of London, in common with financial districts across Europe and North America, lost most of its residential population. Premises that had performed both domestic and com mercial functions were entirely converted to business use, or replaced by purpose built offices. These were not simply functional working spaces. Often designs echoed the architecture of classical temples or the Renaissance palaces of earlier Italian financial centers. Such buildings were intended to foster public confidence in the wealth and probity of the companies they housed, distinguish ing them from the speculators and fraudsters who also populated the city. Collectively, they also proclaimed the importance of the financial sector to London and its role in promoting the international standing of Britain’s capital city. Such thinking was particularly explicit in early twentieth century designs for the reconstruction of the Bank of England and other bank headquarters which formed part of wider efforts to give architectural ex pression to London’s imperial status. Imperial links were equally evident in the export of the palatial architecture of major European banks to cities across the world as a tangible symbol of a powerful alien presence.

Low Finance Payment and Dealing The finances of ordinary people, while linked to com mercial and governmental decisions about investment or taxation, spawned a further diversity of instruments and institutions. Barter, payment in kind, and localized cur rencies persisted in everyday dealing. Sometimes this reflected continuing shortages of coin, but payment in kind or by tokens exchangeable only at employer run truck shops was also a deliberate means of intensifying labor exploitation by lowering the real value of wages.


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TOWN HALL BANK OF ENGLAND

STOCK EXCHANGE MARKET

IRE RA E V RI

Pawn brokers Banks

CATTLE MARKET 1 mile

Figure 4 Two financial worlds in a British industrial city bank branches and pawnbrokers in Leeds, 1905. The principal bank branches clustered in central Leeds close to other key financial institutions; smaller clusters reflected specific foci of client demand, including the city’s markets. Pawnbrokers, often also trading as jewelers or clothes dealers, were particularly common in the poorer residential districts of east and south Leeds. Source of original data: Kelly’s Directories (1905). Kelly’s Directory of Leeds. London: Kelly’s Directories.

Petty Credit Lending to the poor, often as pawnbroking where money is advanced on the security of deposited items, has a near universal history. In Europe it emerged as an or ganized trade alongside other banking during the thir teenth century. Recorded first in Southwest France, licensed pawnshops – granted exemption from religious prohibitions against usury – spread across France, Italy, and to the Low Countries during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Italian involvement – evident in the term ‘Lombard banking’ for the sector – was widespread. But the moral taint associated with circumventing usury laws meant that marginalized minorities, particularly Jews, were also prominent. In the industrial era pawn broking became ubiquitous in poorer urban communities across Europe and North America (Figure 4). Help for the Poor and Self-Help by the Poor The recognition that pawnbroking, while exploitative, provided a useful service in extending credit to the poor, prompted alternative initiatives. Charitable efforts to

provide loans at reasonable interest rates included the monte di pieta` first established by Franciscan monks in fifteenth century Italy. Other organizations such as the rural credit cooperatives promoted in nineteenth century Germany by F. W. Raiffeisen were more the product of individual initiative. Equivalent schemes in British India and elsewhere were state backed. Industrial and political revolution in Europe and North America, however, fostered popular institutions – mutual banks, building societies, and insurance providers – that substituted self help for patronage. Financial service provision by and for the poor often reflected contrasting urban and rural needs. In the countryside credit was chiefly provided to allow peasant farmers to obtain seeds and other inputs, with repayment being expected after harvest. Consumption, however, was the main stimulus of urban demand for petty credit, driving the weekly cycle of pawning and redemption which characterized the budgetary management of many poorer households during the industrial era. Consumers’ cooperation, as an alternative means of stretching meager incomes, was also strongest in industrial towns and

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villages. Its roots were often deepest in smaller centers, for – as with high finance – initial success often rested upon a foundation of trust between individuals who knew each other personally. See also: Capital and Space; Capitalism; Capitalism and Division of Labor; Central Business District; Financial Centers, International; Financial Knowledge; Historical Geographies, Urban; Imperial Cities; Industry, Historical Geographies of; Networks; Networks, Urban; Street Names and Iconography; Trade, Transport and Communications, Historical Geographies of; Uneven Development; Urban Architecture.

Further Reading Black, I. (1999). Imperial visions: Rebuilding the Bank of England, 1919 39. In Driver, F. & Gilbert, D. (eds.) Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, pp 96 113. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Davis, L. E. and Huttenback, R. A. (1986). Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860 1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Roover, R. (1948). The Medici Bank: Its Organization, Management, Operations and Decline. New York: New York University Press. Diederiks, H. and Reeder, D. (eds.) (1996). Cities of Finance. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Gad, G. and Holdsworth, D. (1984). Building for city, region and nation. Office development in Toronto 1834 1984. In Russell, V. L. (ed.)

Forging a Consensus. Historical Essays on Toronto, pp 272 319. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gilbert, E. (2005). Common cents: Situating money in time and place. Economy and Society 34, 357 388. Gilbert, E. and Helleiner, E. (eds.) (1999). Nation States and Money: The Past, Present and Future of National Currencies. London: Routledge. Hunt, E. S. (1994). The Medieval Super Companies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kindleberger, C. P. (2005). A Financial History of Western Europe. London: Routledge. Leyshon, A. and Thrift, N. J. (1997). Money/Space: Geographies of Monetary Transformation (esp. ‘Introduction’, pp 1 38). London: Routledge. Michie, R. C. (1997). Friend or foe? Information technology and the London Stock Exchange since 1700. Journal of Historical Geography 23, 304 326. Spufford, P. (1988). Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spufford, P. (2005). From Antwerp to London. The Decline of Financial Centres in Europe. Wassenaar: Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Von Glahn, R. (1996). Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000 1700. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zelizer, V. A. (1994). The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief and Other Currencies. New York: Basic Books.

Relevant Websites http://www.bankinghistory.de Relevant Academic and Professional Bodies Include the European Association for Banking and Financial History.

Finance, Offshore S. M. Roberts, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Offshore Finance Financial activity that takes place in less-regulated jurisdictions, often with low or no applicable taxes. Offshore Financial Center (OFC) A jurisdiction that has a deliberately less-regulated and less- (or un-) taxed financial sector and offers a range of financial services (corporate and personal banking, insurance, securities, financial management, trusts, and so on). Bigger OFCs host offices of major international banks and the big four global accounting firms. Tax Haven A jurisdiction that either exempts foreigners from paying tax on savings or income from abroad, or has minimal rates of taxation so as to attract foreign companies and individuals seeking to avoid taxes.

Introduction Offshore finance has become a major component of the international financial system. Although there are no precise figures available, it is estimated that at any time, over half of the world’s money will be traveling in offshore circuits or located in offshore centers. Indeed, depending on how they are defined, there are now between 14 and 70 offshore financial centers (OFCs) scattered around the globe (see Figure 1). The Bank for International Settle ments (BIS) estimates that for 2006 the largest five OFCs (Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Netherlands Antilles, Hong Kong SAR, and Singapore) together accounted for 12% of all international bank liabilities – a greater share than the US. In addition to offshore banking activities of a tradi tional sort, the offshore financial markets include a large and diverse financial services business offering innovative financial products or instruments in the bond markets, in the mutual funds sector (including hedge funds), in the trust business, and there is also a significant and very active offshore insurance industry. Every major bank, each of the big four global accounting firms and most, if not all, transnational corporations (TNCs) have extensive offshore networks. By hosting offshore finance – turning themselves into OFCs – a number of small states have managed to es tablish successful economies. Some OFCs are in places (often small islands) that have few other options for economic development and hosting offshore finance has proven an attractive option. For example, the Caribbean

islands with the highest gross national products (GNPs) per capita include the OFCs of the Bahamas, the Cay mans, and the Netherlands Antilles. In Europe, a set of states have historically positioned themselves to host flight capital and now offshore finance, including Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein. Each has profited from its place in the offshore financial world. However, as is discussed below, offshore finance does not only take place in these havens, it also takes place in the world’s supposedly ‘onshore’ financial centers – notably London.

Defining Offshore As is already clear, offshore finance is not a sphere of activity that is completely separate from so called on shore activities. Most analysis of offshore finance points out that offshore is deeply connected to onshore through flows of money and through institutions and other actors that work in both realms. The interesting attempts by BIS researchers to map international banking flows show that many international banking transactions between ‘on shore’ centers are routed through OFCs. More pro foundly, though, offshore finance only exists as a relational category. Offshore is defined by its difference from onshore. Specifically, offshore finance takes advan tage of less (or differently) taxed and regulated spaces in the world economy. OFCs are, as Ronen Palan describes, deliberately structured juridical spaces. Offshore finance is, in this way, distinctly geographical. Through innova tive uses of offshore markets and centers, capital exploits the uneven global topographies of taxation and regu lation to minimize its liabilities to the state (taxes) and accumulate profits. In general, offshore finance may be thought of as the ‘constitutive outside’ of finance. That is, while it may be regarded as very different from or even as working in opposition to onshore finance, even the briefest of analysis reveals that offshore is very much a part of onshore. Offshore finance has recently come under a great deal of pressure and the pressure has largely been aimed at the key juridical spaces through which it works: the OFCs. Long suspected of providing shelter to money launderers and super rich tax dodgers, the OFCs are now suspected of providing terrorists with a financial network, and with assisting corporate fraudsters whose companies pay tiny amounts of taxes in their major countries of operation while hoarding corporate and personal for tunes offshore.

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Figure 1 Offshore F nanc a Centers. Source data: MF 2006.

140 Finance, Offshore

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The Rise of Offshore Finance Offshore financial centers developed, in many cases, out of tax havens. Tax havens themselves arose as places in which wealthy families could shelter their money in trusts or investment companies and avoid paying different kinds of taxes in their home countries. The revenue authorities in Great Britain and in the United States investigated such practices in the 1920s and 1930s. In subsequent decades, as the number of TNCs rose, corporations rather than individuals or families became the main users of tax havens. Indeed, the rise of TNCs during the 1950s and 1960s and more particularly the growth in the levels of foreign direct investment (FDI) activity by TNCs during these decades may be partly explained by the incentives provided for FDI under prevailing tax regimes. Essen tially, TNCs’ profits made abroad were not taxed in the companies’ home jurisdictions until they were repatriated. Thus TNCs had every reason to reinvest profits made overseas in further rounds of FDI. To defer or avoid taxes on profits made overseas, TNCs established various sub sidiary corporate entities in less taxed (or differently taxed) jurisdictions. By using a suite of conduit and holding companies, along with old fashioned transfer pricing techniques, a TNC could effectively minimize its tax liabilities worldwide. If that was the ‘demand side’, the ‘supply side’ was found in the growing ranks of tax havens where enterprising (often expatriate) lawyers, bankers, and accountants worked with legislators to structure the legal and regulatory systems of their countries to facilitate and attract TNCs wishing to set up various types of corporate entities. Many aspiring OFCs (or ‘international financial centers’ as these new and former tax havens often prefer to be called) found they could reap certain rewards, in the shape of fees and revenue, from the business of being an OFC. For otherwise quite desperately poor places, often without much scope for enacting eco nomic development strategies, this potential revenue stream was very appealing. A further and decisive boost to the fledgling offshore finance sector came during the late 1960s and 1970s. This was the period during which the international financial system underwent a profound transition. From the end of World War II until that time, exchange rates had been more or less fixed under the so called Bretton Woods system. The US dollar acted as the de facto world cur rency and it was tied to gold (at $35 an ounce). The tremendous pressures on this relatively inflexible (but stable) system built up in the post war decades as eco nomic growth occurred unevenly. The US found itself in a deficit position (in part due to the costs of the Vietnam War) and in August 1971 President Richard Nixon sus pended the convertibility of the dollar to gold, put a surcharge on imports, and demanded that the dollar be devalued. Eventually, the system of fixed or pegged

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exchange rates broke down and the world’s currencies began to more or less float against one another. The ri gidity of the post war Bretton Woods currency regime was broken. Floating exchange rates were a source of uncertainty and risk for TNCs to some degree, but the movement of currencies against one another also pro vided scope for further profit making through specu lation. Both aspects further fuelled the rise of offshore finance. To deal with currency risk, TNCs could park sums denominated in different currencies in OFCs. To take advantage of the potential for arbitraging in the currency or foreign exchange markets, TNCs could es tablish financial subsidiaries as profit centers in their own right and base them in OFCs. As the world economy globalized further through the last three decades of the twentieth century with inter national finance taking an ever more prominent role, OFCs became homes to financial institutions and other TNCs seeking to take advantage of uneven topographies of regulation, as well as taxation. Offshore markets be came sites of innovation as new types of entities and new types of financial products or instruments were de veloped to allow corporations, including banks, to take advantage of the spatial differences in regulations on fi nancial activities such as interest rate restrictions, reserve requirements, and reporting requirements. As the leading sectors in the US and EU became more identified with services and with intellectual property (rather than with production or trade in more tangible goods), the OFCs became central to the global strategies of technology and pharmaceutical corporations, for example. A corporation holding intellectual property (patents, copyrights, etc.) can structure itself so that the patents are held by a subsidiary based in an OFC and then the onshore cor poration will pay its own subsidiary licensing fees or royalties and very effectively minimize taxes due onshore. For instance, by setting up an Irish subsidiary, Google arranged its finances so that a high proportion of its earnings were through the Irish entity, meaning they were taxed at 12.5% rather than at 35% as they would have been if they had been earned in the US. OFCs are still used by rich individuals (known as ‘high net worth individuals’ in the trade) and wealthy families. Private wealth stashed in OFCs by rich indi viduals and families is reckoned by some estimates to be worth over US$11.5 trillion. This would generate an untaxed income of about US$850 billion a year. With the rise of a super rich class most recently typified by, but not restricted to, the new cadre of cosmopolitan Russian billionaires, OFCs have become routine elements in transnational wealth management strategies. With polit ical instability threatening economic insecurity, middle and upper classes have long sought ‘bolt holes’ should they need them. For example, during the build up to both World Wars, Switzerland and Liechtenstein were

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perceived as safe places to which those in other parts of tumultuous Europe could send their assets. Most OFCs still host flight capital of all sorts and many offer offshore services such as ship or aircraft registries that, while they are not financial, appeal to super rich individual users of offshore finance.

The Geography of Offshore Finance Identifying places that may be categorized as OFCs is quite difficult. In part, this is because the very term ‘offshore’ is somewhat ambiguous and in part because, as is explained below, offshore, while it operates in a dis tinctly geographical way, creates a convoluted geography. This is seen in the development of the onshore offshores in the early 1980s. In 1981, US authorities allowed banks to set up ‘international banking facilities’ (IBFs) in New York (and eventually other states) which operated free of the key restrictions on interest rates and reserve re quirements – requirements that previously could only be escaped by setting up in an OFC. These efforts and re lated ones in Japan, designed to lure offshore business back onshore, plus the long standing dominance of London in the Eurocurrency markets resulted in a major portion of offshore finance actually being conducted onshore. Indeed, there is much truth to the observation that London is the world’s biggest offshore center. With the recent politicization of offshore finance (see below), the identification of places as OFCs has become a loaded

Table 1

issue. However, even acknowledging the definitional difficulties (political and otherwise) it is possible to identify places that host offshore finance. Researchers at the Tax Justice Network (TJN) have compiled an expansive list of OFCs which contains over 70 jurisdictions they identify as tax havens (see Table 1). They usefully categorize the various centers into groups: major financial centers; premier havens; midrange havens; minor havens; and notional havens. Major fi nancial centers are those that are typically regarded as ‘onshore’ and have a diversified financial services indus try, but where certain tax and/or regulatory structures exist to permit their use as havens or OFCs as well. The premier group of centers are those which are the biggest in terms of the volume of offshore business they handle and, while they may be specialized (for example, the British Virgin Islands (BVI) in offshore companies for mation) they offer a suite of offshore services and products. Every premier center also hosts offices for each of the big four global accountancy firms (KPMG; Deloitte; Ernst & Young; and PricewaterhouseCoopers). The midrange centers, in many cases, aspire to be premier centers but may lack the volume of business or the presence of major international players in the ac counting or banking fields. The ‘notional’ centers are those whose legal and regulatory frameworks make them potential OFCs, but for various reasons they have at tracted only a limited amount of offshore business. There is some concern that this class of centers is the most likely to attract illicit finance or those seeking to evade

Typology of offshore financial centers and tax havens

Major financial centers

Premier havens

Midrange havens

Minor havens

Notional havens

Belgium City of London Frankfurt Hong Kong Netherlands New York South Africa Switzerland Tel Aviv

British Virgin Islands Cayman Islands Cyprus Dubai Guernsey Ireland Isle of Man Jersey Liechtenstein Luxembourg Singapore The Bahamas

Aruba Bahrain Barbados Bermuda Costa Rica Dominica Gibraltar Hungary Iceland Labuan Lebanon Macau Malta Mauritius Netherlands Antilles Panama Taipei Turks and Caicos Islands Uruguay US Virgin Islands

Andorra Anguilla Antigua and Barbuda Belize Grenada Madeira Monaco St. Lucia St. Vincent and the Grenadines St. Kitts and Nevis The Cook Islands The Maldives Trieste

Alderney Campione d’Italia Ingushetia Liberia Marshall Islands Melilla Montserrat Nauru Niue Samoa Sao Tome e Principe Sark Somalia The Marianas The Seychelles Tonga Turkish Rep. of N. Cyprus Vanuatu

Source: Tax Justice Network (2007). Closing the floodgates: Collecting tax to pay for development. Report commissioned by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Edited by R. Murphy. TJN London (http://www.taxjustice.nl/dialogs/download.aspx?oid=8ad013e9 1df9 4f2a a400 4fbd6700f0fd) (accessed 3 August 2007).

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taxation. However, in terms of their overall contribution to offshore finance, these centers are negligible. There are identifiable clusters of OFCs. Using the shorter list of OFCs used by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the map in Figure 1 shows the global distribution of OFCs (see also Table 2 above). The major clusters are found in the Caribbean, Europe, and the Pacific. In terms of volume of business, the Carib bean and European centers outrank the Pacific centers, although if Asia and the Pacific are taken together it is reasonable to expect that the centers in this region will continue to grow as Asian economies experience high annual economic growth rates. This is because the clusters of OFCs each tend to operate in connection to their nearby onshore economies. Thus the Caribbean centers are most closely linked into North American circuits of capital and in much the same way the European centers tend to operate as adjuncts to the EU even as they attract business from all over the globe. In part this clustering may be explained by the time zone factor since OFCs tend to be closely associated with onshore financial centers and economies with which they share some portion of the business day. However, it is also a result of relic geographies of empire – many of the Caribbean OFCs are Dependent Territories of Britain, for example – in which small islands found themselves with minimal legal structures ripe for adaptation to the needs of offshore finance and with little democratic or political pressure to do otherwise. Within each cluster there has tended to emerge a hierarchy of centers. For example, in the Caribbean, the Cayman Islands and the

Table 2

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Bahamas are much more significant OFCs than St. Lucia or Dominica, say. Each center has developed special izations within the broad category of offshore finance. Bermuda, for example, is well known as a global center for the ‘captive’ insurance business and as such competes with regional rival The Caymans but also with Guern sey, the Isle of Man, Luxembourg, and Vermont. The BVI, on the other hand, have specialized in offshore company formation and are home to over 300 000 so called international business companies. They compete not only with other Caribbean centers but also with Ireland, Gibraltar, Luxembourg, and Delaware in this niche. Despite the fact that individuals and corporations establishing offshore entities typically establish several in different locations so as not to ‘put all their eggs in one basket’, centers within a cluster also tend to compete for business. They keep a careful watch on the other centers within the region in order to counteract (or preempt) any innovations or adjustments others might be making with regard to the products or services they offer and the fees they charge. This intense competition has led some commentators to regard this as another example of a ‘race to the bottom’ since it is most commonly ex pressed as competitive deregulation. Table 2 shows all the OFCs under IMF scrutiny. The IMF is one of a number of institutions seeking to exert some control over offshore finance. Since the 1990s, offshore finance has come to be seen as a problem by many, and there was an intense effort to clamp down on OFCs in the 1990s. It is to this issue that we now turn.

Offshore financial centers under IMF scrutiny

Europe

Middle East, Africa, and Indian Ocean

Caribbean, Atlantic, Central, and South America

Asia and Pacific

Andorra Cyprus Gibraltar Guernsey Ireland Isle of Man Jersey Liechtenstein Luxembourg Malta Monaco San Marino Switzerland

Bahrain Botswana Dubai Lebanon Mauritius Seychelles

Anguilla Antigua and Barbuda Aruba Belize Bermuda Barbados British Virgin Islands Cape Verde Cayman Islands Costa Rica Dominica Grenada Montserrat Netherlands Antilles Panama St. Kitts and Nevis St. Vincent and The Grenadines The Bahamas Turks and Caicos Islands Uruguay

Brunei Cook Islands Hong Kong SAR Macao SAR Marshall Islands Malaysia (Labuan) Nauru Niue Palau Samoa Singapore Vanuatu

Source: International Monetary Fund (2006). Offshore financial centers: The assessment program np/pp/eng/2006/020806.pdf) (accessed 3 August 2007).

a progress report (http://www.imf.org/external/

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The Crackdown of the 1990s and the Reconfiguration of Offshore Finance Since the mid to late 1990s there have been a plethora of efforts to ‘crack down’ on OFCs. The origins of the crackdown lie in the huge expansion of the offshore markets through the 1980s and 1990s. As the flows of offshore capital grew, various onshores started to become concerned about offshore markets and specifically about the role of OFCs. The onshores had two major classes of concern. First, they were upset that they were losing business to OFCs, despite considerable onshore offshores in centers such as London in the UK and Delaware in the US. This competitive concern evolved into the discourse of ‘unfair tax competition’. Second, onshore elements were worried about the uses of offshore markets and centers for hiding and washing dirty or illicit money. This concern was not new and continued, as it had been, to be typically referenced by the label ‘money laundering’. Since 9/11 this issue has been allied with a generalized concern about the funding of terrorism with which it is now always dis cursively twinned. Both discourses – unfair tax com petition and money laundering – cast OFCs as particular ‘problems’ or ‘suspects’ to be disciplined. In an attempt to reduce the opportunities for criminals to hide their money behind the confidentiality guarantees of the OFCs, the US authorities exerted considerable pressure on Caribbean OFCs through the 1970s and 1980s. In 1986 they succeeded in badgering the Cayman Islands, for example, into signing a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. However, in the 1990s the pressure was stepped up and became more multilateral in character. In 1996 the Offshore Group of Banking Supervisors (a group formed in 1980 and connected to the BIS) issued a report critical of OFCs. Then in 1989 the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) was established by the G7 with the main focus on money laundering. The Organization for Economic Co operation and Development (OECD) began their in vestigations into ‘unfair tax competition’ in 1996, producing the report ‘Harmful tax competition: An emerging global issue’ in 1998. In 1999 the BIS established the Fi nancial Stability Forum (FSF), apparently following the wishes of the G7 finance ministers and central bank governors, and this group (inevitably) issued a report of its own. Since 2003 the IMF has had its own Offshore Fi nancial Center Program which, in coordination with the FATF, the FSF, and the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), monitors OFCs com pliance with ‘supervisory standards’. Along with the rise in the number of multinational organizations scrutinizing the OFCs, onshore states con tinued their own efforts to discipline them. The UK Government produced the Edwards Report in 1998, fo cused on the OFCs that were British dependencies. This was followed by an officially commissioned report in 2000

carried out by KPMG that focused again on Bermuda and British overseas territories in the Caribbean. The EU Savings Tax Directive, which came into effect 1 January 2005, is a system for exchanging information between member states about savings held by EU nationals in ac counts based outside their jurisdiction of residency in order to collect taxes on interest earned. This directive affected not just EU member states but also nonmember European OFCs such as Andorra and Monaco, as well as the Caribbean OFCs that are dependencies of Britain (Anguilla, BVI, Turks and Caicos, Caymans) and the Netherlands (Aruba, Netherlands Antilles). Despite pro tests, particularly from the Caymans and from Switzerland, the directive’s terms have been adopted by most OFCs in Europe and the Caribbean dependencies. The EU Savings Tax Directive is just one of a set of recent efforts by the authorities in rich countries to counter cross border tax evasion and crackdown on OFCs. These initiatives, despite pitting the richest countries on Earth against a motley collection of small states and quasi states, did not succeed in shutting down the OFCs. In fact the results, so far at least, of all these efforts have been rather minimal. There was, for a start, considerable backlash against the ‘name and shame’ strategies adopted by the authorities who, in their various reports, generated lists of uncooperative jurisdictions. Many in the OFCs pointed out that the lists smacked of older geographies of empire with their racist undertones as to who was, and who was not, on the so called ‘black lists’. Caribbean leaders pointed out that it seemed unfair at best that Switzerland and Luxembourg were often left off the lists while The Bahamas and The Caymans were nearly al ways on them. With support from the Commonwealth, Caribbean OFC leaders established the International Tax and Investment Organisation which became the Inter national Trade and Investment Organisation (ITIO). Its members are 17 ‘small and developing states’, 11 of which are Caribbean OFCs. The ITIO has issued its own re ports to counter the OECD led crackdown, pointing out that all the efforts are led by essentially the same group of powerful countries, and that they target offshore business only as it occurs in non OECD member states. As Jason Sharman explores, the OFCs’ objections to the crack down were bolstered by the intervention of several prominent libertarian and neoliberal think tanks, espe cially in the US, whose arguments about the benefits of and moral righteousness of tax competition and privacy resonated with many in the US administration. The views of groups such as the Cato Institute, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, the American Enterprise Insti tute, and Canada’s Fraser Institute also appealed to many in the corporate world for whom OFCs provided lucra tive opportunities. For all these reasons at least, the rich countries pulled back from any direct action and appear, for now, to have settled for a regulatory regime that

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permits offshore finance to continue playing a major role in international capitalism and may have actually strengthened the position of the OFCs.

Recent Developments Meanwhile, the OFCs have become the focus of attention for campaigners of a different variety. Citizens’ groups in France and Britain, among others, have increasingly mobilized the discourse of corporate social responsibility to object to the use of OFCs by corporations that do business in their countries but pay little or no tax in them. Tax dodging by the newly numerous cadre of cosmopolitan super rich also fuels populist complaints that hardworking middle and working classes are shoul dering an increasing share of the tax burden; dutifully paying their taxes and effectively subsidizing the super rich and the corporations who can avail themselves of OFCs. Organizations such as the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions to Aid Citizens (ATTAC), which was established in France in 1998, and the TJN, set up in Britain a few years later, have publicly denounced OFCs and the multinational accounting firms that promote them. Such groups found common cause with antipoverty and development organizations. For example, Oxfam has worked to raise awareness of the links between offshore finance and poverty in the de veloping world. In their 2000 report titled ‘Releasing the hidden billions for poverty eradication’, they estimated that tax havens were responsible for at least US$50 billion in revenue losses from developing countries. This amount, the report points out, is roughly equivalent to annual development aid flows to the developing countries. In 2005 the UK charity Christian Aid, working with the TJN, issued a briefing paper making very similar points. In the US, populist politics concerning the uses of OFCs by individuals and corporations waxes and wanes. Every corporate scandal seemingly contains an offshore ele ment. Enron, for example, is reported to have had 881 offshore subsidiaries, 692 in the Cayman Islands alone. Such corporate behavior coupled with tax dodging by individuals results in an estimated loss of over $100 bil lion a year in tax revenues due to offshore. Citing such figures, US Senators Carl Levin, Norm Coleman, and Barack Obama have introduced a Stop Tax Havens Abuse bill to counter the industry that they say permits tax cheats to offload their responsibilities onto ordinary working people. With such efforts raising awareness of the offshore finance, it may be that OFCs will come under renewed attack. On the other hand, they are places that the world’s biggest corporations and wealthy people are very literally invested in and whether they will allow their greed to be compromised is another issue.

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See also: Capitalism; Financial Centers, International; International Organizations; Transnational Elites.

Further Reading Baker, R. (2005). Capitalism’s achilles heel. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Brittain Catlin, W. (2005). Offshore: The dark side of the global economy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Christensen, J. P. and Hampton, M. P. (eds.) (1999). Offshore finance centers and tax havens: The rise of global capital. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Komisar, L. (2007). Corporate profits take an offshore vacation. Global Policy Forum. http://www.globalpolicy.org/nations/launder/haven/ 2005/0404ashore.htm (accessed 3 August 2007). International Monetary Fund (2006). Offshore financial centers: The assessment program a progress report. http://www.imf.org/ external/np/pp/eng/2006/020806.pdf (accessed 3 August 2007). McGuire, P. and Tarashev, N. (2006). Tracking international bank flows. BIS Quarterly Review December 27 40. Oxfam (2000). Tax havens: Releasing the hidden billions for poverty eradication. Oxfam GB Policy Paper. http://publications.oxfam.org. uk/oxfam/display.asp?searchterm=Tax+havens%3A+Releasing+ the+hidden+billions+for+poverty+eradication&K= 20040623 2316 000 034 (accessed 3 August 2007). Palan, R. (2003). The offshore world: Sovereign markets, virtual places, and nomad millionaires. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Piccioto, S. (1999). Offshore: The state as legal fiction. In Christensen, J. P. & Hampton, M. P. (eds.) Offshore finance centers and tax havens: The rise of global capital, pp 18 42. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Rawlings, G. (2007). Taxes and transnational treaties: Responsive regulation and the reassertion of offshore sovereignty. Law and Policy 29(1), 51 66. Roberts, S. M. (1994). Fictitious capital, fictitious spaces: The geography of offshore financial flows. In Corbridge, S., Martin, R. & Thrift, N. (eds.) Money, power and space, pp 91 115. Oxford: Blackwell. Sharman, J. C. (2006). Norms, coercion and contracting in the struggle against ‘harmful’ tax competition. Australian Journal of International Affairs 60(1), 143 169. Tax Justice Network (2005). The price of offshore. Briefing paper prepared by Tax Research Limited for the Tax Justice Network UK. http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Price of Offshore.pdf. (accessed 3 August 2007). Tax Justice Network (2007). Closing the floodgates: Collecting tax to pay for development. Report commissioned by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Edited by R. Murphy. TJN London. http:// www.taxjustice.nl/dialogs/download.aspx?oid=8ad013e9 1df9 4f2a a400 4fbd6700f0fd (accessed 3 August 2007). The Economist (2007). Survey: Offshore Finance. http:// www.economist.com (accessed on 22 February 2007).

Relevant Websites http://www.visar.csustan.edu Association for Accountancy and Business Affairs. http://www.caymanfinance.gov.ky Cayman Islands Financial Services. http://www.imf.org International Monetary Fund. http://www.itio.org International Trade and Investment Organisation. http://www.oecd.org Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. www.taxjustice.net Tax Justice Network.

Financial Centers, International D. R. Meyer, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Brokerage Firm Buys and sells stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, and other financial instruments for customers. Commercial Bank Diversified financial firm that takes deposits from individuals, firms, governments, nonprofit institutions, and so on and loans to those groups, as well as provides them financial services such as offering advice and exchanging currencies. Derivative Financial instrument traded privately between parties or on exchanges in which the price of the instrument depends on the value of some underlying security such as stocks, bonds, currencies, or commodities. The rights or obligations based on the underlying product are traded, not the underlying product. Derivatives include futures, options, and swaps (exchanges) of payments on currencies or interest rates. Gross Domestic Product The total market value of goods and services produced in a country within one year. It equals consumption, investment, government spending, plus the value of exports, minus the value of imports. Hedge Fund Private investment fund that invests and trades in various assets such as stocks, bonds, and currencies on behalf of clients, including pension funds, universities, and wealthy individuals. International Financial Center Cities that house major financial firms such as commercial and investment banks, brokerage firms, money management firms, private equity firms, and hedge funds which operate internationally. Investment Bank Sells new stocks and bonds for other firms, provides financial services such as trading currencies and commodities and advising on mergers and acquisitions, and invests its own capital in assets. Private Equity Investment in an asset such as a manufacturing firm, retailer, office building, and airline, and this equity does not trade on a public stock exchange. Social Networks of Capital The relationships or linkages among firms and individuals which are paths for exchanging capital. The ‘social’ emphasizes that these relations occur in business and nonbusiness venues.

In international financial centers, pivotal actors (indi viduals and firms) make decisions about the exchange of global capital. These places house commercial and

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investment banks, brokerage firms, money management firms, private equity firms, hedge funds, and so on. The actors in a small number of these centers account for a large share of the exchange of capital around the world, but they do not function alone. Actors outside the leading financial centers are integrated with the pivotal actors through exchanges of capital. Some of these linkages are internal to the organization of a firm, such as a large multinational bank that has regional offices in various financial centers. The majority of the linkages, however, are between actors in different organizations. Broad world regional collections of financial centers exist, and these places have a high degree of linkage among themselves, reflecting the economic exchanges within that world region. At the same time, many link ages among financial centers cross world regions. Some of these have hierarchical characteristics, such as the link ages from a financial center to one of the leading global financial centers. Other connections tie financial centers in different world regions which reflect economic ex changes such as flows of manufactures from a producing country to a distant country which consumes these goods. Although politicians often portray their city as competing with other financial centers, the major financial actors do not interpret intercity relations as competitive. Instead, they engage in cooperative relations through intrafirm linkages, and their interfirm ties consist of both cooper ation and competition.

Past and Present The legacy of the past remains a striking feature of international financial centers. London is unequalled as the greatest financial center because firms from all over the world base major offices there to share knowledge about global finance, and their operations extend to every part of the world economy. London solidified this status in the eighteenth century when British merchants usurped Amsterdam’s dominance over world trade, and the strength of the British economy and imperial reach over the subsequent centuries enhanced that position. The United States took over from Britain as the most dynamic economy by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and New York City became a great financial center. British financial firms remain important yet many firms from other countries are larger. The United Kingdom’s economy as measured by gross do mestic product ranked fifth in the world in 2004 at $1.6 trillion (US$) just below China at $1.7 trillion. The

Financial Centers, International

United States’ $10.8 trillion economy, the first ranked, was almost seven times larger. Nevertheless, London remains the unquestioned leading global financial center, demonstrating that it is the concentration of financial intermediaries which determines importance in global finance and not simply the size of the national economy. In a similar vein, Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Zurich, Switzerland continue to rank among the top five to ten financial centers based on their premier businesses. Yet the world rankings of their home countries according to gross domestic product are much lower; the Nether lands ranks 15th and Switzerland ranks 19th. Amsterdam was the leading international trading and financial center in the sixteenth century before losing that position to London two centuries later. Today its pivotal financial intermediaries include leading global banks head quartered there (e.g., ABN Amro and ING) and more than 70 foreign financial firms with offices in the city. Zurich became a merchant trading center by the thir teenth century, and many of its modern financial insti tutions emerged in the nineteenth century. It now houses the global headquarters of such top flight firms as Zurich Financial, Swiss Re, UBS, and Credit Suisse, as well as many other firms, and it has over 100 offices of global financial firms headquartered elsewhere. Financial centers can break into the top ranks. Tokyo emerged as a major international financial center during the first half of the twentieth century, displacing Yokohama which had been the key center for Japan in the late nineteenth century. Tokyo ranks among the top five or so centers based primarily on its large financial insti tutions that serve the Japanese economy and function as bridges for Japan to the global economy. Hong Kong did not exist until the 1840s when it became the headquarters for British political, economic, and military activities in Asia. Britain had taken Hong Kong from China after defeating it in the Opium War. Under the protection of the British military, leading British firms established their Asian headquarters in Hong Kong, especially for trade with China. Foreign trading firms quickly joined these premier firms, and top Chinese firms from Asia moved key operations to Hong Kong. By the early 1860s when the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank was established, Hong Kong was on its path to become the trade and financial center of Asia based on the large agglomeration of firms from all over the world which linked Hong Kong to the global economy.

The Social Networks of Financial Capital The existence of international financial centers cannot be questioned; the huge agglomerations of financial firms in London, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Zurich, and so on testify to that. Nonetheless, their continued resilience

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seems puzzling, given the innovations in modern tele communications and information technology such as the trunk lines of fiber optic cables and the satellite systems which transmit vast volumes of voice, text, and data globally at blinding speeds. Why do firms refuse to dis perse their global or regional headquarters to widely separated locations where they can enjoy pleasant pas toral settings or small towns? The mechanism of the social networks of financial capital helps explain the paradox that continued cen tralization coexists with extensive decentralization of the distribution of information. Financial intermediaries make more sophisticated use of the swelling amounts of complex financial information which is transmitted. They employ this information when they participate in social networks with other financiers, and this enhances their effectiveness in controlling the exchange of capital. These networks are built and reinforced by intense personal exchanges of deep knowledge, and the networks operate at local levels. Daily work life and many other settings, including local governmental and nonprofit boards, social groups and clubs, and religious organizations, as well as social gatherings such as dinners, parties, and other en tertainment settings, are venues for these exchanges. As financial intermediaries participate in these social networks they manipulate their network connections to access complex knowledge about financial opportunities and risks. These networks also reach among financial centers, and long distance travel is used to maintain the network linkages. The financiers move among agglom erations, and each cluster is an intense setting of social networks of financial capital. Failure to participate in these social networks becomes a competitive disadvan tage because the individuals or firms who are isolated from the networks miss out on opportunities for profit able financial exchanges.

The Rising Scale of Financial Intermediation The scale of international financial intermediation has grown dramatically. Since the mid 1990s the external assets of international banks more than doubled, reaching almost $20 trillion (in United States dollars) by the early twenty first century (Figure 1). A substantial amount of the flows of global capital consist of savers (e.g., indi viduals, firms, and governments) providing capital to borrowers. This is indicated by the fivefold rise in international debt securities over the 1995–2005 period to about $15 trillion (Figure 1). These capital flows are equal to one half or more of the world’s domestic product, which equaled about $35 trillion in 2004. The sophistication of international financial inter mediation is increasing as complex derivatives become

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the key mechanisms to manage risk, such as countries following different economic trajectories, currencies fluctuating in value, and interest rates varying across countries and over time. International banks create de rivative contracts and exchange them, as well as providing them to their customers (e.g., individuals, firms, and governments). Over the counter derivative contracts are those traded directly between two parties without going through an exchange or intermediary, and their nominal or notional value (gross value of the deal) far exceeds the amounts traded on exchanges. The total notional value of these derivative contracts has soared; between 1998 and

2004 it more than tripled to over $250 trillion, an amount that is over eight times the value of the world’s gross domestic product (Figure 2). There are many types of derivative contracts, in cluding foreign exchange, interest rate, equity linked, and commodity, and each of these has variations. Large amounts of foreign currency contracts are exchanged, but the most important derivative contracts are interest rate contracts which are revalued continuously and the timing of gains and losses cannot be readily manipulated. The value of these contracts almost quadrupled during the 1998–2004 period to a total of $252 trillion (Figure 2).

25.0 External assets International debt securities

Trillions of United States dollars

20.0

15.0

10.0

5.0

0.0 1995

1997

1999

2001

2003

2005

Year

Figure 1 Financial positions of international banks, 1995 2005.

Trillions of United States dollars

300

250

Total Foreign exchange Interest rate

200

150

100

50

0 1998

1999

2000

2001 Year

2002

2003

Figure 2 Outstanding over-the-counter derivative contracts of international banks, 1998 2004.

2004


The international financial centers are the headquarters of these managers of risk; and London, New York, and Hong Kong dominate as the decision making centers of global capital.

The Pivots of Financial Capital London Since the eighteenth century, the migration of inter national financiers to London has always been a key feature of its strength. E´migre´s from Europe and else where in the world fleeing turmoil in their home coun tries, as well as financiers seeking their fortune in the great financial center, contributed capital, talent, and their networks of capital to the London agglomeration. These connections built London’s hub position in the global economy and buttressed the imperial linkages which were encapsulated in the old saying that the ‘‘sun never set on the British Empire.’’ Throughout the twentieth century and continuing into this century the London hub attracted top financial firms requiring a presence in the city’s social networks of capital. Because it also has deep connections to the huge economy of Western Europe, any global firm with extensive business in that world region needs a London address. The scale of London’s financial sector is vast. Large United Kingdom banks have their global headquarters in London, including HSBC (US$1277 billion assets in 2004), Barclays ($992 billion), Lloyds ($540 billion), and Standard Chartered ($142 billion), and the other big domestic banks headquartered elsewhere have major international operations in London. The foreign banks in London, however, are the main reason that the city is the pivot of global capital. At least 260 foreign banks have significant offices in London, and they account for over half of all financial assets of banks in the United King dom. The foreign banks employ almost 70 000 in the city, and United States banks, especially those headquartered in New York, account for one third of them, indicating the tight bond between these great financial centers. London specializes in financial services for global clients. It is the world center of over the counter de rivatives trading, and one of the top places for exchange traded derivative contracts. It is the second largest center of the world’s hedge fund managers (after New York), and the leading European hedge fund center. A wide array of specialized business services such as legal services, accounting and consultancy services, ad ministration, and prime brokerage services support the hedge fund industry. The large concentration of global investment banks in London provides the prime brokerage services. Most of European wide private equity investments are managed from London, and it is second only to the leading places in the United States,

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especially the New York City area. London is the global leader in over the counter trading of foreign exchange, and this is an outgrowth of its financial networks which reach wider than any other financial center. This gives London exchange traders the best access to knowledge about the direction and causes of changes in currencies around the world. Furthermore, exchange trading brings together a wide range of specialized actors – such as foreign exchange brokers, banks, clients, and securities brokers – whose decisions need to be coordinated. British financial firms headquartered in London have their regional headquarters for North America in New York, just as United States firms headquartered in New York have their regional headquarters for Europe in London. The agglomeration of the same sets of firms in both cities, firms which both collaborate and compete with each other, enhances the tight financial bonds be tween the two top cities of the global financial network. New York By the early nineteenth century, New York had become the premier financial center of the United States, and its firms maintained close ties to London, a legacy of the long standing merchant trading bonds between the two cities dating from the seventeenth century. The com mercial and, later, investment banks, as well as many other specialized financial firms in New York City which emerged over the course of the nineteenth century and throughout the next century, grew to world class status because the United States became the largest national economy. As of the early twenty first century, it ac counted for 30% of the world’s gross domestic product, twice as much as second ranked Japan. United States fi nancial firms headquartered in New York built their scale and sophistication on the basis of their dominance of the vast domestic market, and they have leveraged that strength in their global expansion as they initially fol lowed the large domestic corporations that expanded internationally. This began in the late nineteenth century and accelerated in the twentieth century, especially after World War II. Now these financial firms operate as ex changers of capital for clients from everywhere in the world. The world’s two largest banks as measured by capital, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase & Company, are head quartered in New York. The world’s fourth ranked by capital, Bank of America, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, houses its global corporate and invest ment banking, wealth and investment management, and consumer and commercial banking businesses in New York, making it the de facto global headquarters of the bank. The city is the global headquarters of six of the ten largest investment banks in the world – JP Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill

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Lynch, and Lehman Brothers. Almost 220 foreign banks operate a major office in New York, thus providing a powerful local social network of capital to all of the fi nancial institutions and giving them network ties to every international financial center. Because most of these foreign banks also have a presence in London, the local social networks of capital in each of the world’s top two financial centers have tight intra and interfirm ties. Similar to London, New York houses a wide array of specialized financial businesses and of the specialized service firms who assist them. The New York Stock Ex change is the largest in the world, and the city is the leading location for hedge fund managers. It is the most important headquarters for international law firms, and Europe, in particular London, is the principal center for the branch offices of these firms. The intraorganizational global linkages of Citigroup and Morgan Stanley reveal the sweep of New York’s ties (Table 1). Citigroup operates in over 100 countries, and it divides the world into six regions, though Mexico and Japan are countries. The list of selected international fi nancial centers in three of the regions reveals that Citigroup embeds itself into the financial networks of the leading metropolis of the respective countries. The firm’s offices in the top international financial centers are the headquarters of the corporate and investment banking units of Citigroup which house those financiers who offer the most specialized and sophisticated banking services. The bank operates world regional headquarters. The European headquarters is based in London, and this gives the cor porate and investment bankers, private equity investors, and wealth management groups access to their peers in other firms who also supervise European operations. At the same time, Citigroup’s corporate and investment banking offices such as in Frankfurt, Germany, while much smaller, still have about 500 employees who work with the 100 global corporations headquartered in Germany. Citigroup reaches into risky yet potentially lucrative financial markets by having a large office in Moscow. Consistent with the way many global financial firms approach Asia, Citigroup treats Japan separately; its Tokyo office reports directly to the global headquarters in New York City. They take this approach because the Japanese economy is the second largest in the world; thus the so phistication of the bank’s financiers must be quite high to deal with financial exchanges within Japan. Equally as im portant, however, Tokyo is not a pivotal meeting place of the social networks of capital in Asia because the Chinese business networks – the dominant group of Asia – do not intersect in Tokyo with the networks from outside Asia. Hong Kong is that pivotal meeting place of the Chinese and foreign networks of capital. Citigroup operates its Asian headquarters (ex Japan) from Hong Kong, as do most foreign firms with Asia wide operations. The other selected Asian financial centers for Citigroup’s operations are

Table 1 The global ties of Citigroup and Morgan Stanley by world region and selected countries and cities, c. 2006 Citigroup

Morgan Stanley

North America Mexico Mexico City Europe, Middle East, and Africa Amsterdam, Netherlands Budapest, Hungary Copenhagen, Denmark Frankfurt, Germany London, United Kingdom Madrid, Spain Moscow, Russia Paris, France Vienna, Austria Warsaw, Poland Zurich, Switzerland Japan Tokyo Asia Pacific Bangkok, Thailand Hong Kong, China Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Mumbai, India Seoul, Korea Shanghai, China Singapore Sydney, Australia Latin America Bogota, Columbia Buenos Aires, Argentina Caracas, Venezuela Lima, Peru Quito, Ecuador Santiago, Chile Sao Paulo, Brazil

North America Mexico Mexico City Europe Amsterdam, Netherlands Dublin, Ireland Frankfurt, Germany Geneva, Switzerland Lisbon, Portugal London, United Kingdom Luxembourg Madrid, Spain Milan, Italy Moscow, Russia Stockholm, Sweden Zurich, Switzerland Latin America Buenos Aires, Argentina Sao Paulo, Brazil Africa Johannesburg, South Africa Middle East Tel Aviv, Israel Asia Pacific Bangkok, Thailand Beijing, China Hong Kong, China Melbourne, Australia Mumbai, India Seoul, Korea Shanghai, China Singapore Sydney, Australia Taipei, Taiwan Tokyo, Japan

premier business centers, including Singapore, Shanghai, and Mumbai. In Latin America, Citigroup operates from the top business centers of each country, most of them the political capitals. As an investment bank Morgan Stanley is much more specialized than Citigroup which has a large consumer component to its international business. With few ex ceptions, Morgan Stanley concentrates its activities in financial centers in North America (mainly the United States) and Europe, and its Asian presence is expanding (Table 1). While Citigroup has a presence in over 100 countries, Morgan Stanley operates in 30 countries. As with Citigroup, Morgan Stanley has its European head quarters in London, and it has smaller offices in the major national financial centers. Again, like Citigroup, Morgan Stanley’s Asian business is supervised from a regional headquarters in Tokyo whose primary responsibility is Japan, and the Hong Kong headquarters oversees each of the offices in the international financial centers in the rest of Asia.


New York thus has tight integration with the world’s international financial centers, and its leading firms provide intraorganizational linkages globally. Because the major offices interact with their peers in other firms in each of the centers, this provides another cross cutting level of integration of financial centers. Hong Kong is the third great center of global financial management and exchange. Hong Kong Based on measures such as the size of financial insti tutions with their global headquarters in Hong Kong, the city never has counted high on the world ranking of financial centers. The one bank of renown which had its global headquarters in Hong Kong, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), shifted its world headquarters to London prior to the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Nonetheless, the bank still derives the majority of its profit from Asia, and its re gional headquarters in Hong Kong supervises all of Asia and particularly the rapidly expanding China operations which now use Shanghai as the country headquarters. Hong Kong is the pivotal financial center of Asia because it is the greatest meeting place of the Chinese and foreign social networks of capital. The nonfinancial firms from around the world house their Asia Pacific regional headquarters in Hong Kong. It has almost 1200 regional headquarters and over 2600 regional offices of international firms. The countries and territories whose domestic corporations choose Hong Kong as their re gional headquarters for Asia read like a list of the richest, most economically important places in the world (Table 2). The United States leads the list, and the countries of Western Europe are heavily represented. Within Asia, Japan is the leader and second rank overall. Many Japanese corporations choose to run their Asia Pacific business from Hong Kong rather than from Tokyo or other major Japanese cities because it possesses the best social networks of capital for business in Asia. Mainland China firms are shifting their Asia Pacific de cision making offices to Hong Kong rather than oper ating them from their corporate headquarters city, making China the fourth ranked home for firms placing regional headquarters in Hong Kong. It also is the de facto global headquarters for a growing share of China’s largest firms. This vast agglomeration of firms needing financial services for their operations in Asia constitutes a strong incentive for financial firms from Europe and North America to house their Asia wide regional headquarters in Hong Kong. The leading Overseas Chinese banks in Asia from outside Hong Kong, such as those from Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, also place a major office in Hong Kong.

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Table 2 Regional headquarters of global firms in Hong Kong by country/territory of incorporation, 2005 Country/territory of incorporation

Number of regional headquarters

United States Japan United Kingdom Mainland China Germany Netherlands France Singapore Switzerland Taiwan Italy Sweden Australia South Korea Canada Other Total

262 204 115 107 75 54 49 45 38 33 20 18 18 17 16 96 1167

The agglomeration of 263 foreign banks in Hong Kong, including 71 of the top 100 banks in the world, is comparable to the clusters in London and New York. Over 70 financial institutions use Hong Kong as their regional headquarters which means they supervise offices in other financial centers in Asia. Another 225 financial institutions have regional offices in Hong Kong which are responsible for all or parts of Asia, although they do not directly supervise offices in other financial centers of Asia. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange is quickly growing into one of the world’s largest stock exchanges as Mainland Chinese companies expand their listing on the Hong Kong exchange. As of 2005, their numbers had reached over 300. Foreign exchange and derivative trading likewise are expanding rapidly. Hong Kong’s position as the third global financial center – dominant in Asia as London is dominant in Europe and New York in North America – is being fueled by the growth of China. The Beijing government promotes Hong Kong as China’s window to global cap ital, and its officials steadfastly support that stance with explicit policies. All of the leading Mainland Chinese banks have their key global banking financiers operating in Hong Kong. As India’s economic growth continues the Hong Kong financiers are leveraging their Asia wide ties, which have roots reaching back over 150 years, to par ticipate in the economic integration of India and China.

The Future The leading financial center of every country in the world operates as an international financial center, and some large countries have multiple centers. The do mestic financial firms of these countries have the best

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access to social networks of capital within their respective countries, and these firms have linkages to the leading world financial centers as capital is exported and im ported. Nonetheless, a relatively small number of inter national financial centers house the headquarters of the major global firms that dominate the exchange of capital. Some of these firms have multinational office structures through which they participate in the social networks of capital in countries and world regions. These intraorga nizational networks interface across firms, thus leading to extensive collaboration, as well as competition. London, New York, and Hong Kong are the key global decision making centers for the exchange of capital, with linkages to most of the world’s important international financial centers. The firms in each city also dominate exchanges of capital within their world region, but this does not mean that the exchanges are one sided. Instead, extensive collaboration occurs partly because the leading firms in these cities operate their own intrafirm networks. Innovations in telecommunications, computers, and software increase the capacity to exchange information, allowing the leading financial firms to centralize their most sophisticated decision making in the top inter national cities. These innovations also permit firms in lesser cities to become more sophisticated in their de cision making. These seemingly countervailing trends exist because the flows and complexity of financial ex changes continue to increase at high rates as part of the growth of the global economy (Figures 1 and 2). In large countries with rapid economic growth such as China and India we can expect to see some of their international financial centers become more important in the global economy. Cities such as Shanghai in China, Mumbai in India, and Sao Paulo in Brazil will become major head quarters of their domestic international firms, as well as sites for many foreign firms to set up their financial op erations. Differential economic growth and development, therefore, contribute to alteration in the importance of international financial centers, a process which has been going on for centuries.

See also: Finance, Historical Geographies of; Financial Knowledge; Financial Risks and Management.

Further Reading Bryson, J. R., Daniels, P. W. and Warf, B. (2004). Service worlds: People, organizations and technologies. London: Routledge. Clark, D. (2003). Urban world/global city. London: Routledge. Corbridge, S., Thrift, N. and Martin, R. (eds.) (1994). Money, power, and space. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Knox, P. L. and Taylor, P. J. (eds.) (1995). World cities in a world system. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Lo, F. C. and Yeung, Y. M. (eds.) (1998). Globalization and the world of large cities. New York: United Nations University Press. Meyer, D. R. (2000). Hong Kong as a global metropolis. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Sassen, S. (2001). The global city: New York, London, Tokyo (2nd ed). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2002). Global networks, linked cities. New York: Routledge. Scott, A. J. (ed.) (2001). Global city regions: Trends, theory, policy. New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, P. J. (2003). World city network. London: Routledge. Yeung, H. W. C. (2004). Chinese capitalism in a global era: Towards hybrid capitalism. London: Routledge.

Relevant Websites http://www.bis.org Bank for International Settlements. http://www.citi.com Citigroup. http://www.lboro.ac.uk GaWC, Globalization and World Cities. http://www.ifsl.org.uk International Financial Services London. http://www.imf.org International Monetary Fund. http://www.investhk.gov.hk InvestHK. http://www.morganstanley.com Morgan Stanley. http://www.worldbank.org World Bank.

Financial Exclusion A. Leyshon, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Financial Citizenship A concept that recognizes the significance of the financial system to everyday life and confers a right and ability on individuals and households to participate fully in the economy and to accumulate wealth. Financial Exclusion The process by which people of low and moderate incomes are directly and indirectly excluded from the formal financial system and denied access to mainstream retail financial services. Financial Infrastructure Withdrawal The closure of financial services infrastructure, typically branches. Financial Literacy and Capability The ability of consumers to manage money, keep track of their finances, plan ahead, choose financial products, and stay informed about financial matters. Prime and Subprime Markets The standard industrial classification of retail financial markets based on the perceived risk of customers. Prime markets are made up in the main of low-risk individuals and households with good credit records. Subprime markets are made up of either low-income and/or credit-impaired individuals and households who are deemed higher risk. As such they pay higher prices for the products they are able to access, which are inflated by a de facto insurance premium.

Introduction Research on the geography of financial exclusion emerged out of concern with the equity effects of the financial services sectors upon communities and local ities. The origins of work of this kind can be traced back to the 1970s, and the initial forays of David Harvey into the political economy of urbanization, and the role played by finance in reshaping the built environment through the actions of the institutions that approved or denied mortgage funding, as well as the role of realtors and/or estate agents in acting as gatekeepers and man agers of urban and suburban residential property markets. This work suggested that some areas of cities were ef fectively embargoed, or redlined, a phrase that reflected the practice of drawing a redline around areas on a map within which borrowers and properties were to be denied funding, because they were deemed either to have too high a risk of default or that the quality of the area was

such that the properties that were borrowed against might decrease in value. Research of this kind flourished briefly but petered out in the 1980s only to reemerge in the 1990s with a more explicit focus of the issue of fi nancial exclusion. The catalyst for a renewed interest in such issues was research undertaken on the financial dynamics of the Los Angeles economy. Against a background of the neoliberal reform of the US banking system and the potent racial politics of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, economists Gary Dymski and John Veitch sought to illustrate the role of retail banking in the everyday construction of uneven development in the urban environment. The concept of financial dynamics sought to illustrate how retail banks and other credit granting institutions were responsible for the circulation and redirection of capital within urban economies. In short, Dymksi and Veitch argued that financial institutions used their branch net works to gather in savings and funds from a wide population but would lend it out more selectively ac cording to strategies of risk aversion and profit seeking. Thus, although individuals and households in poorer inner city areas may be able to deposit money through branches located in their neighborhoods – although sig nificant proportions of the population in such areas would have little if no contact with mainstream financial services – there was much less chance of them being granted mortgages and loans for houses purchase and maintenance. Conversely, those individuals and house holds living in more affluent suburban areas were more likely to be granted access to credit, which means that theoretically they were able to access the intermediated savings and deposits of those less affluent financial cus tomers who were permitted to run current/checking accounts with institutions but were, for reasons of risk aversion, unable to draw down credit. In this way, the inhabitants of more affluent and suburban areas were able, via the intermediation of the financial system, to access funds that not only maintained the market value of properties in such areas – by making purchases possible – but also helped to increase such values by providing funds that paid for the upkeep and improvement of the built environment through maintenance, upgrades, ex tensions, etc. Similar processes of uneven access to credit and debt operated for local businesses too, generating significant spillover effects within the communities effected. In this way, then, the financial system was seen to play an active role in the deepening of uneven development

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Financial Exclusion

within urban economies. It did so by making evaluations of the prospects of individuals, households, and neigh borhoods which, through either denying or granting ac cess to credit, become constitutive of such outcomes as suburban areas flourished through an ongoing process of development while inner city areas become neglected and impoverished through a downward spiral of urban decline as residents of such areas find it hard to both sell, buy, or upgrade property while local businesses may be unable to obtain working credit. This initial foray into the socioeconomic con sequences of financial dynamics and financial infra structure was highly influential in the emergence of a geographical literature on ‘financial exclusion’ in the UK in the mid 1990s. Financial exclusion was understood as a process by which certain individuals, households, and communities were denied access to the financial system. This work was immediately concerned with closure of bank and building society branches – financial infra structure withdrawal – influenced as it was by the ma terial evidence of large numbers of branch closures taking place against the background of regulatory reform and a more competitive retail financial service market. Empirical research on the reorganization of bank and building society branch networks in Great Britain re vealed that the overall number of branches declined by almost one third between 1989 and 2003 (Table 1). During the period 1989–2003 banks closed 36% of their branches. In comparison, the closure rate for building societies – organizations mutually owned by and on be half of their members – was less than half that of banks, with 17% of their branches closing over the period, while the top ten converted building societies – that is, those that bought out their mutuality during the 1980s and 1990s to convert to public limited company status – closed 22% of their branches over the same period. This suggested that shareholder pressure – the requirement of public limited companies to make sufficient returns to maintain share prices and pay dividends to the legal owners of the business – was a major factor in driving branch closures which were closed more vigorously to cut costs and increase profits.

Closures were also found to vary geographically, as firms adjusted their branch networks to spatial variations in markets (Table 2). The average branch closure rate for bank and building society branches for all areas in Britain between 1995 and 2003 was 20%. However, the highest rate of closure – almost 24% – was experienced in ‘multicultural metropolitan’ areas, which included poor inner city areas. Higher than average rates of branch closure were also experienced in areas defined as ‘pros pering metropolitan, traditional manufacturing, built up areas’, and ‘student communities’. Meanwhile, areas that experienced lower than average branch closures tended to be more affluent, which could safely be described as typically Middle England: these were ‘suburbs and small towns, coastal and countryside’ areas, and ‘industrial hinterlands’. By the late 1990s, work which focused on the re organization of retail financial services branches was also being undertaken in other economies such as Canada and Australia where similar processes of financial infra structure withdrawal were observed. For example, in Canada, a series of mergers between large banks had a serious impact on rural branch networks: 75% of rural communities in a study of British Columbia were clas sified as either being ‘moderately’ or ‘highly’ vulnerable to closures according to a bank closure vulnerability index. Meanwhile, the number of bank branches in Australia declined by over 20% between 1981 and 1998. Such observations seemed to confirm that the wave of bank branch closures sweeping industrialized economies was the product of an international process of learning and adaptation to a set of industrial and organizational conventions of how to manage change within the retail financial services sector. Moreover, the outcomes of such conventions were seen to vary over space and, in par ticular, according to the nature of the institutional con text in which they unfold. Thus, in both Canada and Australia, the existence of a richer and more varied fi nancial ecology – such as a vibrant credit union sector, for example – lessened the impact of bank branch closure compared to economies such as the UK which has a thinner and more centralized mix of financial institutions.

Table 1 Branch networks of top six bank groups, top ten converted building societies and top ten building societies, and, Great Britain, 1989 2003 Branches

Top 6 bank groups Top 10 converted building societies Top 10 building societies Total

Change (%)

1989

1995

2003

12 659 3473 1699 17 831

10 406 3348 1478 15 232

8077 2702 1403 12 185

1989 95 17.8 3.6 13.0 14.5

1995 2003 22.4 19.3 5.1 20.0

1989 2003 36.2 22.2 17.42 31.7

From French, S., Leyshon, A. and Signoretta, P. (2008). All gone now: The material, discursive and political erasure of bank and building society branches in the UK. Antipode 40(1), 79 101.

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Financial Exclusion

Table 2 Branch closures and openings by banks, converted building societies and building societies, by supergroup area, Great Britain, 1995 2003 ‘Supergroup’

Total branches 1995

Total branches 2003

Branch closures, 1995 2003

Branch openings, 1995 2003

Net change

Net change (%)

Industrial hinterlands Traditional manufacturing Built-up areas Prospering metropolitan Student communities Multicultural metropolitan Suburbs and small towns Coastal and countryside Accessible countryside Total

1873

1524

479

130

349

18.6

1677

1303

499

125

374

22.3

1832 1431

1424 1111

508 480

100 159

408 321

22.3 22.4

1829

1442

579

192

387

21.4

1040

795

329

84

245

23.6

2651

2209

628

180

448

16.9

2341

1942

497

98

399

17.0

164

128

42

6

33

22.0

14 838

11 871

4041

1074

2967

20.0

From French, S., Leyshon, A. and Signoretta, P. (2008). All gone now: The material, discursive and political erasure of bank and building society branches in the UK. Antipode 40(1), 79 101.

As work on financial exclusion has progressed, the domination of the field by geographers has declined as researchers from other fields have become interested in the problem. As a result, the understanding of financial exclusion has widened, and it is now recognized that there are at least five kinds of financial exclusion. While the earliest geographical studies were concerned in the main which what might be described as ‘access exclusion’ – such as branch closure – it is now recognized that there are at least four additional forms of financial exclusion: condition exclusion (where potential customers are excluded for failing to conform to defined product preconditions, such as failing a credit scoring test); price exclusion (where products are priced out of the reach of some consumers); marketing exclusion (where undesirable customers are avoided by aiming marketing campaigns at potentially profitable sociodemographic groups); and self exclusion (where customers do not even apply for certain financial products, either because they have been refused in the past, they assume that they will be denied, or they are unaware of products that they might apply for). Having outlined the dimensions of financial exclusion, and some of its consequences and effects, the next section considers the wider context within which the social process of financial exclusion has arisen.

Financial Exclusion in Context Financial exclusion is a feature of a new financial land scape that has emerged in many core capitalist countries

over the past 30 years or so which, in turn, has been forged by at least two interrelated processes. First, the re regulation of financial services has been in the vanguard of processes of neoliberalism which have swept market based economies over the past 30 years or so. Initially, processes of neoliberalism were associated with the rollback of the state, as markets were subject to processes of re regulation to make them more open and competitive. Financial sys tems in core capitalist economies such as the US, the UK, and Japan were remade in successive waves of regulatory reform from the late 1970s onwards. For example, in the UK during the 1980s the Conservative government’s neoliberal program of regulatory reform dismantled long standing structural forms of industry regulation, which encouraged risk aversion and ensured that different retail financial markets remained institutionally distinctive, in favor of a more prudential regulatory framework designed to encourage competition. As firms began to enter each other’s markets in search of market share and profits, the widespread cross subsidization of consumers across dif ferent financial products was swept away and each con sumer increasingly became evaluated in terms of their potential value to the business. Subsequently, neoliber alization has proceeded through new policies by which states have sought to gradually abrogate responsibility for many areas of social life which are now left to the market and to individual and household responsibility. This in cludes greater financial responsibility, and expectations of higher levels of financial capability. This has had the im pact of generating significant new markets for the financial services industry.

156

Financial Exclusion

Second, the process of neoliberalization has been accompanied by an empowering of financial markets, which has led some commentators to argue that con temporary life is increasingly subject to a process of financialization. Financialization is seen to have agency at a range of scales, including higher levels of instability within the economic system as a whole, and pressure exerted on corporations by capital markets. However, significantly, the process of financialization also in creasingly has equity effects as it works its way through the financial system to connect to individuals and households. In particular, retail consumers are being connected to global financial markets as debt repayments are pooled and securitized to create investment products that are sold to international investment institutions. In turn, securitization, and financialization more generally, has been enabled by rapid innovations in information communication technologies, developments which have also driven the emergence of telephony and Internet based retail financial services delivery channels, the centralization of processing tasks, as well as the re placement of traditional face to face systems of risk assessment and management with sophisticated, at a distance credit scoring systems. The outcome of these processes of neoliberalization and financialization has been the creation of an uneven landscape of financial citizenship. Financial citizenship confers on individuals and households a right and ability to participate fully in the economy and to accumulate wealth. Levels of financial citizenship are uneven, both between and within national economies, and have sig nificant impacts on life chances and upon overall levels of economic development. For example, there are marked divides in the possession of these rights and in levels of financial participation in the UK. At one extreme there is the 40% of the population that might be considered ‘super included’; they have savings and investments and are becoming increasingly wealthy because of it. These are the idealized financial citizens of the neoliberal state. Second, there are those that may be considered to be less privileged financial citizens, in that while they are fully inside and included within the financial system, they do not have significant savings or wealth, and while they may have full access to financial products they may have limited assets and be heavily indebted. Finally, there are those that are financially excluded or only partially connected to the financial system; they live in a cash economy, use doorstep financial services, or mainstream but limited products like basic bank accounts. Thus, the process of financial exclusion is a product of a broader bifurcation of the market for retail financial services. Sociotechnologies such as credit scoring systems enable financial institutions to sort prime from subprime customers. Prime financial markets are made up of in dividuals and households that possess socioeconomic and

geodemographic profiles that make them targets of the marketing and financial strategies of retail financial ser vices firms. These middle and high income customers are actively pursued by retail financial services firms, and may be described as the financially super included, benefiting from intense competition between institutions for their business. One of the drivers of this strategy is the tendency toward the securitization of retail financial products, whereby lenders aggregate the loans made to low risk customers and sell them to investors in inter national securities markets. Subprime customers, mean while, have low to moderate incomes and/or financial assets and are either excluded from mainstream financial marketing campaigns for new products or are denied access to services if they apply. The geography of prime and subprime financial markets follows established geographies of income and wealth. Thus, for the most part prime retail financial customers may be found in affluent urban and suburban areas, whereas subprime markets are concentrated in areas of low and moderate income, typically in inner city areas (and in Britain, at least, on public sector housing estates). In the absence of mainstream financial services, which continue to close branches in such areas, a host of specialist subprime or ‘fringe’ retail financial institutions ply their trade. They provide similar services to the mainstream but at a much higher cost. It is now possible to identify pronounced financial ecologies, made up of distinctive combinations of markets, customers, and in stitutions which are distributed over space.

Financial Exclusion and Public Policy Financial exclusion has been recognized by policymakers because of the ways in which it disproportionately affects those of low incomes and can exacerbate problems of social exclusion. Early examples of legislation passed to tackle financial exclusion – although it was not identified as such at the time – include the Home Mortgage Dis closure Act (HMDA) and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in the US. The HMDA was passed in 1975 and requires mortgage lenders to make their loan data publicly available for scrutiny. It makes it possible for communities and activists to determine whether financial institutions are serving local housing needs, help local government and other officials attempt to attract private investment to areas where it is needed and, significantly, make it possible to identify possible discriminatory lending patterns. The CRA, meanwhile, was passed in 1977 to ensure that banks and other deposit taking in stitutions served the credit needs of the communities in which they operate, including low and moderate income neighborhoods, albeit consistent with safe and sound banking operations. As a result, financial institutions are

Financial Exclusion

periodically evaluated according to CRA criteria to en sure that credit needs are being met. In many ways, the HMDA and the CRA remain high water marks of anti financial exclusion legislation, although even in the US they have not served to prevent the advance of processes of financial exclusion, and have waxed and waned ac cording to the political predilections of presidential ad ministrations. Both measures were responses to the problems of civil unrest in the US cities in the 1960s that revolved around problems of discrimination and uneven development. A similar policy response took place after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which saw the growth of a movement which encouraged the growth of community development financial institutions. Since the late 1990s, the UK government has pion eered legislation that has explicitly sought to combat financial exclusion. The central tenets of the UK finan cial exclusion policy have been fourfold: (1) pressuring banks and leading building societies into offering basic bank accounts, which are stripped down versions of normal current/checking accounts, but without overdraft facilities, specially designed for low income consumers; (2) lining up the post office as a third party distribution network in order to take advantage of the fact that it has more branches than the leading banks and building so cieties put together; (3) seeking to tackle low levels of financial literacy and capability through the promotion of financial education; and (4) to promote third party lenders, such as credit unions, which in some cases are able to provide community based alternatives by lending in areas that are otherwise subject to financial exclusion. However, what is significant about all these measures is that they were market orientated and sought to avoid any strong forms of government interventions within retail financial services markets. Moreover, in some in stances the measures contradicted other arms of gov ernment policy. For example, the plan to use the thousands of post office branches as de facto banks and building society branches to compensate for the closure of actual branches may have been a good idea in prin ciple but failed to take into account that elsewhere the government was seeking to turn the quasi state post of fice into a self sustaining economic organization capable of reproducing itself without government subsidy. Thus, in order to cut operating costs, the post office embarked upon its own round of branch closures replicating the actions of the banks and building societies for which it was supposed to substitute. Moreover, in an effort to open up new income streams the post office signed a co operative agreement with the Bank of Ireland to develop its own range of branded financial products, thereby putting itself in direct competition with the institutions for which it was supposed to be acting as a third party distributor.

157

Future Research The growing amount of public policy attention to fi nancial exclusion will have an important bearing on the kind of work being done in this area. There are initiatives on tackling financial exclusion underway in large num bers of Western economies and increasingly at the level of the European Union. As a result, the volume of policy related material has increased markedly in recent years, much of it produced by or for government departments, regulatory bodies, commissions, and policy review bod ies. However, the focus of public policy is toward market based solutions, based on constructions of individuals as consumers, which tends to exclude more radical or interventionist strategies. An area of work that does need urgent attention is a critical reevaluation of the concept of financial exclusion itself. While initially highly valuable as an idea that drew attention to the ways in which financial marginalization acts as an agent that helps to produce social deprivation, the exclusion–inclusion binary has steered policy toward producing outcomes that can deliver higher levels of ‘inclusion’. While a worthwhile outcome, it is increas ingly recognized that financial inclusion on its own is not necessarily a panacea, and that finer grained and more nuanced understandings of the relationship between in dividuals and households and financial services markets are required. Ways forward here include the development of concepts such as financial citizenship and financial ecologies, which have the advantage of examining fi nancial markets as a whole, not just the boundaries. These concepts may have a better purchase on the relationship between social position and geography in the production of the position of individuals and households within fi nancial markets. See also: Public Policy; Uneven Development.

Further Reading Dymski, G. A. (2005). Financial globalization, social exclusion and financial crisis. International Review of Applied Economics 19(4), 439 457. Dymski, G. A. and Veitch, J. M. (1996). Financial transformation and the metropolis: Booms, busts and banking in Los Angeles. Environment and Planning A 28, 1233 1260. French, S., Leyshon, A. and Signoretta, P. (2008). All gone now: The material, discursive and political erasure of bank and building society branches in the UK. Antipode 40(1), 79 101. Leyshon, A. and Thrift, N. (1997). Money/Space: Geographies of Monetary Transformation. London: Routledge. Leyshon, A., Burton, D., Knights, D., Alferoff, C. and Signoretta, P. (2004). Towards an ecology of retail financial services: Understanding the persistence of door to door credit and insurance providers. Environment and Planning A 36, 625 645. Leyshon, A., Thrift, N. and Pratt, J. (1998). Reading financial services: Texts, consumers, and financial literacy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16, 29 55.

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Marshall, J. N. (2004). ‘Financial institutions in disadvantaged areas: A comparative analysis of policies encouraging financial inclusion in Britain and the United States. Environment and Planning A 36, 241 261. Pollard, J. S. (1996). Banking at the margins: A geography of financial exclusion in Los Angeles. Environment and Planning A 28, 1209 1232.

Relevant Websites http://www.citizensadvice.org.uk Citizens Advice Bureau.

http://www.ffiec.gov Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. http://www.fsa.gov.uk Financial Services Authority. http://hm treasury.gov.uk HM Treasury. http://www.which.co.uk ‘Which?’ Magazine.

Financial Knowledge G. L. Clark, Oxford University Centre for the Environment, Oxford, UK J. C. Marshallw, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK K. Strauss, Oxford University Centre for the Environment, Oxford, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Cognitive Psychology Branch of psychology that stresses individuals’ information-processing capacities and the constraints thereon. Context Used here to indicate the significance of the environment in which people make decisions including the social resources at hand. Financial Information Data, indicators, and related materials representing the performance of financial markets. Financial Knowledge Substantive interpretations of the underlying causes and consequences of financial market performance. Intuition A complex automatic response involving cognition, experience, and emotion rather than conscious calculated response to an issue or situation. Liberalism Branch of political philosophy that stresses the autonomy and significance of the individual, most often attributed to British writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Neoliberalism A term used by contemporary writers to signify the retreat of the state and the re-emergence of individualism driven by market imperatives. Rationality An idealized conception of the process whereby individuals make decisions consistent with their best interests. Risk Estimated probability of a loss-making event or class of events occurring over a well-defined period of time (linked with the rate of return in financial markets). Uncertainty Unknown events and circumstances that may affect individual welfare (especially relevant to nonstationary financial markets).

Introduction In the space of about 25 years, the welfare state and its attendant principles and practices has been heavily erod ed in virtually all Western advanced economies. Left behind is a commitment to maintaining adequate stand ards of living for the population as a whole (especially in the Anglo American economies) and a dawning real ization that the state cannot guarantee welfare in the face of globalization and demographic ageing (especially w


in continental European countries). Liberalism has re emerged as a core political ethos prescribing the respective responsibilities of the individual, the corpora tion, the community, and the state in relation to social welfare. Notice, however, that the liberalism associated with John Stuart Mill combined a commitment to indi vidual autonomy and responsibility with a recognition that not all people were equipped by reason of intelli gence, education, and moral character to be fully re sponsible. By contrast, neoliberalism has little patience with state paternalism; individuals (and their families) are deemed responsible for their well being in the market economy. With political neoliberalism has come the hegemony of a certain type of economic theory predicated upon individual rationality and utility maximization. Being both a recipe for theory and a normative vision for so ciety, this form of economics has been associated with the de regulation of financial markets, the fostering of shareholder (as opposed to stakeholder) value, and the global integration of trade and currency transactions. Compared to the broad sweep of the twentieth century post World War I, individuals are increasingly respon sible for their own long term welfare, itself a function of their performance in financial markets. And yet, at its moment of victory, the rational actor model has seen its theoretical hegemony slip away in the face of critiques from behavioral finance and cognitive psychology. Em pirical in focus and subject to the exacting protocols of shared testing regimes, cognitive science has raised sig nificant doubts about the capacity of people to play the role assigned to them by neoliberalism. We may be ra tional, but not rational enough. If people are to be the rational actors of theory and policy, they need to process information in a manner consistent with their own interests and in relation to the interests of others in a well functioning market economy. Given their dependence upon the burgeoning financial markets of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, individuals need a certain quality and quantity of financial knowledge such that their decision making will promote their long term (if not short term) well being. By this logic, financial knowledge is the bedrock of neoliberalism; it is a necessary ingredient in any gov ernment policy that attempts to shift responsibility for social welfare to the individual. As such, financial knowledge is a matter of substance (knowing how

159

160

Financial Knowledge

markets function, for example), and a matter of social identity and even morality (being responsible, informed citizens).

Scope and Significance Financial knowledge clearly matters in many aspects of everyday life, some of a short term nature and some with profound long term consequences for welfare. Financial knowledge is used for rudimentary decisions such as discriminating between consumption items on the basis of cost and quality. So, for example, when we assess washing machines and dryers the ‘rational’ model sug gests that we should do so by comparing the attributes of various options assuming a budget constraint and some base line preferences of expected use and location in the home. As summarized, this assessment process could be quite formal and explicit. In fact, the evidence suggests that people use shortcuts or heuristics to sort the avail able options into manageable packets where, in the last instance, issues of cost and value may be used as tie breakers between equally desirable products. In these situations, substantive financial knowledge may not be necessary to make a decision. There are, nevertheless, a variety of public and private agencies whose mandate is to encourage ‘informed’ financial decision making. There are, however, other more important decisions that cannot be easily reversed once taken and the costs of which cannot be recouped in any simple sense. For ex ample, in many countries people purchase healthcare insurance plans where the long term costs of under insurance may be so significant that short term cost effectiveness should be ignored. Likewise, in many countries, the middle class are increasingly significant consumers of education for their children; cost effectiveness must be balanced against the expected long term rate of return of human capital. In these situations, where past decisions affect long term welfare, financial knowledge is closely related to individual’s discount functions – the value attributed to short term con sumption against expected long term well being. People might reasonably apply some rudimentary financial knowledge and decision techniques in all the above cases. However, buying a washer–dryer is different in ‘type’ from buying healthcare, education, and pensions. The distinction drawn here is between financial knowledge that is relatively shallow, being contingent on current information about short term benefits, and fi nancial knowledge that is relatively deep, being contin gent upon long term expected prospects and their consequences. The former refers to knowledge and de cisions that are typically reversible (at modest cost), whereas the latter refers to knowledge and decisions that are in large part irreversible (albeit with exceptions in

extreme cases). It can be observed that the former is almost always about events given individuals’ background circumstances – the only knowledge needed to make a decision is that inherited from past decisions (e.g., other products of manufacturer X have been reliable and good value for money). The latter may require knowledge only partially available from past decisions and is, more often than not, dependent upon financial expertise not shared widely through society. For example, calibrating the risk adjusted rate of return on one kind of healthcare policy over other kinds of healthcare policies requires a wide range of detailed knowledge (including knowledge about the relationship between healthcare and lifetime earnings). Whether about rudimentary or complex time dependent issues, financial knowledge must be assembled and then applied through decisions. Therefore, financial knowledge has more value for its instrumental use than for its intrinsic quality. This suggests two implications. First, individuals must decide on how much and of what quality information to collect, recognizing that the costs of assembling data must be balanced against its value in decision making. Second, given the costs of decision making (time, effort, and other opportunities foregone) people have incentives to apply decision templates rather than approach each decision afresh on its own merits. Inevitably, much financial knowledge is generic but, in some instances, it may also be case specific. There are significant incentives in the financial markets for com mercial vendors of information to blur the two together, treating the former as the solution to the latter.

Rationality and Knowledge Rationality is a universal characteristic of people what ever their context or culture: it could hardly be otherwise given biological imperatives. However, individuals who share a basic cognitive capacity as human beings will also vary considerably in terms of their cognitive perform ance, including their ability to logically assess and evaluate alternatives. More significantly what counts as sensible (or acceptable) in some societies will not be necessarily the same in other societies; context and cul ture (being here synonyms for environmental factors) are crucial when people evaluate or judge behavior against social standards. Rationality represented by the subjective expected utility (SEU) maximization model makes two specific assumptions about the utilization of financial knowledge. First, given the price of knowledge it is ra tional to economize on its collection and use and, second, outcomes (positive and negative) are symmetrical in that they are equally valued for their consequences. Unfortunately for the SEU model, neither of these assumptions hold true in real life. It is self evident that

Financial Knowledge

agents vary in terms of the financial knowledge they can afford. The knowledge they can afford thereby affects the options they consider, and the options considered may be suboptimal in terms of the maximization of individual welfare. With experience calibrated using past decision metrics, individuals may become isolated from the best options and even from the better options they can afford. This type of behavior may be legitimated by cultural preferences which serve to justify the favoring of some options over other options. It is also apparent that many people whatever their sociodemographic status are risk averse, preferring the certainty of a known but small ‘win’ over a much larger but risky potential ‘win’. Being risk averse may be more or less valued in different settings, attracting the admiration of some and the approbation of others. These cultural cues are likely to constrain, re inforce or, in some instances, determine behavior. Most importantly, SEU models of rationality have been criticized for their shallowness regarding social identity and the significance of the emotions. It is fre quently assumed that social identity and the emotions adversely affect reason because they filter what is ob served and the implications drawn thereof. Therefore, to the extent that reason is informed by information and financial knowledge, social commitments and emotions are thought to prompt wishful thinking and biased or capricious decision making. However, cognitive psych ologists have sought to counter these theoretical as sumptions with empirical evidence suggesting that the emotions may be a valuable intuitive device for first order response to new situations. If financial knowledge has a formal quality (perhaps learnt from or explained by others) such that it is a means of assessing the virtues or otherwise of competing options, the emotions may pro vide a simple mechanism for presorting options by relevance. By this account, explicit financial knowledge could be added to the mix of decision techniques at the end of a sequence of more intuitive judgments rather than at the start of the process. In practice, people are more or less rational; they ap proach problems from two intersecting vantage points – their intrinsic cognitive capacity and their experience in certain settings (Herbert Simon’s scissors). Simon be lieved in bounded rationality and his famous metaphor created a picture of individual decision making in which the twin blades of cognition and environment come together to produce a decision outcome. People are also innately emotional in the sense that they bring to situ ations intuitive judgments based upon fear, anger, happi ness, and love (see below). For some theorists, however, financial knowledge is an antidote to the confounding affects of emotion and commitment. However, this seems naı¨ve: the results of decision making – behaviour – have cultural and social significance including, crucially, emotional significance. Being purely rational is more a

161

normative statement of supposedly ideal behavior rather than a positive statement of fact. It is also often an ideologically driven assessment of socially acceptable (even laudable) behavior in the context of market based late capitalist societies.

Risk and Uncertainty Financial markets are awash with information. There are information markets for vendors and for buyers – in fact, the problem is not so much the lack of information so much as the lack of means to discern relevant infor mation and our inability to discriminate between infor mation and information sources in terms of their quality. Directly or indirectly, financial products inevitably in volve risk and uncertainty. So, for example, the purchase of a home mortgage may involve the vendor and buyer in complex time dependent calculations of expected in flation and interest rates. Vendors who underestimate interest rates over a specified period of time effectively subsidize mortgagees (and vice versa). Moreover, many people do not appropriately weigh low incidence but costly risks. Continuing the mortgage example, during the 1980s and 1990s many UK home buyers took out endowment mortgages, betting that a low risk event (collapse of the stock market) would not occur or would not be compounded by collateral threats to household income and wealth. Many people are unaware of the risks they face in everyday life. They certainly do not appreciate the fact that risks are related such that one event may cascade to affect a person’s entire well being. To deal with these issues in regard to finance, governments have vigorously encouraged disclosure policies, transparency in product design and management, and the adoption of risk as sessment by formal decision trees that deliberately ex pose contingent risks (see below). Most importantly, governments have encouraged ‘plain English’ disclosure policies using terms and concepts anchored by average rather than expert competence. However as suggested above, these policies are compromised on three counts. First, rationality is idealized, eschewing the compli cations of context and culture. Second, rationality is portrayed as an issue of substance rather than of process. Third, rationality is conceived as unbounded notwith standing the fact that people seek to limit the scope of a problem rather than see it as a whole. Naı¨ve investors assume that financial information is representative of stable economic processes. Financial information is taken on face value with little appreciation of the motives of those who produce and market such information. In part, this reflects the lack of alternatives – independent cost effective expert information is hard to obtain. By necessity, risk is calibrated using past

162

Financial Knowledge

information and extrapolated into the future. Therefore, naı¨ve investors tend to use financial information in ways that reinforce past commitments; information at odds with individual predispositions is often discarded or ig nored, suggesting that the costs of assimilating such in formation make it easier to wait for exogenous events to force through reconciliation or a change in tactics. In practice, naïve investors tend to associate cost with reputation; rightly or wrongly, the presumption is that the higher the cost of financial information the more reliable the information. Sophisticated investors closely scrutinize the integrity of financial information, seeking evidence of contamina tion by competing interests. Rather than extrapolating surface trends, they look for changes in the variance of underlying time series, believing that this is one indi cation of market instability. Sophisticated investors be lieve that uncertainty is endemic; finely calibrated risk profiles of financial products, the core of advertising programs by the finance industry, suggest a level of cer tainty that is not justified by the performance of financial markets. For sophisticated investors, financial knowledge is more important than financial information. However, there is a paradox: financial knowledge must be con tinuously assessed in the light of changing circumstances. It must be constructed and deconstructed at every turn.

Stylized Facts If it has become apparent that people are not the efficient information processing machines of economic theory or, for that matter, government policy (although we should recognize that government policy is hardly ever coherent on this issue given the vestiges of paternalism that infuse the modern nation state). On average, people are risk averse, eschewing financial opportunities that a so called fully rational person would or should assume. On aver age, people are inefficient users of information, often backing ill informed opinion when they should collect more information or, perversely, collecting more infor mation that is warranted by the scope of the problem. On average, people overvalue the near future and undervalue the long term future. On average, people do not carry through on past plans, ‘jumping at shadows’ when they ought to back informed commitments. On average, peo ple are poor at data analysis, befuddled by even the most elementary notions of probability and contingent risk. However, the results of cognitive science do not tell the whole story. Research on the financial behavior and planning of different sorts of people suggests a more nuanced picture. While the precise details vary by country, especially if we were to include developed economies outside of the Organisation for Economic Co operation and Development (OECD), it appears that

financial literacy is distributed on a 20/60/20 basis in most advanced capitalist countries. That is, 20% of the population appear to have such poor financial com petence, knowledge, and access to advice that their im mediate and long term welfare is imperiled. At the other end of the distribution, 20% of the population are best characterized as sophisticated investors combining access to expertise with knowledge and understanding of fi nancial markets. In between, however, 60% of the population are, at best, naı¨ve investors subject to many of the cognitive shortcomings noted above but with the resources to be active consumers of financial products. It is tempting to correlate cognitive ability with age, gender, and socioeconomic status. There is, for example, a clear relationship between older age and some types of cognitive decline. On the other hand, folk law in the finance industry would have it that men and women are different in that the former are analytical and the latter are emotional (left brain/right brain dominant, etc.). This claim is empirically ill founded and makes gross gener alizations about people from a specific environment with a distinctive and hierarchical segmentation of tasks and functions. Social scientists believe that sociodemographic status counts because status is a good proxy for income and educational resources – the assets needed to acquire fi nancial knowledge and expertise so as to compensate for acknowledged cognitive shortcomings. Moreover, cogni tive psychologists tend to at best ignore, and at worst discount, the significance of sociodemographic charac teristics and their testing regimes often involve groups of undergraduates and MBA students from elite uni versities. Studies have shown that risk aversion, for ex ample, is frequently correlated with income and household wealth, which chimes with the concentration of equity ownership along class lines (notwithstanding the ‘shareholder society’ supposedly heralded by the dot com boom). The ‘interaction’ of sociodemographic characteristics in the context of financial knowledge and decision making is understudied. Most importantly, it appears that formal education, professional qualifications, and task specific training can make a difference to people’s financial expertise. University level education in subjects demanding quan titative skills and the attainment of professional qualifi cations postuniversity in areas of related knowledge do make a difference, and long term task specific training seems to reinforce the advantages of education and professional qualifications. Inevitably, education, pro fessional qualifications, and training are correlated, albeit imperfectly, with household income. It is also apparent that, not withstanding the massive post war improvement in educational attainment, in Western societies high quality education, quantitative skills, and training are socially stratified not widely distributed.

Financial Knowledge

Context of Knowing By this account, financial knowledge is intimately related to individual decision making. Just as plainly, the quality and quantity of financial information available to indi viduals is related to their socioeconomic status. There also appears to be a relationship between expertise, education, qualifications, and training. Most importantly, many people have neither the cognitive ability nor the acquired skills to be expert decision makers. They must therefore rely upon others through social networks and organizations to improve the acquisition and use of fi nancial knowledge. The evidence suggests, in fact, that most people depend upon family and friends when seeking to extend their financial knowledge and better calibrate their decision making. By this logic, the household is a very important resource for information, advice, and decision clues. It need not contain any more expertise than the sum of its parts; nonetheless, it may be able to rule out extremes and fanciful assumptions. However, small groups may be also subject to the in fluence of dominant individuals (whatever their expertise or lack thereof) and may converge on conventional or even catastrophic solutions rather than the best or even second best solutions. This is an argument for broadening the decision environment to include the workplace and wider sections of society at large. Some 30 or 40 years ago, the workplace combined paternalism with class specific entitlements such that the available knowledge was allo cated by virtue of job classification. However, evidence on the value of workplace information exchange is mixed; surveys suggest that employees rarely share financial in formation with one another. More often than not, em ployers provide the relevant information and brief programs on the issues and options. While employees often indicate that this information is useful, sign up rates for information briefings are reported to be low with de fault options dominating deliberate employee choice. Research on pension plan participants has shown that the behavioral effects of such training programs are limited despite positive attitudinal responses. Another source of financial knowledge is peer imi tation and advertising. If conventional class related social aspirations are less meaningful in (post)modern societies, it is apparent that many people make financial decisions according to their role models (public figures) and their peers (represented in the media by television programs and the like). In part, consumption by imitation may be driven by workplace relationships and professional ties. In part, consumption by imitation may signal aspirations of social identity and recognition. Consequently, financial knowledge is nothing special; consumption (the accu mulation and assessment) of financial knowledge is likely governed by the same behavioral customs and conven tions that govern the purchase of fashion items such as

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clothes and automobiles, where you live, and the organ izations to which you belong. In fact, it’s hard to believe otherwise. In this world of image, media, and consumption, the internet and web based resources are sometimes identi fied as important alternative (good and bad) sources of financial information. It appears that access to this me dium is heavily dependent upon an individual’s work environment and job tasks. It also appears that younger people are more willing to use the web to search for information and to make purchasing decisions based on web information than older people (a finding that will not surprise those knowledgeable of the adoption of in novation). However, most websites, especially those sponsored by government and not for profit consumer advocates, utilize an abstract display format rather than a media driven format, emphasizing a claimed difference between (important) financial knowledge and other kinds of (less important) consumer information. Whether this is effective remains to be seen.

Emotional Knowledge The ‘contextual’ model of financial knowledge suggests that it is made at the intersection between individual cognition and the environment (the family, place of work, society at large, etc.). By this logic, the exercise of cognition provides incomplete solutions if not sup plemented by specific learning (formal and informal). Clearly, then, social and cultural context matters both in terms of what counts as financial knowledge and in terms of how individuals reach economic and financial decisions. The worlds of image and media consumption, of work, and of peer and professional association discussed in the previous section are not geographically and culturally uniform. Financial knowledge is socially constructed and often locally embedded, despite the much heralded effects of globalization on information, as well as capital flows. Much of the research discussed in this contribution ori ginates from, and relates to, the global North, but fi nancial knowledge is not hegemonically constructed by the firms and institutions of the ‘developed’ world. The emerging economic strength of China and its embrace of certain forms of capitalism and entrepreneurialism under the rubric of communism is but one example of a sub stantially different financial knowledge context. The different responses of Asian governments to the financial crises of the late 1990s suggest others, as do the socialist and populist Latin American regimes of Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales. Moreover these countries are charac terized by huge social and economic inequalities: sophisticated, globally integrated, financially wealthy investors exist alongside small (though in many cases

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growing) middle classes and substantial populations of very poor individuals, many of whom depend on sub sistence farming. In this sense geography also matters, particularly in relation to the mutable scales at which individuals ex perience financial decision making and the construction and dissemination of financial knowledge. Geography is not only key to an understanding of the context of decision making because it describes the role of place and the importance of spatial embeddedness: geog raphers’ insistence on the entwined nature of culture and economy (without one being reducible to the other) is also valuable. The research programs of economists and cognitive scientists are strong on behavioral modeling, the identification of nonrational behaviors in experimental settings, and the extrapolation of beha vioral effects from empirical data. Geographers have the capacity to contribute to a nuanced understanding of context that fleshes out the environment of decision making. However, there is another sense in which cognition is incomplete – the emotions also play a significant role in determining ‘knowledge’ and behavior. To agree with this statement is to move a significant step away from the rational actor paradigm that dominated the social sci ences over the second half of the twentieth century and embrace a twenty first century theory of the mind–brain that stresses cognitive integration and functional inter dependence. It is also to accept, as suggested above, that the rational individual is not an island: cultural and so cietal interactions, personal relationships, and environ mental and geographical factors matter. Thus, it provides a clue as to the nature of intuition – the moment when people reach a solution by some ‘unconscious’ mix of cognitive skill, social resources, and emotion. Basic emotions have a built in physiological origin; emotions such as fear, disgust, happiness, and anger are mediated by innate brain circuits in higher primates, we included, although their expression can be modulated by social learning. Other emotions like love are even more modulated by culture and learning and more ascriptive in origin; ascribed behavior draws social approbation or admiration. Following Aristotle, the emotions can also be thought of as a form of visceral judgment made about a situation and the behavior that follows. In this sense, the emotions ‘value’ information by visceral judgment, pro viding a response that may or may not be further con ditioned by cognition and social resources. This way of integrating the emotions with decision making and be havior recognizes that most behavior is responsive rather than reflective. So, for example, fear may be the response of many people to a financial market crisis. As a basic emotion, but with a large overlay of acquired triggers and meanings, it represents foreboding about a sudden reversal of fortune

bringing to the fore the likely negative consequences of such an event. It may follow a stock market bubble characterized by euphoria and the suspension of disbelief (‘irrational exuberance’), equally deep seated emotions from our biological past but applied to very different material circumstances. It is little wonder, therefore, that risk aversion is so systematic amongst humans across the whole range of experience, whether they are educated or not, skilled or not, or reflective or not. Taking this one step further, fear and happiness may (respectively) amplify or discount adverse financial information, just as these emotions may select amongst the available financial information to fashion an interpretation of current cir cumstances. Fear and happiness are shared human ex periences that can lead to ‘herd behavior’. For those less convinced about the role and significance of the emotions in financial knowledge, consider a more social emotion: love. Clearly, love is associated with bio logical drives such as sexual desire and reproduction. On the other hand, love is also associated with socially desired behavior such as care for the young, respect for the old, and a commitment to the welfare of family and friends. Not all people are bound by love; some are entirely selfish. However, the comparison is revealing. Those committed to others may have very shallow discount functions, whereas those who are wholly selfish may have very steep discount functions. Love may give rise to hyperbolic dis count functions, whereas selfishness may manifest as weakness of will. As feminists have long pointed out, caring behavior is essential for both social reproduction and social cohesion. Either way, people’s need or otherwise for approval may be a powerful determinant of how they respond to financial information and knowledge.

Future Research Financial knowledge is a field of research and an area of public policy that is bound to grow in significance over the coming years. Its place at the intersection between a retreating state and the growing responsibilities of indi viduals for their own welfare suggest that it is one of the most important determinants of long term social justice. At the same time, so many of us appear to be naı¨ve decision makers and investors; we lack the skills of fi nancial professionals and will never have enough infor mation and knowledge to makeup the difference. That relatively few people have the capacity to structure de cision making in ways that manage cognitive shortfalls, the costs and benefits of social resources, and the play of emotions suggests that some market agents will benefit from exploiting those differences. Here lies an issue of political economy in that the welfare consequences of such inadequacies are bound to flow back into the po litical system.

Financial Knowledge

Cognitive science has made heavy inroads into the coherence and plausibility of the rational actor model. Research findings have emphasized the inherent nature of many of the anomalies and biases taken by some to be aberrations easily managed by self conscious planning. At the limit, the revolution in cognitive science threatens to overturn the notion of agency and responsibility. How ever, this is an extreme interpretation: rationality remains a human trait. Most often, human cognition fails or proves inadequate in circumstances that require a degree of precision that few people in the course of everyday life would recognize as realistic. One of the most important research frontiers is at the interface between cognition and the environment where Herbert Simon’s scissors are in play – where decisions have to be taken that require not just cognitive capacity but also an appreciation of the circumstances of specific situations. This also requires an appreciation of the breadth and diversity of those situations, culturally, socially, and geographically, beyond the advanced capitalist econ omies. The contribution of a group of anthropologists, psychologists, and economists studying game theory across a large number of small scale ‘traditional’ societies (and in comparison with the results of similar experi ments carried out in university undergraduates in Europe and North America) has been to show that the norm of utility maximization is not universal. On the other hand the results of their analysis demonstrated that social learning was a statistically significant factor in observed behavioral differences. Cross cultural accounts of the construction and dissemination of financial knowledge are important to a nuanced understanding of the context of individual decision making. As described, financial knowledge is vital to the well being of adult men and women. Less understood are the possible payoffs of financial education and literacy pro grams aimed at young children and teenagers. In play, in this regard, are a series of complex issues having to do with the cognitive development of children as they ma ture to adulthood and the degree to which they are able to assimilate information from the environment in their putative decision frameworks. At the other end of the age distribution, there are issues of similar significance, not ably the consequences of ageing for cognitive functioning and the capacity of the elderly to respond to changing circumstances. At its core, liberalism values human au tonomy and responsibility whatever people’s ages. However, there are counterarguments for the desirability of some level of paternalism, especially on the side of those who are simply not able to play the roles assigned to them by neoliberalism. In any event, there remains a most troubling issue: how individual choice based on financial knowledge is exercised in the context of culture and the emotions. It was suggested above that intuition is one expression of

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their interrelationships. It was also suggested that a single focus on cognition at the expense of cultural expectations and emotional commitments would be incomplete as a matter of empirical reality and incomplete as a matter of policy relevance. While easily expressed as such, there are few frameworks available that allow for a means of integration. Furthermore, given the significance of fi nancial information and knowledge for well being, the academic literature has preferred silence on these issues to a full fledged research program that would set the shape of things to come. See also: Emotional Geographies; Finance, Historical Geographies of; Financial Risks and Management; Neoliberalism; Psychoanalysis; Psychoanalytic Theory/ Psychoanalytic Geographies; Uncertainty.

Further Reading Ainslie, G. (2001). Breakdown of Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baron, J. (1994). Thinking and Deciding (2nd edn.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bertrand, M., Karlan, D., Mullainathan, S., Shafir, E. and Zinman, J. (2005). What’s psychology worth? A Field Experiment in the Consumer Credit Market. Working Paper 11892. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Brocas, I. and Carrillo, J. (eds.) (2003). The Psychology of Economic Decisions, vol. 1: Rationality and Well being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clark, G. L., Caerlewy Smith, E. and Marshall, J. (2007). The consistency of UK pension fund trustee decision making. Journal of Pension Economics and Finance 6(1), 67 86. Clark, G. L., Munnell, A. and Orszag, M. (eds.) (2006). The Oxford Handbook of Pensions and Retirement Income. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Damagio, A. (ed.) (2003). Looking for Spinoza. London: Vintage. Gigerenzer, G., Todd, P. M. and The ABC Research Group (1999). Simple Heuristics that Make us Smart. New York: Oxford University Press. Gross, D. M. (2006). The secret history of emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henrich, J., Boyd, R. and Bowles, S. (2006). ‘Economic Man’ in cross cultural perspective: Behavioural experiments in 15 small scale societies. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 28(06), 795 815. Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decisions under risk. Econometrica 47, 263 291. Leyshon, A. and Thrift, N. (1997). Money/space: Geographies of Monetary Transformation. London: Routledge. Nussbaum, M. (1994). The Therapy of Desire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ortony, A., Clore, G. L. and Collins, A. (1988). The Cognitive Structure of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shiller, R. (2001). Irrational Exuberance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Simon, H. A. (1982). Models of Bounded Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thrift, N. (2005). Knowing Capitalism. London: Sage. Wagner, R. K. (2002). Smart people doing dumb things: The case of managerial incompetence. In Sternberg, R. J. (ed.) Why Smart People can be so Stupid, pp 42 63. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Relevant Websites www.behavior.org/econ behavior.org. www.fsa.gov.uk Financial Services Authority.

www.nber.org National Bureau of Economic Research. www.oecd.org Organisation for Economic Co operation and Development.

Financial Risks and Management P. Bennett, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Derivative A collective term for a range of financial products, including options and futures, that are derived from something else, such as real commodities and indexes of virtually anything. Future A financial product which takes the form of a contract to buy something (which does not have to be a real commodity) in the future at a price agreed in the present. Hedging An act which protects against financial loss and future fluctuations in prices, such as by purchasing a derivative. Moral Hazard The controversial idea that people, institutions, or even states will take less care over their financial well-being if they know their risk of falling into financial difficulty is insured. Reinsurance Insurance for insurers. Reinsurers normally take on the more extreme portions of risks covered by ordinary insurance companies. Retroactivity The application of current laws to events that took place before the law was passed. Strict Liability Legal responsibility for an event which applies even where no fault or negligence is proven. Vertical Disintegration The outsourcing of parts of the supply chain to other firms, rather than managing the entire production chain in-house.

Financial Risks and the Risk Society Risks are not events in themselves, be they accidents to individuals, natural hazards, or global stock market cra shes, but rather the ways in which the potential negative effects arising from such events are interpreted. Risk, then, is the interpretation of the potential for suf fering a harm of some kind – be that physical, emotional, financial, or any other kind of harm. Inevitably, in a capitalist society, risks are commonly interpreted in fi nancial terms, and their multifaceted dimensions are often reduced to the potential for suffering financial losses. This was reinforced in 1921 by Frank Knight who influentially defined risk in relation to its management through the insurance industry. He used the term risk for situations in which, while the outcome of an individual event was unknown, the probability of the various po tential outcomes could be calculated based on the history

of previous occurrences and/or mathematical calcu lation. This was in contrast to uncertainties, which were situations in which even the odds were unknown. Of course, one individual’s uncertainty is an insurance company’s risk, because while an individual may lack historical data (not to mention actuarial training), the insurer can aggregate together the outcomes of many different events over both time and space. This allows the probability of individual events occurring to be estab lished, and premiums to be set for all that cover the expected losses of the few. For Knight, risks were something for which insurers were prepared to offer insurance while uncertainties were uninsurable. More recently, insurability (or lack of it) is a key factor in sociologist Ulrich Beck’s depiction of the Risk Society. For Beck, the Risk Society is characterized by uncertainty (in Knight’s terminology) with the calculus of risk breaking down and insurers find it increasingly difficult to calculate probabilities and offer insurance against risks that are perceived as new, large scale, and uncertain. Environmental and technological hazards that have arisen (or that we have become aware of) since the middle of the twentieth century often have no reliable risk history. Well established weather related risks may have their risk histories overturned by climatic change. Nor do they seem to possess other characteristics that render them insurable, such as a clearly defined begin ning and end, or a clearly limited set of victims. How, then, is the insurance industry supposed to offer cover to people against the hazards arising from climate change or cover for companies’ environmental liabilities? It’s not just insurers, but all the traditional sources of risk expertise and management, most notably the state, that face difficulties in the Risk Society. Increased economic uncertainties since the 1970s combined with the apparent lack of capacity and/or willingness of the state to fully fund national insurance and welfare systems have led to a greater emphasis on the responsibility of the individuals to manage their lifetime of risks. The pru dent, responsible citizen is one who takes out private insurance against unemployment, ill health, old age, and death. However, with the insurance industry also be coming more circumspect about the risks it takes on, this raises concerns about those deemed too risky or too poor (or both) to access these market based systems. And of course, economic uncertainty affects not only individuals, but also corporate actors who have estab lished various strategies to help manage their financial risks in a volatile global marketplace.

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The rest of this article will further explore these three areas of research into financial risks and management, focusing on environmental, welfare, and corporate risk management.

Environmental Risks and Insurance Insurance companies, although willing to take on the risks of others, are just as risk averse as any other com pany. However, by pooling many risks, predictability is increased and the insurers remove the risk to themselves of unexpected liabilities. There are, however, various conditions that risks have to be able to fulfill in order to make their insurance commercially viable. Any financial losses covered must be clearly delimited over time, in space, and in value. They should be caused accidentally. The financial losses covered should accrue to the insured party. There should be a large number of similar, but crucially independent, insured units. And they should not have catastrophic potential for the insurer. At the same time the price of insurance must be low enough to attract customers. The changing physical – and economic and legal – nature of environmental risks has implications for their management through both first and third party insur ance sectors. In the first party sector, property insurers will be affected if new, large scale risks result in un predictable changes to the frequency and magnitude of damage caused. Climate change could render well es tablished historical records of floods and hurricanes useless for calculating future insurance premiums. Con versely, if an increasing frequency of extreme weather events is experienced, some areas could become so prone to particular events that insurance cover becomes eco nomically unfeasible. There are some clear research opportunities for physical geographers here, particularly those carrying out research that purports to predict future climate and weather patterns. Reinsurance companies, who by in suring the insurers bear the brunt of extreme events, have invested substantial sums in climate related research. Such research also raises ethical issues where the results are used to enhance risk assessment and, potentially, exclusion from insurance cover; here there is a role for human geographers in examining the social con sequences of such research by their physical geography colleagues. Nevertheless, increasing climate related claims are hardly just (or even mainly) due to physical environmental change. That virtually all of the 50 cost liest insurance events over the last 30 years occurred in more developed countries is not a reflection of the relative severity of physical processes. Rather, processes that encourage people and firms to locate in risk prone areas, that cause insured values to rise, and, crucially, that

further the interconnectedness of economic activity (the ‘loss’ of a factory being destroyed is hardly limited to the cost of the factory itself, nor even to any one company’s business), have arguably had the greater impact on in surers’ fortunes in recent times. Even with regard to physical processes, economic geographers also have a role to play in examining more innovative ways in which companies are dealing with both extreme and mundane weather events. The futures market has been long used to hedge risks of commodity price fluctuations, but can also be enrolled to hedge the risks of fluctuations in events. By purchasing catastrophe derivatives, linked to a quarterly index of catastrophe in a particular region, insurers can smooth out their exposure. If catastrophes are high, the price of the future increases, allowing insurers to make money with which to offset their higher payouts. Conversely, if catastrophes are low, the insurers lose money on the future, but their payouts are also much lower. Overall, the risks are smoothed out over time. Human geographers have also investigated the use of weather derivatives, which are used to displace the risks of the more everyday weather that insurance com panies will not usually cover but which might cause significant losses for a company running outdoor at tractions, for instance. While the buyers may be hedging their risk, the sellers may be engaged in speculation, and the use of weather derivatives can be seen as an example of the commodification of nature. This raises important questions about how and why this commodification oc curs, and what the consequences of it are, such as the privatization of knowledge about the weather. Third party insurers are affected by the changing sociolegal construction of environmental liability risks that has increased the uncertainty and potential magni tude of claims. Two key research questions arise here. The first question concerns the continued viability of commercial insurance in compensating for environ mental financial risks, given their changing scientific, social, and legal production. Environmental issues pose challenges for the most fundamentally held legal prin ciples, that enable individuals to be held responsible for clearly defined events. Most famously, the US site clean up program known as Superfund, originating in 1980, established controversial principles of strictness, retro activity, and joint and several liability. Strictness and retroactivity meant that insurers were liable for risks caused during the period of insurance, even if the insured company obeyed all the laws of the time and used the best available technology. In many cases risks built up unseen over time, only becoming apparent as sites were cleaned up many years after the policy year had ended (and often after the policyholder had gone out of busi ness). In common with other environmental and health risks, insurers found themselves exposed to long tail fi nancial liabilities. Joint and several liability meant that


the authorities could sue any company that had worked on the site for the costs of cleanup, irrespective of their responsibility in causing the pollution in the first place. Insurers argued this led to a ‘deep pocket syndrome’ in which the companies with the richest insurers were sued. These principles, which risked undermining the very conditions of insurability, led to a contraction of the environmental liability insurance market in the late 1980s, and raised doubts over whether the insurance in dustry was up to coping with a new era of environmental concern and associated legislation (much as Beck had suggested). Of course, environmentally risky production didn’t cease in 1989. Many large companies found it viable (and cheaper) to self insure. Insurers themselves began to offer claims made policies, in which payouts were made if an environmental risk was discovered, rather than caused, during the policy year, so limiting their re sponsibility and redefining the temporality of environ mental risks so that insurers’ concern over their production was deflected into the future. More exclusions and lower limits made it harder to claim. A veneer of business as usual masked the limits faced by insurers in coping with new environmental risks. More positively, insurers’ concerns over their liabil ities led to them becoming more circumspect about who they insured. The second key research question around liability insurance concerns the extent to which insurers can be enrolled in programs of environmental govern ance. Insofar as insurance can facilitate the external ization of environmental risks from the production process and so even undermine the polluter pays prin ciple increasingly embodied in environmental liability legislation, this may seem unlikely. Once a polluting firm has purchased insurance, it can ‘remove’ the incentive to take care because it knows the insurer will pay up, cre ating moral hazard. On the other hand, precisely by translating an intangible environmental risk into a fi nancial value, the insurer potentially has some sway over the environmental behavior of the firms it insures. Cor porations with good pollution control programs and good risk records get lower premiums. Where possession of environmental liability insurance is a ticket to trade, in surers can act as gatekeepers to entire industrial sectors. However unfair insurers might have found legislation like Superfund, it means they now think twice about which companies they are prepared to cover. Managing financial risks becomes the quasi policing of firms with which you have a relationship. Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of what might be con sidered to be either the governmentalizing of private relationships or, conversely, the privatizing of govern ment regulation, is an important research agenda. The experience of the environmental insurance sec tors suggests that the Risk Society poses considerable

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challenges for traditional forms of risk compensation and management, although physical environmental change is perhaps the least of these sectors’ concerns. However, it also suggests that Beck has somewhat overstated his case, and that insurers can find new, profitable opportunities in environmental risks that help to sustain business as usual.

Personal Financial Risks and Exclusion A refusal to offer flood insurance to households in flood prone areas is one way property insurers have reduced their exposure to environmental risk. Human geog raphers have long studied the impact of insurers’ red lining in urban areas perceived to be at high risk from crime. More recently, the rolling back of the welfare state, while taking many forms in different countries, has often produced a greater reliance on the private insurance sector for the management of personal financial risks arising from major life events such as unemployment, ill health, old age, and death. Insurances that have histor ically mainly been provided privately, such as life in surance, have taken on a greater significance in those countries where private housing has expanded at the expense of social housing, and more people require it to protect their dependents from mortgage obligations. New insurances, such as critical illness cover, mortgage pay ment protection insurance, and forms of private un employment insurance, have also been developed. Human geographers have examined the contrasts between state and private insurance provision in at tempting to understand the implications for people who are excluded from these private financial products. In surance provision tends to work on the basis of one of two principles: solidarity or mutuality. Private insurance systems are almost always organized on the principle of mutuality. State insurance systems can be organized on either principle, but tend to maintain at least some element of solidarity. In a solidarity insurance system, contributions are mandatory, cover is paid for collectively out of taxation, and is provided through the monopoly of the state. Those who are better off pay most, thus cov ering claims from those who cannot afford to pay. Risks are calculated for the national population as a whole and premiums reflect individuals’ share of this national risk, weighted according to individuals’ ability to pay (their taxable income). Mutual systems differ in two key respects. First, in dividuals choose whether to purchase the insurance or not. Second, the market is competitive, which affects the price of premiums. Fail to offer a good price to low risk individuals and they’ll find a competitor who does, leaving you with the high risks and the big claims. For the insurance underwriter, then, competition doesn’t just mean making premiums as ‘low’ as possible; it means

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differentiating them so that they are as ‘accurate’ as possible with respect to the risk posed by each applicant. Participants are grouped into pools of similar or mutual risks and are charged a commensurate premium. In this system, those deemed to be of high risk (and, of course, most in need of the cover) pay the most or may even find themselves excluded altogether. Of course, the financial/social exclusion agenda can be argued to deflect attention away from more funda mental issues of poverty and structural inequality. Refusal of access to private insurance markets might be con sidered to be a middle class concern, but of little rele vance to those who can’t contemplate the financial outlay required to purchase even standard rates, or, for that matter, get a home or mortgage or job to insure in the first place. However, lack of access to private insurance can be a de facto barrier to accessing housing markets (life insurance may be considered a prerequisite for taking out a mortgage by those with dependents), can exacerbate health concerns and, if the risk does become reality, can potentially plunge households into serious financial dif ficulty and even poverty. In life and illness insurance, an applicant’s riskiness relates to their health prospects and so the actual underwriting of risks, in which a premium is calculated, is preceded by the collection and assessment of health risk information. While health risk assessment by in surers is well established, this does not mean it is un controversial. The practice of health risk assessment raises questions about the ethical and appropriate use of medical information and the consequences for those people who cannot access insurance. Personal medical details, not only of the applicant but also of their families, are accessed as a condition of even applying for the product. Research by human geographers has found that currently 8% of life insurance applicants in the UK receive inflated premiums and 1.4% are excluded altogether, with considerable variations between insurers. The recent development of predictive genetic tests has also raised questions about a new class of asymptomatic ‘healthy ill’ and their possible exclusion from insurance markets. The way in which risk knowledge is constructed by financial institutions has also undergone some profound changes with both positive and negative implications for financial inclusion. Banks (as well as insurers) place in creasing reliance on computerized systems of risk rating, and less on traditional systems of vetting applicants which depended more upon personal, tacit knowledge. Positively, such systems of producing and assessing knowledge at a distance reduce the risk that the personal prejudices of the assessor will influence the decision over whether or not to offer a loan or insurance. Negatively, credit scoring systems have set new definitions of riski ness based on statistically measurable and describable

characteristics that can be assessed at a distance, which may further exclude those already disadvantaged. Human geographers, concerned with the geography of knowledge, as well as social exclusion, have investigated the ethical and policy implications of these develop ments, armed with participatory research techniques that open up such debates to those without detailed scientific or commercial knowledge.

Corporate Risks and Management Many financial risks faced by corporations are not in surable, but the ways in which these risks are managed often have profoundly geographical consequences. Fi nancial turbulence, particularly in the post Bretton Woods era, has long been of interest to economic geog raphers. Rapid fluctuations in the prices of currencies (and the relative prices of commodities and financial products) present clear financial risks to any firm that operates or trades internationally (and, in the longer term, also affects those that don’t). Other fluctuations – cultural, psychological, and political – have implications for market conditions and patterns of demand. Firms can attempt to manage the financial risk of these fluctuations in demand and supply costs through spatial, temporal, and structural changes (the latter two just as geographical in their implications as the former). The irony of all these strategies is that, while they ameliorate some risks they almost always create new ones. Altering the spatial structure of the firm is one way to manage those risks (both before and after they have arisen). A decentralized spatial structure, particularly where different production facilities cater for different markets, can reduce the risks of fluctuations in supply and demand through diversification, and help stabilize rev enue across the firm as a whole. On the other hand, it can also lead to increased transaction costs and difficulties in monitoring the behavior of spatially dispersed managers. Relocation may also be an option for dealing with dif ficult market conditions that have already arisen, where the option exists to relocate to areas of potentially lower labor and regulatory costs and/or greater productivity. The existence of sunk costs, however, means that spatial strategies are both costly and risky in themselves. Closing down an operation may mean writing off much investment that has been made in plant facilities, in the training and accumulated experience of labor, and in the wider local business relationships that have been estab lished. Beyond writing off existing sunk costs, actual expenditure may be required at the point of exit and even for a considerable time afterward (most significantly in terms of pension obligations), while relocation means beginning a new round of sunk costs elsewhere. And therein lies the inherent risk to any spatial fix to the risks


of capital accumulation: new investment often requires significant long term commitment to make sunk costs worthwhile, yet such commitment is difficult in an un certain market environment. Relocation can seriously dent a company’s profit line to the extent that exit via bankruptcy may be the only viable option. Sunk costs, then, are both inherent to, and potentially signifi cant constraints on, corporate spatial restructuring, and form the basis of significant counterarguments to the more extreme proponents of globalization. Further re search is required into their characteristics (which are by no means solely negative for firms) and their implications for both creating and managing financial risks faced by companies. Structural changes have been associated with risk minimizing, so called flexible firms, not least because they reduce exposure to sunk costs. The vertical dis integration of the production chain refers to the out sourcing of parts of the production process. This may, of course, be done for cost minimization purposes and, in such cases, vertical disintegration is bound up with spa tial relocation as those parts of the production process deemed less skilled are sourced from lower cost lo cations. However, risk management is another key mo tivation behind vertical disintegration and here it need not be bound up with spatial decentralization (indeed, it can have quite the opposite effect). In a nutshell, out sourcing externalizes the bulk of the sunk costs involved in the activity from the buying firm. Notwithstanding the significant penalties that may lie in breaking contracts, the sunk costs invested in capital, labor, and pensions become the responsibility of the outsourced firm. Once again, however, new financial risks arise for firms on both sides of the relationship as they become ever more dependent on linkages and transactions with other firms. For instance, the subcontracted operator might not share the same commitment to (an image of) social and en vironmental responsibility as those firms with famous brand names to protect. In many vertically disintegrated sectors, not least the financial industry, trust and the acquisition of tacit knowledge become ever more im portant in making risky transactions, and the associated need for face to face meetings and networking is one (of many) reason why vertically disintegrated sectors like financial services still tend to be agglomerated in par ticular locations. Firms and investors can also manage risk temporally through the purchasing of financial derivatives (including the weather and catastrophe derivatives mentioned above), such as futures, options, and swaps, allowing them to reduce their exposure to volatile financial values. As with other strategies of financial risk management, the use of derivatives brings with it its own risks. While de veloped as a means of hedging risks, derivatives are also used speculatively, as a means of taking risks in order to

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(hopefully) make profits, and it is this that has been re sponsible for the huge growth in trading of derivatives, and the range of financial products on offer, over the last three decades. Yet this speculation, and the use of in creasingly risky products, means that the volatility in the system which necessitates the use of derivatives in the first place is increased, not lessened. As well as the sys temic risk, any firm that trades heavily in derivatives, can face major risks itself, as exemplified by the collapse of Barings Bank in 1995. It’s not just firms that are at risk. Other institutions, including governments, can trade de rivatives, most famously Orange County in California, which lost $1.6 billion in the derivatives market in 1994, with major implications for the funding of public facil ities. The real world implications of these virtual prod ucts, in terms of their impact on trade, investment, financial integration, and people’s welfare, is an import ant question for economic geographers, as are the chal lenges of regulating such risky financial products by countries which are locked in a competitive struggle for the business of the financial sector.

Conclusions The issue of how to manage financial risks, and the im plications of this management for personal, environ mental, and corporate welfare, is relevant to all areas of economic geography, and many areas of human geography beyond. In this article three areas have been outlined in which concern with financial risks and management are a central part of research agendas, but it is important never to assume that profit maximization is the only motivation behind firms’ behavior, a crucial insight with implications for all research into individual and corporate economic decision making. See also: Agglomeration; Climate Change; Corporate Responsibilities; Environmental Hazards; Financial Centers, International; Financial Exclusion; Fordism, Post-Fordism and Flexible Specialization; Redlining.

Further Reading Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Bennett, P. G. (2000). Environmental governance and private actors: Enrolling insurers in international maritime regulation. Political Geography 19, 875 899. Bennett, P. G. and Smith, S. J. (2007). Genetics, insurance and participation: How a Citizens’ Jury reached its verdict. Social Science and Medicine 64, 2487 2498. Brown, R. L. (1991). Environmental liability insurance: An economic incentive for responsible corporate action. Alternatives 18, 18 25. Clark, G. L. and Wrigley, N. (1995). Sunk costs: A framework for economic geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 20, 204 223.

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Ericson, R., Barry, D. and Doyle, A. (2000). The moral hazards of neo liberalism: Lessons from the private insurance industry. Economy and Society 29, 532 558. Knight, F. (1921). Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. Boston, MA: Hart, Schaffner & Marx. Leyshon, A. and Thrift, N. (1997). Money/Space: Geographies of Monetary Transformation. London: Routledge. Leyshon, A. and Thrift, N. (1999). Lists come alive: Electronic systems of knowledge and the rise of credit scoring in retail banking. Economy and Society 28, 434 466. Pollard, J. S., Oldfield, J., Randalls, S. and Thornes, J. E. (2007). Firm finances, weather derivatives and geography. Geoforum 38 (in press).

Swyngedouw, E. (1997). Producing futures: Global finance as a geographical project. In Daniels, P. W. & Lever, W. F. (eds.) The Global Economy in Transition, pp 135 163. Harlow: Longman. Tickell, A. (2000). Dangerous derivatives: Controlling and creating risks in international money. Geoforum 31, 87 99.

Relevant Websites http://www.swissre.com Sigma Research Database, Swiss Re.

Firms M. Taylor, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction The firm in economic geography is fundamental to understanding how local economies and communities function and evolve in a globalizing economic environ ment. In their infinite variety, they are at the very heart of modern day life: as transnational corporations (TNCs), corporations, branch plants, and subsidiaries; as joint ventures, subcontractors, and franchisees; as small firms and family firms; as partnerships and sole proprietor ships; as manufacturers, service providers, and retailers. They are pivotal actors and sites of collective agency at the core of the economic geography project that seeks to understand how they shape economic and social growth, development, decline, and change in local and regional economies. They are the sites of enterprise and innov ation, of decision and indecision, and of growth, obso lescence, and decay. They are the creators and destroyers of jobs, products, and services; the creators and ma nipulators of markets; and, simultaneously, the allies and the enemies of governments. At the same time, they are interlocked one with another in a myriad of ways as they compete, control, and collaborate to create wealth for their owners and managers. Simultaneously, there are limits to managerial discretion and degrees of autonomy within firms that reflect inter and intra organizational power relations, asset bases, and competencies. In add ition, it is these layers of complexity that make firms’ boundaries increasingly fluid and hard to define. From the perspective of economic geography, firms can be regarded both as creators of and created by the societies within which they operate. Within those soci eties, they are the loci where social and economic pro cesses meet, interact, and are played out against the backdrop of the drive for personal wealth creation that underpins capitalist societies. Against this background of the dynamic complexity and plurality of firms, there is a constant academic search for the processes that create and maintain both enterprise and enterprises in capitalist societies: a search for a theory of the firm.

Theorizing the Firm The search for that body of theory is now more im portant than ever in the wake of rapid international ization and economic globalization, the constantly widening and deepening reach of TNCs, and the rapid industrialization and growth of the Indian and Chinese

economies. There is a new urgency to understanding what firms are and how they interact with places and people to shape, mold, transform, and change the way economies work. In this changing environment, it is equally important to better understand local processes of enterprise and entrepreneurship in both corporations and small firms as these are seen as central to building and maintaining the competitive advantage of places. These processes are now regarded as being increasingly dependent upon the local embedding of firms in networks of trust within places: communities, localities, and re gions. This has thrown into prominence the need to understand more fully the interconnection and idio syncrasies of firms, along with their competencies, cap acities, and capabilities, and their weaknesses, limitations, and vulnerabilities. Attempts to understand and theorise the firm have developed and evolved across a range of disciplines, in cluding economics, economic sociology, and manage ment science, to understand the processes of enterprise and collective agency at the core of capitalist systems of production. These separate but complementary per spectives on the nature of the firm have added layers of new thinking by exploring ‘rationalist’ perspectives, fo cused on efficiency, and ‘socioeconomic’ perspectives, concerned with the social construction of economies. They explore processes of maximizing, transaction costs, uncertainty and risk taking, social relations, networking, embeddedness, institutionalization, governance, and learning. Each contributes a distinctive layer of meaning to a progressively deeper stylizing of the firm. Economic geography has borrowed and built on these theories to develop a fuller understanding of the role of place, space, and locality in the development and func tioning of firms – to develop an appreciation of the symbiotic relationship between firms and places, with each being, at least in part, constitutive of the other. This focus of place, space, and locality is a key difference between geography and the other social sciences in the way the firm is theorized. Economic geography has em phasized location decision making, the spatiality of transaction patterns, networking, and the local impacts of culture and society as they shape commercial organiza tions. Within these parameters, firms in economic geog raphy are interpreted in very different ways. At one extreme, they are seen as no more than ‘capital’, a homogeneous group in constant conflict with ‘labor’. Most commonly, they are treated as a phenotype, the

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smallest unit of analysis that does not need to be un packed. Increasingly, they are seen as network members defined primarily by their relational ties, with porous and open boundaries that make them hard to define and de limit as they merge and meld one with another. Equally, they are seen as some form of collective organism en gaged in a form of biological evolutionary struggle into which they are born, and within which they age, mature, and die. Alternatively, at the other extreme, they are in terpreted as being engaged in a performative discourse or dance, a point and counterpoint of interpersonal relations and relational ties as key individuals and decision makers jostle for power, control, and ascendancy.

From Contracts to Behavioralism The foundations on which conceptualizations of the firm have developed in economic geography can be identified in the neoclassical, rationalist ideas of the complete and incomplete contracts theories of the firm from eco nomics, and their extension into the less economistic, behavioral approaches in management science. The ‘complete contracts’ approach assumes that, within a capitalist economy, all economically significant contin gencies can be foreseen and incorporated into enforce able contracts. The ‘incomplete contracts’ approach, most frequently referred to as the transaction costs model, assumes, more realistically, that there are costs associated with using the market mechanism and that it is either impossible or too costly to specify all the unforeseen contingencies in a transaction. As a result, contracts be tween firms are necessarily open ended or incomplete. Both approaches also assume that firms strive for effi ciency and competitiveness by maximizing profits and optimizing productivity. The transaction cost approach attempts to leaven the rationalist, maximizing assump tions of the complete contracts model by introducing the concept of bounded rationality, that firms do not have all the information they need on which to make decisions. However, issues of efficiency and enforceable contracts are always important and central in shaping firm be havior, though in more recent conceptualizations of the firm in economic geography that focus on the social construction of economies, they have too readily been relegated and neglected to the point of being rejected. The first attempt formally to conceptualize the firm in economic geography was built on Herbert Simon’s ideas on ‘satisficing’ by Alan Pred in Behavior and Location published in 1967. The aim, as in a work 30 years later, was to understand how knowledge and behavior affected location decision making. In this groundbreaking work, the firm was seen as an information processor con ditioned by the information available to the entrepreneur or the enterprise to inform decisions on the commitment

of scarce resources to generate profits, and their ability to use it. Benchmarked against neoclassical maximizing principles and, coupled with Smith’s elaboration of Rawston’s concept of spatial margin’s to profitability, an interpretation of spatial patterns of economic activity was offered that went far beyond the untheorized empirical description that characterized the economic geography of the 1960s. This was, in effect, a behavioral, knowledge based theory of the firm that was well ahead of its time in recognizing the spatial consequences of significant vari ations in the knowledge and ability between decision makers. It was, however, only a beginning. It was ex tended through the 1970s and into the 1980s by a range of complementary empirical strands of research on three main elements of knowledge acquisition and decision making. These elements were: (1) the linkages and transaction structures of firms; (2) the information flows (including face to face meetings) of individuals and management teams; and (3) the changing corporate forms as TNCs emerged and evolved, bringing the need to better understand the spatiality of intra organizational as well as inter organizational decision making. This stream of behavioral research in economic geography was most fully summarized by McDermott and Taylor in 1982 in Industrial Organisation and Location. Some of the major elements of this stream of thinking were that: firms learn through their transactions (linkages) and • information ties (flows) with other organizations; the spatiality of these ties varies between types of firm, • with the smallest and technically least sophisticated

• • • •

having the most localized transaction structures and information flows – that is, they depend on the proximity and local linkage that is now labeled as ‘clustering’; there are size thresholds in the development processes of firms that also match with the funding thresholds of the ‘venture capital gap’, the ‘equity gap’, and the ‘international finance gap’ as they appeared 25 years ago; the external commercial environment impacts differ ently on different types of enterprise, be they cor porate headquarters, branch plants, innovative small firms, subcontractors, family firms or commercially unsophisticated ‘refuge’ firms; different types of firms, especially branch plants and innovative small firms, bring different structures and dynamics of employment to the places where they locate or where they are created; and firms that survive and grow disengage from local ag glomerations of production – that is, ‘market makers’ rather than the locally linked achieve commercial success.

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This is, of course, a brief caricature of a now largely ig nored genre of behavioral economic geography research which finds perhaps its fullest expression in the work of Taylor and Thrift in 1983 and the enterprise segmentation model of the firm that they began to elaborate. The model drew on structural contingency theory and recognized the different operating environments faced by the different segments of corporate sector enterprises and smaller firms, which, in turn, impacted on their use of funds, skills, technology, inputs, production, outputs, and their con tractual relations with counterpart organizations. In the corporate sector, ‘leaders’ developed new products, assets, and services to secure future revenue streams, ‘inter mediates’ were the main generators of current incomes, while ‘laggards’ extracted residual income from assets approaching obsolescence. Corporate sector ‘supports’, meanwhile, provided management and technical supports, controlled finance, information, and the appointment of key personnel: all the transfer pricing mechanisms to maximize revenues, minimize the global tax take, and maximize executive salaries. In the smaller firm segments, ‘leaders’ were again the innovators, though frequently being no more than externalized research and develop ment (R&D) for the corporate sector. The ‘loyal oppos ition’ occupied segments of the economy too small to excite corporate sector interest, while the subcontractors and franchisees were the ‘captured capitalists’ comprising the ‘satellite’ segments subordinated to corporate sector interests. The ‘satisfied’, in contrast, were smaller, often family owned firms, recognized in the management lit erature as a significant proportion of the small and me dium enterprise (SME) populations whose principal goal was to remain independent and to achieve satisfactory profits. Finally, those small firms with technical skills but limited commercial acumen were labeled ‘craftsmen’. Unfortunately, this essentially agency based behavioral approach to the firm was, in the words of Nigel Thrift, ‘mugged’ by Marxism. That mugging saw the firm reduced to ‘capital’ (in opposition to ‘labor’) and declared an ir relevant analytical category by Walker . This was an ex treme position that was softened in work on the spatial divisions of labor and, more generally, in thinking within geography on localities.

Developing Socioeconomic Perspectives on the Firm An alternative, more strongly socialized approach to the theory of the firm developed in parallel with what some would say were the overly economistic ideas of the complete and incomplete contracts theories in eco nomics, and it is these ideas from the business, manage ment science, and strategic management literatures that

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have informed more recent, innovative thinking on the firm in economic geography. The inspiration for this socioeconomic thinking is clearly evident in Polanyi’s ideas on reciprocal exchange and the interpretation and extension of these ideas by Granovetter. It is found in Simon’s ideas on ‘satisficing’ and Veblen’s ideas on the entrepreneur as being first and foremost a ‘moneymaker’. It draws on behavioral ideas; evolutionary ideas, and, in particular, resource based ideas initiated by Penrose in 1959 but reinterpreted and extended by later researchers. The behavioral strand of thinking, popularized by Cyert and March, focuses on decision making in firms. From this perspective, the firm is a site of decision making in the face of conflict, uncertainty, problem stimulated search, learning, and adaptation. It is tied into a framework of relationships, involving, among others, managers, workers, stockholders, suppliers, customers, lawyers, tax collectors, and regulatory agencies. Most have little interest in the specific objectives of the firm as long as they receive satisfactory side payments (wages, dividends, satisfactory products, and good treatment of creditors). However, conflict arises because, depending on their areas of responsibility, different managers pri oritize different goals and judge the firm’s success by those goals. When goals are not met, search behavior is instigated, initiating learning and adaptation. What this approach provides is a set of linked mechanisms to ex plain how decisions are made within firms when futures are vague and opaque, how resources are deployed, and how knowledge is created and used. The evolutionary strand of thinking is drawn from evolutionary economics as outlined in Nelson and Winter’s seminal work on the firm and economic growth. These authors started from the position that economic change involves firm specific, endogenously generated competencies and resources combined with exogenous pressures for change generated in the environments within which firms operate. At the core of the firm are its ‘routines’ – the way it does things that can be as in appropriate as they can be appropriate. External pressure necessitates a constant ‘search’ for new routines and technologies so that the firm can cope. The ‘selection environment’ comprised everything that affects a firm’s well being: conditions outside the firm in a particular industry or sector and the behavior of other firms. This was the environment that was not only the arena within which the firm sought opportunities, but it was also the arena within which the firm itself was selected. Resource based views (RBV) of the firm began with Penrose in 1959, who interpreted the firm as a set of resources mobilized to cope with the pressures of the external commercial environment. The firm is there to create and mobilize tangible and intangible assets to create value and fuel growth. Learning in management

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teams is seen as central to this process as it combines with the organizational slack of excess resources and human capital, constrained by managerial capacities. It is, in essence, a supply driven approach to the firm centered on the strengths and capacities of individual enterprises. The RBV is an interpretation of the firm that has been extended in later elaborations to incorporate issues of inimitability and the isolation of resources in order that firms can maximize returns to their owners. In these later interpretations, resources are viewed as isolating mech anisms used to generate rents and prevent imitation; with ambiguity, property rights, and the high costs of learning being used to prevent imitation by competitors. In part of this literature, managerial competence is regarded as a resource – the resource of imagination built on an initial stock of knowledge. Importantly, this line of thinking leads directly into the knowledge based view of the firm which interprets firms as social communities designed to create and transform knowledge into moneymaking products and services. In this capacity, firms are thought to work better than markets, especially when internal structures are flat rather than hierarchical, because this is thought to promote learning. Weeks and Galunik have further extended the RBV to develop a cultural view of the firm. By this interpretation, firms are cultures created by people working within the limits of bounded ration ality to estimate rent streams from products and services. As such, the culture the firm wants to create guides the optimal design of the firm. These streams of thinking have shifted the ground rules for thinking on the theory of the firm in economic geography in three ways: (1) they have relaxed the as sumption of rationality, (2) they have seen decision makers as satisficers working in the face of uncertainty with imperfect knowledge, and (3) they have viewed learning and knowledge as the keys to commercial suc cess or failure. These shifts in thinking have been drawn on extensively in economic geography’s treatment of the firm.

Socioeconomic Perspectives on the Firm in Economic Geography Socioeconomic perspectives on the dynamics of local economies have created new conceptualizations of the firm in economic geography that draw on and extend those perspectives emphasizing a geographical cum spa tial dimension. Here it is possible to identify six different but complementary approaches: (1) an institutionalist perspective; (2) an embedded networks perspective; (3) a resource based perspective (including the concept of the ‘learning firm’); (4) a relational perspective; (5) a dis cursive perspective; and (6) a temporary coalitions perspective.

The ‘institutionalist’ perspective interprets the firm as a refuge from market pressures and an institutional framework that supersedes issues of cost. It is an organ ization within which rules and routines can be used to fashion strategies to counter competitive uncertainty. Skills and information underpin traditions and habits within firms which gives those enterprises permanence beyond market speculation. Those habits and skills act like genes to reproduce an organization that will evolve and change, much as is envisaged in the evolutionary economics that is currently gaining popularity in eco nomic geography. The ‘embedded enterprise’ perspective envisages the firm as enmeshed in socially constructed networks of reciprocity and interdependence involving untraded inter dependencies and unequal power relations. Embeddedness itself comprises distinct elements: cognitive embeddedness as shared ways of thinking; cultural embeddedness as common cultural values; social embeddedness created by immersion in shared social relationships; political embeddedness as a common framework of governance; and the structural embeddedness of buyer–supplier relation ships that build to form networks that channel market exchange. This is a perspective on the firm that has influ enced views on, among other things, ‘industrial districts’, ‘innovative milieu’, ‘power networks’, and ‘learning regions’, and resonates strongly with Porter’s views on clusters. The RBV of the firm emphasizes competencies and ‘learning’. Firms are seen as bundles of activity specific resources combined into firm specific competencies. Firms learn through the application of their resources and become processors and generators of knowledge. Processes of ‘ubiquification’ in a globalizing world have been argued to have made knowledge, especially tacit knowledge, the last remaining localized resource, trans ferred through face to face contact. Hence, the RBV of the firm in economic geography has emphasized the importance of the ‘learning firm’ in the ‘learning region’. However, this interpretation has not gone unchallenged, with Amin and Cohendet maintaining that the place premium attached to externalities, trust, and social cap ital, for example, have been overplayed. Instead, it is argued, it is relational not geographical proximity that is important for the functioning of the firm. The RBVs and knowledge based views of the firm that find their origins in the strategic management literature underpin a set of interrelated and interwoven ideas on the firm in economic geography that have been labeled variously as ‘discursive’ and ‘relational’. Here the firm is seen as bringing together diverse social relations, in cluding social, family, and interpersonal ties. The relational perspective regards the firm as a con stellation of network relationships controlled by social actors with activities spread across space but embedded in particular places. In line with the literature on global

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networks by Dicken et al. (2001) these networks are the ‘‘foundational unit of analysis for y understanding y the global economy, rather than individuals, firms or nation states (p. 89).’’ The relational power and the power geometries of those networks together with their terri torial organization mold the economic geographic out comes of these network relationships. The actors themselves draw on and bring into the firm the diverse social relations within which they are themselves em bedded. Those relationships, in turn, define the bound aries of the firm which are recognized as being extensive, variable, and fuzzy. According to Yeung, adopting this perspective involves shifting attention away from the capitalist logic of the firm to the relations among firm specific actors. As such, the conceptualization of the firm needs to be more open and fluid, and the economic conceptualization of the firm needs to be extended to embrace place based politics, cultural practices, and so cial interactions. As it currently stands, this relational perspective from economic geography is no more than a heuristic, a description of collections of relationships that by Yeung’s admission is fragmented and fuzzy. Critics of this relational perspective argue that it offers no pro cesses through which combinations of people, assets, competencies, and knowledge arise, prosper, decline, fail, or evolve and change, just that power and relationships exist. With power untheorized, it does not engage with competitive or collusive strategies, and it has been said that it is no more than process less description that is neither in time nor of time. The ‘discursive’ view of the firm in economic geog raphy draws on actor network theory and emphasizes the importance of representational analysis in building the knowledge of the firm. In this project, it also mirrors aspects of the cultural evolutionary perspective on the firm that has been developed in strategic management. The firm in this view is more than a limitless domain of networks and flows, and the meaning of the firm is de rived from the common understandings among owners and managers that are needed to secure legal rights, together with property and territorial jurisdiction, to balance self interest and cooperation, to appropriate surpluses generated by the firm, and also to legitimize the right to exploit labor. This is the firm as discourse – a discourse of managerialism centered on information, knowledge, and talk. What the firm is appears and fades according to the narrative that holds sway at any time; a narrative of production and investment, or narratives of organization, finance, or legalism each with their own logics, vocabularies, and calculus. In essence, the firm by this interpretation is the medium that becomes the message that becomes the reality. Finally, the temporary coalitions perspective on the firm goes beyond the legally defined ‘shell’ of the firm to disentangle processes of people being enterprising from

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the narrower operations of enterprises as legally defined firms. By this view, firms are temporary coalitions of people who identify commercial opportunities to create personal wealth, shoulder risk, apply assets to tasks, and trust in theirs and their partners’ competencies to achieve their goals. Firms, irrespective of whether they are SMEs or corporations, are, therefore, time limited and vulner able, temporary crystallizations of commercial endeavor. Coalition members may be coopted, imposed, recom mended, tolerated, or be there by virtue of birth. They are there to achieve personal wealth, and trust is not a prerequisite for membership. They are held together by currently poorly understood processes of collective agency through which they combine their skills to achieve a common purpose. They wield their combined power internally to achieve a cost effective product or service that has market value, and they wield it externally to secure resources and access markets through whatever mechanism is expedient, be it competition or collusion.

Conclusion The conceptualization of the firm outlined here dem onstrates a progressive layering and deepening of think ing as efforts have been made to engage with issues of spatiality, change, and globalization. However, a signifi cant agenda for future research remains comprising, in the first instance, seven central elements. First, theory needs to deal better with time, going beyond the bulking up of micro processes and placing the firm centrally in time. Second, economic geography needs to understand better the proprietorial control of knowledge by firms as part of their inimitability strategies to retain and main tain competitive advantage and to secure future streams of profits. Third, theorizing in economic geography needs to more fully consider the nature of the boundaries of the firm. Current thinking sees those boundaries as fuzzy, permeable, and multiple, but, in so doing, makes the firm an awkward if not irrelevant analytical category, not withstanding the legal/contractual structures that em brace and surround it. Fourth, economic geography currently underplays the significance of entrepreneur ship processes; not only when firms are first created, thus missing the first crucial point in the development of a firm, but also at later stages in firm development as coalitions of owners and managers strive to cope with change. Fifth, a related issue is the need to more fully incorporate into economic geography’s treatment of the firm the impact of demand and pressures of the market. How do firms cope with external market pressures and the power relationships they involve? Indeed, as a sixth issue, theory needs to consider more fully power rela tionships both between and within firms, especially in multi sector, multi site, and multinational enterprises.

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Finally, economic geography’s treatment of the firm needs to explore more fully the supply of funds to firms. As with economics and management science, economic geography is preoccupied with the use of funds by firms – their investment strategies – but not the way they acquire and garner the financial resources they employ. The commodification of money since the 1980s has relegated the supply of funds into firms to just one among a number of necessary inputs. The fiduciary responsibility of fi nancial institutions, once central to the finance literature, now goes largely unmentioned, as the current credit crisis shows only too clearly. This issue of the supply of funds impacts strongly on the first six items of the re search agenda on the firm outlined here. Finance for enterprise, it can be argued, is at the very heart of any understanding of the firm in an environment of economic globalization. See also: Agglomeration; Competitiveness; Creativity; Embeddedness; Enterprise Discourse; Entrepreneurship; Globalization and Transnational Corporations; Industrial Location; Industrial Organization; Innovation; Knowledge Economy; Location Theory; Networks; Relational Economic Geography; Technological Change; Technology and Regional Development.

Further Reading Amin, A. and Cohendet, P. (2000). Organisational learning and governance through embedded practices. Journal of Management and Governance 4, 93 116. Cyert, R. M. and March, J. G. (1963). A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Maskell, P., Eskilinen, H., Hannibalsson, I., Malmberg, A. and Vatne, E. (1998). Competitveness, Localized Learning and Regional Development Specialization and Prosperity in Small Open Economies. London: Routledge. McDermott, P. and Taylor, M. (1982). Industrial Organisation and Location. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, R. and Winter, S. (1982). An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Penrose, E. (1959). The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. New York: Wiley. Pred, A. (1967). Behaviour and Location. Part 1. Lund Studies in Geography, Series B, No. 27. Schoenberger, E. (1997). The Cultural Crisis of the Firm. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Storper, M. (1997). The Regional World. Territorial Development in a Global Economy. New York: Guilford Press. Taylor, M. and Asheim, B. (2001). The concept of the firm in economic geography. Economic Geography 77, 315 328. Taylor, M. and Oinas, P. (eds.) (2006). Understanding the Firm: Spatial and Organizational Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, M. and Thrift, N. (1983). Business organisation, segmentation and location. Regional Studies 17, 445 465. Walker, R. (1989). A requiem for corporate geography. Geografiska Annaler B 71, 43 68. Yeung, H. W. C. (2005). The firm as social networks: An organisational perspective. Growth and Change 36, 307 328.

First Law of Geography M. F. Goodchild, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Geostatistics The theory of regionalized variables, or spatial variables subject to spatial dependence. Idiographic Science The scientific description of the unique properties of places and times. Nomothetic Science Science that stresses the value of general principles that apply everywhere in space and time. Positivism A philosophy of science that stresses the confirmation and refutation of hypotheses through experiment. Semantic Interoperability Successful sharing of data as a result of terms having shared meaning. Spatial Autocorrelation A measure of spatial dependence. Spatial Dependence The tendency for nearby things to be more similar than distant things. Spatial Heterogeneity The tendency for conditions to vary over a space.

Introduction In science generally, it is widely accepted that the most valuable truths about the natural world are those that apply everywhere in space and time. There would be little value, for example, in a periodic table of the elements that was valid only in North America, or only on Tuesdays. Such knowledge is described as nomothetic, and philosophies of science such as positivism see it as the end product of a lengthy but well recognized process of inference and experimentation. By contrast, knowledge about the specific properties of places and times is de scribed as idiographic, and many of the terms used to characterize such knowledge are pejorative – consider, for example, descriptive, anecdotal, and journalistic. The notion that there might be nomothetic truths within the domain of the discipline of geography has risen and fallen in popularity over the years. In the 1950s Hartshorne and Schaeffer championed the idiographic and nomothetic positions respectively, and Schaeffer in spired a generation of graduate students, many of them enrolled at the University of Washington, to direct their research toward nomothetic knowledge, in areas such as central place theory and theoretical geomorphology. Bunge’s 1962 book Theoretical Geography (and its second edition of 1966) captured this movement most forcefully,

arguing that geographic knowledge ‘‘must meet certain standards including clarity, simplicity, generality, and accuracy’’ (p. 2) and that the purpose of geographic re search was to discover ‘‘these patterns, these morpho logical lawsyso that (our) planet, Earth, fills (our) consciousness with its symmetry and ordered beauty’’ (p. xvi). While the nomothetic impulse flourished for more than a decade, it fell into decline in the 1970s with the waning of the quantitative revolution. But in the 1990s a degree of revival took place, and much of the earlier work became newly fashionable, motivated at least in part by the rise of geographic information systems (GIS). One of the early observers of this shift was Peter Taylor, who argued in a 1990 critique that GIS represented ‘the positivists’ revenge’. GIS is a generic tool designed to represent a vast array of distinct types of geographic information. As such it must recognize the nature of geographic information, and exploit its significant features in order to achieve both generality and acceptable performance. Thus, the nature of geographic information is an important topic in GIS texts, and the growth of interest in GIS has prompted new research into principles, regularities, and laws that can be found through experimental investigation. Of these, by far the most important has turned out to be a principle suggested almost tangentially in a paper written in 1970 by Waldo Tobler, one of the leading members of the University of Washington school, on the topic of modeling the urban growth of Detroit. Tobler suggested somewhat tongue in cheek that the principle might be termed the first law of geography, but in recent years as its generality and utility has become recognized a con sensus has emerged that it does indeed justify that title. The next section describes the law in detail, and discusses its generality and utility. The following section reviews recent commentaries and examines the case for additional laws.

Tobler’s First Law of Geography The Earth’s surface is almost infinitely complex, and it would be impossible to characterize even a small part of it with perfect fidelity. Instead, geographers and others often indulge in spatial sampling, selecting a comparatively small number of locations at which to collect data, and assuming that the gaps between such observations can somehow be filled. If every location had characteristics that were completely independent of those of its nearby

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locations, this would clearly be impossible. But in reality characteristics tend to vary fairly slowly over the Earth’s surface, such that the characteristics at one location tend to be similar to those at nearby locations. Of course, what exactly is meant by ‘nearby’ and ‘similar’ remains to be seen, and depends on the particular characteristics of interest. Weather, for example, tends to vary very little over distances less than 1 km, but tends to vary greatly over distances of 1000 km; soils, on the other hand, can vary substantially over distances as short as 10 m. Tobler (1970) originally stated the first law (TFL) in the form ‘‘All things are related, but nearby things are more related than distant things’’. The important message is in the second part, and because ‘related’ carries un necessary connotations of causality TFL is better stated as ‘‘nearby things are more similar than distant things’’. TFL thus forms the basis of the process known as spatial interpolation, or the formal process by which the gaps produced by spatial sampling can be filled. The word law is very powerful, suggesting the kind of universality that only a second law of thermodynamics can possess. Nevertheless, there are clearly exceptions even to the second law of thermodynamics, as Maxwell’s Demon demonstrates. Newton’s laws of motion were found to have exceptions at both ultrasmall and ultra large scales, but despite quantum mechanics and the special law of relativity it is still common to refer to them as laws. In short, as commonly used in science the term law does not necessarily imply perfect predictability. In the social sciences the concept of law is much more controversial. Many would argue that law like behavior will never be found among human populations; and even that search for it is unethical. The experimental physicist Ernest Rutherford is once said to have remarked, perhaps after having been annoyed by some social scientist col leagues, that the only truth that could possibly be dis covered in the social sciences is ‘‘some do, and some don’t’’. Against this background it seems fair to label Tobler’s statement as a law, even though it is far from determin istic, and even though its parameters vary from one phenomenon to another. There are clearly exceptions to the law, when phenomena reveal less similarity locally than at a distance. The checkerboard is often cited as an example, since every white square is surrounded by the opposite color, but note that in order for this to occur it is necessary for every square to have a uniform color; in other words, TFL applies at the within square scale, but not at the between square scale. On the economic landscape, the territories established by certain organisms similarly defy TFL, since the presence of one organism makes others less likely in the immediate vicinity. The cliffs of the Grand Canyon represent another exception to TFL, since the property elevation varies dramatically over short distances.

One way to gain insight into the significance of TFL is through a simple thought experiment. In a world in which TFL was absent nearby places would be as dif ferent as distant places. It would be necessary to step only a vanishingly small distance away from one’s current location to encounter the full range of conditions on the Earth’s surface, from the height of Mount Everest to the depths of the Marianas Trench, and from the summer temperatures of Death Valley to the winter temperatures of the South Pole. A world without TFL would be an impossible world from the perspective of human existence. Several methods have been devised for characterizing TFL and the property it addresses, which is known generally as spatial dependence. The field of geostatistics, also known as the theory of regionalized variables, was devised by statisticians as a way of formalizing the principle known informally as TFL, and of optimizing the process of spatial interpolation that relies on it. The variogram (or more correctly semivariogram) is defined as a function describing the increase of variation in a phenomenon with increasing distance. In the absence of TFL, variation over short distances is as large as variation over long distances, and the variogram is flat. With phenomena that obey TFL, however, variation is gener ally observed to rise monotonically until it reaches a maximum value known as the sill, at a distance known as the phenomenon’s range (Figure 1). TFL can also be measured at fixed scales for patterns such as the checkerboard, or for data distributed over irregularly shaped regions such as states or counties. Two indices of spatial dependence are in common use: Moran’s I and Geary’s c. Both are described more specifically as metrics of spatial autocorrelation. Moran’s I scales from positive values when TFL applies, to zero when neighboring values are as different as distant values, to negative when neighboring values are more different than distant values. The respective ranges for Geary’s c are o1, 1, and >1. Despite the existence of two competing statistics, however, the terms used to describe spatial de pendence typically follow the Moran ranges, and patterns for which TFL is valid are commonly described as having positive spatial dependence. Figure 2 shows such a data set and its associated Moran statistic. Spatial dependence can be described, largely cor rectly, as the most important property of any spatial pattern. It can be useful in distinguishing the impacts of hypothesized processes, since the presence of strong, positive spatial dependence at a particular scale implies that the processes causing the phenomenon are similarly persistent at that scale. Smoothing processes (such as glaciation) and diffusion processes (such as migration) both result in patterns with strongly positive spatial de pendence, while sharpening processes such as economic competition result in the opposite. But this kind of


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Figure 2 Percent black mapped for Milwaukee census tracts from the 1990 census. Moran’s I statistic is 0.8971, indicating very strong, positive spatial dependence (and adherence to TFL).

(a) Sample and model variogram of precipitation

12.0

γ

8.0

4.0

Sample variogram Model variogram

0.0 0.0 (b)

0.4

0.8 0.12 Distance

0.16

Figure 1 A typical variogram analysis of Tobler’s first law. (a) The map shows precipitation amounts at points for California’s Bay Area. (b) The graph plots variance against distance, showing the familiar monotonic rise.

inference is scarcely sufficient to explain the growth of interest in TFL in recent years, which relies instead on much more utilitarian arguments concerned with GIS design. In a world without TFL every point’s characteristics would bear no relationship to those of its neighbors, and in order to represent any geographic data set in a GIS it would be necessary to characterize every point. The re sult would be an impossibly large data set. TFL allows spatial patterns to be captured by sampling, since spatial

interpolation can always be used to fill in the gaps. TFL is the basis on which all contour maps are made, and the basis on which each day’s weather maps are compiled from point data. It allows large areas to be characterized as homogeneous, and represented in a GIS as polygons rather than as multitudes of points, achieving massive degrees of data compression. In other words, TFL is the basis of the armory of tricks with which GIS databases represent what is in principle an infinitely complex world. The specific details of any phenomenon’s spatial behavior, as represented for example in its variogram, are the basis on which the density of sampling is determined, since points spaced closer together than the range of the phenomenon will yield observations that are to some degree redundant. It is also the basis for parameters of GIS representation such as pixel size, minimum mapping unit, and spatial resolution. No wonder, then, that the growth of GIS stimulated a renewed interest in TFL and its implications.

Commentary In 2004 the Annals of the Association of American Geographers published a Forum on TFL, with five distinct per spectives, an introduction by the Forum’s editor Daniel Sui, and a response by Waldo Tobler. Jonathan Phillips reinterpreted TFL in the context of physical geography, while Harvey Miller discussed the potential for greater formality in TFL as scientific understanding of social behavior advances. Among the skeptics, Trevor Barnes argued that TFL, as all science, must be understood as a social construction that is intimately related to the

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places of its origin and the life of its author, while Jonathan Smith examined TFL against three require ments – universality, necessity, and synthesis – and found it lacking in all respects. It is clear that TFL is a contentious idea within the discipline, particularly among cultural geographers, and that debates over its meaning will continue. The present author’s contribution to the Forum ad dressed two questions: does TFL apply to spaces other than the geographic, and are there other laws of geog raphy waiting to be discovered? On examination, it is clear that TFL applies to the spaces of other planets, but interesting insights can be gained by asking whether it applies to the space of the human brain, the human genome, or the digits of pi. Similar benefits to those obtained by exploiting TFL in the representation of geographic information, including compression and in terpolation, might apply to branches of informatics that address these other spaces. Several candidates for additional laws have been suggested. Perhaps the strongest candidate is spatial heterogeneity, the observation that conditions on the Earth’s surface vary, in what a statistician would describe as nonstationarity. If it is impossible to conceive of perfect explanation in the social sciences, and indeed in many of the environmental sciences as well, then it fol lows that the unexplained variation will display geo graphic patterns, and that models estimated for different parts of the geographic world would have different par ameters. This concept has been addressed recently through the development of a range of place based statistics, or statistics that measure the properties of places, with no expectation that the results will gener alize to other places. They include geographically weighted regression, a technique that allows the par ameters of a linear model to vary spatially, leading to interesting insights in many applications. Spatial heterogeneity has an interesting implication for another aspect of GIS, the problem of interoperability. Two systems are said to be interoperable if data from one can be read and processed by the other, and clearly issues of data format are at the forefront of the problem. More difficult to address, however, are issues of semantics, or the variation in the meaning of terms from one part of the world to another. A number of projects, such as the European Union’s INSPIRE, have attempted to overcome such variations through the establishment of common standards, and techniques for translation and cross walk ing between classifications. But the problem remains a serious impediment to the integration of geographic data, and to studies that span several jurisdictions. Lack of semantic interoperability, through the adop tion of different classification systems and different meanings of terms in separate jurisdictions, can be readily understood as a necessary consequence of spatial

heterogeneity. Left to their own devices, researchers in any limited area of the Earth’s surface will adopt systems that work well for that area, and because of spatial het erogeneity are necessarily different from the systems that work well in other areas. Global standards will never work as well, and there will always be resistance locally to their adoption.

Conclusion Seen from half a decade later, the discipline of geography of the 1950s appears to have been remarkably homo geneous. The debates of that period led to the divisive quantitative revolution, which was followed by an equally divisive retreat. Today, however, the discipline is thriving, at least in the US, as a polyglot of vastly different per spectives and methodologies. The reaction to TFL, as reflected in the Annals Forum of 2004, is only one indi cator of the degree to which the discipline has agreed to tolerate, or at least agreed to differ. Within the GIS community TFL is regarded as a cornerstone of repre sentation and a key to analytic insights, while large sec tors elsewhere in the discipline may raise fundamental objections to the very idea of laws in geography. Any effective use of GIS requires an understanding of the nature of geographic information, and TFL stands as the most compelling summary of that nature. It demon strates once again that the discipline of geography is the logical home of GIS, because only with a deep under standing of the nature of the real geographic world can one hope to make sense of the bits and bytes of its digital representation. See also: Geographically Weighted Regression; Kriging and Variogram Models; Spatial Autocorrelation; Spatial Interpolation.

Further Reading Bunge, W. (1966). Theoretical Geography (2nd edn.). Lund, Sweden: Gleerup. Cliff, A. D. and Ord, J. K. (1981). Spatial Processes: Models and Applications. London: Pion. Fotheringham, A. S., Brunsdon, C. and Charlton, M. (2002). Geographically Weighted Regression: The Analysis of Spatially Varying Relationships. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Isaaks, E. H. and Srivastava, R. M. (1989). Applied Geostatistics. New York: Oxford University Press. Longley, P. A., Goodchild, M. F., Maguire, D. J. and Rhind, D. W. (2005). Geographic Information Systems and Science (2nd edn.). New York: Wiley. Sui, D. Z. (2004). Tobler’s first law of geography: A big idea for a small world? Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94(2), 269 277. Taylor, P. J. (1990). Editorial comment: GKS. Political Geography Quarterly 9(3), 211 212. Tobler, W. R. (1970). A computer movie simulating urban growth in the Detroit region. Economic Geography 46, 234 240.

First World K. D. Willis, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Global Governance Forms of rule making and policymaking at a global level which involve a range of institutions, including national governments, nongovernmental organizations, and multilateral organizations, among others. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) The value of all goods and services produced within a country regardless of who produced them. Gross National Income (GNI) The value of all goods and services claimed by the residents of a particular country regardless of where those goods and services were produced. It includes income from abroad, such as remittances and profits repatriated by companies from overseas subsidiaries.

Introduction ‘First World’ is widely used as an umbrella term for the countries of Western Europe, as well as the United States of America, Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. The term’s origin was political and dates from the Cold War period. Despite the collapse of the Communist bloc, the rise of the so called ‘newly industrializing countries’ (NICs) and the growing interconnectedness of many parts of the world due to processes of globalization, the idea of the First World continues to be used as a short hand for economically rich capitalist countries that have liberal democratic political systems. This article discusses the changing meaning of the term First World and considers the usefulness of cat egorizing many countries and millions of people in this way. In particular, issues of economic and human de velopment diversity will be considered, both between the countries of the First World and within these countries. Changing global political power relations and new forms of global governance at the start of the twenty first century will also be considered, including the rise of China and India as potential global superpowers in both economic and political terms.

Origins of the First World As with the terms ‘Second World’ and ‘Third World’, the concept of the First World only makes sense when related to other categories. Rather than being a self ascribed

identity, the concept of the First World came to the fore at the meeting of the nonaligned countries at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955. This conference of largely newly independent African and Asian countries sought to lay out a development path which would follow neither the capitalist route of the First World, nor the communist strategies of the Second World. The threefold categorization was therefore not meant as a hierarchy, but rather a division between different forms of political system. Based on this definition, the First World of the 1950s consisted of Canada, the United States of America, the countries of Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand (see Figure 1). Despite its original use as a political term, First World soon became synonymous with countries with high levels of economic development, high levels of urbanization, low mortality rates, widespread access to basic services, and high levels of consumerism. In other words, based on Eurocentric ideas of ‘development’ the First World was ‘developed’ and First World status became a goal for many countries in the Global South. Even though Japan had been one of the countries at the Bandung Confer ence, its rapid post World War II economic development along noncommunist lines led to its inclusion in many classifications of the First World from the 1960s onward.

The End of History The collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s/early 1990s marked the end of the Second World and what Francis Fukuyama termed the ‘end of history’, as the Cold War framing of world events had come to an end with the perceived victory of capitalism and liberal democracy. The collapse of the Second World should have, in theory, meant the end of the ideas of the First World and the Third World as they only made sense as part of a tripartite division of the world. However, the terms had become so embedded in common usage that they continue to be used, although other divisions, such as Global North/Global South and Developed/ Developing countries, have become popular. Most research which considers the regional groupings, focuses on defining or problematizing the Third World or Global South, rather than considering the First World. This reflects a common process within categorization whereby what is viewed as ‘normal’ or ‘desirable’ is not interrogated, despite the fact that it is as socially con structed as any other category. Eurocentric ideas of ‘de velopment’ and ‘progress’ have often meant that the First

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First World

Figure 1 First World c. 1950. From map data & Maps in minutesTM (1996).

World is taken as the norm and other parts of the world are contrasted with it. The countries which emerged from the Soviet bloc, both through the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the move toward capitalism of the Eastern European countries, are sometimes referred to as ‘transitional’ economies. However, within this category, there are countries such as the Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan which have levels of economic and human development similar to many countries in the Third World, while others such as Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Russia are much more similar to the First World nations. Politically, ten of the ex communist states or republics are now members of the European Union (EU).

Economic Diversity As with all attempts to classify countries, there are vast differences between countries within one category, not to mention major differences within countries. In 1987, for example, Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDP p.c.) in the First World ranged from US$5500 in Greece and US$5597 in Portugal to US$17 615 in the USA and US$16 375 in Canada. High levels of national income per capita are still used as a form of classification, but this does not necessarily just encompass the countries which are usually referred to as First World. The World Bank classifies countries into four categories based on Gross National Income per capita (GNI p.c.) (see Table 1). In 2007, the high income country classification included the long standing First World countries, but also included other countries, most notably South Korea, Singapore, Israel, and a number of the oil rich states in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (see Figure 2). Thus, the countries with First World levels of national

Table 1

World Bank country classification criteria 2007

Classification

Gross National Income per capita (GNI p.c.)

Low income Low middle income Upper middle income High income

US$935 or less US$936 US$3705 US$3706 US$11 455 US$11 456 or more

From World Bank (2007). World development report 2007, Report of the World Bank. Washington, DC: World Bank.

economic wealth vary greatly in terms of the structure of their economies, and also their political systems. They are also involved in different political groupings and al liances. Coherence within this group of countries is therefore unlikely and demonstrates the problems with classification systems. Within countries there can also be significant differ ences. The First World classification was, and continues to be, based on national level indicators, but in many cases wealth does not ‘trickle down’ equally to all members of the population. This may be related to spatial differences, for example, between rural and urban areas, but there may also be social differences, between men and women, between different classes, and also income distinctions based on ethnicity. The term ‘Fourth World’ has sometimes been used to refer to economic ally and socially marginalized indigenous groups in the First World. These included First Nations peoples in Canada and aboriginal populations in Australia. Income inequalities are often measured using the Gini Index which runs from 0 to 100 with 0 being absolute equality in expenditure or income and 100 being absolute in equality. Thus, the higher the index, the more unequal the wealth distribution within that country. Among the World Bank classified ‘high income countries’ in 2007, Gini Index figures ranged from 24.7 for Denmark and 24.9 for Japan to 42.5 for Singapore and 40.8 for the

First World

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Figure 2 High income countries, July 2007. Based on data from World Bank (2007) and map data & Maps in minutesTM (1996).

Figure 3 Countries with high HDI, 2007. Based on data from UNDP (2007) and map data & Maps in minutesTM (1996).

USA. Figures were not available for the oil rich states of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, among others.

Levels of Human Development The use of First World as synonymous with ‘developed’ needs to recognize the diversity of development meas ures. In the late 1980s, the United Nation Development Program (UNDP) devised the ‘Human Development Index’ (HDI) as a measure of development which goes beyond simple economic measures such as GNI p.c. The concept of ‘human development’ encompasses standard of living (measured using GDP p.c.), education (meas ured using adult literacy rates and gross enrolment rates), and health (using life expectancy at birth). Using these measures, the UNDP calculates a composite index – the HDI – which runs from 0 to 1; the higher the figure, the higher the level of human development.

According to the UNDP, countries with a high HDI in 2007 were much more widespread than those with high incomes according to World Bank criteria (see Figure 3). This reflects an understanding of development which does not see education and health levels as highly cor related with income levels. Thus, while all countries with a high income had high HDI in 2007, there are many others which had achieved high levels of human devel opment at a national scale, without a GNI p.c. figure of over US$11 456. Many Eastern European ‘transition’ countries fall into this category, as do many Latin American countries. Malaysia was classified as a high human development country in 2007, as was Libya – the only African country to achieve this status. Achieving high levels of human development can come through economic wealth, but the patterns of high HDI also reflect the way in which state policies, par ticularly in health and education, can create conditions for improved human development despite lower levels of national wealth. For example, Cuba achieved an HDI

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Figure 4 OECD members, 2007. Based on data from www.oecd.org and map data & Maps in minutesTM (1996).

figure of 0.838 with an estimated GDP p.c. figure of US$6000 and Libya’s HDI of 0.818 was achieved with a GDP p.c. figure of US$10 335. These figures take into account purchasing power parity (PPP) to recognize different costs of living within different economies. These mismatches between levels of human development and economic wealth, demonstrate how problematic the concept of First World is, once the original political categorization has broken down.

Global Political and Economic Power In the post Cold War period, new groupings have emerged on the global stage representing new forms of alliances. In some cases, these groupings have strong representation from earlier First World countries, but increasingly countries which were previously in the Second or Third Worlds are making their mark and challenging the idea of First World meaning economic ally and politically dominant. The G8 is an organization with its roots in the 1970s Cold War world. Government representatives of the original G6 of advanced industrial democratic countries (France, the USA, the UK, West Germany, Japan, and Italy) met to discuss key economic and political chal lenges both domestically and internationally. By the late 1970s this group had become the G7 with the addition of Canada, and representatives of the European Com munity also attended meetings. Thus, most of the countries of the First World were part of this organiza tion. Notably, exceptions included Australia and New Zealand. Following the collapse of the USSR, Russia joined in 1998, so the group became the G8. In some sense, this group of countries represents a new First World in terms of economic and political power. But such a position should not be taken for granted. The Organization for Economic Co Operation and Development (OECD) has a similar history. Its members

have high levels of economic development and are broadly classified as capitalist democratic states. This again has overlaps with the original definition of the First World, but as of 2007, membership was more diverse, including Mexico, Turkey, South Korea, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Slovak Republic (see Figure 4). Countries apply to become a member and the OECD Council decides whether to extend mem bership and on what conditions. The organization aims to promote economic development in its member countries by sharing expertise. Since World War II, global governance institutions such as the United Nations, World Bank, and World Trade Organization (WTO) have been set up as a way of promoting peace and economic stability. Of course, the agendas set by these organizations are not neutral and have often reflected the priorities and ideologies of the First World, particularly the United States and countries of Western Europe. However, the economic rise of some countries in the Global South, combined with the in creasing mobilization of alliance within the Global South, has meant that First World dominance in certain fora has been challenged. This has been particularly noticeable in the WTO trade talks. Since it was established in 1995, the WTO has promoted reductions in trade barriers between its members and sought to uphold a rules based trading system. Countries which become members of the WTO have to abide by the rules and members can appeal to the WTO in situations where they believe other mem bers have broken the rules. Despite such a system, criticisms have been leveled at the WTO regarding the possible uneven application of the rules in favor of First World or Global North countries. In 2003, the WTO members met at Cancuń, Mexico for trade talks. Prior to the meeting a group of Third World or Global South countries created an alliance called ‘G21’ as a negoti ating bloc against the US and EU agricultural subsidies

First World

Table 2

Brazil China Germany India Japan Russia USA

Economic and population indicators GDP (US$ bn) 2005

GDP p.c. GDP p.c. (PPP) (US$) annual 2005 growth rate (1990 2005) %

Population 2005 (millions)

796.1 2234.3 2794.9 805.7 4534.0 763.7 12 416.5

8402 6757 29 461 3452 31 267 10 845 41 890

186.8 1313.0a 82.7 1134.4 127.9 144.0 299.8

1.1 8.8 1.4 4.2 0.8 0.1b 2.1

a

Figure includes Taiwan. Figure refers to shorter period due to changing national boundaries following break up of the USSR. From UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) (2007). Human development report 2007/8, Report of the United Nations Development Programme. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tables 1, 5 and 14. b

policies. G21 members included the increasingly eco nomically important China and India as well as many Latin American countries, Pakistan Egypt and the Philippines, among others. Rather than agreeing to terms proposed by the Global North which had often hap pened in the past, the G21 countries continued to lobby for fairer policies on agricultural subsidies. No agree ments could be made and the talks broke down. These new forms of alliances have continued to make their presence felt within the WTO and other institutions, meaning that assumed power of the First World coun tries is not always exercised in reality. The economic rise of the so called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) in the early twenty first century also demonstrates the problems with a bounded idea of an economically dominant First World based on categories from the 1950s (see Table 2). These countries contain a significant percentage of the world’s population and are growing in importance in relation to both manu facturing production and natural resources. If economic development patterns continue to follow the same trends, then some, or all, of these countries will dominate the world economy in the middle of the twenty first century in a way that the previously designated ‘First World, countries did in the middle of the twentieth century.

Summary The First World was originally identified in relation to the Second and Third Worlds in the 1950s and had a political basis. Over time, the concept has taken on other meanings, most notably to do with levels of economic development and progress. This has meant that the concept continues to be used despite the disappearance of the Second World with the collapse of the communist bloc. It is now used to refer to countries with high levels

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of national income per capita, high levels of urbanization, and high standards of living. However, the number of countries which fall into this category is increasing de pending on the criteria used and the countries have di verse forms of political system, as well as different economic structures. There are also disparities within the countries; the population is not all at First World status. Finally, assumptions that First World countries have the power to shape global economic and political processes are being challenged in some settings. Classifying countries is always open to debate and there are concerns about diversity within national boundaries. The use of the term First World is indicative of this. The debates outlined in this article also stress the ways in which categories are based on assumptions which are often left unstated, such as ‘development’ being de fined in relation to levels of national income or other economic measures. Since the end of the Second World, other terms have become increasingly common to refer to First World regions, such as Global North or De veloped World. While they may be based on different criteria, they too suffer from the problems of diversity and the impossibility of classifying the world’s people and places into a small number of categories. See also: Cold War; Development I; East/West; Eurocentrism; North-South; Second World; Third World.

Further Reading Antipode (1981). Special issue on the ‘Fourth World’, Antipode 13: Issue 1. Auty, R. (1979). World within worlds. Area 11, 232 235. Blaut, J. M. (1993). The Colonizer’s Model of the World. New York: The Guilford Press. Bonnett, A. (2004). The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Eckl, J. and Weber, R. (2007). North South? Pitfalls of dividing the world by words. Third World Quarterly 28, 3 23. Friedmann, J. (1992). The end of the Third World. Third World Planning Review 14, v vii. Fukuyama, F. (2006). The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press (originally published 1992). Langhammer, R. J. (2005). China and the G 21: A new north south divide in the WTO after Cancuń. Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy 10, 339 358. UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) (1990). Human development report 1990, Report of the United Nations Development Programme. Oxford: Oxford University Press. UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) (2007). Human development report 2007/8, Report of the United Nations Development Programme. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, G., Meth, P. and Willis, K. (2009). Geographies of Developing Areas: The Global South in a Changing World. Abingdon: Routledge. World Bank (2007). World development report 2007, Report of the World Bank. Washington, DC: World Bank. Worsley, P. (1979). How many worlds? Third World Quarterly 1, 100 108. Worsley, P. (1984). The Three Worlds: Culture and World Development. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

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Relevant Websites http://www.g8.utoronto.ca G8 Information Center. http://www.oecd.org Organization for Economic Co operation and Development. http://www.undp.org United Nations Development Program homepage. Follow links to the Human Development Report for national statistics.

http://www.worldbank.org World Bank homepage. Follow links for statistics on national economies. http://www.wto.org World Trade Organization homepage.

Flaˆneur, The A. Latham, UCL, London, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Arcades An architectural form that emerged in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century and was popular until the second half of the nineteenth century. Arcades consisted of a pedestrian passage, flanked by a row of facing shops, open at both ends and roofed in glass and iron roof. They usually connected two parallel streets. They were a historical precursor to both the department store and the enclosed shopping mall. Baudelaire, Charles (1821–67) A Parisian poet, journalist, and publisher. Seen by many as the first poet of the modern city. Closely associated with the figure of the flaˆneur. Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940) A Jewish German cultural historian, social critic, and philosopher. Key member of the Frankfurt School of critical social theory. Most well known for his writings on the emergence of a commodified, capitalist, metropolitan culture in nineteenth-century Paris. Commodification The process though which something of no previous market value becomes part of the market economy, that is to say, becomes a commodity. The term originates from the writing of Karl Marx. Flaˆneurie The activity of being a flaˆneur. In contemporary Western cities individuals are constantly switching between a kind of flaˆneurie and other more instrumental ways of navigating through urban space. Modernity The sense that the world is defined by constant social, economic, and technological change. Situationist International/Situationism An international left-wing avant-garde artistic and philosophical movement active from late 1950s to the early 1970s. The work of the situationists centered on critiquing the commodification of everyday life. Central to this critique was the artful generation ‘situations’ that ruptured the otherwise smooth surface of everyday commodity culture. Surrealism An avant-garde artistic movement that originated in Paris in the early 1920s. Surrealism sought to tap directly into the creative powers of the human unconscious.

Introduction The flaˆneur was a nineteenth century literary figure. Originating from the French verb flaˆneur, which literally

translates to ‘stroll’, the flaˆneur has come to personify a key moment in the emergence of a consumption driven, modern, capitalist urban economy. This importance is largely a product of the emphasis that two key writers placed on the flaˆneur: Charles Baudelaire, a mid nine teenth century Parisian poet and critic, and Walter Benjamin, a mid twentieth century interpreter of Baudelaire, and the rise of consumer capitalism. Both Baudelaire and Benjamin saw the flaˆneur as being not simply defined through their style of movement, but by the fact that they are walkers or pedestrians. The flaˆneurs are much more defined by their stance toward – and their relationship to – the urban crowd within which they find themselves. The flaˆneur represents the urban individual who has come to terms with the anonymity and confusion of the urban crowd to such an extent that he is genuinely at home within it. As such, the flaˆneur is significant in three ways. First, he (as will be seen, the flaˆneur is almost always a man) embodies an exemplary way of experi encing and making sense of the energy and confusion of the commodified spaces of the modern metropolis. Sec ond, and simultaneously, the flaˆneur also represents a particular artistic and critical sensibility that manages to reach beyond the ephemeral nature of urban life and somehow captures its essence. The flaˆneur in the figure of the artist, the writer, or the journalist represents the possibilities of creative becoming within the capitalist city. Third, if the flaˆneur represents the possibilities for self becoming within the capitalist city, he also maps out the limits of this self fashioning, and this self becoming.

The Emergence of the Flaˆneur The flaˆneur first emerged as a recognizable social form in 1830s’ and 1840s’ Paris. Closely associated with the dandy – an English term from the Regency period that referred to aristocratic men who cultivated an exagger ated interest in fashion and manners – the flaˆneur was a person who delighted in the experience of being among urban crowds. What was distinctive about the flaˆneur, and which marks him off from the regency dandy is his ab sorption in the everyday minutiae of the city. Whereas the dandy was principally concerned with his own self stylization (again like the flaˆneur, the dandy was always a man), and as part of that self stylization always finding himself in the most fashionable places, the flaˆneur’s focus is more democratic: he is interested in everything and anything that is going on in the city. As Charles

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Baudelaire, the most eloquent and committed champion of the flaˆneur and flaˆneurie, wrote of the flaˆneur: The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. (Baudelaire, 1972: 399 400)

This is an interpretation of the flaˆneur that is in some senses idiosyncratic and distinctive to the writing of Baudelaire. If, along with Baudelaire, novelists such as Honore´ de Balzac and Victor Hugo saw dignity in the flaˆneur, for many other writers he was, in fact, little more than an idler. Indeed, a popular French dictionary published at the start of the nineteenth century de scribed the flaˆneur as ‘‘a lazybones, a loafer, a man of insufferable idleness, who doesn’t know where to carry his trouble and his boredom’’ (Ferguson, 1994: 24). But for Baudelaire, in finding a home in the urban crowd the flaˆneur makes himself a paradigmatic figure of modernity: he is a heroically modern individual. This notion of the flaˆneur as a heroic figure is crucial to the flaˆneur’s enduring intellectual significance. In elevating the flaˆneur from a simple ‘idler’ or blase´ dandy, Baudelaire transforms the flaˆneur from an incidental figure to someone who stands at the intersection of three forces that defined nineteenth century modernity: (1) the rise of the large industrial city, (2) the dissolution of traditional social bonds that anchored social identity, and (3) the ever in creasing commodification of everyday life. The flaˆneur as an ideal type manages both to give form and meaning to the maelstrom of change that defined the nineteenth century metropolis, and he defines his own identity through his interaction with the social forces pressing that change. Equally, however, the experience of the flaˆneur also embodies the precariousness of the social relationships that define modernity: the flaˆneur as someone who enjoys the urban crowd and who is also dependent upon it to make a living as a writer or an artist. While Baudelaire himself drew inspiration for his own descriptions of the flaˆneur from a range of contemporary Parisian literary and artistic figures, most notably the illustrator Constantine Guys, it is his own life and his own writing that most tellingly express the experience of the flaˆneur.

Charles Baudelaire, the Urban Crowd, and Nineteenth-Century Paris Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821 and, apart from spending part of this childhood in Lyons and 2 years near the end of his life in Belgium, he lived his entire life there. Paris was, so Baudelaire claimed, the only place where he

managed to obtain either happiness or inspiration. It was only in Paris, its streets, cafes, parks, and apartments, that Baudelaire found what he needed to live anything like a worthwhile life, and the form of life that he pursued owed almost everything to that city. Although Baudelaire had a small inheritance, he earned his living as a journalist, publisher, and poet. Yet, what is striking about his work is how he reinvented the role of the poet, as that of the poet as flaˆneur. Baudelaire sought to be a poet of the now, the everyday, a poet of the modern city. He wrote how ‘‘Parisian life [was] rich in poetic and wonderful subjects’’ and how in the city ‘‘[t]he marvellous envelops and sat urates us like atmosphere.’’ Indeed, the very form and rhythm of his poems are fundamentally embedded within the labyrinth of the city. For example, in describing the stirrings of prostitutes and criminals in the early evening in the poem ‘Dusk’, Baudelaire wrote: One hears the hissing kitchens close at hand, The playhouse screech, the blaring of the band. The tables at the inns where gamesmen sport Are full of swindlers, sluts, and all their sort. Robbers who show no pity on their prey Get ready for their nightly work a day Of cracking safes and deftly forcing doors, To live a few days more and dress their whores. (Baudelaire, 1993: 193)

This scene could only be of a city. But, while dependent upon the urban, Baudelaire’s poetry does much more than simply reflect what is already there. In the poem above Baudelaire throws image upon image, the plain (the kitchens) upon the sinister (swindlers, sluts, and all there sorts), all the while twisting every image toward a demonic pitch (the kitchens hiss, the playhouse screeches, and the perhaps homely inn is full of swind lers), and then carelessly lets these demonic forces out into the city night (where, in the next verse, they set to slaughtering), as after all – and to return to the ordinary – the criminal has to work to live like everyone else. The movements of Baudelaire’s poems through the urban landscape transform that landscape: his verse throws it out of balance, and reconfigures it. They also do some thing else that is quite remarkable. They take ordinary urban scenes, ordinary urban inhabitants, and make them the legitimate subject of art. What is striking about Baudelaire’s writing is how it involves a kind of mimesis: his poetry literally takes on the qualities of the city it describes. This empathy for the world around oneself is one of the defining features of the flaˆneur, and it is one of the key abilities that distinguishes him from the simple ‘badaud’ or ‘gaper’. In his prose poem ‘The Crowds’, Baudelaire (1991: 44) describes how ‘‘the Poet benefits from an incomparable privilege which allows him to be, at will, himself and others.’’ [y] ‘‘He

Flaˆneur, The

makes his own all the professions, all the joys, and all the sufferings that chance presents to him.’’ Following the argument of the German cultural historian and social critic Walter Benjamin, one might say that in his poetry Baudelaire attempted to get hold of his world mimetic ally. To do this required a remarkable, and carefully cultivated, modality of interacting with the urban crowd: a perceptual modality that involved a subtle and complex play between distance and closeness, empathy and boredom. The flaˆneur had to open himself up to the crowd, while simultaneously protecting himself from the danger of sensory overload that the urban crowd pre sented. Baudelaire described how entering a crowd was like moving ‘‘into an enormous reservoir of electricity.’’ It is the flaˆneur’s ability to channel this energy through his own empathy that gave him his artistic power, and it was also his control of this empathy that protected him from being consumed by the crowd. The flaˆneur and Baude laire’s empathy was founded on an ability to turn his empathy back in on the self so that it did not escape back on to the original empathic object. It was this distance that allowed Baudelaire to remain, despite the poetically empathic communions occurring within him, apart from the world he observed. In addition, the flaˆneur’s mobility was one more defence: at any time he could detach himself from one scene and move on. Much of Baudelaire’s poetry speaks of the distinct pleasures, and possibilities for momentary transcendence, that come through the play of surface within the urban crowd, most famously in the sonnet ‘To A Woman Passing By’: Around me roared the nearly deafening street. Tall, slim, in morning, in majestic grief, A woman passed me, with a splendid hand Lifting and swinging her festoon and hem; Nimble and stately, statuesque of leg. I, shaking like an addict, from her eye, Black sky, spawner of hurricanes, drank in Sweetness that fascinates, pleasure that kills. One lightning flash y then night! Sweet fugitive Whose glance has made me suddenly reborn, Will we not meet again this side of death? Far from this place! too late! never perhaps! Neither one knowing where the other goes, O you I might have loved, as well you know. (Baudelaire, 1993: 189)

In these lines, the urban crowd exists as a source of excitement and mysterious surprise. Indeed, the crowd’s movement defines the very way in which this figure is encountered. Both the poet and the woman are caught within the crowd’s momentum, their meeting can only be a fleeting one, could only be ‘one lightning flash’. This

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ephemerality, with all the unspoken mysteries that reside within it, is the very pleasure of the crowd; in it, no tedium, no mundanity has any chance to gain hold. It was this kind of ephemeral, yet moving moment that Bau delaire sought to give form to in his writing. As Benjamin (1973: 125) wrote commentating on ‘To a woman passing by’: ‘‘This is the look [y] of the object of a love which only a city dweller experiences, which Baudelaire cap tured for poetry, and of which one might not infrequently say that it was spared, rather than denied, fulfilment.’’ If Baudelaire welcomed and indeed championed the powers of this momentarily shared gaze, it is also clear that something was absent within it. Baudelaire describes the women in ‘To A Womany’ as aloof and distant, and unlike the poet she does not appear to be touched by the encounter as he is. Indeed, there is a vein of coldness that runs through ‘To A Women Passing By’. To understand this coldness one must return to the dynamics of the flaˆneur’s empathetic gaze. Baudelaire talked of the artist among the crowd as ‘‘like a mirror as vast as the crowd.’’ Indeed, a process of narcissistic mirroring lies at the very heart of the flaˆneur poet’s gaze. It is clear that the women in ‘To a woman passing by’ makes eye contact with the poet. But the shock felt by the poet, and its resonance as expressed within the lines of the poem, are profoundly monological. The closing ‘‘O you I might have loved, as well you know’’ has nothing to do with the sighted women’s thoughts, and everything to do with the poet’s. How are we to understand this apparent failure of the flaˆneur to really connect? The most common reading of this failure is that it represents less the failure of the poet flaˆneur himself, and to read his lack of connection as an allegory of the profound social and economic transfor mations within which Baudelaire the flaˆneur was bound. Following an argument first put forward by Walter Benjamin in 1973, in his book Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism, the gaze of the flaˆneur can be seen as bound to the process of commodification that was coming to pervade all relationships in the nine teenth century metropolis. Within this world, the joys of looking enjoyed by the flaˆneur were the joys of the market, of the value free fall of the commodity: The intoxication to which the flaˆneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers. If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls for it would have to see in everyone the buyer into whose hand and house it wants to nestle. (Benjamin, 1973: 55)

But for the flaˆneur, his free roaming gaze is only one half of the commodification process: the other was the individual’s entrapment within the very forces on which

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that gaze played. As Benjamin wrote: ‘‘Baudelaire knew how things really stood for the literary man: As flaˆneur, he goes to the market place, supposedly to take a look at it, but already in reality to find a buyer’’ (quoted in Buck Morss 1989: 185).

The Historical Decline of the Flaˆneur and His Intellectual after Life It is important to stress the achievements of Buadelaire’s writing. As Benjamin (1973: 154) wrote, the singular achievement of Baudelaire was that he took ‘‘something lived through’’ and gave it ‘‘the weight of experience.’’ But in any case it was not the failure of the flaˆneur as writer or artist that led to the demise of the flaˆneur in the pure form expressed in Baudelaire works. It was the changing structure of Paris itself that led to the flaˆneur’s decline: the construction of the city’s grand boulevards and the rise of the department store in the later half of the nineteenth century robbed the flaˆneur of his natural habitat. The construction of the grand boulevards gen erated large increases both in the volume and speed of nonpedestrian traffic throughout Paris. These increases made the act of strolling the streets evermore precarious. At the same time, the development of the department store and the parallel decline of Paris’ many arcades robbed the flaˆneur of another of his key haunts. Depart ment stores were places to loiter in, but only for a certain purpose: that of shopping and consumption. This was definitively not what the flaˆneur and his flaˆneurie was about – even if the department stores had been prepared to be accommodating of his presence. So what has happened to the flaˆneur? If he has dis appeared from the streets of Paris, the flaˆneur continues to have a significant place in much contemporary writing on the contemporary city. There are three main ways that the flaˆneur’s enduring significance can be traced. First, the kind of emphatic gaze described by Baudelaire and carefully explicated by Benjamin can be seen as the original or ‘Ur’ form of the consumerist gaze that defines a great deal of everyday life. What is significant about the gaze of the flaˆneur is that it has become a taken for granted, natural, way of looking and relating to much of the contemporary world. All sorts of ways of looking and interacting with people and things are defined through the kind of emphatically distanced, mobile, gaze like that of the flaˆneur. Television, cinema, shopping, driving, the Internet, all involve a modality of relating to the immediate environment that is very close to that of the flaˆneur – even if it has been stripped of the heroic element that so concerned Baudelaire. What is inter esting about this interpretation of the afterlife of the flaˆneur is the way in which a certain kind of visual flaˆneurie has become universal. It is no longer simply associated

with the male gaze – although that gaze does in all sorts of ways remain privileged – and also with the visual practices of women. Indeed, some commentators such as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman see the decline of the nineteenth century flaˆneur as intimately tied up with the commercially driven feminization of urban space: urban public space comes to be thoroughly defined by the commercial calculus of salesmanship and profit, and the shopper – who is ordinarily a woman – becomes a pas sively empathetic vessel responding only to the carefully crafted phantasmagorias constructed by marketers. Thus, as the cultural historian Susan Buck Morss writes: The flaˆneur becomes extinct only by exploding into a myriad of forms, the phenomenological characteristics of which, no matter how new they appear, continue to bear his traces as ur form. This is the ‘truth’ of the flaˆneur, more visible in his afterlife than in his flourishing. (Buck Morss, 1989: 346)

Second, the flaˆneur remains significant because the kind of heroic stance toward the seductions of the modern city fashioned by Baudelaire continues to be seen as full of artistic – and somewhat ironically – critical possibilities. The list of artists and artistic movements who have been influenced by Baudelaire (or indeed Benjamin’s inter pretation of Baudelaire) is too long to list in detail. Nonetheless, within human geography, three schools of artists are of particular importance: surrealism, the Situ ationist International (SI), and contemporary performance art. Each of these schools has taken Baudelaire’s refusal to be fully seduced by the pleasures of consumer capitalism, along with his intense conviction that the everyday has a power to reveal the beautiful, as the starting point for a wide ranging series of explorations of urban space. Taking the techniques and insights developed by the surrealists, SI, and working with artists and political activists, geog raphers have explored the possibilities of engendering new ways of looking at and engaging with the ordinary spaces of cities. In a more traditionally academic vein, other writers have seen flaˆneurie less as an actual everyday practice, and more as ‘‘an analytic form, a narrative de vice’’ (Jenks, 1995: 148). In these accounts, the researcher becomes, like Benjamin, a kind of intellectual flaˆneur, who attempts through observation, historical detective work, and carefully constructed texts, to guide the reader through the spaces of the contemporary city. Within geography, perhaps the best examples of this type of work are Jon Goss’ essays on the Mall of America – America’s biggest shopping mall at the time Goss published his essays – and Allan Pred’s writing on modernity in Sweden. Finally, the flaˆneur has remained a central starting point for discussions about the emergence of a con sumption dominated, capitalist, urban society in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In this context,

Flaˆneur, The

the focus is less on the figure of the flaˆneur and more on the visual practices that he embodied, that is to say, his flaˆneurie. For social historians and historical geographers working in this area, flaˆneurie has become ‘‘shorthand for the mode of modern urban spectatorship that emphasizes mobility and fluid subjectivity’’ (Schwartz, 1999: 9). Two strands of this kind of work are worth high lighting. The first concentrates on exploring the role of women in the nineteenth and earlytwentieth century metropolis. Early feminist commentators on Walter Benjamin’s writing on the flaˆneur stressed the degree to which the gaze that Benjamin was writing about was profoundly masculine. However, more recent work has emphasized the degree to which women were in fact actively involved in the making of the urban crowd. In particular, a great deal of writing has demonstrated the very real freedoms and possibilities that the new con sumptions spaces of the nineteenth and early twentieth century presented to women. Women might have been precluded from being flaˆneurs in the idealized style of a Baudelaire, but they found ways of engaging in all sorts of types of flaˆneurie that were liberating in quite profound ways. The second strand of work attempts to move be yond the flaˆneur and flaˆneurie and examines how the urban crowds that emerged in the nineteenth century metrop olis were more than just an incoherent mass. In fact, these crowds came to constitute themselves as a kind of public: a kind of imagined community. Through the crowd’s interaction with a range of novel forms of mass media that were emerging at the same time – from illustrated newspapers, popular theaters, to wax museums and cinema – the second half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of new forms of mass spectatorship. In these accounts, the ‘badaud’ or ‘gaper’ that Baudelaire and Benjamin were so dismissive of regains his or her his torical dignity. They become players in the construction of a new kind of urban community. In this work the flaˆneur does not disappear, but he does rather lose his central place in the story of nineteenth century urban modernity. See also: Consumption; Cultural Geography; Marxism/ Marxist Geography I; Public Space; Retail Geographies.

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Further Reading Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2002). Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge: Polity. Baudelaire, C. (1972). Selected Writings on Art and Literature, Charvet, P. (trans.). London: Penguin. Baudelaire, C. (1993). The Flowers of Evil, McGowan, J. (trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bauman, Z. (1995). Life in Fragments. Essays in Postmodern Morality. Oxford: Blackwell. Benjamin, W. (1973). Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso. Buck Morss, S. (1986). The flaneur, the sandwichman and the whore: The politics of loitering. New German Critique 39, 99 140. Buck Morss, S. (1989). The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Featherstone, M. (1998). The flaneur, the city and virtual public life. Urban Studies 35(5 6), 909 925. Goss, J. (1993). The ‘magic of the mall’: An analysis of form, function, and meaning in the contemporary retail built environment. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83(1), 18 47. Goss, J. (1999). Once upon a time in the commodity world: An unofficial guide to the mall of America. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89(1), 45 75. Jenks, C. (1995). Watching your step: The history and practice of the flaneur. In Jenks, C. (ed.) Visual Culture, pp 142 160. New York: Routledge. Knead, L. (2001). Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth Century London. New Haven, CT: Yale University. Latham, A. (1999). The power of distraction: Distraction, tactility, and habit in the work of Walter Benjamin. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17(4), 451 473. Lees, L. (ed.) (2004). The Emancipatory City: Paradoxes and Possibilities? London: Sage. Pinder, D. (2005). Arts of urban exploration. Cultural Geographies 12(4), 383 411. Pinder, D. (2005). Urban encounters: De´rives from surrealism. In Adamowicz, E. (ed.) Surrealism: Borders/Crossings, pp 39 64. Oxford: Peter Lang. Pred, A. (1995). Recognizing European Modernities: A Montage of the Present. London: Routledge. Prendergast, C. (1992). Paris and the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell. Rappaport, E. (2000). Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Savage, M. (1995). Walter Benjamin’s urban thought: A critical analysis. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13(2), 201 216. Schwartz, V. (1999). Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin de Siecle Paris. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shaya, G. (2004). The flaneur, the badaud, and the making of a mass public in France, circa 1860 1910. The American History Review 109, 1. Tester, K. (ed.) (1994). The Flaneur. London: Routledge. Wilson, E. (1991). The invisible flaˆneur. New Left Review 191, 90 110. Woolf, J. (1985). The invisible Flaˆneuse: Women and the literature of modernity. Theory Culture and Society 2(5), 37 46.

Fluidity–Fixity P. Adey, Keele University, Keele, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Mobility–Moorings Dialectic A phrase coined by John Urry and Henri Lefebvre that describes the mutually reinforcing relationship between fixity and fluidity. Fluidity and fixity are enabled and sustained by each other. Obduracy A term which is suggestive of permanence, rigidity, or fixity. It is less about immobility but an inability to change – the capacity for something to endure and remain the same. Pointillism Developed by Marcus Doel, the term denotes a style of thinking which presupposes that social action occurs ‘in’ places of a container-like character. Relational Materialism An approach developed from science and technology studies and actor-network theory that views objects and things as both social and material entities. Matter, from this perspective, is the achievement of a matrix of relationships. Sedentary and Nomadic Metaphysics Two ideas or imaginations of mobility in social and cultural thought. These ways of seeing the world cast fixity or fluidity as their starting points, or their norms.

[T]here’s no holding the world still and looking at it. (A. N. Whitehead, 1979) [T]he human intellect feels at home among inanimate objects, more especially among solids, where our action finds its fulcrum and our industry its tools. (H. Bergson, 1911)

academic!). If someone stops us in mid sentence, we might protest, ‘‘I was just getting into the flow of things.’’ The first example suggests a certain kind of immobility through the toughness, or persistence of the person we might consider ‘hard’. Conversely, the second example draws upon the metaphor of a fluid. Being ‘carried away’ implies that we are being pulled or drawn along down a stream – the momentum of the academic in full flow. For most people these metaphors might be used in everyday life as a means to describe or comprehend our world. This article shows how geographers deploy them in exactly the same way – as a means to make sense of processes, relations, and geographies. This article sketches out how conceptions and meta phors of fluidity and fixity are embedded and routinely enacted in geographical theory and research. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the discipline, the article does not limit itself to the words of just geographers, but also pertinent works which have influenced them. The article covers how conceptions and metaphors of both fluidity and fixity are embodied within geographical epistemol ogies, ontologies, and research methodologies. This article starts by tracing out the contradictions between approaches which have privileged fixity within their analysis, and conversely those which have given primacy to fluidity. The prioritization of either of these two perspectives, it is suggested, imbues such approaches in moralistic meanings and significance. The rest of the article complicates these points of view. Perspectives which presuppose a dialectic of fluidity and fixity are examined, as is the understanding of these terms within research methodology. The article finishes with a con sideration of the relationality of fluidity and fixity, and further research directions being developed now or imminently.

Introduction

Sedentarism and Nomadism

Fluidity and fixity seem fairly banal and material notions. Indeed, for human geographers, they may appear more relevant to the study of rivers, coasts, and lava flows. However, fluids and fixities are also powerful meta phorical devices that we use on a daily basis. Consider this: when describing someone who we might think of being very able to physically protect themselves, ‘‘he’s (or she’s) hard’’ might be a popular phrase used to describe them. Likewise, we might be involved in a conversation where we get carried away with what we are saying (something that occurs rather commonly for an

Lisa Malkki once argued that the inclination to fixity surmounted to a ‘sedentarist metaphysics’: the propensity to see the world in fixed and bounded ways. It assumes a sedentary way of life, one based on routines and habits in particular places. From the humanistic geographical tradition, a number of authors saw that one’s fixity within a certain place could furnish senses of social attachment. These sedentary lifestyles could enable the creation of what is known as a ‘sense of place’. Through fixity the socially barren landscape of space would be turned into a place of meaning. The home was characterized most

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commonly in this way. However, casting place and home in fixed and bounded ways serves to construct a binary opposition between fixity and mobility. Posed as a polar opposite to fixity, fluidity tends to be given the reverse meanings; it opposes the fixity of a meaningful place by its inherent supposition of change. Furthermore, by moving out of or beyond places meant the loosening of the social bonds one might form with a specific place. In a sense, fluidity and mobility were everything fixity and immobility were not. These sorts of perspectives have been questioned by approaches coalescing around more fluidic principles, underpinned by what we consider to be a ‘nomadic metaphysics’. More recent post structural thought, drawing upon the processual thinking of philosophers, such as Whitehead and Bergson, has driven efforts to rethink the fixity of the world anew. A more mobile world is understood alongside more mobile concepts. Cultural theorists discuss how mobility offers a way out of the fixed power structures of authority. For many authors, the airport, the rhizome, or the nomad provide useful meta phors which critique essentialist and foundational ways of thinking. Here fluidity and mobility are romanticized as acts of freedom and democratic choice, whereas fixity and immobility are seen as the product of domination and subjugation. For De Certeau, the idea of resistance was described by the process of a fluid – a wave washing over the solidity of the fixed and enduring power of the rock. The work of many geographers has resembled these styles of thought. The powerful frictionless fluidity of the nomad even featured in Halford Mackinder’s 1904 essay on the Geographical Pivot, which discussed the ‘mobilities of power’ generated by transportation technologies in relation to the fixed land they moved over. In essentia lizing fluidity with power, and fixity with geopolitical vulnerability, for Mackinder the topographical charac teristics of the Asian steppe offered the free flowing mobilities that would permit an army to move swiftly across the continent, and seize global power. Geography’s quantitative revolution saw its own romantification of fluidity. Flows and fluids took on economically productive associations with the movement of people, goods, and capital in circuit models of trans portation networks and location analysis. Indeed, motorways were compared to the hierarchical structure of river systems. The object of the fluid was even given ontological status as the basis for the human individual, understood as nothing but a flow for behavioralists such as George Zipf. Although as Emily Martin describes in more recent scholarship, the body as flow is not always interpreted in such a positive way, as leaky flows and fluids threaten to overcome the integrity of the skin. Given the more recent preeminence given to no madism and fluidity within post structural geography, several scholars have warned of the problems given to

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prioritizing fluidity over fixity, or nomadism over sedentarism. Two of the main critiques in this area have revolved around freedom and transformation. We can deduce that the act of equating nomadism with escape works to essentialize fluidity to a universal. Of course, this is incredibly problematic given that we do not all have the same access to mobility. Furthermore, by allo cating these kinds of meaning to fluidity one forgets how some mobilities are entirely forced and restricted. In deed, the intersecting flows of the airport terminal have been repeatedly used to characterize new kinds of no madic existence, and even thought, regardless of the in equity of the airport experience. However, Tim Cresswell has gone far to show us that while these ideas and concepts might have found the focus of so many academic discussions, they have not remained in this domain. Rather, it has been suggested that both nomadic and sedentary metaphysics can inform opinions surrounding immigration or strategies of protest and state techniques of control. For instance, David Atkinson shows how both sedentarist and nomadic ways of thinking and living were enacted in the Bedouin Sannusi resistance to the Italian fascist regime in Libya. The conflict saw sedentarism and nomadism pitted against each other through the different styles of warfare. For the Bedouin, guerrilla style tactics were employed which relied upon freedom of mobility, independence, and little concern with a territory to defend. Conversely, the Italians enacted a technique of fixity and contain ment. By constructing concentration camps they confined the nomads into an enclosed and disciplined space characterized by immobility. In the contemporary world, incoming illegal migrants and asylum seekers are inter preted, given meaning, and potentially treated along similar lines. Immigrants are described as a flood, a rising tide that threatens the stability and homeplace of par ticular localities. Comparable terms have been used to describe the in movement of tramps, homeless people, and travelers. Rendered a leaky container, place is transgressed.

Dialectics Other approaches have worked less to separate fluidity and fixity but understand how they are intimately related. For David Harvey, the bounded and fixed senses of place favored by some humanistic geographers may, in fact, be seen as reactions to the threatening and unsettling world of globalization and the fluidity of capital. Harvey’s ap proach to place runs in parallel to the kind of dialectical relationship between fixity and fluidity that, he argues, is so fundamental to the perpetuation of capitalism. For Harvey, and several of the authors who have fol lowed his work, the hallmark of the capitalist system is

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the dialectical relationship between fluidity and fixity. Drawing on Karl Marx, Marshall Berman, and later Al fred North Whitehead, Harvey argues that the circu lation of global capital is dependent upon an apparent tension between fixity and fluidity. This tension is evi dent in urban spaces which function as ‘spatial fixes’. The city is a site in which production and consumption are located in just such a way that capital accumulation can continue. For Harvey, these fixities are only ever tem porary states of equilibrium. Crisis points meet the city with creative destruction, restructuring it for the next surge of capital accumulation. In other words, the per petual running of capital cannot occur without the fixities around which it will accumulate and later depart. In his reading of Whitehead’s notions of enduring objects in Justice Nature and the Geography of Difference, Harvey is at pains to show that neither can there be any fixity without the generation and movement of capital to construct and maintain it. Such processes always meet crises. At such a point the fixities created by the accu mulation of capital melt into thin air torn down repeat edly like the casinos in Las Vegas. New locations and spaces upon which accumulation occurs will be de veloped once more. Neil Brenner has probably done most to extend Harvey’s and Henri Lefebvre’s thought on this topic through the notion of spatial scales. According to Bren ner, scales as territorial entities offer another dimension to that of flat spatial fixities; and capital’s need to terri torialize and accumulate within fixed and discrete geo graphical spaces is repeated in a scalar dimension as various geographical scales offer hierarchical and boun ded territories for capital accumulation. Furthermore, Brenner shows how throughout the last three centuries, such scales have been reworked and reorganized as the economic status quo reaches crisis point. Consequently, the reconfiguration of territorial spatial scales allows the processes of territorialization, de territorialization, and re territorialization to successfully occur on new rela tively immobile geographical infrastructures. Running alongside this work, scholars writing from the perspective of travel and mobility have noticed similar relationships occurring in the organization of societies and lives that occur on the move. It is con sidered that mobilities and immobilities are dialectically linked, and actually need each other in order to sustain various systems and processes. Borrowing ideas from complexity theory, John Urry defines this relationship as the ‘mobility–moorings dialectic’ in which complicated and large scale mobility systems rely upon rigidly fixed infrastructures to support them. For Urry, and later ex plored by Adey, the infrastructural mooring of the airport offers an obvious example of this correlation. The airport is a system of both relatively immobile materials such as bricks, concrete, and mortar; infrastructural pipelines of

lead, copper, as well as spatially sunk and located insti tutional arrangements and contractual obligations. Such a fixed entity provides mooring to the vast matrix of the global airline system. Without this immobility, the airline system would simply not work. One might make similar comparisons to the immobility of the telecommunication and satellite communication infrastructures that permit the technologies of mobile and satellite phones and tel evision, or even wireless broadband.

No Holding Still Another strand of work which orbits the fluidity–fixity debate concerns discussion about the world which we study. How geographers simply comprehend and make sense of the world and the very research processes they engage in, can be seen to operate according to pretty well fixed understandings. We might think of this as a particular kind of ontology – a theory of a world that resembles a snapshot image – a world captured, fixed – a world that ‘is’. Such perspectives have undergone several critiques in recent years. In terms of research methodology, various efforts have been critical. Sarah Whatmore borrows from science and technology theorist Isabel Stengers to rethink the ‘field’ as a passive world out there that lies down and plays dead for researchers to capture and probe. Such a prospect is reminiscent of Whitehead’s famous maxim that, ‘‘there’s no holding the world still and looking at it,’’ echoed in Dicken and Lloyd’s rather overlooked complaint, ‘‘we can’t just go out and ‘stop the world’ (Whitehead, 1979).’’ As an alternative approach, drawing on the writings of Simonden, Deleuze, Guattari, and others, geographers have begun considering not the world as it is, out there for us to study, but rather a world that is in becoming. This is a world that cannot just be, but that is brought forever into being. Conceiving the ‘field’ as a fluidic, active, complicated, and messy terrain to encounter problematizes the issue, as does an understanding of the mobilizing process of research itself. Drawing on Bruno Latour, Whatmore outlines the ‘energetic exchanges’ set in motion by research practice. Practices which literally put the world into play, as researchers take evidence back to the lab, compress earth and soil underfoot, or cause pedestrians to bypass their questionnaire. While this relationship between fluidity and fixity may provoke geographers and academics to rethink their re search methods, it has also disturbed conceptions of the spatial relationships geographers are concerned with. In particular, it de solidifies the more or less container like ideas of space and place that provide stages to social action. Every space is in motion says Nigel Thrift. Taking an ‘ontogenetic’ approach is not to suggest that things and events are understood to happen in place, a conception

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Marcus Doel describes as ‘pointillism’ which we can re late back to sedentary thought. Rather this kind of ap proach is to understand how social action does, in fact, ‘take place’. For Doel it is to understand the ‘myriad currents’ that traverse and indeed make space. It is not a question of ontology, but an ontogenetic animation of space, action, or subjectivity. It is an engagement with a world or a subject always turning into something else. Body centered, phenomenological ontologies that orbit around body practice, are encompassed in some of the ideas deployed by geographers who have rethought the relationship between subjectivity and landscape. J. B. Jackson had started this some time ago as he pondered the flexible life of the mobile home dweller in the American landscape. But more recently John Wylie’s rendering of his ascendance of Glastonbury Tor postures a less than static individual, but rather an ‘interinvolve ment’ between landscape and the body. One’s subjectivity is not pre given a priori, just as space, is never simply ‘there’. It is not out there, fixed, for us to find. Rather through the act of walking up the Tor one is assembled and performed in the very practice of strolling along or hiking upwards. For Mike Crang, this kind of space–time acts less like a container of action, but is deformed and made by it; as one’s ‘self ’ is assembled, so to is the world. Geographers influenced by Ingold’s phenomenological attitude to landscape suggest that practices of walking and dwelling do not occur on top of the landscape, acting ‘upon’ it, but they occur with it. Fixity in this sense be comes an illusion taken from the academic attempting to separate themselves from it. However, it is important to consider that this kind of genesis may be helped and nudged along. Dodge and Kitchin, borrowing from Adrian Mckenzie, argue that the in becoming status of the world is brought about by its augmentation – its manipulation by various software, electronic, and information communications systems. This ‘technicity’ serves to marry up space with software code. In this way, almost every action and movement we make becomes recorded, tracked, traced, and modified by software in one form of another. It also means that space is increasingly more reflexive. Spaces react to presence and shape and change accordingly. These sorts of outlooks appear grounded in a world always in motion. The illusionary nature of fixity is ex plained and surpassed by notions of connection, rela tionality, and transformation. Even notions such as identity are seen as fluid and ephemeral, coalescing into semipermanent forms before moving on again. Having said that, some authors have become increasingly dis satisfied with such an emphasis. In comparing the thinking of Judith Butler and Luce Irigary, Jenny Robinson questions Butler’s favoritism of instability, of identities constructed anew through performativity. While suggestive of potential social transformations,

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Robinson asserts that Butler elides the sticky and hard to change fixities of identity which do not alter and transform, or are simply replayed rather than replaced. Similarly, Hester Parr makes the point that many people with mental health problems seek not fluidity but sta bility – safe psychological and social boundaries. More over, Rose and Wylie complain that efforts to embrace the ‘relational’, ‘mobile’, and ‘fluidic’ in fields like land scape, can go too far, flattening out arrested topographies of disconnection, isolation, and immobility. Fixity, it seems, is making a comeback.

Special Effects The final work we can dwell on concerns relationships and effects. In fact, for a group of authors the charac teristics of fixity and fluidity emerge as the effect or an accomplishment of a series of relationships. Perhaps the most exemplary instances of this work can be found in the recent focus upon architecture within human geog raphy. Drawing on theorizations of ‘relational material ism’ from science and technology studies and theorists, such as John Law, work in this area suggests that we think of buildings as ‘building events’. In this view, the apparent stasis or movement of a building is brought about by an effect, by the sum of a particular relationship. Geog rapher Lloyd Jenkins follows Law and Anne Marie Mol’s example of a World War I bunker through which the materiality of the bunker is not only given by the com position of the concrete it is made of, but rather by the relations it is involved in, such as the weather, reinforcing rods, and more. The interactions of a host of people, things, and climate act in such a way that the very old building is maintained and made durable. Consider a wall. Clay, sand, cement, water, carbon, the energy from the fire that dries the bricks, rain, the various acids in the rain, particulates of dust and more intersect with a shoe, a hand, a football, the seat of one’s pants, skin, blood, light, to create what we know as a wall. In deed, the wall may be protected through legislation, ownership rights, and a host of social forces that stop the wall being vandalized or knocked down. While these relationships hold the wall together and create its sense of fixity, other kinds of relationship can make it much more fluid. Jane Jacobs expands on the example of the Ronan Point high rise disaster in the 1970s to consider the complex webs of associations and materialities that added up to the big ‘event’ of the high rise apartment, and the event of its collapse. Gas, pipes, matches, load bearing flanks, Mrs Ivy Hodge, the designers, building regu lations and codes of practice, all interacted together to produce the building’s fluidity. Failure or breakdown is not the only time when flu idity is apparent within the networked sociality of

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buildings or individual objects. In Law’s example of a Portuguese merchant ship, he describes how the various people, objects, and things that make up the ship hold together in relatively solid relationships. The network immutability realizes the task of holding together a working sea going vessel, thereby, giving the ship its mobility. However, these kinds of immutable mobiles have come under question because of the absolute fixity given to the internal space of the network, or its topology. Mol and Law discuss how some objects work precisely because of the internal fluidity of their network. Thus, something like a Zimbabwean bush pump continuously changes. Its internal structure can be modified and altered. Parts break off it and can be replaced; its shape and form alters slightly as it is used differently in dif ferent places. Its network is fluid, a mutable mobile.

Fixed and Fluid Futures As Lackoff and Johnson put it, fixity and fluidity seem to be metaphors we live by. Their characteristics have been applied to subjects as diverse as the workings of capitalism to the meanings given to asylum seekers; from under standings of landscape to the form of buildings. They seem to be terms geographers have put to work in order to better comprehend systems of knowledge, to get at how the world functions, or to theorize the research method ologies we might employ. They are not, furthermore, just academic for they are metaphors rooted in thought, daily language, and practice. Let us now conclude with some of the directions research in this area looks to be going. Degree, Phase, and State Most simply, there appears to be an increasing effort, and need, to begin to differentiate these terms. Like concepts such as mobility, fluidity and fixity can become rather opaque and all encompassing, hiding the innumerable differences between one fixity and another, one fluid and another. Work in this area might begin to see fixity and fluidity as two ends on a continuum, with varying degrees in between. Alternatively, notions, such as ‘phase’ and ‘state’, as recently delineated by Martin Jones, Law, and Mol, and explored in fields, such as pedestrian dynamics, can take into account the ability for fluids or fixities to shift and change state from one moment to the next, phasing in and out. Moving beyond the binaries of fluids and fixities, Mol and Law also suggest that the properties of fire may helpfully describe the flickering presences of certain relationships. Obduracy, Endurance, and Persistence We also need to ask, why is it that some things do not move? Why do some things endure or attain a sense of

persistence? Some of the most innovative work at the interface of fluidity and fixity debates concerns this very question. Anique Hommels’ study on obduracy and the unbuilding of cities may be one such area geographers and social scientists will follow. Building upon ideas surrounding relational materialism from the social con struction of technology (SCOT) and actor network the ory (ANT), Hommels provides a comprehensive analysis of what holds the form of cities together. Focusing on several urban areas in the Netherlands, Hommels argues that a lack of participation and the momentum of tradi tion can make a city hard to budge. Citizens, closed out of the planning process may find their urban spaces particularly rigid and unmalleable. Conventions and traditions in city design and use can work to solidify structures further. Affect, Materiality, and Sensation Another indication of the future of research in fluidity and fixity may be found in the writings of geographers such as Ben Anderson who discuss and theorize the no tion of affect. Arguing that we take account of the phe nomenological and affective dimensions of subjectivity, David Bissell suggests that we consider the corporeal experiences of fixity and immobility. Such an approach elides dualisms of fluidity and fixity, by exploring how the most immobile acts of waiting for a train, listening to music, or being bored, can evoke innumerable affective resonances and transitions in the body’s activity or pas sivity; anger, agitation, excitement, tiredness, fatigue, and hunger are some among many examples. In this sense, the corporeal affective modes of activity go beyond fluid displacement or a fixed position, and overcome roman ticized and productivist associations. See also: Actor-Network Theory/Network Geographies; Humanism/Humanistic Geography; Poststructuralism/ Poststructuralist Geographies; Social Studies of Scientific Knowledge.

Further Reading Adey, P. (2006). If mobility is everything then it is nothing: Towards a relational politics of (im)mobilities. Mobilities 1, 75 94. Anderson, B. (2004). Time stilled space slowed: How boredom matters. Geoforum 35, 739 754. Atkinson, D. (2000). Nomadic strategies and colonial governance: Domination and resistance in Cyrenaica, 1923 1932. In Sharp, J., Routledge, P., Philo, C. & Paddison, R. (eds.) Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination and Resistance, pp 93 121. London: Routledge. Bergson, H. (1911). Creative Evolution. New York: H. Holt. Bissell, D. (2007). Animating suspension: Waiting for mobilities. Mobilities 2, 277 298. Brenner, N. (1998). Between fixity and motion: Accumulation, territorial organization and the historical geography of spatial scales. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16, 459 481.

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Certeau, M. D. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Crang, M. (2001). Rhythms of the city: Temporalised space and motion. In May, J. & Thrift, N. J. (eds.) Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, pp 187 207. London: Routledge. Cresswell, T. (2006). On the Move: The Politics of Mobility in the Modern West. London: Routledge. Dicken, P. and Lloyd, P. E. (1990). Location in Space: Theoretical Perspectives in Economic Geography (3rd edn.). London: HarperCollins. Doel, M. A. (1999). Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Hommels, A. (2005). Unbuilding Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, London. Jacobs, J. M. (2006). A geography of big things. Cultural Geographies 13, 1 27. Jenkins, L. (2002). Geography and architecture: 11, Rue du Conservatoire and the permeability of buildings. Space and Culture 5, 222 236. Jones, M. (2005). Towards phase spatiality: Regions, regional studies and the limits of thinking space relationally. Paper presented at the Regional Studies Association Conference, Aalborg, Denmark. Law, J. and Mol, A. (2001). Situating technoscience: An inquiry into spatialities. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19, 609 621.

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Mackinder, H. J. (1904). The geographical pivot of history. Geographical Journal 170, 298 321. Malkki, L. (1992). National Geographic the rooting of peoples and the territorialization of national identity among scholars and refugees. Cultural Anthropology 7, 24 44. Martin, E. (1998). Fluid bodies, managed nature. In Braun, B. & Castree, N. (eds.) Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium, pp 64 83. London: Routledge. Massey, D. B. (2005). For Space. London: Sage. Parr, H. (2006). Mental health, the arts and belongings. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31, 150 166. Thrift, N. (2006). Space. Theory, Culture and Society 23, 139 146. Urry, J. (2000). Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty First Century. London: Routledge. Urry, J. (2003). Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity. Whatmore, S. (2003). Generating materials. In Pryke, M., Rose, G. & Whatmore, S. (eds.) Using Social Theory, pp 89 104. London: Sage. Whitehead, A. N. (1979). Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. London: Free Press. Wylie, J. (2002). An essay on ascending Glastonbury Tor. Geoforum 33, 441 454. Zipf, G. K. (1949). Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology. Cambridge, MA: Addison Wesley Press.

Focus Groups A. J. Secor, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Dialogic Data Data that consist of the interchanges between research participants. Focus Groups Group discussions for the purposes of research that are comprised of a moderator, a set of questions, a number of recruited participants, and a determined time and place within which the discussion takes place. Focus Group Guide An outline of questions that is used to structure group discussion around particular issues. Moderator The person who leads focus group discussion. Snowball Technique A sampling method in which research subjects are selected by a chain of referral, with one set of contacts providing further contacts.

Focus groups are group discussions constructed for the purposes of research. Their key elements are a moder ator, a set of questions, a number of recruited partici pants, and a determined time and place within which the discussion takes place. Focus groups have also been called group interviews or in depth groups. Researchers using these terms have emphasized that, in adapting focus group methods from marketing research, social scientists can modify group techniques to facilitate more in depth and informal discussion among partici pants. Focus groups have become a notable method in geography since the mid 1980s. They can be used as a primary research method or in conjunction with other methods, such as interviews, surveys, or ethnographies. The strengths of focus group research arise from the interaction of participants. Focus groups provide a forum in which research participants can discuss and debate issues of common concern. Researchers have the op portunity to observe the range of statements and pos itions taken up and the ways in which they are deployed in relation to one another. Focus groups allow researchers to observe social interaction, albeit in a setting of their own construction. Group dynamics are not a flaw of the method, but rather the point of it. Depending on the goals and techniques of the moderator, focus group conversations can work to decenter the researcher and thus destabilize some of the power inequalities that in here in the research relationship. In a focus group dis cussion, participants typically interact more with each other than they do with the researcher. Participants are

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able to shift the terms of the discussion and question each other, allowing new framings of the central research questions to emerge. In addition, researchers have found that, by encouraging participants to share experiences and form solidarities, focus groups can have positive ef fects. For these reasons focus groups have also been adopted as a feminist research method. Focus groups also have weaknesses. Focus group re search is not the best way to collect individual level data. A focus group with eight participants should not be thought of as eight interviews, but rather as a singular event with the unit of analysis being the dialog between participants. Focus groups are not the right method for learning people’s life stories in depth. In addition, group discussions are not appropriate for investigating sensitive topics, especially in closed communities where partici pants may fear that their comments will travel beyond the group. While group dynamics are an important element of focus group inquiry, care should be taken to recognize and interpret the silences of certain partici pants and the dominance of others. Finally, focus groups should not be thought of as a panacea for problems of inequality within research practices. Designing focus group research involves decisions about group composition, recruitment, and procedures. The number of focus groups needed for a study is vari able. Usually, four to five groups on a single topic with a single population are enough to reach saturation, that is, the point where no new themes or modalities of dis course emerge. The relatively low number of groups needed to reach this point is a function of the research method itself, which provides access to discursive pro ductions circulating within particular social contexts. Focus groups usually consist of 4–12 participants, with the optimal number being 8–10. Groups are usually composed to maximize the commonalities among par ticipants and the differences between groups, though the dimensions of difference (age, gender, race, class, em ployment, etc.) vary depending on the study. While it is often advocated that focus groups be comprised of par ticipants who were not previously acquainted, many re searchers have conducted focus group research with preexisting groups. Recruitment of participants will vary depending on the kind of focus groups being conducted. While snowball techniques (in which a set of contacts is asked to provide additional contacts) will work to pro duce groups of people who know one another to varying degrees, the construction of anonymous groups requires wider sampling techniques.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are led by a moderator who may be the researcher or an assistant employed for that purpose. The moderator leads the group to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the goals of the research. A guide, or outline of questions, is used to structure discussion around particular issues. Group discussions usually begin with a statement about the research project and intro ductions from all participants, after which the moderator poses general questions conducive to the free flow of discussion. Sometimes, activities such as writing or commenting upon images or stories are included in the design. Focus groups usually last from 90 to 150 min and are tape recorded with the permission of the participants. In geography, focus groups have been used to in vestigate a wide range of topics, from the experiences of immigrants to the ways in which retailers talk about environmental responsibility. Geographers have em phasized the importance of where group interviews are conducted, since different places may affect both the comfort level of certain participants and the positioning of the researcher in relation to the participants. In her research project with domestic workers in Canada, Geraldine Pratt used focus groups to investigate the ways in which immigrant women and service providers talk about their experiences of work, race, and urban space. Some of these groups were conducted with immigrant women who already knew one another from the Philip pine Women Center. This context was an important part of the focus group research. Because these groups took place within an activist organization, the focus groups easily became spring boards for collective action around issues of shared concern. Analysis of focus group discussions begins during the group meeting and continues through the stages of transcription, coding, and writing. Focus group tran scription is challenging because speakers often speak over one another, interrupt, and use nonverbal cues to

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complete sentences. Notes taken during the group meeting can be very helpful in deciphering transcripts. Focus group transcripts can be coded in the same way as interview transcripts, with themes and interpretations being flagged and cross referenced. Given that focus group research produces dialogic data (i.e., the inter changes between participants), it lends itself to discourse analysis. Such an analysis is attentive to the positions taken up, the framing of issues and debates, and the si lences, omissions, and negated statements that structure the conversation. In short, focus group analysis takes into consideration the ways in which group discussions function as social contexts within which positions and meanings are produced and contested. See also: Discourse Analysis; Interviews: In-Depth, Semi-Structured; Mixed and Multiple Methods.

Further Reading Barbour, R. and Kitzinger, J. (eds.) (1999). Developing Focus Group Research: Politics, Theory and Practice. London: Sage. Burgess, J. (1996). Focusing on fear: The use of focus groups in a project for the community forest unit, countryside commission. Area 28, 130 135. Goss, J. and Leinbach, T. (1996). Focus groups as alternative research practice: Experience with transmigrants in Indonesia. Area 28, 115 123. Krueger, R. A. (1994). Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Limb, M. and Dwyer, C. (eds.) (2001). Qualitative Methodologies for Geographers. London: Arnold. Montell, F. (1999). Focus group interviews: A new feminist method. National Women’s Studies Association 11, 44 71. Morgan, D. (1996). Focus Groups as Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Pratt, G. (2002). Studying immigrants in focus groups. In Moss, P. (ed.) Feminist Geography in Practice, pp 214 229. Oxford: Blackwell. Wilkinson, S. (1998). Focus groups in feminist research: Power, interaction, and the co construction of meaning. Women Studies International Forum 24, 111 125.

Food Networks P. Richardson and S. J. Whatmore, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Actant/Actantiality An entity that is potentially active; the potentiality of an entity to become active, to emerge as an actor through interaction within a network; the recognition of agency as a relational effect constituted by interactions within a network. Agribusiness The agglomeration of all operations involved in the production of a final food product for consumption, such as manufacture and distribution of farm supplies, on-farm production, storage, processing, distribution, marketing, and retailing. Agribusiness is increasingly characterized by vertical integration, whereby individual transnational corporations coordinate (and profit from) activities in all spheres of exchange. Connectivity A term borrowed from mathematics and electrical engineering, now used in post-structuralist social theory, to refer to the existence of pathways between different entities/spaces. Things can be considered as more or less connected, and so the emphasis here is on the intensity and density of connections, rather than on the metric distance between objects. Conceiving of the relations between entities in terms of connectivity results in a nonlinear and multidirectional conception of space–time. Emergence/Emergent Referring to a behavior, property, or pattern that appears through the interaction of a number of entities or actants, and in doing so forms more complex behaviors, properties, or environments as a collective. Emergence is typically associated with an ontology of ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’. Relational Materialism A philosophical approach that understands relations to be a condition central to the experience of embodiment. Material forms or assemblages are considered to be co-dependent, coproduced, and embedded within ecological networks. Within this framework, all bodies are interdependent and are always constituted through and meditated by interaction with other bodies, be they human or nonhuman. Topology The visualization of space as an active, folded, and relational component of socioecological relations rather than as a flat, passive surface on which they take place. Topological spaces are formed interactively, through convergences, connections, and continuities, and by the tensions that exist between fixity and movement.

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The notion of food networks emerged in popular, policy, and academic discourses in the 1990s and is closely al lied with the terminologies of ‘alternative food networks’ and ‘commodity networks’. Less a development of agricultural geography or food geography per se, the notion of a food network has become a key heuristic device within the broader interdisciplinary realm of agro food studies. Conceptualizing the connections be tween the diverse activities and arenas of food pro duction, distribution, retailing, and consumption in terms of a ‘network’ signals a shift in thinking about the space–time of agro food (away from the systems based approaches associated with political economy, which had been dominant). In an influential article, ‘The social construction of international food: A new research agenda’, Arce and Marsden argued that the ‘‘political economy perspective on the food system has reached its empirical and conceptual limits.’’ This statement marks a definitive moment in the turn toward ‘network’ ap proaches in agro food studies. In advocating for network based approaches, Arce and Marsden pointed to the deterministic character of approaching agro food through the lens of political economy. Pre 1990s debates, they argued, had been pre eminently concerned with the application of economistic, industrial restructuring theories to agricultural geography. By the end of the 1990s, however, political economy had developed a wide repertoire of concepts for approaching agro foodstuffs; including agro food systems, food re gimes, agro food complexes, agri business, and commodity chains. The ‘commodity chain’ approach (largely inspired by Freidland et al.’s 1984 seminal work on lettuce) was perhaps the most popular of these and had a tendency to focus analysis on relations between farm businesses and agri chemical suppliers and/or food processing industries. By contrast, the terminology of ‘food regimes’ signaled an analytical focus on the regulatory apparatus sustaining global agricultural markets and prices. What these ap proaches share in common is a central concern with in dustrial food production and an engagement with the corporation and/or the nation state as the principal units of analysis. Within agro food studies, and geography in particular, these approaches came to be heavily critiqued on a number of fronts. The limitations that political economy faced in thinking about (1) the materiality of foodstuffs and the question of ‘nature’, (2) social agency and the (un)making of so called ‘macro scale’ processes, (3) the spatiotemporal contingency of food production and consumption, and (4) the complex role of food

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consumption practices, are most relevant to the develop ment of network based approaches. ‘Globalising food: Agrarian questions and global restructuring’, an influential collection of essays published in 1997, is a key reference that captures the early tensions between political economy and network approaches. The tensions between these approaches have often been distracting, but have sometimes been creative, and efforts to recognize and work through them mark one of the major contributions of geographers to the development of agro food studies. As the ‘Globalising food’ collection foreshadowed, the analytical disagreements and silences between political economy and network based approaches map onto a growing divergence between North American and European agro food research (and politics). These divergences are linked to distinctive theoretical influences, analytical foci, and policy engagement. As such, and also because of the locational bias of the case studies presented in most of the food networks literature, the following discussion is perhaps most salient in the European context.

The Specificities of a Network Approach to Food This section outlines the distinctive features of a network approach to agro food. But first, it must be pointed out that the vocabulary of food networks is not confined to academic domains; food networks are conceived and discussed in activist and policy circles with equal vigor. Nor is this vocabulary deployed from a single philo sophical position. The word ‘network’ is often used as spatial metaphor or visualization device without articu lating the clear ontological or empirical stance that would follow from an engagement with actor network theory (ANT), (which is generally considered to be the most radical network approach). However, despite the variety of ways in which networks are conceptualized, there are four analytical commitments that are distinctive of a ‘food network’ approach: (1) relationality and co production, (2) embeddedness, (3) materiality and embodiment, and (4) topological spatialities. Relationality and Co-Production The network approach is a relational approach. In con trast to approaches that presume modernist divisions (between nature and society, for example), relational approaches understand these divisions as co produced and emergent. That is, instead of assuming autonomous and stable identities, relational approaches assume a radical indeterminacy and aim to avoid imposing a priori definitions and distinctions upon actors/entities. Actors or entities as such are mutually constituted through the relationships that (in)form networks. Importantly, net works, entities, and relations are understood not as

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simply being there, but as in a continual process of interaction and ‘becoming’. Embeddedness An important aspect of the food network approach is an attentiveness to embedded practices, experiences, and situations. Food networks destabilize notions of global and local, or macro and micro, by focusing on embedded interactions. The notion of embeddedness specifically lo cates the interactions that constitute a network. The con cept of embeddedness captures the particularity and context of interconnections, giving consideration to the places and socionatures that inform (and are formed through) a food network. In one of the earliest studies articulating a network approach, Thorne and Whatmore argued that the relations between actors in a Fairtrade coffee network (including farmers, certificatory institutions, consumers, retailers, etc.) should be understood not as in evitable consequences of the systemic globalization of an agro food commodity, as is often portrayed, but as em bedded performances that are highly contingent. By at tending to the embeddedness of food practices and interactions, the network perspective ‘‘problematises global reach, conceiving of it as a laboured, uncertain, and above all, contested process of ‘acting at a distance’ (Whatmore and Thorne, 1997: 290).’’ In other words, looking at em bedded practices enables a critical stance on totalizing discourses and metanarratives, such as globalization. Materiality and Embodiment Networks always have physical dimensions; they are made of bodies that are always interactive and multiple. This is not incidental but integral. Playing with the analytic concerns of ANT, feminism, phenomenology, and environmentalism in various ways, food network approaches engage with the material embodiment of food relations, that is to say, with the metabolic relations between the eater and the eaten. Analytic concern is focused on how the process of eating connects different bodies – the stomach, the laborer, the foodstuff – and on how these connections are integral to the unfolding of the food network itself. For example, when thinking about ‘quality’ food networks, it is clear that the discursive ‘qualities’ of food are always bound up with material relations. This materialist aspect of the network approach contributes to posthumanist debates by considering food as a ‘fleshy vector’ through which heterogeneous entities interact and are incorporated into sociomaterial assem blages. This perspective argues that materiality ‘matters’ in the sense that it makes a difference or affects others, in other words that it has agential capacity. A valuable contribution to this debate is Emma Roe’s concept of ‘things becoming food’, in which she adopts a relational materialist approach to interrogate the process of how

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things become (conceived as) edible. In thinking about the specific material transformations undergone as ‘things become food’, she emphasizes the importance of taking materiality seriously and asks us to address the meth odological challenges that are entailed. Topological Spatialities A key distinction of the network approach is the way in which space–times are mapped and imagined. In contrast to conventional understandings of space as a flat surface over which things move in a measurable way, networks articulate an alternative spatiality that is folded and nonlinear. The location of food production and con sumption are not mapped in terms of the metric distance between them, but in terms of the density and diversity of connections that constitute them. Moreover, whereas a non network analysis of agro food relations might understand the space–time of these relations to be the consequence of a particular economic logic, a network approach interrogates this logic and disrupts the deter minism of such analyses. Following the analytical com mitments to relationality, embeddedness, and materiality, the topological spatialities, (or folded spaces), of a food network are conceptualized as emerging through the situated relation of bodies to other (multiple) bodies. In this way, space–time is considered as relational and dynamic rather than given and static.

Food Networks in Practice What emerges from the food network approach is an overarching interest in connectivity, and from the more radical perspectives, an interest in new (anarchic) forms of connectivity. As discussed, the vocabulary of food networks is not confined to agro food studies or aca demia. In fact, food networks are an excellent example of the ways in which concepts and discourses are mediated through academics, policy makers, social activists, and retailers. This section will point to a few practical mobilizations of the food network approach and flesh out the analytical tropes discussed above. Co-Producing Organic Foods It can be argued that the principles of relationality and co production are well articulated by the discourses and practices of organic farming. Through examining the activities of organic box schemes or organic community supported agriculture, a practical articulation of rela tionality can be discerned. As opposed to traditional farmers’ unions and organizations, these schemes are performative modes of ordering that explicitly enroll multiple actors (including producers, processors, con sumers, and distributors) into the food network, and in

doing so form producer–consumer alliances that are necessarily interconnected and interdependent. In such schemes, for example, the Riverford Organic Vegbox Home Delivery operation in Devon, UK, the commit ment of consumers to producers, and vice versa, anchors a strategic alliance that enables the network to be sus tained. Through consumer commitment, flexibility, and support in the form of regular payment to Riverford for a seasonal and variable vegbox, producers have a depend able and direct market for their produce. Producers and consumers experience a material and discursive con nectivity through the organic vegbox that is central to the constitution of the food network. Riverford’s website tells us of the ‘‘desire to grow something that was not dependent on subsidies but was actually wanted by cus tomers (http://www.riverford.co.uk; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ Similarly, the popular philosophy articulated by the UK Soil Association regarding the production and consumption of organic foods entails a diffuse relational understanding of health and environment. That is, the Soil Association argues that organic food connects eco logical health and human health: ‘‘Eating food grown without unnecessary chemicals is both good for you and the countryside (http://www.whyorganic.org; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ It is purported that ‘‘Organic farmers work with nature. Trees, hedges, and wide un farmed field edges are important on organic farms. These provide habitats for natural predators such as beetles, spiders and birds which control pests (http://www.whyorganic.org; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ These arguments demonstrate how the notion of relationality is expressed by organiza tions that suggest and perform a co production of natures, hedges, habitats, spiders, foods, and human well being in the making of their food networks. Embedding Food The concept of embeddedness, which is central to the network approach, is clearly articulated through agro food movements that seek to localize production– consumption relations. The notion of local food is not the same everywhere – the idea of the ‘local’ is usually full of contradictions and tensions spurred by ethical debates and the politics of scale. Here, a brief discussion of an alternative food movement – FoodShare in Tor onto, Canada – will serve to convey what embeddedness can come to look like in practice. FoodShare was founded in 1985 around a concern for the growth of hunger in the city of Toronto following economic re cession. FoodShare was originally mandated to co ordinate emergency food services, but soon began to explore more restorative methods for addressing issues of food poverty, health, and community well being. As FoodShare’s website states, ‘‘FoodShare tries to take a multifaceted, innovative and long term approach to

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hunger and food issues. This means that we’re involved in diverse actions: grassroots program delivery, advocacy for social assistance reform, job creation and training, nutrition education, farmland preservation and cam paigns for comprehensive food labelling are just a few examples of the areas we work in (http://www.food share.net; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ By promoting pol icies around social and environmental sustainability through community based outreach projects and edu cation, FoodShare explicitly articulate a concern with ‘embeddedness’. That is, they seek to ‘make food a pri ority at all levels of society’ by addressing the particular issues faced in their area, embedding more just and health giving food practices in the everyday lives of situated individuals and communities in Toronto. Materializing Animal Welfare As discussed above, some network approaches – particu larly those influenced by feminist scholarship – take a special interest in embodiment and the shifting materi alities of agro food networks. An engagement with the bodily currency of food networks explicitly connects the health of people, animals, plants, and ecologies at large. In ‘quality food’ campaigns, for instance, the materiality of food is explicitly acknowledged in arguments around food quality and safety. Furthermore, the bodily relation of consumer health, producer health, and environmental health is pivotal to their thought and practice. The UK Soil Association implies these connections when making the argument that ‘‘Organic food is good for your health. No food scares have ever included organic food (http:// www.whyorganic.org; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ Another acknowledgment of the importance of materiality can be seen in the marketing campaign of ‘Rachel’s Organic’ in Wales, who imply that it is the food itself that physically conveys ‘quality’ through how it tastes. Rachel’s Organic explicitly connect tastiness to the conditions of pro duction: ‘‘We believe that caring for our land and animals in a sensitive way results in far better tasting products, which are good for our customers and their families (http://www.rachelsorganic.co.uk; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ Similarly, the Soil Association claims that ‘‘The welfare of animals is not only important for their happi ness but also to produce quality food (http:// www.whyorganic.org; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ Through these practical expressions of materialist modes of thought, health is understood as a material condition that is co produced through bodily relations of the soil–cow–milk–human. As ‘Rachel’ states: ‘‘I strongly believe that the cultivation of healthy soil leads to production of wholesome food which in turn promotes the health and well being of those who eat it (http:// www.rachelsorganic.co.uk; accessed 15 April 2009).’’ That ecological degradation and animal cruelty lead to

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the transmission of ill health through a network of re lations is a well versed notion in the discourses of al ternative food networks. For further examples of the ways in which embodied connectivity is evoked by al ternative food movements, see the activist film ‘The Meatrix’ and the Rachel’s Organics promotional film ‘Dancing Cows’. The Topological Spatiality of Fairtrade Fairtrade is a coded practice and a brand that focuses specifically on the relationship between producers and consumers. There are over 2000 Fairtrade certified prod ucts in the UK, which generally come from developing countries in the global South, such as the coffee farmer cooperative, Coopeldos, in Costa Rica. Producer organ izations that supply Fairtrade products are inspected and certified by the Fairtrade Labelling Organisations Inter national. The label should ensure that producers receive a minimum price covering the cost of ‘sustainable pro duction’ and premium for support of social or economic development projects. In discussing Fairtrade coffee, Whatmore and Thorne argued that strengthening and embedding certain points of connection, such as farmers’ cooperative institutions, agricultural practices, and con sumer knowledge, is important to maintaining flows and connectivities throughout the network. These points of connection are encoded in technologies and legislation – in particular, through labeling and certification practices – which are imperative to the ‘success’ or durability of the Fairtrade coffee network. Traceability and certification practices work by territorializing, or stabilizing, particular social and technical arrangements in order to facilitate the movement of products and strengthen the reliability of the ethical claims that they embody. The Fairtrade label thus makes certain forms of relation durable. In this process, actors are brought into specific material and ethical re lations that remap the coffee network. What is important is that the spatiality of Fairtrade coffee is not understood in terms of the metric distance traversed by the coffee as it travels from the locality of the (globally sourced) producer to the locality of the (globalized) consumer. Rather, dif ferent actors are connected through specific material and ethical relations, and it is the form that this connectivity takes that is important to us, and to the producers/con sumers. The binary concepts of ‘local’ and ‘global’ then seem senseless to the spatiality of this coffee network: through the ethical and material connectivity articulated by the Fairtrade label, the spaces of the global and the local are enfolded.

Conclusion At this point it is important to remember the diversity of network based approaches that are employed by food

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geographers. However, it will by now be clear that the network approach to studying and engaging with the geographies of agro food has lent itself to, and been pi oneered by, movements and critiques that consider themselves to be alternative or radical. What is it about the network approach that makes it so amenable to a politics of ‘alternativeness’? Although the network ap proach is entirely applicable to studying any set of food relations, and does indeed de stabilize the alternative versus conventional distinction that we might crudely imply, there is a particular kind of ethics that is articu lated through the idea of food networks. It is these ethical implications that make it useful to alternative food movements and radical scholarship. In particular, thinking about relations brings the co production and complexity of materiality to the fore and in doing so, calls for a more than human relational ethics. Not only does this approach challenge exploitative relations, it also gives credence to the active participation of ‘nonhumans’ in food networks This relational approach to ethics swells the company of others to whom our responsibilities extend. As an ana lytical approach to agro food relations, the network ap proach facilitates an empirical understanding of the material ways in which human and nonhuman health become intimately connected through the interbodily relations that bind us all together. Although the more radical approaches to agro food have been seen as interrogative of the geometry of power in networks (by showing how struggles build and main tain particular asymmetrical relationships), it is impor tant to note the critique to which it has been subject. Some are troubled by ANT’s abandonment of the social categories associated with inequality – such as gender, race, and class – without which, they believe, no ana lytically or politically adequate means of addressing questions of power is possible. Others are more troubled by the opening up of politics to more than human others which is seen as consequence of a loss of privilege at tributed to human intentions through ANT’s ‘sym metrical’ approach to agency. These critiques reveal the deep seated and often unexamined humanist commit ments of orthodox social science approaches. Readers should consider the different ways in which power and agency are understood and situated from the perspective of ANT and recognize the challenging and, perhaps unfamiliar, philosophical resources on which it draws to adequately assess these critiques. See also: Actor-Network Theory/Network Geographies; Agriculture, Sustainable; Animal Welfare, Agricultural; Commodity Chains; Embodied Knowing; Environment; Food Networks, Alternative; Food Regimes; Globalization and Transnational Corporations; Human-Nonhuman; Local-Global; Moral Economies; Nature; Nature-Culture; Space-Time.

Further Reading Arce, A. and Marsden, T. K. (1993). The social construction of international food A new research agenda. Economic Geography 69(3), 293 311. Bryant, R. L. and Goodman, M. K. (2004). Consuming narratives: The political ecology of ‘alternative’ consumption. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29(3), 344 366. Fitzsimmons, M. and Goodman, D. (1998). Incorporating nature: Environmental narratives and the reproduction of food. In Braun, B. & Castree, N. (eds.) Remaking reality: Nature at the millennium, pp 194 220. London: Routledge. Friedland, W. H. (1984). Commodity systems analysis: An approach to the sociology of agriculture: Focus on agriculture. In Schwarzweller, H. K. (ed.) Research in Rural Sociology and Development, pp 221 235. Greenwich, CT, USA: JAI Press. Goodman, D. (1999). Agro food studies in the ‘age of ecology’: Nature, corporeality, bio politics. Sociologia Ruralis 39(1), 17. Goodman, D. (2001). Ontology matters: The relational materiality of nature and agro food studies. Sociologia Ruralis 41(2), 182. Goodman, D. and DuPuis, E. M. (2002). Knowing food and growing food: Beyond the production consumption debate in the sociology of agriculture. Sociologia Ruralis 42(1), 5. Goodman, D. and Watts, M. (1997). Globalising food: Agrarian questions and global restructuring. London: Routledge. Ilbery, B. and Maye, D. (2005). Alternative (shorter) food supply chains and specialist livestock products in the Scottish English borders. Environment and Planning A 37(5), 823 844. Lockie, S. (2002). The invisible mouth: Mobilizing ‘the consumer’ in food production consumption networks. Sociologia Ruralis 42(4), 278. Lockie, S. and Kitto, S. (2000). Beyond the farm gate: Production consumption networks and agri food research. Sociologia Ruralis 40(1), 3. Morgan, K., Marsden, T. and Murdoch, J. (2006). Oxford geographical and environmental studies series: Worlds of food: Place, power and provenance in the food chain. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Murdoch, J. (2000). Networks A new paradigm of rural development? Journal of Rural Studies 16(4), 407 419. Murdoch, J. (2006). Post structuralist geography: A guide to relational space. London: SAGE. Raynolds, L. T. (2002). Consumer/producer links in Fair Trade coffee networks. Sociologia Ruralis 42(4), 404. Roe, E. (2006). Things becoming food and the embodied, material practices of an organic food consumer. Sociologia Ruralis 46(2), 104 121. Sage, C. (2003). Social embeddedness and relations of regard: Alternative ‘good food’ networks in south west Ireland. Journal of Rural Studies 19(1), 47 60. Whatmore, S. (1995). From farming to agribusiness: Global agrifood networks. In Watts, M. & Johnston, R. J. (eds.) Geographies of global change. Berlin: Blackwell. Whatmore, S. (2002). Transgressing objectivity: The monstrous topicality of GM food. Geographies: natures, cultures, spaces, pp 120 145. London: SAGE. Whatmore, S., Stassart, P. and Renting, H. (2003). What’s alternative about alternative food networks? Environment and Planning A 35(3), 389 391. Whatmore, S. and Thorne, L. (1997). Nourishing networks: Alternative geographies of food. In Goodman, D. & Watts, M. (eds.) Globalising food: Agrarian questions and global restructuring, pp 287 304. London: Routledge.

Relevant Websites http://www.fairtrade.org.uk Fairtrade Standards, The Fairtrade Foundation, London, UK. http://www.foodshare.net FoodShare.

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http://www.rachelsorganic.co.uk Rachel’s Organic. http://www.riverford.co.uk Riverford Growers, Riverford Organic Vegetables. http://www.soilassociation.org Soil Association.

http://www.themeatrix.com The Meatrix Films. http://www.whyorganic.org Providing information on Organic Issues.

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Food Networks, Alternative D. Goodman, University of California – Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA M. K. Goodman, King’s College London, London, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Alternative Food Networks New and rapidly mainstreaming spaces in the food economy defined by – among other things – the explosion of organic, Fair Trade, and local, quality, and premium specialty foods. In these networks, it is claimed that the production and consumption of food are more closely tied together spatially, economically, and socially; however, the politics and practices of alternative food networks have more recently come under critical scrutiny from geographers and others as a narrow and weakly politicized expression of middle- and upper-class angst. Convention Theory An influential theoretical approach to studying Alternative Food Networks. Identifying the norms, qualifications, and organizational forms involved in network coordination which uphold different conventions of ‘quality’, convention theory offers a general typology to distinguish product quality in terms of ‘orders of worth’ that specify the different logics orchestrating their production and governance. Conventionalization Thesis With particular reference to California, the conventionalization thesis suggests that large-scale organic producers are integrated into national and global commodity networks, while holistic, ‘movement farmers’ or ‘artisanal’ growers serve low-volume, localized markets. This is also known as the ‘bifurcation’ thesis of structural change in US organic agriculture. Embeddedness Drawn from a dialog between Granovetterian economic sociology and heterodox economics the so-called embeddedness in alternative food networks refers to the ‘re-placement’ of food within its social, cultural, economic, geographical, and environmental contexts in response to the ‘disembedding’ forces of conventional food networks. Ethical Trading Initiative Formed in the 1990s in the UK through a coalition of supermarkets, transnational corporations, activists, and development NGOs, the Ethical Trading Initiative focuses on the enforcement of international labor standards at the points of commodity production in the global South across food and a number of other commodities, such as flowers and clothing. Fair Trade Developing from political ‘solidarity’ movements in the 1960s and networks of ‘alternative trading organizations’ created by development NGOs, church groups, and charitable institutions, fair trade was conceived originally as an alternative political project intended to replace the conventional international trading system; it now extends to all manner of foods,

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handicrafts, and manufactured goods. Constructed as a ‘politicized’ movement and market, fair trade is distinguished by its commitment to more-equitable development for poor Southern farmers and producers through direct trading links with Northern consumers who pay a premium price and ‘social dividend’ for goods such as coffee and bananas. Quality Foods These are foods – such as organic commodities, those with definable (and often certifiable) places of origin, and ‘distinguished’ by taste – that, through both materially and socially constructed means, affect a host of assignable characteristics that attempt to set them apart from ‘other’ foods. Reflexive Localism This refers to a theoretical project, vis a` vis local food movements and their conceptualizations, that works to get beyond the typical normative and potentially conservative/reactionary localisms that have become de rigeur in local food activism and scholarly work. Spatial Dynamics of Care This is where, in alternative food networks, an ethics of care is constructed across the places and spaces of food production and consumption to connect, for example, fair trade producers and consumers, and organic consumers to a pesticide-free countryside. These connections are fostered through both material and discursive means, the latter often through highly ‘meaningful’ labels of origin and/or images of producers designed to invoke an affective response. Sustainable Agriculture Movements These are heterogeneous and increasingly fragmented congeries of NGOs, food and agricultural activists, government institutions, and academics working to make conventional agriculture more environmentally and socially sustainable. Some argue that the more ‘radical’ early incarnations of sustainable agriculture have been ‘captured’ by a technocentered and flat political agenda at the expense of a more robust and holistic food democracy.

Introduction: Alternative Food-Scapes Several interrelated processes, not entirely synchronous, but with cumulative effect, are transforming and di versifying modern food provisioning in Western Europe, North America, and many other parts of the world. These processes have created economic and cultural spaces,

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often designated as niche markets, for alternative food networks (AFNs), whose products – organic, Fair Trade, local and quality, premium specialty foods – are differ entiated from those typically furnished by mainstream food manufacturers and retailers (see Figures 1–5). In their infancy, AFN products were distributed through new institutional forms parallel to mainstream channels, such as charity shops, food cooperatives, farm ers’ markets, community supported agriculture (CSA), or box schemes. However, the rapid growth of AFN sales, particularly to more affluent income groups, attracted the attention of the large scale retail supermarkets, which now provide shelf space for AFN products, often under their own labels, and increasingly subject AFN producers to the rigorous cost price disciplines of supply chain manage ment. The differentiated products supplied by AFNs and their spectacular growth has reinforced perceptions that ‘quality’, in its various socially constructed and material dimensions, rather than price, is becoming the new basis of competition in food provisioning. The ‘turn’ to quality, and the scope it provides for further product differen tiation, neatly complements the competitive strategies of firms in the highly oligopolistic sector of food retailing. The neatness of fit between nonprice quality attributes and oligopolistic product differentiation strategies is il lustrated perfectly by organic products in the UK, where supermarkets currently account for 70% or more of sales. The interface between ‘alternative’ and ‘conventional’ food provisioning thus is an increasingly permeable and highly contested terrain. While the distinction between these two systems retains some heuristic value and

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provides insight into the eco social imaginaries and materialities of these provisioning schemes, this article highlights the competitive and cultural political dy namics unfolding along this interface as ‘alternative’ food products enter mainstream channels of provision. Addi tionally, we emphasize the contested nature of the spatial, political economic, and cultural conceptualizations of what ‘AFNs’ constitute in popular and academic discourse. Quality, its material and discursive construction in farm fields, the market place, and on the table, is the fulcrum of this struggle to control modes of integration between food production and consumption. The turn to quality associated with the rise of alternative food prac tices and the proliferation of AFNs thus potentially represents a significant reconfiguration of producer– consumer relations and the spaces where these are performed. Although the production ‘moment’ in these alternative agro food circuits dominates academic re search, the quality ‘turn’ and the growth of AFNs typi cally are attributed to processes whose effects work largely through the demand side as consumer knowl edges, perceptions, and economies change. These processes include heightened consumer anx ieties about the safety and nutritional value of standardized industrial foods as the result of episodic food scares (e.g., BSE; Escherichia coli; salmonella; foot and mouth disease; and avian influenza). This crisis of confidence in mass produced ‘placeless and faceless’ foods is articulated particularly by higher income con sumers – the ‘worried well’ – with the means to ‘opt out’ from mainstream provisioning. In this climate, rising

Figure 1 Scenes from Inside London’s Borough Market: An Organic Statement. Here, in the iconic Borough Market in London, the ‘practice’ of AFNs is readily apparent. On one of the banners hanging over the ‘Total Organics’ food stall inside the Market is a declarative statement that ‘‘quality’’ foods ‘‘won’t bite back’’; this goes to the heart of AFNs’ charm offensive through their often combined sense of ‘safer’ and ethical food.

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Figure 2 The ‘Vision’ of AFNs. One of the important storylines of AFNs is that they provide the knowledge to consumers of where their food is coming from and how it has been produced. For the Ginger Pig, this vision means consumers knowing they are getting free-range and traditional pig breeds but also, in a slightly humorous twist, free-range ‘farmers and butchers’. Also note the other trappings announcing the quality of the goods given that they supply a well-known ‘foodie’ cafe´ and have garnered attention from the BBC and The Observer Food Monthly.

Figure 3 ‘Knowing’ Northfield Farm and its Rare Breeds. Northfield Farm’s bid for quality comes through this proud statement: ‘‘Our aim at Northfield Farm is to produce and source premium quality Beef, Lamb & Pork; naturally reared & humanely killed. We specialise in rearing and sourcing Rare and Traditional breeds of cattle, sheep & pigs. We believe the producer & consumer must strive together to ensure traceability and excellence & 2004.’’ Thus, rare and traditional-bred livestock is one of the ‘alternative’ selling points of Northfield Farm and one of the ways they work to differentiate themselves in the kinds of quality meats they provide.

affluence and growing income inequalities have trans lated these omnivore food anxieties into effective mon etary demand for quality products of known provenance, transforming cultural norms of ‘good food’, taste, and social distinction.

The prominence of provenance and place – ‘terroir’ – in new constructions of quality has received further im petus from the parallel, closely related rise of ethical consumption, and a ‘moral imaginary’ of food which encompasses ecological sustainability, social justice,


Figure 4 ‘‘How Did it Get Here?’’: Tracing the Cheese. This is an hour-by-hour photo-display of where the Comte´ cheese wheels in the right of the picture come from; the traceability of the cheese is foremost in the presentation of this quality food.

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cultural integrity, and animal welfare, for example. This has certainly been the case with transnationally sourced fair trade foods, such as coffee, and is encapsulated in the so described novel ‘moral economy’ created by the dis cursive and material producer–consumer connections that characterize fair trade networks. Here, moral geog raphies work to stitch together the various ‘poor’ places of production in the underdeveloped South with those of the ‘spectacular’ places of consumption in the North in the name of transnational development for small farmer communities. Price premiums and guaranteed price floors mix with the emplaced solidarity images of farmers to facilitate a ‘developmental consumption’ that allows Northern consumers the opportunity to convert their ‘labor’ of choosing fair trade goods into on the ground Third World development. This morally charged ‘charm offensive’ of developmental consumption is echoed in Northern AFN discourses in the precepts of consuming to support the livelihoods of small farmers, rural com munities, and ecological farming through the purchase of organic and local foods. Finally, in the European Union (EU), meso and macro level developments are creating new opportuni ties for AFNs and quality food products as the gradual reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is slowly attenuating the pronounced sectoral emphasis on agricultural production and commodity support mechanisms. Impelled by the trade liberalization mandate of the World Trade Organization (WTO), this narrow and sectoral productivist focus is giving way

Figure 5 Re-producing AFNs: Organic and Artisinal Goods in Erlangen, Germany. A modern German incarnation of an AFN in the well-known form of the farmers’ market. Organic and artisanal goods, like this bread maker, are at the core of this AFN in Erlangen’s city center.

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to a pluralistic, regionally based and more endogenous concept of integrated rural development. Thus, the in stitutional space and budgetary resources created by CAP reforms have encouraged some scholars to see AFNs as the vanguard of the ‘new’ model of rural de velopment, as advocated in the 1996 Cork Declaration, the Agenda 2000 reforms, and more recent EU policy documents. That is, innovative expressions of a new paradigm of European rural development are marking the transition away from the productivist, crisis ridden model of conventional industrial agriculture into AFN lands ‘beyond’. These disparate processes, operating at different scales and conjunctures, have combined to give AFNs ‘room for manoeuver’ in food provisioning systems, despite the continuing hegemony of mainstream industrial foods and the retail multiples. The quality ‘turn’ manifest in AFNs has stimulated a significant body of academic research and a wide repertoire of theoretical approaches.

Approaching AFNs: Understanding the Spaces of Quality, Embeddedness, and Ethics The liminal, yet integral, situatedness of food in agri cultural nature, social labor, and culture gives rise to multiple material and discursive constructions of quality. This polysemic character of food, in turn, explains the complex analytics of the quality turn to alternative food networks. The main conceptual categories used to expli cate this turn in food provisioning and consumption are the interrelated characteristics of quality (e.g., taste, ‘dis tinction’, etc.), embeddedness, trust, place, and the local. The contested and contingent nature of these con structs, and the associated difficulties of deciphering their complex expression in material environments, social be havior, organizational forms, discourse, and power re lations, defines the theoretical and empirical challenge posed by AFNs. The literature on AFNs has drawn but sparsely on meso level theories and concepts. These include the network paradigm, actant network theory, conventions theory, and culture economy approaches. More avowedly sectoral or industry perspectives have extended com modity chain analysis in elaborating concepts such as ‘systems of provision’ (SOPs), short food supply chains (SFSCs), and global value chains (GVCs), to give greater analytical purchase on issues of governance, power re lations, and the competitive dynamics of economic rent. Other allied but more culturally inflected approaches draw loosely on the ‘commodity cultures’ approach in order to ‘follow the thing’ as these alternative foods move from and among sites of material and symbolic pro duction and consumption.

Of the meso level approaches, convention theory has been by far the most influential in AFN research since it speaks directly to the ‘economy of quality’. It offers a general typology to distinguish product quality in terms of ‘orders of worth’ that specify the different logics or chestrating their production and governance. It thus identifies the norms, qualifications, and organizational forms involved in network coordination and which up hold different conventions of quality. The ‘worlds of production’ variant of this perspective has been used in the AFN literature to conceptualize the quality ‘turn’ as a contested process of transition. That is, from the ‘com mercial’ and ‘industrial’ worlds, with conventions based respectively on price and standardized quality norms, to the ‘domestic’ world, with quality conventions founded on trust, tradition, and place, and the ‘civic’ world, where conventions incorporate social justice and environmental sustainability. The concept of social embeddedness has been drawn, somewhat uncritically, from the dialog between Grano vetterian economic sociology and heterodox economics, united by their critique of the asocial abstractions of neoclassical economic theory. This productive dialog influenced the ‘new’ industrial geography and research on Marshallian industrial districts in the late 1980s, and also informs more recent debates on the economy– culture divide in human geography. However, this genealogy and recent reworkings of the concept of embeddedness have received scant attention in the AFN literature. Similarly, major theoretical advances in human geography, notably relational conceptualizations of place, space, economy, and the politics of scale, find little re flection in AFN research, despite the critical importance attributed to the local and provenance. The meso level perspectives deployed in AFN re search are production centered and focus primarily on the characteristic features of different modalities of economic coordination. Consumers and consumption are seen as mere appendages to the production process or as abstract inhabitants of ‘spaces of quality’ in typologized ‘worlds of production’. Reconstructive efforts have sought to overcome this neglect by theorizing consumers as social, relational, and reflexive constituents in AFNs and deploying the notion of consumer knowledges. These efforts attempt to transcend the false dichotomy between production centered perspectives of society and cultural approaches, which respectively theorize consumption practices in terms of Marxian commodity fetishism or Durkheimian cultural totemism. This ‘economic/cultural faultline’ is also reflected in the unhelpful academic division of labor between agricultural ‘production’ soci ology and the ‘cultural’ sociology of food. Other authors have addressed this issue by developing notions of con sumer aesthetics to analyze cultural formations of pro duction and consumption in comparative perspective, as


in the polar cases of US fast food and Italian slow food or standardized and artisanal culinary traditions. In further efforts to get beyond these false dichotomies, recent work on AFNs has sought to explore and charac terize the expansive ‘moral geographies’ that inhabit and often underpin these networks. Extending the so called normative turn in human geography, research has focused on the ‘economy of regard’ fostered in farmers’ markets and the ‘spatial dynamics of concern’ in constructing the spaces and places of fair trade. Here it is argued that an ‘ethics of care’ is woven in the tissue of the imagined and material connections between knowing consumers and distant ‘others’ in the diverse forms of free range chickens and cattle, pesticide free streams, artisanal bread makers, and Ghanaian cacao growers. There remains great scope for deeper theorization along these lines, in particular through a careful and critical exegesis of the limits and possibilities of these nascent conceptualizations of ethic ally drenched ‘alternative economic spaces’ for concrete political action and social justice. In the main, the AFN literature has neglected theo retical development in favor of empirically grounded, case study analyses of alternative food production and provisioning networks, new economic forms, and insti tutional mechanisms of governance and policy. This emphasis has yielded ‘thick’ ethnographic descriptions of individual local networks and detailed analyses of the burgeoning number of food accreditation, labeling, and promotional schemes devised to provide new bases for rural development. These generalizations extend broadly across AFN scholarship. Nevertheless, despite a shared microanalytic toolkit, the US and Western European literatures diverge significantly on several points. These two branches of scholarship project different sociopolitical imaginaries, which can be attributed to their respective research constituencies. A parallel literature has arisen on glob alized AFNs, but one heavily framed by the precepts of Third World development and the quality turn’s pen chant to ‘certify everything’. Thus, an implied project of this article is to suggest that further conceptual and empirical cross fertilization needs to open up between Northern focused AFN work and that on Southern ‘de velopment focused’ AFNs.

The American Experience: Conventionalization, Entrepreneurialism, and Localism In the US, researchers are in conversation with activist communities and typically have strong normative com mitments to the social movements contesting the hegem ony of the mainstream, corporate industrial food system and the allied agricultural technoscientific complex.

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Correspondingly, AFNs and, more generally, sustainable agriculture movements (SAMs) figure as material and symbolic expressions of eco social imaginaries of alter native, local and regional ‘foodsheds’, whose scaling up, it is argued, would create an ecologically sustainable, egali tarian, and socially just food system. In the US literature, AFNs and SAMs thus are assessed in terms of their op positional status and ‘transformative potential’ to deliver progressive systemic change in food provisioning. Measured against this standard, SAMs have been castigated persistently by academic scholars for their neglect of labor relations, social justice, and the needs of low income consumers. Despite SAMs’ origins in the radical civil rights and antiwar politics of the 1960s and 1970s, contributors have emphasized the primacy of an alternative technological managerialism and related ef forts to achieve scientific legitimacy over social justice and a progressive transformative politics. In this managerialist representation, it is argued, the organic is framed as a competing system of efficient resource management, buttressed by modernist epis temology and scientific knowledge claims. This repre sentation privileges ecological sustainability, food safety, and health concerns, placing SAMs on the neoliberal, green consumerist terrain of individual market choice and consumer sovereignty. Such technocentrism, con tributors have emphasized, has preempted progressive socioecological politics that give prominence to questions of social justice, food security, class, gender, and race. This social agenda, by default, has fallen to an uneasy coalition of Community Food Security movements and antihunger activists, who advocate local entrepreneurial initiatives and public food entitlement approaches, respectively. These shifts in the political ambition of organic AFNs charted by US scholars have also been theorized in terms of commodity fetishism. Thus, by contrast with con ventional industrialized foods, the organic intentionally unveils its ecological production relations, ‘farming in nature’s image’, and philosophical values of stewardship and a ‘land ethic’ of care are ascribed to this ‘moral ecology’ of transparency. However, as several authors have demonstrated, this transparency does not extend to labor, working conditions, citizenship, or equality of ac cess to nutritious food. In short, the commodity fetish has been reworked to support food safety and health claims, while continuing to obscure unjust social relations of production and consumption. The ethical standing of organic AFNs and SAMs arises from their embeddedness in sustainable ecologies and not, as in the case of Fair Trade, in moral economies of social justice. This ‘technology led vision’ was endorsed by the leading SAMs in negotiations over the USDA’s Proposed Organic Rule in the late 1990s and is codified in the technocentric regulatory criteria used to define

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acceptable production practices for the USDA’s ‘Organ ically Grown’ label. This narrow conception, which ef fectively translates ‘organic’ into a market brand, a mode of technological competition, and one among many dif ferentiated food products, has fragmented SAMs and dissipated hopes invested in organic agriculture as a progressive force. Most recently, activist ambition and academic research has focused on the development of localized food systems, local farmer knowledge, and territorial labels of origin. This research tracks smaller organic growers, excluded by scale requirements from interregional and export markets, who are seeking new sources of economic rent and live lihood by going ‘beyond organic’ and finding niches in local direct marketing and local food networks. Some US contributors have denounced the economic privilege and WASP ish ethnocentrism that currently characterizes these networks. However, efforts to develop a food justice movement to mitigate the class and racial complexion of AFNs are isolated and incipient at this point. In following this trajectory of SAMs, US scholars have analyzed the decline of progressive politics and structuralist critique and the emergence of a more circumspect, incrementalist analytics of change, more accommodated to the hegemonic neoliberal discourses reifying the market and consumer choice. One recent empirical study of 37 alternative food initiatives in California reveals that they are characterized by an entrepreneurial culture and a politics of engagement explicable only by neopopulism. These Californian ini tiatives are no longer ‘oppositional’ but rather ‘alter native’ organizations articulating narrowly proscribed claims of localism, community food security, and sus tainable local agriculture. The trajectory of fragmentation is formulated in political economic terms in debates evoked by the so called ‘conventionalization’ and ‘bifurcation’ theses of structural change in US organic agriculture, and with particular reference to California. These formulations contend that the rapid growth of markets for organic produce, reinforced by the minim alist ‘allowable inputs’ approach to federal codification, has engendered a dualistic process of change. Large scale, often monocultural producers are integrated into national and global commodity networks, leaving hol istic, ‘movement farmers’ or ‘artisanal’ growers to serve low volume, localized markets. Empirically, the large scale specialized segment of organic production shares many attributes with its conventional industrial coun terpart, and these similarities are even more pronounced in marketing and distribution as Earthbound Farms meets Whole Foods, Inc., accentuating the industry’s dual structure. Other contributors have argued that the division be tween ‘industrial’ and ‘artisan’ growers ‘within’ the

organic sector is problematic and may conceal un warranted normative and ideological assumptions. For example, that ‘artisanal’ maps directly onto more pro gressive, movement oriented ideologies and holistic agroecologies, and that ‘industrial’ equates with both economic behavioral and conservative ideological elem ents of the ‘conventionalization’ thesis. This debate clearly calls for more empirical research, not least be cause agro industrial dynamics and capitalist imperatives of social reproduction are pervasive. This discussion of binary structures and unexamined normative assumptions leads neatly to agrarian localist discourses and portrayals of AFNs as sites of resistance to time space distantiation and corporate power articu lated through the oligopolistic, globalizing industrial food system. In contributing to those discourses, US scholar activists have formulated normative concepts such as ‘food in social context’, ‘commensal community’, and ‘foodshed’ as counter narratives to corporate he gemony. In this binary opposition, the local is repre sented as a potentially ‘insulated space’, which affords opportunities to re embed food provisioning in local institutions and the ethical norms of a ‘moral economy’ characterized by mutuality, reciprocity, and equity. These norm based, neopopulist narratives propagate ideas of ‘secession’, disengagement, and what some authors term the ‘principle of succession’, which involves a gradual transition from the industrial food system to the foodshed. Several recent contributors have sought to problem atize the conflation of social relations and spatial relations in those idealized formulations of local food networks. Such spaces, it is argued, may accommodate a reaction ary ‘defensive localism’ marked by conservative politics and nativist sentiments, rather than the progressive, ethical, and associative economy so often imputed un critically to localized AFNs. In short, eco social embed dedness can obscure difference, inequality, and social injustice. Other authors have challenged such ‘normative lo calism’, where the local is cast as the realm of resistance to anomic, globalizing capitalist forces, for its erasure of the politics of the local. That is, it fails to recognize that contested issues of distributive justice, human rights, and identity can arise in these idealized, insulated spaces. The notion of ‘reflexive localism’ accordingly has been pro posed in order to focus attention on the social relations and power asymmetries subsumed in the rhetorics of ‘sustainable local development’ and ‘local control’. A re flexive conceptualization of localism recognizes the ‘dif ferential (or adverse) incorporation’ of social classes into the market economy, civil society, and state. Social classes are differentially positioned to benefit from ‘sustainable local development’ but these distributive consequences are lost in the discursive trappings of normative localism.


Activist narratives of a normative localism embedded in a secessionist moral economy have also failed to problematize scale construction at the local level. This omission ignores potentially negative outcomes of the dynamic, contested interactions between local forms of social spatial organization and translocal actors and in stitutions. Rather than situating the local within a re lational politics of scale, it is framed as a social space where new economic forms incorporating ethical norms are allowed to grow and flourish. In short, the local is reified, obscuring the contested sociospatial processes involved in its construction and the practicalities of se cession and local control. Although these analytical limitations and erasures arguably reflect the pre occupation of US scholarship with the ‘movement’ as pects and ‘transformative’ potential of AFNs, similar shortcomings are also found in the European literature.

Niche Markets, Relocalization, and ‘Alternative’ Policy: AFNs and the Western European Experience Although reified local–global dichotomies, norm based localism, and neopopulist rural imaginaries inhabit the European literature, it differs from its US counterpart in the prominence given to AFNs as territorialized value chains, a source of diversified farm livelihoods and, more broadly, as catalysts of revitalized rural economies. The focus is more economistic: ‘just value’ rather than ‘just values’ and communitarian discourses of social justice. The instrumental market centered tenor of AFN re search in Europe intersects with wider political economic processes, ranging from CAP reform, the transition to more pluralistic visions of rural development, and de volved rural governance to public debates on food safety and the conservation of rural socioecological environ ments. In this context, AFNs are envisioned as integral elements of a European eco social imaginary, that is articulated politically by claims of rural cultural excep tionalism and finds institutional expression as ‘multi functionality’ in EU rural development policy and international agricultural trade negotiations. In buttressing claims of European exceptionalism, a complementary discourse of economic performance and competitiveness has emerged, which frames AFNs/SFSCs as new sources of value added that can be captured locally and so stimulate rural economic regeneration. These value streams arise from the capacity of AFNs to re embed and re socialize food provisioning in local ecol ogies and communities. In this way, as urged by the 2002 Curry Commission report, ‘The future of food and farming’, published in response to the UK outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease, AFNs are ‘re connecting’ with consumers through new markets of quality local produce.

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In this market led, ‘economic’ localism, re connection is made by valorizing signifiers of the local that can be commodified and translated into premium prices; that is, into streams of economic rent. Several contributors have drawn attention to the dynamism of commodification processes as new attributes of territoriality are ‘internal ized’ by the discourse of food quality and subsumed by the value form, including the conservation of rural landscapes, wildlife habitat, and sustainable rural en vironments. Other authors suggest that the spatial pro liferation of territorial valorization processes will lead to ‘competitive localism’, threatening economic rents and accentuating the uneven development patterns impli cated in these ‘new rural geographies’ of food. European AFN/SFSC research has grown rapidly in recent years and a wide selection of local and regional case studies is now available. Some contributors have made preliminary schematic attempts to assess the geo graphical distribution and economic significance of quality food networks. However, the dearth of com prehensive data is such that only ‘educated guesses’ are possible about the economic impacts of AFNs, their temporal, spatial, and evolutionary dynamics, and their stability in the longer term. Accordingly, the following discussion concentrates on several lacunae and erasures in European AFN research. This literature reaffirms the role of farmers as key actors in the relocalization of food provisioning and privileged beneficiaries of the economies of scope asso ciated with the diversification of on farm production activities. Yet farm level innovation and AFN centered rural development strategies have largely escaped critical interrogation. Thus AFN case studies typically fail to analyze relations of power within the farm enterprise, whether in the labor process, the household, or gendered property structures. Similarly, although farm based multifunctional activities are seen as the engine of the ‘new’ rural development model, there has been little systematic evaluation of how this model will address entrenched rural problems of income equality, low paid employment, and rural poverty or reconfigure spatial processes of uneven development. By neglecting to examine relations of domination at these different scales, this literature leaves unanswered the question of ‘who gains and who loses’ from this market led, farm centric response to the quality ‘turn’. The erasure of relations of domination and, by ex tension, politics in analyses of economic localism is complemented by the limited attention given to the rent seeking behavior of downstream actors, notably retail multiples. In addressing this neglect of food supply chain relationships, a recent study analyzes the production of new quality food ‘spaces’ in the UK and the concomitant struggle to dominate the material and discursive con struction of quality. Competitive control of quality

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confers power to delineate markets and draw boundaries between retailer led commodity chains and AFNs. In the UK case, the entrenched regulatory hegemony of re tailer led food governance, sanctioned by the state, places AFNs at a tremendous disadvantage in this struggle. This analysis of power relations across the spaces of food provisioning will hopefully stimulate further research on this theme. Other contributors have approached this question more generally by emphasizing the dynamic nature of economic rents and their competitive erosion by rent seekers. These pressures are exemplified by EU Regu lation 2081/92 regarding PDI/PDO designations, which has led to a profusion of quality assurance schemes, logos, and labels to valorize territorial identity and local prov enance. In one study, these differentiation strategies are described in terms of the ‘qualification’ of place, process, and product, or the three Ps. These new territorial constructions of quality are open to imitation and stra tegic convergence, and retail multiples have responded by developing own label, locally sourced product lines and quality food brands. Such moves by leading retailers to dominate the emerging ‘quality food spaces’ suggest that ‘main streaming’ and brand proliferation may so dilute the meaning and imagery of ‘local’, ‘organic’, and ‘specialty’ foods that these terms will become meaningless as in dicators of ‘alternative’ food provisioning networks. These dynamic changes at the interface between ‘con ventional’ and ‘alternative’ provisioning clearly threaten the foundations of the territorial value added model of rural development insofar as these competitive pres sures erode price margins, and rents are captured by extralocal, downstream, supply chain actors. Several authors have identified the need for a better under standing of the dynamics of economic rents and their distribution as a major research gap in the AFN/SFSC literature. This gap and the neglect of social relations, power dynamics, and the politics of the local arguably are symptomatic of a deeper theoretical problem. That is, the ontology of the local is taken as a given, and not as a category that is socially constructed, contingent and therefore in need of explication. AFN/SFSC scholarship thus does not problematize the local as ‘place’, as a scale of accumulation nor its genesis in dynamic and contin gent interactions with translocal actors and institutions. The static, bounded, and reductionist conceptualization of the local in this literature entirely ignores theoretical developments in human geography, notably relational perspectives of place, as in Doreen Massey’s work, and analyses of the politics of scale. Close engagement with such work would expose the reification of the local and its naturalized social relations to much needed critical analysis.

The failure to acknowledge consumers as active partners in the emergence of AFNs is paralleled by the limited analysis of the social relations of consumption in both the US and Western Europe. With its markedly higher prices, quality food provisioning has been char acterized as a ‘class diet’ of privileged income groups, who can afford this form of personal ‘quarantine’ from conventional industrial foods. Thus the US natural foods chain, Whole Foods, is satirized as ‘Whole Paycheck’. Several recent studies of public sector procurement policies, notably school meals, community food co operatives, and sustainable urban food systems, speak to this issue of democratic access. Such initiatives, however, almost surely will be over taken by the accelerating incorporation of quality foods into product lines of mainstream retailers. The ‘Wal Mart effect’ on the conventional alternative provisioning interface represents the new frontier for the analysis of ‘spaces of quality’ and their alterity. This raises the interesting question of how mainstreaming and more democratic access will unsettle the eco social imaginaries and moral geographies of quality foods, perhaps by di luting the moral charge of connection as these com modities are popularized and no longer garner social distinction.

Globalized AFNs: Qualities, Ethics, and Mainstreaming So called quality foods and foods invested with particular ‘qualities’ are driving the growth of globalized AFNs in forms of transnational organic food chains, the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), and fair trade networks. All three have – in one way or another – captured the geo graphical imaginations of activists and scholars, polit icians and businesses, and consumers and producers as pathways to ameliorate damage to the livelihoods of workers and peasant communities in these neoliberal ‘times’. Certified organic AFNs comprise the growing on and off season movement of tropical fresh and processed foods to the North from the South; one of the largest and fastest growing exporters is China. While research to date has been highly descriptive, excellent accounts of one such AFN exist in the particularly fine grained ethno graphic analyses of a set of Mexican organic coffee co operatives. Attention here is to the practice of the governance ‘work’ of organic certification and the po tential problems this writes into the eco social relations fostered amongst coffee, community members, certifiers, and international regulatory bodies. This research points to the paradox of the ‘roll out’ of certification schemes throughout poor farming communities in the South: greater development possibilities open up but at the


expense of often unforeseen economic and social costs in internecine competition and conflicts among com munities and their members. In short, certification for producer communities – in organic and fair trade net works – is not a neutral practice. A related lesson is that these political economies of certification can often only be gleaned through extensive ethnographic research. The ETI, developed in the late 1990s and located in the UK, was formed from a coalition of supermarkets, transnational corporations, activists, and development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). With its focus on the enforcement of international labor standards at the points of commodity production in the global South, research on the ETI has focused on food, flower, and clothing production. Some of the best work on ETI AFNs – again done at the ethnographic scale – has fo cused on the international trade of ‘veg’ from Africa to the UK. Contextualized against the canvas of wider food ‘scares’ from imported goods, one scholar conceptualizes the ETI as a form of ‘soft’ colonialism working to pro duce ‘pure’ African spaces through the regulation of nonexploitative labor and chemical free foods. Here, the unintended and non neutral consequences of the ETI certification have worked to marginalize some of the poorest farmers, alter community social relations through the creation of ‘benign dictators’ invested with certifica tory power, and further entrench the economic power of supermarkets more than half a social, economic, and cultural world away.

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Fair trade AFNs have quickly become an expanding ‘sacred’ space for activists, scholars (much beyond geog raphy), and many multinational corporate entities (see Figures 6–9). Some of the earliest geographical work utilized fair trade coffee as a backdrop around which to wrap a series of conceptual and theoretical threads; here it was argued the ‘nourishing networks’ of fair trade coffee were better conceptualized through the Latourian metaphors of ‘longer’ versus ‘shorter’ networks of ‘im mutable mobiles’. This was put forward in an attempt to shed the essentialized scalar categorizations of the local, regional, and global in describing the ‘mode of ordering of connectivity’ in the producer–consumer connections of fair trade coffee AFNs. Unlike AFN scholarship, work (geographical and otherwise) following this initial be ginning has been more conceptually and theoretically driven, and ethnographic research on fair trade networks has been relatively neglected. Several lenses have been used to work through fair trade and its bid to ‘guarantee a better deal for Third World producers’. An early developmental lens for fair trade has given way to wider discussions of how fair trade must constantly negotiate the contentions of the con ventions it articulates: those of domesticity (e.g., trust) and civic norms (e.g., global citizenship) vis a` vis those of commercial, industrial and market ness (e.g., price, quality, labeling, etc). This articulation is encapsulated in the rather empty twin platitudes – both of which have been uttered with little geographically minded acumen

Figure 6 The Beginnings of the Fair Trade Cacao Commodity Network: A Farmer and his ‘Farm’ in Costa Rica. Fair trade works through organized cooperatives of small farmers; this fair trade cacao farmer in the figure is a part of the cooperative known as the Asociacioń de Pequenõs Productores de Talamanca (APPTA) on the southeastern coast of Costa Rica (http://www.appta.org/). Fair trade works to produce goods based as much as possible on sustainable agroecological principles. Thus, the farmer is standing in the midst of his inter-cropped pineapples, cacao, and other crops. At the same time, though, even with this image of a fair trade cacao pod the yellow fruit hanging on tree branches in the picture it ‘hides’ the different relationships of power, economy, and politics ‘present’ in this cacao that will eventually end up in a fairly traded chocolate bar.

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Figure 7 Fair Trade Cacao in the Dominican Republic. These are processing facilities for CONACADO, the largest exporter of fair trade cacao in the world located in the Dominican Republic. One of the things to note here, besides the massive size of the operation, is that the processing facilities are more cooperatively run and owned than in the Costa Rican market where most of the early processing is done by the farmers. The image here is of one of six bloques of Dominican farmers and processing facilities scattered around the country.

Figure 8 Drying Cacao in the Dominican Republic. Note the denuded hills in the background; often fair trade farms and cooperatives become islands of green in the midst of environmentally-damaging ‘business-as-usual’ farming.

or verve – that fair trade operates ‘in the market but against it’ and/or that it is ‘in the market but not of it’. Newer and more grounded work on the so called de velopment ‘case’ for fair trade has sought to explore the

ability of these AFNs to build small producer capacities (at a number of levels) and bolster livelihood strategies within and beyond fair trade commodity chains. On the other hand, dissection of the governance structures of fair trade certification and regulation is beginning to reveal some problematic aspects of this certificatory regime in the growing inequalities of power between producer communities and regulators. There is also a ‘business’ case being made for fair trade, particularly through the publication of the book Fair Trade : Market led Ethical Consumption. In simple terms, the arguments being made are that fair trade is simply another expression of consumer choice and is in fact a neoliberal solution to the problems of international trade and development. While the validity of these claims is somewhat questionable from a number of different perspectives, it is a rather politically savvy, ‘realpolitik’ line of argument that attempts to preemptively defend the fair trade model from the critiques and gerry mandering of more powerful so called ‘free trade’ advo cates. In many ways, it is these conceptualizations that have paved the road for fair trade to move smoothly into the mainstream of supermarkets and larger retail outfits, and become part of the established repertoire of some of the transnational giants of the conventional food system, such as Nestle´, McDonald’s, and Starbucks. The final lens discussed here is that of ‘consumption’: work has concentrated on conceptual development that entrains production and consumption and space and place in the exploration of fair trade AFNs. This has come at the expense of greater engagement with ‘live’ consumers. Rather, one strand of the discussion has


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Figure 9 A Cacao Nursery Funded through the Fair Trade Premium. This cacao-plant nursery is owned and operated by CONACADO. In addition to more and better infrastructure for example, roads, home gardens, housing, etc. the nursery was financed through fair trade’s ‘social dividend’ and is used to promote the economic and social development of its members.

focused on the use of the images and discourses of pro ducers’ ‘em placed’ livelihoods designed to link the spaces and places of fair trade production and con sumption. It is argued that these ‘political ecological imaginaries’ have given poor farmers, fair trade com panies, and NGOs the opportunities to ‘seize the fetish’ and rework it toward more advantageous Third World development. More recently, it has been suggested that the reworked fetish has damaging effects through an essentialization of the ‘other’ that maintains the deeper inequalities of representation and political economy that quite rightly still haunt the global economy; soft colo nialism might just be rearing its ugly head in fair trade AFNs. Another strand of engagement with fair trade’s con sumption scape explores the sort of ethical key to which fair trade is tuned. Conceptualized as a ‘solidarity seeking’ moral economy, it has been suggested that fair trade moves beyond the requirement that one must be socially and geographically ‘near’ to care about others. Instead, these AFNs shed the confines of ‘place’ to open up an ‘ethics of care’ that is similarly fostered across distant social, economic, and geographical ‘spaces’. And, yet, counterarguments are emerging to suggest that, precisely because of the far flung distances between producers and consumers in the global economy, it is only through the images, realities, and connections of place that fair trade can and does work. A number of further avenues are opening up for greater empirical and theoretical work on globalized AFNs. For instance, research is beginning to focus on the sort of Faustian bargain fair trade has made to enter the

mainstream: on the one hand, markets have expanded rapidly and thus more money is being transferred from the well off North to poor farmers in the service of livelihood empowerment and economic development. On the other hand, this growing presence in conventional retail spaces has come at the price of a lower political register that is starting to see fair trade networks first and foremost as ‘quality’ products rather than as advancing a potentially transformative political project. More re search needs to focus on the wide ranging effects of the mainstreaming of fair trade and other ethical goods from a number of geographically informed angles. Not least of all, researchers should engage with the growing bifur cation of the fair trade movement – similar to that in organic AFNs – along the faultlines of the so called ‘movement’ or ‘100%’ fair traders versus those that ad vocate a more mainstreaming perspective. See also: Agriculture, Sustainable; Agri-Environmentalism and Rural Change; Food Networks; Food Regimes.

Further Reading Cook, I. et al. (2006). Geographies of food 1: Following. Progress in Human Geography 30(5), 655 666. Goodman, D. (Guest ed.) (2002). Special Issue: Rethinking Food Production Consumption: Integrative Perspectives. Sociologia Ruralis 42(4), 271 277. Goodman, D. (Guest ed.) (2003). Special Issue: International Perspectives on Alternative Agro Food Networks: Quality, Embeddedness, Bio Politics. Journal of Rural Studies 19(1). Goodman, D. (2004). Rural Europe redux? Reflections on alternative agro food networks and paradigm change. Sociologia Ruralis 44(1), 3 16.

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Goodman, D. and Watts, M. (eds.) (1997). Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring. London: Routledge. Goodman, M. (2004). Reading fair trade: Political ecological imaginary and the moral economy of fair trade foods. Political Geography 23(7), 891 915. Guthman, J. (2004). Agrarian Dreams? The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Harvey, M., McMeekin, A. and Warde, A. (eds.) (2004). Qualities of Food. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marsden, T. and Murdoch, J. (eds.) (2006). Between the Local and the Global: Confronting Complexity in the Contemporary Agri Food Sector. Oxford: Elsevier. Maye, D., Holloway, L. and Kneafsey, M. (eds.) (2007). Constructing Alternative Food Geographies: Representation and Practice. Oxford: Elsevier. Morgan, K., Marsden, T. and Murdoch, J. (2006). Worlds of Food: Place, Power, and Provenance in the Food Chain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mutersbaugh, T., Klooster, D., Renard, M. and Taylor, D. (Guest eds.) (2005). Special Issue: Certifying Rural Spaces: Quality Certified Products and Rural Governance. Journal of Rural Studies 21. Nicholls, A. and Opal, C. (2005). Fair Trade: Market Driven Ethical Consumption. London: Sage. Raynolds, L., Murray, D. and Wilkinson, J. (eds.) (2007). Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization. London: Routledge. Van der Ploeg, J. (Guest ed.) (2000). Special Issue: Rural Development: From Practices and Policies towards Theory. Sociologia Ruralis 40(4). Zaccai, E. (ed.) (2007). Sustainable Consumption, Ecology and Fair Trade. London: Routledge.

Relevant Websites http://www.appta.org Asociacioń de Pequenõs Productores de Talamanca (APPTA). http://www.sustainweb.org Sustain: The Alliance for Better Food and Farming. http://www.colostate.edu The Center for Fair and Alternative Trade. http://www.foodsecurity.org The Community Food Security Coalition. http://www.fairtrade institute.org The Fair Trade Institute. http://www.isealalliance.org The International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling (ISEAL) Alliance. http://ofrf.org The Organic Farming Research Foundation. http://www.fairtrade.org.uk The UK Fairtrade. http://www.foodethicscouncil.org The UK Food Ethics Council. http://www.soilassociation.org The UK Soil Association. http://www.farma.org.uk The UK National Farmers’ Retail and Markets Association (FARMA). http://www.ams.usda.gov The USDA National Organic Program.

Food Regimes B. Pritchard, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Doha Round A set of World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations which commenced in 2001 with the purpose of developing a new body of international trade agreements. Regulation Theory A theory to explain the emergence of extensive periods of economic and political stability. In regulation theory, capitalism was stabilized when a mode of regulation locked into a regime of accumulation. Uruguay Round A series of negotiations which took place from 1986 to 2003 that established a new set of international trade agreements, including, in particular, the formation of the WTO and the Agreement on Agriculture. World Trade Organization An international organization with responsibilities to administer international trade agreements. World-System Theory An approach which seeks to understand and explain economic and political processes in their global and historical terms.

orientation of the approach gave insufficient acknow ledgment to local and regional diversity. Alternative perspectives oriented with an eye to emphasizing diversity were presented most comprehensively by Michael Watts and David Goodman in their 1997 edited collection Globalizing Food. Notwithstanding the debates over these issues, the food regimes concept remained an attractive and widely used method for investigating the global pol itics of food. In the first decade of the twenty first century, moreover, it has garnered new found credentials by way of providing a framework to explain global scale recon figurations of the world food order centered on private regulation of food trade (notably by transnational super markets) and the appropriation of green credentialing by these same actors. A prescient article by Harriet Friedmann in 2005 poses the suggestion that the instabilities of the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime during its first decade of existence (notably, fo cused around intractable disputation on agricultural trade) reflect the collapsing fragments of the second food regime, with emergent ‘corporate environmental’ trade systems as the formative basis of a new regime in processes of construction.

Introduction

Origins and Significance

The food regime concept was developed in the 1980s as a way of understanding the relationships between the es tablishment and evolution of nation states on the one hand, and the international political economy of food, on the other. Upon its seminal presentation in a 1989 article by Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael, it struck an immediate chord with a wide array of researchers seeking to identify the historicized logic to the complexities of agri food economics and politics. Moreover, coming at a time when international rules on agricultural production and trade were being incorporated into the multilateral trading system, it provided a mechanism by which re searchers might interpret these developments. It indi cated that contemporary negotiations over agriculture could be seen as components of a restructuring of the world food order in line with an epoch of crisis and (attempted) resolution. In the years since its initial presentation, it needs to be said, the food regimes concept has come under con siderable challenge. In the mid 1990s, researchers influ enced by ‘post stucturalism’ suggested that the food regimes approach offered an overly mechanical inter pretation of the history of food. Allegedly, the macro scale

The importance of the food regimes concept lies in its capacity to provide a holistic representation of the international agri food system without resorting to market determinism. It argues that the struggles faced by actors within agriculture and food systems can be understood through recourse to a world historical per spective that positions such processes within global po litical epochs. This approach stands in stark contrast to the orthodox approach, dominant within most branches of economics, which treats politics as an exogenous variable within market relations. This formulation was built from the merger of two broad approaches in international political economy. The first of these was the world system theory approach pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein in the 1970s. The world system approach seeks to understand and explain economic and political processes in their global and historical terms. This gives emphasis to, and makes ex plicit, the world historical conditions that underpin the individual circumstances of economic and political actors. In other words, the multifaceted struggles con fronting actors in the world economy are seen as de riving, ultimately, from a system wide logic of global

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capitalist processes. The second broad approach influ encing food regimes concept is regulation theory. De veloped initially by French researchers interested in charting the institutional, political, economic, and social factors that underwrite capitalist development, regu lation theory posed a means to explain the emergence of extensive periods of economic and political stability. In regulation theory, capitalism is seen to be stabilized when a mode of regulation (regulatory practices and settings) coincides with a regime of accumulation (the conditions for profit making). Friedmann and McMichael welded together these two approaches in their seminal articulation of the concept. Their objective was to develop a historicized appreciation of how and why global systems of food provisioning connected to world political systems. Arguing that for considerable periods of history, there is relative stability in the characteristics of large scale food production and consumption and their relation to the state system, the approach connected a series of disparate arguments about national and international transformations in food and agriculture, to a historically anchored framework based around the metatrends of international political economy. Hence, as suggested by Farshad Araghi in his 2003 article published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, the food re gimes approach is ultimately concerned with the eco nomics of imperialism and power in world politics. Friedmann and McMichael identified two food re gimes over the preceding century. The ‘first food regime’, which Friedmann and McMichael date from 1870 to 1914, originated in the food politics of Europe’s urban working classes and coincided with British Imperial he gemony. It was characterized by enhanced levels of commodity production as the colonial ‘frontier’ was opened up and the demand for food and fiber increased in the burgeoning economies of a newly industrializing Europe and North America. In the process, an inter national division of labor was established, based on the production of tropical (cocoa, palm oil, sugar, coffee, and tea) and temperate (beef, grains, and dairy) commodities in the colonial territories of the European powers, and manufactured goods within the industrialized centers. In the United States, the same process was underway as the ‘moving frontier’ expanded and facilitated extensive ranching and grain farming, and led to the increased production of agricultural products to feed the swelling populations of the industrializing Eastern seaboard, continually being replenished by mass migration from Europe. Effectively, therefore, this process amounted to relocation of the British (and to a lesser extent, Euro pean) food supply to colonial territories, altogether underpinned by a ‘free trade’ rhetoric anchored by the gold standard. On this basis, the first food regime has also been dubbed the ‘colonial diasporic’ food regime. The class relations which underpinned this regime were the

urban working populations furnished by cheap food and the settler farmers who supplied this. It depended also on the environmental bounty coming from the farming of lands previously nonsubjected to Western farming practices. After World War I, the indebtedness of the colonial powers and the economic instability associated with the Great Depression resulted in these colonial relations losing momentum as a driving force of global capital accumulation in agriculture. The food system, cor respondingly, was characterized by an unfolding of ten sions in the inter war period, of which the ‘dust bowl’ crisis of the US Midwest represents the most widely represented illustration. Coming out of this crisis, gov ernments framed a set of policies to rein in agricultural market volatility. This included the Roosevelt New Deal, which established the basis of US family farming an chored within state supports. Connecting these developments to the rise of a new world political order, Friedmann and McMichael date the emergence of a stabilized ‘second food regime’ with the ascendance of US political, economic, and military might in 1945. Two conjoined political–economic pro cesses underpinned the establishment of a stabilized food order in this period. First, production supports and price stability systems furnished originally as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal underwrote an expan sion of the soybean hogs and grains livestock complexes of Midwestern and Prairie agriculture. Second, this re gime of domestic interventions sat hand in glove with an assertion of US political hegemony, buttressed by the production of large agricultural surpluses that were incorporated into the Marshall Plan and disbursed globally through food aid programs. The decision by the US Congress in 1947 not to ratify the proposed Inter national Trade Organisation kept agriculture out of the multilateral trading system, and hence made domestic US farm policies largely immune from the pressures of international trade liberalization which, by the 1970s and 1980s, impacted heavily on the manufacturing sector. Consequently, over the 1950s and 1960s, American agriculture (protected at home and supported abroad) emerged as the most vital force in the global food economy. Unlike the first food regime, which was framed around the growth of trade, in the period of the second food regime, trade was politically constructed around the provisioning of food aid, and the subsid ization of commodity exports to serve domestic political agendas. These arrangements were supported by the insertion of Fordist modes of production and consumption within food and agriculture. The second food regime was an ‘intensive’ food regime characterized by the mass pro duction of significant transformed (durable) agro food products for mass consumption. Increases in production

Food Regimes

were generated from the development of new hybrid seeds, agricultural technologies, and mass food pro duction systems. (This is in opposition to the first food regime which can be characterized as ‘extensive’ because growth in output was predicated on bringing new areas of land into the global production system.) Rapidly rising real incomes were matched by a rapid increase in the production and consumption of ‘Fordist’ food, typified in the popular imagination by Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans. The emphasis was on the mass production of standardized products, increasingly organized by large scale agri food companies and marketed through chan nels of mass distribution, such as supermarkets and fast food chains. The Fordist logic of the second food regime, however, came together most spectacularly with the feed livestock complex, which girded a global set of interconnections based around the production and export of (US subsidized) feed; its supply to cattle producing regions (notably Latin America), and the production of low cost meat for mass markets. An important article by Steven Sanderson in 1986 coined the phrase ‘the world steer’ and brought together these ideas for the first time. It had an influential role within Friedmann and McMi chael’s crystallization of the food regime idea a few years later. The tensions and contradictions of the second food regime came into the open in the 1980s in the form of trade wars between the United States and Europe, a prolonged crisis in US agriculture, and initiatives to regulate these systems internationally via the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The insti tutionalization of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) generated significant agricultural surpluses in Europe, challenging US hegemony as the global pro vider of food. At the same time, the costs of agricultural subsidization were made increasingly visible to national constituencies thus providing the basis for attacks on the status quo from neoliberal economic groups and parties with vested interests in reducing global agricultural subsidies, such as Australia. The decision in 1986 to commence a new round of trade negotiations (the Uru guay Round), with the explicit objective of incorporating agriculture into the multilateral trade system, repre sented an agenda to resolve these tensions through international political means. Ultimately, this gave rise to an emergent ‘global’ regulatory architecture for gov erning the politics of food. The conclusion of the Uru guay Round in 1994 implemented the establishment of the WTO as a permanent institution to promote inter national accord on the rules of trade, to encourage trade liberalization, and to arbitrate trade disputes. Through this, key elements in the national regulation of food and agriculture were subsumed to global institutional par ameters. For food regime researchers since that time, the vital issue on which much analysis has turned has related

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to the question of whether these institutional transfor mations can be categorized in terms of a supposedly emergent ‘third food regime’, or whether they reflect inchoate elements of transition that are yet to take full form.

A Third Food Regime? In various contributions during the period of GATT/ WTO negotiations in the first half of the 1990s, Friedmann and McMichael were careful to interpret these develop ments in terms of ‘the contours’ of a potential new food regime. While asserting how these processes were re flective of the unravelling of the second food regime, their analysis suggested that the jury was out, so to speak, on that regime’s successor. Other analysts, however, were quicker to interpret agriculture’s inclusion within multilateral trade rules as evidence of an emergent third food regime. One set of ideas, explored in Richard Le Heron’s 1993 book Globalized Agriculture, Political Choice foresaw the incipient third food regime as an ‘integrated regime’ of global agri food production, characterized by flexibility, spe cialization, and globally footloose production trade complexes. As outlined by Le Heron, this regime would recompose national centered food complexes within the logic of international trade regulation. Consistent with these trajectories, moreover, would be enhanced free doms for transnational agri food companies undertaking production and intrafirm trade within a global ‘level playing field’. Although expressed as an ideal type, in spiration for this model seems to have come from the development of the intercontinental, counterseasonal, fresh fruit and vegetables trade, which grew dramatically in the early 1990s. In an influential 1995 article, Richard Le Heron and Michael Roche applied these ideas to the ‘clean and green’ agri food exports of New Zealand. Clearly, the fresh fruit and vegetables sector is re flective of powerful new impulses concerning the or ganization and regulation of the global food system. Nevertheless, it remains a commodity specific model at variance to the way that much of the rest of the global food system is organized. The neoliberal ‘New Zealand experiment’ remains an outlier in the regulation of agri food systems. Self evidently, the concept of an emergent third food regime implies there is a hegemonic political order which is underwriting a particular system of agri food production and trade. Equally self evidently, the pioneering New Zealand neoliberal model of the mid 1990s does not fulfil this requirement. Bill Pritchard’s research on the international restructuring of the dairy sector highlights the continuing role of state centered intervention which complicates attempts to generalize upon the contemporary character of agri food

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globalization. His later work with Niels Fold, brought together in the 2005 edited collection Cross continental Food Chains, asserts the sector specific and territorially embedded conditions which need to be acknowledged in discussion of these issues. In seeking to distill the key elements of the global politics of food, and by extension positing the vital signs of any incipient ‘third food regime’, from the late 1990s McMichael turned his attention to how subsidized US agricultural exports were undermining the domestic food economies of developing countries. This perspective drew into focus the basic contradiction of the WTO in its treatment of agriculture: firstly, that it enshrined and accepted the rights of developed Northern economies to continue to protect their domestic agricultures, and secondly, it imposed on developing countries mandatory economy opening regulations that subjected them to subsidized agri exports from the North. Focusing on the first of these contradictions, the WTO has belied implied suggestions in some parts of the food regimes literature of the early 1990s that the WTO would instil a free market in world agri food trade. While some researchers had looked toward the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of GATT and the formation of the WTO as a defining moment of transformation in world agriculture, the ‘on the ground’ impacts of these developments were far from momentous. Indeed, the first decade of the WTO seemed to perpetuate, in different institutional guise, the con tradictions of the global food order of the 1980s. How ever, in the case of agriculture and the WTO, levels of protective support within Northern countries remain little changed from those at the commencement of the Uruguay Round in 1986. What has happened is that agricultural policy makers in Europe, North America, and Japan have been adept in finding ‘wriggle room’ that enables continued support for farmers yet remains legally consistent with the complexities of international law as prescribed in WTO agreements. As such, the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) broadly sanctioned the continuation of agricultural support policies, albeit in restructured formats to accommodate WTO provisions. For developing countries, in contrast, the WTO system has codified and delimited their scope for man euver. The WTO framework has encouraged developing countries to extensively restructure their agricultural sectors in line with agendas to open domestic economies, liberalize land laws (thus facilitating large scale agri culture), and to ease restrictions on foreign investment. McMichael phrased this state of affairs as producing a situation where ‘comparative advantage becomes com parative access to subsidies’. The forced agricultural liberalization for developing countries combined with sanctions to the North has imposed a progressively heavy burden on global development over the past decade. One key focus of McMichael’s work on these issues has been

the ‘east Asian import complex’, with particular reference to the US–Japan agricultural agreements opening Japan’s beef and citrus sectors to US exports, and the role of US maize exports in undercutting and destabilizing the do mestic Filipino food system. Certainly the food and agricultural situation facing developing countries in the WTO era has assumed pressing global significance. By the mid 1990s half of the foreign exchange of the FAO’s 88 low income food deficit countries went to food imports (FAO – Food and Agri culture Organization). Subsidized Northern agricultural exports are having considerable displacement effects on farmers, from Mexico to Malawi. Faced within an in creasing inability to secure domestic food security through local cultivation of food staples, (instead these are imported), developing countries have turned to high value agri exports. The sale of these products to wealthy consumers in first world nations underpins export earn ings that are used, to some extent at least, in purchasing the imports required to ensure local food security. Interestingly, McMichael’s attention to these issues was not explicitly couched in the framework of a third food regime. In a chapter published in 1999, McMichael commented that the food regimes concept was a ‘child of its time’, meaning that it spoke to the emergent tensions in world food politics of the late 1980s, as the post 1945 order fell apart. Implicitly, what seemed to be apparent in McMichael’s analysis of the injustices of the WTO food system was that it remained part and parcel of a de stabilized interregnum. His recent research on new social movements, in particular La Via Campesina, engages with the question of the ‘politics of resolution’ coming out of this period. Friedmann has taken the furthest steps toward pro posing the elements of a prospective third food regime with her theorization of the lineaments of a corporate environmental food regime. Building on broadly con temporaneous work by David Burch and Geoffrey Lawrence, which sought to connect the restructuring of supermarket supply systems to the food regime concept, the central feature of Friedmann’s recent work is what she sees as a convergence of environmental politics and retail led reorganization of food chains. In the shadow of intractability of WTO negotiations on agriculture, key elements of the regulatory scene have shifted to private companies. In their quest to control key aspects of food safety risk and to present a green face to their consumers, transnational supermarket chains are now establishing grades and standards which often exceed internationally sanctioned requirements. As Friedmann suggests, this is cultivating a new set of class relations within the global food system; between affluent consumers (shopping in supermarkets) who have access to clean and green food; and those materially excluded from such possibilities. In a word, state anchored international and national

Food Regimes

institutions have been outflanked by private capital, creating the basis for an emergent new food regime. Considering these issues in global context, Friedmann asserts that the fundamental cleavage in world trade talks has shifted from the US–EU trade impasse to a wider set of differences between Northern and Southern countries. This is occurring in the backdrop to declining US global influence, particularly with the ascent of China within the WTO and the economic rise of India. Together with Brazil and South Africa, these countries displayed their power for the first time comprising a formidable negotiating bloc that derailed the WTO Ministerial Conference in Cancun, Mexico, in 2003.

Conclusion Friedmann’s 2005 research provides the most com prehensive and compelling application of the food re gimes concept to the conditions of the present time. Nevertheless, she is careful to acknowledge that the emergent corporate environmental food regime will have its countercurrents. The essential feature of the food regimes approach is that it is best used as a tool of hindsight. It can help order and organize the messy reality of contemporary global food politics, but its ap plications are necessarily contingent upon an unfolding and unknowable future. However the current age evolves, the food regimes concept will provide a conceptual architecture to shape interpretations of change. Since the late 1980s, it has opened up new ways of thinking about the relationships between food, politics, and society. Used by geographers and other social scientists alike, it is one of the most influential conceptual innovations in the field of agri food studies over the past three decades. See also: Dependency; Food Networks; Green Revolution; Neoliberal Economic Strategies.

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Further Reading Araghi, F. (2003). Food regimes and the production of value: Some methodological issues. Journal of Peasant Studies 30(2), 41 70. Burch, D. and Lawrence, G. (2005). Supermarket own brands, supply chains and the transformation of the agri food system. International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 13(1), 1 18. Fold, N. and Pritchard, B. (eds.) (2005). Cross Continental Food Chains. London: Routledge. Friedmann, H. (1993). The political economy of food: A global crisis. New Left Review 197, 28 59. Friedmann, H. (1994). Distance and durability: Shaky foundations of the world food economy. In McMichael, P. (ed.) The Global Restructuring of Agro Food Systems, pp 258 276. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Friedmann, H. (2005). From colonialism to green capitalism: social movements and emergence of food regimes. In Buttel, F. H. & McMichel, P. (eds.) New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development: Research in Rural Sociology and Development Vol. 11, pp 227 264. Oxford: Elsevier. Friedmann, H. and McMichael, P. (1989). Agriculture and the state system: The rise and decline of national agricultures, 1870 to the present. Sociologia Ruralis 29, 93 117. Le Heron, R. (1993). Globalized Agriculture: Political Choice. Oxford: Pergamon. Le Heron, R. and Roche, M. (1995). A ‘‘fresh’’ place in food’s space. Area 27(1), 23 33. McMichael, P. (1994). Introduction: agro food system restructuring unity in diversity. In McMichael, P. (ed.) The Global Restructuring of Agro Food Systems, pp 1 18. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. McMichael, P. (1996). Globalization: Myths and realities. Rural Sociology 61(1), 25 55. McMichael, P. (1998). Global food politics. Monthly Review 50(3), 97 122. McMichael, P. (1999). Virtual capitalism and agri food restructuring. In Burch, D., Goss, J. & Lawrence, G. (eds.) Restructuring Global and Regional Agricultures: Transformations in Australasian Agri Food Economies and Spaces, pp 3 22. Aldershot: Ashgate. McMichael, P. (2000). A global interpretation of the rise of the east asian food import complex. World Development 28(3), 409 424. Pritchard, B. (1996). Shifts in food regimes and the place of producer co operatives: Insights from the Australian and United States dairy industries. Environment and Planning A 28, 857 875. Pritchard, B. (1998). The emergent contours of the third food regime: Evidence from Australian dairy and wheat sectors. Economic Geography 74(1), 64 74. Sanderson, S. (1986). The emergence of the world steer: internationalisation and foreign domination in Latin American cattle production. In Tullis, F. L. & Hollist, W. L. (eds.) Food, the State and International Political Economy, pp 123 148. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press.

Fordism R. Hudson, Durham University, Durham, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Division of Labor This term describes the ways in which work is divided between people. It can refer to the organization of work in individual workplaces (technical division of labor), between companies (social division of labor), or between places (spatial division of labor). Fordism as a particular way of organizing the economy has its own distinctive technical, social, and spatial divisions of labor. Limits to Growth This concept reflects the fears that some key natural resources (notably hydrocarbons and metallic minerals) would become exhausted and pose ‘limits to growth’. Such resources undoubtedly are absolutely limited in supply. However, a variety of technical and social innovations have, for the moment, kept this issue relatively low on the agenda. Mass Production and Consumption Mass production and consumption are central to Fordism. Mass production leads to the lowering of average production costs via achieving economies of scale – the reduction in the average cost of production as a result of progressive reductions in marginal production costs as production volumes increase. Mass consumption is the necessary corollary of mass production. The sale of commodities such as automobiles, washing machines, and shirts enables companies to exchange the things that they have produced for money, which in turn enables them to buy raw materials, components, and labor and produce further commodities. NIMBY (‘Not in My Back Yard’) A term that denotes opposition to locating unwanted activities such as polluting industries or waste disposal facilities in particular locations. However, not all people have equal capacity to mount such opposition and in some parts of the world people compete to attract such activities as a source of jobs and incomes. As a result, the geography of such activities is uneven at various spatial scales. Regulationist Approaches Regulationist approaches, first developed by French political economists such as Michel Aglietta, Robert Boyer, and Alain Lipietz, strive to understand how the inherently crisis-prone capitalist economy manages to avoid slipping into serious crises. A regime of accumulation refers to a relatively stable aggregate relationship between production and consumption. Mode of regulation denotes the regulatory mechanisms within the state and in civil society, the body of beliefs, habits, laws, and norms consistent with and supportive of a regime of accumulation. Regulationist approaches

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emphasize the correspondence within a given mode of development between regimes of accumulation and modes of regulation necessary for social systemic stability. Fordism represents one such coupling, typically seen as dominant for much of the twentieth century. Scientific Management Closely associated with the work of F. W. Taylor (hence ‘Taylorism’), this refers to the application of time-and-motion studies to the organization of work in the workplace so as to maximize labor productivity and minimize the amount of time that workers are not actually working while at work. Henry Ford built upon this in producing automobiles by introducing the moving production line and controlling the speed of work via the speed of the line. Suburbanization The process through which the consumption and residential landscapes of Fordism were altered via the spatial extension of cities and towns, initially in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. This process was crucial in creating markets for the new mass-produced consumer goods central to Fordist development. Third World A term coined in the 1960s to denote former colonies that achieved political independence in the 1960s, in contra to the more advanced capitalist development of the First World and the state socialist Second World. Subsequently some Third World states attracted industrial investment from the Fordist core of the First World and became seen as ‘newly industrializing countries’ and as the sites of peripheral Fordism, though many were excluded from these processes as uneven development became more sharply etched at the global scale.

Introduction The term ‘Fordism’ has come to have many meanings. It originated as a description of the radical new way of organizing the mass production of automobiles that was developed by Henry Ford in the early years of the twentieth century. From there it diffused to a great var iety of other places and industries. Later it became used to describe a particular macro scale model of the or ganization and linking of mass production and con sumption, often seen as the canonical model of capitalist development in the second half of the twentieth century. At both micro and macro scales, Fordism was seen to have distinctive geographies, of production, exchange,

Fordism

and consumption. If the twentieth century can be char acterized as that of Fordism, it is also the case that by the end of that century there was a lively debate as to whe ther Fordism had run its course and was being replaced by some sort of ‘post Fordist’ successor. As of now that debate remains to be settled one way or the other but the evidence of continuing mass production and con sumption, and indeed its expansion into the new spaces of the emerging economies such as China and India is difficult to discount.

Fordism and the Organization of Work in the Workplace Fordism as a specific form of micro scale organization of mass production first emerged in the US in the early years of the nineteenth century at Henry Ford’s auto mobile plant at Highland Park. While undoubtedly a revolutionary shift in methods of manufacturing, Ford’s mass production model built upon previous advances in methods of manufacturing, in particular Taylor’s work on scientific management, a detailed technical division of labor in the production process, and the precise mea surement of the time needed for workers to undertake a particular task on a production line. Taylorism in turn built upon the emergence of the American System of Manufacture specifically as a way of wresting control over the production process from craft workers, based on the use of specialist machines to produce interchangeable parts. This was a key development in manufacturing, with profound implications for workers and the organization of work but the full implications of this development for deepening the technical division of labor and or ganization of the labor process were not developed until Taylor’s work on scientific management and Ford’s revolutionary mass production automobile plant with its mechanised assembly lines. Mass production is based around selling low cost standardized products in large homogeneous markets. When initially introduced into automobile production by Ford, it led to dramatic increases in labor productivity. The labor time needed to produce a Model T Ford fell from 12 h and 8 min in October 1913 to 1 h and 30 min 6 months later. Mass production thus conferred great competitive advantage but required workers to be or ganized and to work in specific ways, based around a separation of mental from manual work, extreme spe cialization of tasks, and a deep technical division of labor within the workplace. Workers typically perform simple, repetitive de skilled tasks with very short job task cycles (often defined in seconds) on the production line. The moving line delivers materials to them at speeds deter mined by management. Increases in labor productivity are achieved via increasing the line speed because of

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managerial decisions. As such, alienated workers perform repetitive routine tasks on an uninterrupted basis at a pace dictated by the speed of the line. Shift systems allow maximum utilization of machines. There are well known problems associated with Fordist mass production as a result of both labor and product market changes. The initial challenges arose due to increasing resistance by workers in the ‘full employment’ conditions of the core urban and regional labor markets that emerged in the advanced capitalist countries in the 1960s as tensions emerged in the macro scale Fordist mode of regulation (see below). There was increasing resistance to speedup and intensification of work, leading to industrial disputes and disruptive official and unofficial ‘wild cat’ strikes. One neo Fordist managerial response to this was to in crease automation within mass production factories (e.g., by using robots in production) to alleviate problems of labor control. Some commentators have proclaimed the demise of Fordist mass production in many branches of manu facturing and the emergence of a post Fordist production system but others point to the extension of the principles of Fordist production into activities such as agriculture and mining and to an expansion of both ‘downgraded manufacturing’ and ‘downgraded services’ as the prin ciples of Fordist mass production have been extended to encompass more occupations and locations (and the latter point is discussed more fully below). Principles derived from Fordist approaches to production have been translated into, and to a degree, reworked and extended within a diverse range of routine service activities, including the fast food sector and call centers and other activities that involve processing large amounts of data and/or paper or dealing with customer enquiries.

Fordism as a Regime of Accumulation and Mode of Regulation: Balancing Mass Production with Mass Consumption and Mass Destruction As well as being seen as a micro scale approach to or ganizing work and mass production in the workplace, Fordism has also come to be seen in macro scale terms, as a particular way of regulating economy and society and normalizing particular conceptions of social and eco nomic relationships. Indeed, it would be fair to say that Fordism is generally acknowledged as the defining mode of capitalist organization in the second half of the twentieth century, despite claims as to its demise and its replacement by ‘post Fordism’. This macro scale con ception of Fordism is particularly linked to the rise of the French regulation school, while recognizing vari ations in emphasis within this approach. Such variations

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notwithstanding, the shared central concern of the reg ulationist approach is to understand how the inherently unstable and crisis prone capitalist economy manages, improbable though it may seem, for most of the time to avoid serious crises. From a regulationist perspective, a regime of accumulation refers to a relatively stable aggregate relationship between production and con sumption – Fordism represents one such coupling. In relation to understanding Fordism in particular, the sig nificance of the national state in balancing increases in productivity and consumption within the national terri tory is perhaps the primary insight of the regulationists. They place particular emphasis upon the role of the state in equilibrating productivity increases with increases in consumption levels and patterns. Achieving and main taining this temporal stability implies a definite degree of correspondence between changes in consumption and the lifestyles and living conditions of waged workers and their families and changes in production. More specific ally, the rising labor productivity and the expansion of output that is central to Fordist mass production were related to the emergence of new forms of housing and the growing ownership of various ‘white goods’, consumer electronics and, above all, of automobiles, the symbolic commodity of Fordist mass consumption (see below). In addition, however, the emergence of the advertising in dustry – ‘‘the magic system,’’ as Williams (1980) famously described it – also played a crucial role in changing patterns and norms of consumption and persuading people to purchase the new consumer goods. Mode of regulation refers to the regulatory mechanisms within the state and in civil society, the body of beliefs, habits, laws, and norms consistent with and supportive of a re gime of accumulation and which, in fact, make it possible. Regulationists advocate an approach which privileges neither production nor reproduction but which em phasizes the correspondence within a given mode of development between regimes of accumulation and modes of regulation necessary for social systemic stability. In regulationist terms, then, Fordism is a regime of accumulation in which the productivity gains resulting from the widespread diffusion of mass production methods are balanced by the growth of mass con sumption and rising consumption norms as the national state sought agreements over the rate and composition of economic growth and the distribution of the benefits of such growth with the major collective interests of capital (such as national employers’ associations) and organized labor (notably trades unions). By seeking to ensure that national economic growth rates are both sufficient and sustainable (economically, politically, and socially – though significantly not ecologically: see below), with the national territory appropriately located within the overall accumulation process, the national state can fund its own

activities and avoid the dangers of fiscal crisis. By seeking to guarantee that changes in conditions of production and consumption are mutually consistent and compatible (via taxation and income redistribution policies, for example) and that the mode of regulation is itself successfully re produced (e.g., through educational and health policies), the national state seeks to ensure smooth and sustained economic growth. While increasing mass consumption was a central element in sustaining Fordism as a regime of accumulation, it is also important to emphasize the role of the production of armaments, weaponry, and the means of destruction as central to the Fordist regime, exemplified most sharply in the military industrial complex of the US, with an estimated 30% of the US economy accounted for in this way. While at one level of abstraction it is possible to speak of a canonical national Fordist regime of accumulation and mode of regulation, in practice ‘actually existing Fordisms’ exhibit variations around this canonical model. This is partly a reflection of the fact that regimes of accumulation and modes of regulation do not simply exist, preformed and awaiting discovery by national states. Moreover, Fordism became established in different national political and cultural contexts, which shaped the particular ways in which distinctive national Fordisms emerged and developed. There are, therefore, national variations around the canonical generic Fordist regime of accumulation. The contrast between the UK and US, West Germany and Sweden, and Japan in the 1980s provides a striking example of the different ways in which national state strategies can develop in the context of the same global economic and political environment. The rise of Fordism to dominance in the US was central to both the transformation of the sociospatial structure of the US and the rise of the US as the globally dominant capitalist power in the twentieth century. The rise of China in the first decade of the twenty first century provides evidence of the continuation of Fordist mass production in new sociopolitical contexts and the con tinuing influence of the Chinese Communist Party in an emerging capitalist economy. This particular variant of mass production and consumption is having dramatic effects, at a variety of spatial scales and registers. It is, inter alia, leading to China becoming the major center of production in the global economy for a wide range of goods, especially consumer goods. This in turn is linked to major changes in the international division of labor and patterns of international trade. It is also having fundamentally transformative effects within China: for example, regional inequalities have sharpened enor mously as the new export oriented industries are con centrated on the eastern coast, leading to internal migration on an unprecedented scale and massive urban expansion. Industrial expansion coupled with the rise of a mass consuming middle class is in turn leading to

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massive environmental transformation, devastation of the environment, and serious problems of environmental pollution. The coexistence of these national variants was and is permitted by the international monetary system, which left scope for national autonomy in selecting the precise form of Fordist mode of regulation. It is, however, also important to note that some of the most successful – in terms of conventional indicators of growth such as GDP per caput – economies of the latter part of the twentieth century certainly involved mass production and consumption but cannot plausibly be conceptualized as Fordist, such as that of South Korea.

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initially these new geographies were recast within na tional boundaries, increasingly they are now recast as parts of new international divisions of labor in what is typically represented as a globalizing economy as com panies have increasingly become multinational or trans national in their scope and mode of operations. Indeed, the shift of routine assembly and component production to peripheral locations leads some commentators to speak of ‘peripheral Fordism’. Such ‘spatial fixes’ thus enable Fordist manufacturing to be preserved by con taining its inherent contradictions within new intra national and international divisions of labor – for a time at least.

Fordist Spatial Divisions of Labor Initially, companies using Fordist mass production methods were located in the cities and major urban areas within the US and later in Western Europe that provided both masses of cheap labor and markets for the new mass produced consumer goods. However, by the latter half of the 1960s such locations were becoming increasingly problematic as sites of production as ‘full employment’ conditions led to growing labor resistance to the discip lines of Fordist production and the physical and mental stress resulting from demands for constant increases in lines speeds and in labor productivity, which are crucial to corporate competitiveness. In response to this, and enabled by changes in both production technologies and transport and communi cation technologies, big companies using Fordist mass production strategies increasingly began to restructure the social and spatial organization of production. The growing size of corporations enabled them to split up production processes, functionally and spatially, while technological changes allowed de skilling of jobs. Con sequently, companies could locate specific parts of the overall production process in spaces with ‘appropriate’ labor market conditions, and in particular shift de skilled work to areas characterized by large masses of people prepared to undertake such work, usually for lower wages. Since workers require little training for routine production, companies can pursue aggressive ‘hire and fire’ tactics, often with rapid labor turnover as retention is not an issue in spaces in which there is an abundant supply of people looking for work. In contrast, high level managerial and control functions, R&D, and skilled manufacturing activities tend to be retained in their original locations, although there is now evidence of changes in the locations of some of these more highly qualified ‘white collar’ activities to emerging economies with cheap but highly skilled labor such as India. Geographies of Fordist mass production have thus been recast at various scales, stretching the social relations of production over successively greater distances. While

Fordism and Fordist Geographies of Exchange and Consumption The emergence of mass consumption and new con sumption norms for the relatively affluent middle classes and fractions of the working class was associated with the construction of new spaces of exchange, sale, and con sumption. Just as Fordist geographies of production re quired new and changing geographies, so too did those of exchange, sale, and consumption of commodities. The development of Fordist mass production was linked with a series of innovations in the ways in which retailing and spaces of exchange were organised. There is an identifiable historical geography to their evolution – Miller et al. (1998: 3) describe this in terms of ‘‘an arc from the arcades and department stores of Paris through to the shopping malls of the United States.’’ While de partment stores emerged in the central areas of Paris, London, and New York in the nineteenth century, they both spread spatially and proliferated in number in North America and Western Europe as Fordist mass production took off in the early twentieth century. For Nava (1997: 56), they constitute one of the ‘‘key iconic aspects of modern urban society,’’ targeted deliberately at female shoppers, fusing aspects of entertainment and tourism with ‘hard sell’, as geographies of retailing and sale were recast as an integral part of the expansion of Fordism. The emergence of the shopping mall represented a further step change in the organization of spaces of sale. While planned shopping centers first emerged in the US in the early twentieth century, shopping malls as now commonly understood first appeared in 1956 with the opening of the Southdale Mall in Minneapolis. This was to be the first of many, all over the world and increasing in size (with the emergence of ‘megamalls’ in the 1980s). Once again, mall developments were associated with significant changes in geographies of retailing. On the one hand, these were typically located out of town, requiring access by automobile, while, on the other, their

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internal spatial arrangements were designed to increase sales by manipulating the movements of shoppers within the mall. While related, retailing geographies of sale and geographies of consumption within Fordism are not synonymous. The house – or home – is a key site of consumption and one of the distinctive aspects of Ford ism is the way in which new residential areas – above all the suburbs – developed from the 1920s and 1930s, ini tially in the US, as locations for the affluent middle class and, later, for fractions of the working class. Suburban ization involved creating new residential living spaces, containing a self service society dependent upon household appliances produced and purchased as com modities. Magazine advertisements, promoting the growing diffusion and adoption of ‘white goods’ – vac uum cleaners, refrigerators, and other household appli ances – were central to the construction of this new consumption space. The sale of these commodities was promoted in a very gender specific way – allied to allu sions (or maybe illusions?) of the rationality of science and a modernist belief in scientific progress. This was projected as providing the basis for new forms of household management, replacing domestic labor by new consumer durables, outputs of the burgeoning new For dist mass production ‘growth industries’. Purchasing and using such devices would, allegedly, lead to cleaner homes, reducing the risks of ill health because of im proved standards of food hygiene. This emphasis on the consumption of new mass produced household goods amplified a tendency that had already emerged in the US in the late nineteenth century increasingly to commodify the home, replacing unpaid domestic labor with machines. By the end of the nine teenth century, food, shelter, clothing, and home fur nishings had all become commodities. This was a process that was subsequently to expand greatly in terms of both scale and spatial reach. Referring specifically to furnish ings and the ways in which these artefacts are deployed in creating particular environments and spaces, such as living rooms and drawing rooms, Sack suggests that, as consumption in the home involves both material and symbolic aspects, then each time a product is brought into the home, that home is transformed physically, as something is there which was not there before, and transformed in terms of values and meaning. The point can be generalized to all the other rooms and spaces within the home. Such rooms are then both material and discursive constructions, embodying and expressing the identities and values of the people who make and per form them, as homemaking has become very closely re lated to identity formation, and once again the activities of the advertising industry are critical in mediating re lations between producers and consumers and creating markets for new commodities.

Fordism and the Destruction of the Natural Environment A corollary of Fordism as a system of mass production and mass consumption is that it was (and to a consider able degree still is) a system of the mass production of wastes and ecological mass destruction. Since economic activities all involve energy and materials transformations that are subject to the laws of thermodynamics, they inevitably have unintended environmental effects. For dist production, like all capitalist production, regards the natural environment as a source of natural resources to be exploited efficiently in search of profits. At various times fears have been expressed that some key natural resources (notably hydrocarbons and metallic minerals) would become exhausted and pose ‘limits to growth’. Such resources undoubtedly are absolutely limited in supply but a variety of technical and social innovations as Fordist production has evolved have, for the moment, kept this issue relatively low on the agenda. However, while there have been some improvements as a result of government legislation and state regulation, the way in which the natural environment continues to be regarded as a sink of infinite capacity for deposition of unwanted wastes, the unpriced by products of production, poses very serious problems. In addition, once the products of Fordist mass production are sold, consumers of them treat the environment as a waste dump for the unwanted by products of consumption or for commodities at what they deem to be the end of their socially useful lives. There is abundant evidence of such impacts. Limits to this waste dumping can be set by national states placing a total prohibition of particular types of waste discharged, by setting maximum permissible limits, by creating prices for them via taxation systems, or via creating trading systems in pollution permits. A consequence of this is that pollution standards vary between countries, with important implications for the location of pollutant in dustries and for patterns of trade in wastes. As environmental standards rose in the core countries of the Fordist economy, so too did pressures to relocate environmentally polluting production processes to per ipheral locations. From around the 1960s there was growing concern about the environmental pollutant ef fects of certain sorts of industrial production (including those involving asbestos, arsenic trioxide, benzidine based dyes, certain pesticides and carcinogenic chemicals, chemicals such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and some basic mineral processing activities such as those for copper, lead, and zinc). As a result, enabled by advances in transport and communication technologies, companies began to relocate hazardous and polluting production activities. Initially this involved moving to peripheral regions within their home national territories but increasingly to parts of the Third World, thereby

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constituting a formative moment in the creation of the (so called) newly industrializing countries. Companies were often encouraged in this by financial inducements and low (or no) levels of environmental regulation as national governments were eager to encourage the per ceived benefits of modernization via industrial growth and employment. This has greatly extended the com modification of nature and greatly exacerbated local causes and levels of environmental degradation. Cru cially, however, this simply displaced the location of pollutant industries as part of the new Fordist spatial divisions of labor rather than effectively dealing with the issues of polluting production. An alternative to exporting polluting industries from the core territories of the Fordist economy is to export their pollutants. The international trade in pollutants is complex, however, with locations such as La Hague in France and Sellafield in the United Kingdom importing nuclear waste from other parts of the world for re processing there. More often, though, destination lo cations for wastes are in countries on the periphery of the global economy, such as Kassa Island, off the coast of the former French African colony of Guinea, or the Ivory Coast. Thus, as people in more economically developed countries came to understand the dangers posed by noxious pollutants, and environmental standards were increased, pressures rose to find ways of dealing with such pollutants. Exporting them to other areas desperate for foreign currency was often cheaper than dealing with them at home. It was made easier when the recipient countries were misled about the nature of the wastes and/or had authoritarian nonelected governments who neither knew nor cared about the risks to the environ ment and the health of their populations. Dealing with such wastes within their home territory could, on the other hand, involve considerable financial costs but, perhaps more significantly, political costs, in the face of NIMBYism (‘not in my back yard’) and opposition by local communities to such wastes being treated in ‘their place’. However, not all local communities have equal capacity to resist so that such waste dumps are often located in areas of working class or ethnic minority housing. Indeed, poorer communities within the ad vanced capitalist world and peripheral states within the global economy have engaged in bidding wars, seeking to act as destinations for hazardous wastes in return for monetary payments and incomes.

The Limits to Fordism? There clearly are limits to Fordism, at both the micro and macro scales, as a particular way of organizing capitalist production and, more generally, economic and social life

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in capitalist societies. Some of these limits would apply to all forms of political and economic organization, notably those arising as a result of the laws of thermodynamics, others arise from the general contradictions of a capitalist political economy (e.g., those that reflect the contradictory character of capitalist social relations) and some are spe cific to Fordism itself (e.g., the tensions inherent in the state seeking to balance mass production with mass con sumption within the national territory). There has been much written about the demise of Fordism and its re placement with some form of post Fordist successor but while there is considerable evidence of experimentation with micro scale organization of production processes, it is by no means clear that this constitutes a non Fordist al ternative and there is scant evidence of a new and stable post Fordist macro scale model of political and economic organization. One has to only look at China and India to recognize that the age of mass production and mass con sumption is far from dead. On the other hand, the failure to recognize that Fordist production, exchange, and con sumption activities involve material transformations that have unintended consequences and have created a legacy that could well have globally catastrophic consequences is becoming perhaps the key issue of the twenty first century. See also: Consumption; Environmental Regulation; Fordism, Post-Fordism and Flexible Specialization; Industrialization; Regulation; Spatial Division of Labor; State.

Further Reading Aglietta, M. (1979). A theory of capitalist regulation: The US experience. London: New Left Books. Aglietta, M. (1999). Capitalism at the turn of the century: Regulation theory and the challenge of social change. New Left Review 232, 41 96. Beynon, H. (1973). Working for Ford. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dicken, P. (2007). Global shift (5th edn.). London: Sage. Hudson, R. (2001). Producing places. New York: Guilford. Hudson, R. (2005). Economic geographies. London: Sage. Hudson, R. (2007). Region and place: Re thinking regional development in the context of global environmental change. Progress in Human geography, 31(5), 827 836. Jessop, B. and Sum, N L. (2007). Beyond the regulation approach. Chelthenham: Elgar. Lash, D. and Urry, J. (1987). The end of organised capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. Lipietz, A. (1987). Mirages and miracles. London: Verso. Miller, D., Jackson, P., Thrift, N., Holbrook, B. and Rowlands, M. (1998). Shopping, place and identity. London: Routledge. Miller, R. (1991). ‘Selling Mrs. Consumer’: Advertising and the creation of suburban socio spatial relations. Antipode 23, 263 301. Nava, M. (1997). Modernity’s disavowal: Women, the city and the department store. In Falk, P. & Campbell, C. (eds.) The shopping experience, pp 56 92. London: Sage. Sack, R. (1992). Place, modernity and the consumer’s world. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Sassen, S. (1991). The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Williams, R. (1980). Problems in materialism and culture. London: Verso.

Fordism, Post-Fordism and Flexible Specialization J. Lovering, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction A well known narrative in human geography enshrined in many textbooks tells the story of the rise and fall of Fordism and its replacement by post Fordism. In the 1990s, this came to occupy center stage in economic geography in particular. It has since lost some of its drawing power, but its influence remains significant, particularly in analyses of the changing role of regions and cities, and in policy debates. It is also implicit if not explicit in many accounts of the geographies of postmodernity.

The Narrative: The Historical Transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism and the Rise of Flexible Specialization The narrative of Fordism into post Fordism suggests that economic development has proceeded through a distinct sequence of ages or epochs. The last of these was Fordism. We are now living under its successor, post Fordism. The story also supplies an explanation for this transformation. It brings a set of cognitive and normative messages. It tells us how to think about the past and the present, and what to do to prepare for the future. The lessons are political. The advent of post Fordism entailed not only economic but also social, cultural, and political shifts. The concept of Fordism originated with writings on Henry Ford, whose industrial achievements in mass car manufacture greatly impressed his contemporaries. An tonio Gramsci, reading about them at considerable social and geographical distance (he was in an Italian prison), came to the conclusion that Ford’s huge factories were not only the industrial corollary of mass production, but they also represented a new paradigm for how to organize labor in capitalist society in general, using a subtle combination of coercion at work and seduction in the world of consumption. Henry Ford had deployed the techniques of sociological inquiry and scientific management to develop a method for managing a largely immigrant workforce with diverse skills, origins, and languages. His combination of a mechanically regulated workplace, relatively high wages, and ideological in struction promised miracles of productivity in the factory, and unprecedented levels of consumption in the home. Gramsci saw Fordism as offering workers a Faustian deal; ever growing consumption was traded for

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dehumanizing work and political quietism. It implied the construction of an entirely new kind of working class. But he also believed that in the longer term this arrangement would undermine itself. Fordism would provide workers with more leisure than ever before. The more advanced workers would use this to develop a broader critique of capitalism. They would come to recognize their collective strength, and would challenge once again the domination of the capitalist class system. This time around the confrontation would take place increasingly through ‘cultural’ struggles in civil society. Gramsci’s writings on Fordism (or the American System) were revisited in the 1960s and 1970s by a new generation of West European intellectuals in or on the fringes of the Communist Party. They were searching for a means of conceptualizing the class dimensions of what seemed at the time to be series of profound upheavals in economic and political life. Gramsci’s suggestions con cerning Fordism were expanded to develop the theory that capitalism developed through a series of well defined stages, conjunctures, or ‘epochs’. The develop ment of capitalism was shaped by a sequence of strategies seeking to contain the tendency of the working class to form a self aware unified political force. While each such strategy provided a degree of stability for a time, it eventually disintegrated and a crisis prevailed until an alternative was arrived at. Each phase of stability de pended on the one hand a distinct pattern of economic growth (the ‘regime of accumulation’) and on the other a distinctive set of social institutions and behavioral norms (the ‘mode of regulation’). Fordism as sketched by Gramsci had been the latest and greatest of such com binations, but by the 1970s it was in terminal decline. Capital was trying to modify it to create instead neo Fordism. The availability of new computerized infor mation and control technologies would enable firms to reimpose control by redistributing work across different groups of workers, and different geographies. The huge plants employing vast labor forces on routinized tasks that had characterized Fordism would give way to a di versity of workplaces. Some of these would employ labor on more flexible terms, giving workers the oppor tunity to develop high skills and conduct a wider range of tasks. These workers would gain greater autonomy, but their contribution to the collective task of production would be ensured by new technologies and the discip lining effects of competition. Others would labor on much as before.

Fordism, Post-Fordism and Flexible Specialization

The concept of Fordism thus entered political dis course just as the object it purported to describe was disappearing. Its function was to lay the ground for an analysis of what followed; neo Fordism. As this narrative became academicized and began to attract a wide range of contributors drawing on different analytical per spectives and political agendas, predictions of the arrival of neo Fordism generally gave way to talk of post Fordism. Sometimes there is a lot in a name. Talk of post Fordism suggested that capital was now seeking to do more than patch up tried and trusted institutions by using new geographies. Instead, it was embarking on a much more comprehensive project, rejecting all the key institutional and cultural elements of Fordism. American writers on post Fordism tended to devote more attention to technology and markets and the creative potential of the liberated individual worker, and less to the re structuring of the working class, and the contradictions in this which had been Gramsci’s main concern. With the addition of the theory of ‘flexible specialization’ in the 1980s the story of life after Fordism took a radical new turn, apparently offering lessons very different from those intended by its original authors. By the 1990s these insights and suggestions had crystallized into a well defined orthodoxy among neo Marxist social scientists. Here the term ‘Fordism’ came to be largely a descriptive one, designating the institutions and social patterns of advanced capitalist countries (above all the USA) in the period beginning roughly in the late 1930s and ending in the mid 1970s. The key institutions were oligopolistic corporations, insti tutionalized systems of national collective bargaining, and high levels of national taxation and public spending. These all entailed huge bureaucracies, which in their turn created new fields of service sector employment, also organized on largely Fordist principles. These were the institutional correlates of a new set of macro economic relationships: regularized large scale invest ment in physical capital and plant, steady increases in productivity and output, mass consumerism, monopo listic economic governance, and nation centered circuits of spending and investment (overseas trade forming a relatively small part of national consumption). All this underpinned what came to be called the Golden Age of Capitalism, which saw not only an unprecedented rise in output, productivity, and material living standards but also a general reduction in economic and spatial inequalities. Writers on management tended to call this managerial capitalism, economists were more likely to call it Keynesianism, while political analysts might refer to an era of welfare nationalism. To describe it as Fordism was to indicate membership of a particular intellectual and political community drawing its cognitive and normative inspiration from a broadly Marxist analysis of the causal

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centrality of capitalism. From this perspective a central feature was the feedback loop that Fordism provided between growing productivity and rising spending. This banished overproduction and underconsumption, the ghosts that had haunted capitalism in the 1870s and the 1930s. It achieved in reality the principle of recycling incomes so as to expand domestic working class pur chasing power that critics of the economics of imperial ism such as Rosa Luxemburg or J. A. Hobson had argued for theoretically half a century earlier. By expanding domestic markets, the economic motor of the tendency to imperialist expansion and war was switched off. Fordism provided the framework within which warfare capitalism came to be displaced by welfare capitalism. The Working Class under Fordism The central organizational feature of Fordism, according to Gramsci and the Regulationists, was the insti tutionalization of relations in the workplace. Different stages of the labor process were rigidly separated: con ception (the organization of methods and engineering based on elite skilled labor), manufacturing (deploying a skilled and disciplined workforce), and unskilled as sembly and execution (drawing on labor with no skill and allowing extensive mechanization). This followed the principles of scientific management set out in by F. W. Taylor, who famously claimed that the most boring tasks could as well be performed by a trained gorilla. For later writers on Fordism, especially in the American tradition influenced by Piore and Sabel in the 1980s, the Taylorist workplace was the cellular unit encoding the essential principles and drivers of the system of mass production. It imposed constraints on individual expression and creativity and these eventually dragged that system into crisis. The European neo Gramscian approach gave ra ther more emphasis to the class relations implicit in the institutions of Fordism, emphasizing national procedures shaping collective agreements in industry, full employ ment policies, the empowerment of trades union as bargaining entities, the cultivation of working class con sumerism, and the effects of the welfare state in sus taining the feedback links of consumer capitalism. Keynesian macroeconomics had provided for the first time an apparatus able to regulate the national economy as a whole. Under Fordism the space of capital came to correspond to national political space to a degree unequalled before or since. High taxes and a large public sector were the price paid by national capital as a trade off for assured if unremarkable profits and minimal disruption. The Rise of Fordism This conception of Fordism was based on an image of the US. But different variants of ‘Fordism’ were to be found

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in most advanced economies in the 1950s and 1960s. A cloned and exaggerated version in some respects flourished in the Soviet Union, symbolized in the anec dotal literature that was very popular among writers in this field by the famous barber shop with 100 seats. Some of the industrial and labor process ingredients of Fordism proved to be exportable to Third World countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, and South Korea. The global ization of Fordism was promoted by US multinationals, US political influence through transnational bodies, and by local development elites seeking rapid industrializa tion by copying Western methods. In the latter cases, the working class was not large or affluent enough to create the self sustaining macroeconomic dynamics of the core Fordist countries, so the Taylorist and state protectionist aspects usually dominated. This story of Fordism concentrated on the functional relationships which it entailed. This was complemented by a historical narrative which sought to explain how this remarkable assemblage came into being. Private firms discovered the production line and Taylorist labor process. Governments discovered the advantages of state deficit financing and macroeconomic management. Eventually, especially in the US during the 1940s, the construction of Fordism become a conscious goal (for Gramscians a ‘project’) on the part of identifiable factions within capital and within the state. In the US motor industry interests and the European oriented foreign policy establishment proved especially important. The Demise of Fordism But by the same token Fordism contained the seeds of its own eventual demise. For some this lay in its destructive impact on individuals and their creativity. For others the problem lay in the unsustainability of its institutions and systemic connections. Over time, firms used to profiting from largely secure domestic markets lost the incentive to maximize efficiency or innovation and began to lose market shares to new competitors. They turned increas ingly to national state protection in the 1960s. The state underpinned empowerment of workers under Fordism also meant that they too experienced declining com pulsion and became increasingly inefficient and expen sive. The late 1960s saw a rapid growth of grass roots level industrial militancy and the ‘youth revolt’ against capitalist discipline. From all sides the demands upon the state expanded until they reached the limits of the tax and spend made possible by the de facto class accord, and the technical capacities of state bureaucracies. A fiscal crisis broke out. In the US and later Britain this was followed by a middle class tax revolt which put an end to Keynesianism and the growth of the welfare state by the late 1970s. The demise of Fordism seemed to explain much of the crisis of the Western capitalist world: a

combination of inflation and economic stagnation, or ‘stagflation’. New political leaderships (Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney, Hawke, Ozal, etc.) committed themselves in varying degrees to purging their national Fordist insti tutions. In so doing they deepened and globalized the recession. In this austere context, corporations experi mented with new styles of labor management, technol ogies, marketing, and locations. By the 1990s, these had coalesced to form the key elements of post Fordism. In the late 1970s, Regulationist writers had anticipated increasingly austere neo Fordist control over the working class and a corresponding new global geography of pro duction. The dominant account of post Fordism 10 years later presented rather a different scenario. It emphasized all round fragmentation: technological, economic, social, cultural, political, and geographical. And it emphasized the corporate and geographical opportunities this would bring. The central feature of the emergent post Fordist regime of accumulation – in these new accounts – would be a reorientation from mass produced standardized commodities to differentiated product markets. Industrial investment would increasingly focus on creating the capacity to introduce new products (and to a lesser extent processes) rather than ever larger economies of scale. Corporate managements would move away from top down authoritarian management and seek instead to mobilize the creative resources of their staff through flatter management hierarchies and new individualized incentives. The market share of firms could only be de fended by permanent revolution in product innovation, processes, marketing, and thence employment. The key to this upbeat new reading of ‘life after Fordism’ was the arrival of what its enthusiasts called ‘flexible specialization’. Flexible Specialization By the mid 1990s ‘flexible specialization’ supplied a hugely influential new final chapter to the story of Fordism. In their landmark New Industrial Divide of 1985, Pirore and Sable claimed that new technologies were making possible a new social and technological model of production ideally suited to the demands of the new age of permanent industrial and market revolution. That revolution was portrayed as a technological and cultural inevitability to be celebrated, rather than a de fensive response to governmental and corporate crises, and as such to be inspected for weaknesses. For the new technological optimists the increased volatility of markets reflected, quite properly, the fickle tastes of affluent consumers and the inevitable, but welcome, growth of competition. Flexible specialization was the formula for success in addressing these challenges. Bespoke batch production, on a new high technology basis, provided the technological corollary to the break up of standardized


consumption. Specialized goods could be produced for rapidly changing markets using flexible general purpose machinery and high skill labor. For its enthusiasts, many of whom found a home in economic geography departments, flexible specialization was not merely a new corporate strategy; it was a desirable model for the construction of an entirely new system of production and consumption. It unleashed the creativity and collaborative capacities of the workforce which the dismal routines of Fordism had long suppressed. Instead of a mass force engaged in boring routine tasks and earning institutionally set incomes from rigidly prescribed Taylorist work, post Fordist competitiveness required a dynamic and flexible labor force able to make constant active contributions to ensure ceaseless innovations to both products and process. Rather than relying for their careers on a stock of established technical skills, workers would increasingly need to create new careers by nurturing the skills of adaptability and the ability and willingness to contribute their creativity and imagination to work teams. Where the icon of Fordism had been Henry’s quintessential mass production car plant, the corporate icon of post Fordism was another but very different car manufacturer – Toyota. Toyota (so the story went) had transformed production and employment by deploying new design, production, and communication technologies. It distributed work among closely linked subcontractors and maximized the use of just in time to minimize inventories. Workers themselves took re sponsibility for quality control, and helped generate new innovations. Toyota embodied the post Fordist future. Workers would no longer be interchangeable lumps of labor. Particular groups of skilled workers, rather than vast supplies of anonymous labor, would be the key to corporate competitiveness. In Piore and Sabel’s vision, flexible specialization would enable to rise of a new class of yeoman crafts workers and entrepreneurs. They would be linked through relations not only of commerce but also of trust. But this would take time, and in the im mediate future the spread of flexible specialization would widen the unhappy differentiation between different groups of workers (and consumers). The manual indus trial working class would decline to become a rump surviving only in the low wage, low skill margins where flexible competitors had yet to arrive, or anticipated profits to be too low to bother. The economy and labor market would, for the foreseeable future, be character ized by a growing industrial divide. The Fordist Region The Fordism into post Fordism narrative was particu larly attractive to geographers because it constructed each term in ways that had immediate spatial impli cations. It promised both a powerful way to explain

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empirically observable changes in economic geographies, and suggestions as to how future policies might best capitalize upon emergent trends. The idea that the geo graphical changes of the 1970s–1990s represented a re structuring of historical significance – the spatial dimension of a fundamental reconstruction of capitalism as a system – became an almost unchallenged orthodoxy. The economic geographies of Fordism were shaped by its characteristic separation between the different func tions of the labor process, projected across space. As the sustained growth of national markets led local firms to become national corporations, a new interregional divi sion of labor had formed, guided by the Taylorist separation of functions. Different types of work were allocated to different regions. Some specialized in skilled production tasks and others in de skilled production and assembly. Less advantaged places specialized in routine production and assembly. But the background context of high national growth rates and full employment policies ensured a degree of convergence in terms of overall and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) indicators. The era of Fordism was in general one of declining regional and urban disparities. In aggregate terms, if not qualita tive ones, employment opportunities spread out from the overheated center to the cooler periphery. At the local level, this often created a de facto territorial compact between places and firms. But the demise of Fordism implied the reversal of these trends. In the versions of post Fordism that gave pride of place to flexible specialization, a very different conception of the causes and requirements of regional (and later urban) development became influential in the 1990s. The relationships between places would now be shaped by competition between them, rather than by their functions in a corporate and state administered division of labor. Post Fordism means place competition. For some writers, notably the Los Angeles School of Economic Geographers at UCLA and its many fol lowers, this raised the exciting prospect of development of a set of new industrial spaces based on clusters of innovatory firms interacting both through the market and (more importantly) in civil society. Coinciding with – and targeted on – the emergence of a new stratum of policymakers at the regional (later city re gional) level, such cheering claims became very prom inent in the 1990s, acquiring the label of the New Regionalism. This highlighted the positive potential of post Fordism and the new proliferation of subnational units of economic governance (small countries, regions, and city regions). The Fordist City The concept of Fordism also suggested new ways of understanding the urban. Where the Victorian industrial

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city had been defined by its role as a center of pro duction, the Fordist city was essentially a site for mass consumption. Under Fordism, urban development was assimilated to the process of generating new consumption demands to absorb the increasing output. The most vis ible and revolutionary dimension of this was an un precedented wave of suburbanization, and the radical reconstruction of cities around car use. And as subur banization attracted higher income groups outward the inner cities changed their social composition. At first they became more narrowly working class. Later, as Fordism and skilled manual employment declined, they became the main locus of deindustrialization, un employment, and poverty. In racially divided societies such as the US this took on the charged dimension of ‘white flight’. The demise of Fordism accordingly signified the start of an epochal change in the regional and urban dynamics of capitalism. And this had cultural dimensions. As post Fordist flexible accumulation became the key to renewed growth (accumulation) postmodernism became the dominant mode of representation. In this account, the post Fordist city witnessed the replacement of industrial society by urban society. Many claims originating in the Fordism–post Fordism analysis went on to influence postmodernist ideas of the city more widely. Hardt and Negri, for example, claimed that the Fordist worker was a ‘mass worker’ while the post Fordist worker is a ‘social worker’, self valorizing and intellectually equipped, whose appearance on the historical stage augurs the (spontaneous) arrival of a new post socialist revolution ary ‘multitude’.

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Narrative The narrative of Fordism and its transition into post Fordism has been hugely influential in human geography, especially economic geography. But in the course of its migration from a European Left intellectual perspective with an implicitly radical agenda into a transatlantic academic orthodoxy with policy implications in line with the wider political and corporate policy rhetoric, it underwent a number of subtle but important changes. The initial idea that Fordism would give way to neo Fordism was largely forgotten. And the differences of focus between the neo Marxist Regulation approach and the American technological–institutional approach ten ded to be overlooked as the narrative became a neat pedagogic orthodoxy. As such, it provides students with a sweeping introductory historical outline that has the virtue of seeming to explain much. It certainly inspired a wave of productive new research. But on closer exam ination it was always riddled with empirical, conceptual, and theoretical problems. Talk of Fordism and post Fordism, and especially of flexible specialization, has only been free of controversy or challenge when it has been comfortably vague. For it was, and still is, beset by a lack of clarity and agreement as to exactly what the key concepts describe, how appropriate they are to different national and regional situations, and what it is that they really explain. Empirical When and when did Fordism exist?

Post-Fordism in Policy At a less abstract level the thesis of the imminent arrival of post Fordism was thought to have major and clear policy implications. A whole new quasi academic indus try emerged to spell them out. Industrial policy should aspire to generalize flexible specialization, especially by creating smaller firms and more innovative ones. Vertical disintegration, networked production, and the adoption of flexible technologies should be encouraged. Labor market policies should break up collectivist institutions and encourage flexibility and training for adaptability. Learning and knowledge should be key policy goals for firms, workers, and places. Spatial policies should en courage place competition, especially through the de velopment of industrial districts and other forms of cluster wherein the players interact dynamically through both traded and untraded connections. The old spatial policies of the Fordist era were now both unworkable and unnecessary. For many urban and regional political leaders, Silicon Valley and the Third Italy came to be seen as offering transferable lessons.

The first and most basic problems were empirical. The narrative tells a neat story, but history and geography are never so obliging. Few parts of the world ever experi enced full blooded Fordism–Taylorism of the kind which occupies central place in the story. The Ford car plant itself, for example was never very representative of US industry. In many advanced countries many industries, including automobiles, were never thoroughly Taylorist even in the Fordism’s supposed heyday. Many companies experimented with Taylorism and abandoned it in favor of more humanistic techniques even in the Fordist era. The tidy world conjured up by Fordist storytellers never really existed, even in the American heartland. The narrative of the decline of Fordism was no less empirically questionable. The claim that mass production was coming to an end was wildly overstated when it was first made in the 1970s. It is perhaps even more at odds with reality today. In the twenty first century, standard ized goods and services are being produced and con sumed on a more global and massive scale than ever before. That some of these are modified to form local bespoke packages does not speak to the end of mass


production, but its continuation as the platform for strategies of market differentiation in an era of incipient overproduction. In the more developed countries recent employment growth has been concentrated in the service industries. And much of this has taken a highly Fordist form in terms of the labor process and the production of standardized commodities (Walmartization and Starbu kization). In the fastest growing newly industrializing countries such as India and China, much of the recent expansion has been based on techniques of mass pro duction and labor processes that echo Fordism and Taylorism rather than post Fordist flexible specialization. Many of the foundational assumption of the post Fordism thesis turned out to be at best overstated, at worst parochial. Even when these claims were first made, researchers cast doubt on their empirical validity. In the Third Italy, for example, larger firms were in fact growing faster than small ones. The much publicized Italian craft model was limited to a few special cases, and these de pended on the existence elsewhere of much more Fordist kinds of employment. Large US firms were reasserting their dominance over supposedly post Fordist smaller ones, and this was giving rise to increased labor market segmentation and worker inequality. Today, in the world as a whole the number of people producing mass prod ucts and working under more or less Fordist–Taylorist conditions is probably far greater than when the death sentence on Fordist mass production was formally an nounced in seminar rooms two decades ago. How pervasive is ‘flexible specialization’?

The suggestion that flexible specialization provides the descriptive and explanatory key to post Fordism has not been confirmed by empirical or theoretical research. Empirically, there are clearly many different models of ‘post Fordism’, including not only Toyotaism but the Alpine and Nordic model based on high technology consumer goods. And some of the supposedly arche typical examples of post Fordism, such as Japanese car firms, have turned out to be much less exemplars of flexible specialization than early commentators believed. Surveys of small firm development have not identified a general trend to flexible specialization, even in sup posedly classic case such as subcontracting in Japan and Germany. The theory of flexible specialization claimed that it was much more than just another form of corporate adaptation; it was destined to become hegemonic. Some seekers after flexible specialization and of the dynamic regional clusters associated with it have managed to find sufficient examples to sustain this vision. But the non converted have not been persuaded. While empirically it is clear that various forms of flexible specialization have been adopted by a number of prominent firms and in fluenced a number of significant locations, it requires a

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very selective focus to make these appear as prototypical. And it requires a rather tendentious kind of technological determinism to cast flexible specialization as the key factor explaining contemporary growth and geographical tendencies in general. Labor flexibility – post-Fordist speculation versus neoliberal reality?

An early empirical critique of post Fordism focused on the vagueness in its discussion of labor flexibility. Post Fordist accounts often failed to distinguish carefully enough between increased flexibility in work and flexi bility in employment. Clearly, some fields of work were indeed becoming more pleasant. More liberal conditions of employment were typical for the higher qualified and more ‘creative’ work force. But these were often made possible only because elsewhere labor was engaged under broadly Fordist conditions (e.g., in subcontracting or supplier production units located in the emerging economies). If the quintessential Fordist worker was tied to a production line in a car plant, the post Fordist equivalent turned out to be tied to a cappuccino machine and the erratic demands of customers, not necessarily a freer or more creative situation. The idea that post Fordism necessarily involved flexible specialization, and that this meant labor markets and employment con ditions would generally become less Taylorist, could be sustained empirically only by looking at selected trees, not the forest. Critics objected that advocates of the post Fordist were not discovering new trends so much as lending a new cheerful gloss to the age old reality of fragmented and inegalitarian labor markets. Conceptual and Theoretical If the empirical and historical status of the claims central to the Fordism–post Fordism narrative were contentious, their explanatory value was even more contestable. The narrative was from the start criticized for a lack of clarity in conceptual terms and apparent contradictions. These critiques focused on the tendency to explanatory re ductionism in the form of technological determinism in the versions of post Fordism emanating from one side of the Atlantic, and disguised vulgar Marxist economic determinism in those coming from the other. In the technology centered and individualistic per spective (signified by Piore and Sabel), the explanatory weight is carried by claims concerning new technological possibilities in the organization of production and labor markets. Some detected in the rosier expressions of this the influence of a lingering romantic Jeffersonian vision of an economy of independent small businesspeople, close to that of classical liberal economics. The flexible specialization thesis could be seen as a Left ish version of the prevailing neoliberal tendency. The legacy of the

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European post Gramscian approach on the other hand was criticized for a tension between its official intention to develop a multicausal perspective and a de facto ten dency to portray events as superstructural adaptations to the requirements of a new pattern of accumulation. This tradition smuggled in a functionalist, if not simply tele ological, pseudo explanation. In both streams of post Fordist writing the original Gramscian notion of capitalism as a class system and as a cultural construct had been lost. By focusing on sup posedly enduring factors of production and employment both accounts gave more emphasis to the apparent structural dimensions of capitalism (institutions, both formal and informal) than the perpetual and amorphous class struggle that, for Gramsci at least, had been at least equally important. The original Regulationist question, asking how an enduring way of managing class relations and conflicts comes to be established, and how it gives rise to new sets of contradictions, had slipped off the research agenda. Although much ink would eventually be spilt by Regulationist writers insisting that an analysis of Fordism and post Fordism enables analysts to grasp na tional or subnational specificities the contents of this tin have rarely matched the description on the outside. The best historical accounts of the development of accumu lation and regulation in particular countries have drawn only lightly on the Fordism narrative, treating it as a stylized ideal typical heuristic starting point rather than rigid framework. The Fordism into post Fordism story does not really explain much about recent history, and much of recent history fails to confirm the story. What is the connection between post-Fordism and flexible specialization?

By the mid 1990s even some of its earlier enthusiasts felt that so many criticisms of the flexible specialization ex planation for industrial districts had accumulated that its use in future should be much more cautious and muted. The claim that post Fordism in general would be char acterized by flexible specialization has become increas ingly implausible. Jessop suggested that post Fordism should be seen only as a very general historical category the journey toward which could take a variety of forms. The normative assertion that policy should aim to maximize flexible specialization enjoyed considerable influence in certain elite policy networks, especially at the regional and urban levels, but has been controversial in more intellectually rigorous circles. The relationship between flexible specialization and economic restructuring asserted by early writings on post Fordism arguably rested on misreading changes in degree as changes in kind, and on misinterpreting con tingent corporate behavior of the period as signs of ne cessary general tendencies. In the early 1970s, Hymer argued that firms increasingly focused their product

innovations and marketing on new expensive products sold to affluent elites (vertical accumulation), rather than continuing to expand the output and reduce the price of products consumed by working class consumers (horizontal accumulation). This tendency was reinforced by the effect of subsequent neoliberalizing policies, including greater openness to imports and inward in vestment, and the accompanying slowdown in growth of per capita output and incomes in former Fordist coun tries. Firms have sought to protect market share by driving up expenditure on marketing and greater product differentiation. This suggests that the corporate emphasis on innovation – so prominent in post Fordist analysis and policy debates – is more a response to changed market conditions than their prime mover. Some degree of flexible specialization has long been an element in the repertoire of corporate strategies, contingently useful or not according to case. The post Fordism claim that it is necessarily much more than this is not anchored in a firm grasp of economic history. Methodological problems in the use of case studies

The academic literature invoking flexible specialization as the key to post Fordism has drawn heavily on case studies. But these have often attracted criticism on methodological grounds. A typical approach took the form of listing alleged exemplars of flexible specialization (Emilia Romagna, Baden Wurttemberg, the Salzburg region, and Silicon Valley used to be favorites), inferring common characteristics, attributing these with explana tory significance, and then drawing policy conclusions. This method risks treating regions as semiautonomous entities making their own way in the world. And indeed, many criticisms argued that the particularities of each example and their connection to specific national and international contexts were not properly explored. The New Regionalism was characterized by a voluntaristic conception of what regions can do for themselves, carrying the tendentious implication that particular re gions show the rest of the world its destiny. The sug gestion that Silicon Valley, for example, was some kind of post Fordist prototype that could be emulated elsewhere became enormously popular. Millions of air miles were consumed relaying visiting politicians and consultants from other valleys ambitious to learn its secrets. But its real achievements were much more ambivalent, and much more dependent on nontransferable locational and historical factors than the fashionable view pretended. The most celebratory accounts of the new geographies of post Fordism have been marked by a very casual use of ideal types in the theoretical analyses, and a lack of at tention to epistemological and methodological issues concerning case studies. Many empirical studies also adopted an actor focus, emphasizing the perspective of


managements in particular. This may have encouraged the tendency to detach the particular from the general, the microeconomic from the macroeconomic. It is always difficult to know how much weight to attach to actors’ claims for their own novelty and significance. Alternative explanations of phenomena attributed to post-Fordism

As time has passed, the post Fordist narrative has become steadily less persuasive. Many factors other than those stressed in these accounts have clearly had a major im pact on industrial, employment, and geographical change. These include the continued vulnerability of capitalism to booms and slumps (1997, 2002, and 2007–) and the rising significance and globalization of finance capital and consequent property market, and the wider question of the role of modernization strategies in shaping national economic trajectories. Macroeconomic and international trade and investment policies since the 1980s have slo wed rates of growth of aggregate demand while opening up national economic space. This has had a far greater quantitative and qualitative impact on the geographies of employment than flexible specialization or any of the other institutional dimensions of post Fordism. Leaving aside the massive changes in the economic impact of a few major countries – especially China and India – the era after Fordism has been characterized by a general stagnation in the growth of productivity, output, and output per capita. In this sense it has been less dy namic than the Fordist era, despite the impression given by the flood of glittering new products in the shops. A larger share of output goes to capital, but the growth of consumer demand has not been sufficient to generate enough investment opportunities to absorb it, so a smaller share of profit is invested. An increasing share is diverted to acquiring rent generating assets (land, prop erty, and artifacts) rather than industrial productivity. This underpins the explosion of the property market which has shaped the global proliferation of urban re generation strategies. This is probably both empirically and theoretically a much more ubiquitous and significant influence on development in many cities and regions than the emergence of flexible specialization. The post Fordism literature paid little attention to neoliberalism and especially to the associated growth of finance capital (the words are conspicuously missing from the index to Amin’s reader on post Fordism). But the rise of finance capital would seem to go a long way to ex plaining why many large firms have in effect transformed themselves from organizational units embracing physical assets in the form of production capacities (factories) and large scale in house labor, and have become instead financial units coordinating the distributed division of labor from conception to production to marketing. Neoliberal industrial restructuring has transformed

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capitals from bounded units of production to units of organizational power. Many older manufacturing cor porations have shed much of their production capacity and have evolved into entities managing the conception, production, and marketing process through a series of subcontractors, filliers, strategic alliances, and so on. Case studies of particular units characterized by flexible specialization, or of regions, throw little light in them selves on the dimensions and dynamics of change in this corporate context. The post Fordist account also completely overlooks some prominent macroeconomic and labor market in stitutions of the literally post Fordist (or neoliberal) era. One such is the Bretton Woods II system whereby US consumption is subsidized to the extent of $1.7b daily by funds from Asia. This bizarre contingency of inter national economic relations underpins the expansion of Chinese ‘neo Fordist’ production on the one hand and the ‘post Fordist’ specialization of some American pro ducers on the other. Another is the fact that the global commodity producing labor supply has grown by of 1 billon – between one third and a half – following the demise of the Soviet Union and the state led opening of China. This has had a profound impact on corporate strategies, for example, making it much more feasible to redistribute routine labor to cheaper workforces for example. The Fordism–post Fordism story, despite intentions, has taken a very one sided and economistic view of the construction of market forces which overemphasizes technology and underemphasizes political and socio cultural factors. One casualty has been gender, largely invisible in most accounts of Fordism and post Fordism. But changing gender relations, household structures, as pirations, and labor supply have a fundamental effect on economic restructuring, especially in countries experi encing neo Fordist growth such as Turkey, Brazil, or China. This is both an empirical and a theoretical omission. Policy and Politics Any doubts about the empirical and theoretically plausibility of the Fordism–post Fordism narrative filter through to its usefulness for policymaking. For critics the policy conclusions drawn from this account were in adequate from the start: first, they would be unlikely to succeed even in their own terms. Second, they would be likely to be partial in the sense that they prioritize par ticular economic interests and social groups over others for spurious reasons. One line of criticism suggests that flexible special ization was in fact little more than the particular response of a particular set of Northern firms to local contin gencies. It was a local reaction to specific influences,

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including the general neoliberalization of policy. Post Fordist accounts misrepresented this as signifying a new historical trend in capitalism in general. In so doing they provided an ideological gloss legitimizing the particular response to crisis adopted by those American and European firms and their governments, puffing up a local contingency as a universal prototype. The effect was to suggest that a US centric 1990s model was nothing less than the ideal type for the rest of the world for the foreseeable future. If post Fordism is a Gramscian project to reestablish capitalist stability, then the flexible specialization story tended to become part of this project rather than a cri tique of it. It licensed a focus on, and political support for, those who stand to benefit from globalization and neo liberalization. This emphasis on flexibility (and by der ivation, on territorial production complexes) diverted attention from many other questions relevant to geo graphical change. In particular, it overlooked macro economics, although the state of aggregate demand remains much more important to the economic welfare of working people in general than the competitiveness of particular firms or sectors.

The post-Fordism narrative legitimizes the emergence of a global capitalist class?

Arguments such as these implied that the politics of post Fordism, despite claims made for it in the 1980s was by no means automatically progressive or Left wing at all. And indeed the post Fordist narrative proved to be very useful to particular fractions of capital and particular governance interests, playing a major role in the construction of a shared discourse within the new global networks of policymakers and corporations that proliferated from the 1990s. It spoke of and to the new networks of spatial policymakers, rather than com munities, working people, or small entrepreneurs in general. Stephen Hymer argued in his pioneering anal ysis of globalization in the early 1970s – largely ignored by Regulationist writers – that the shift from horizontal to vertical accumulation, which post Fordist accounts now take as a given fact of contemporary economic life, in fact reflected the political emergence of a frac tion of capital whose interests lay in the global en forcement of private property rights, the free movement of capital, and increased income inequalities, rather than the steady increase of domestic working class in comes. The post Fordist thesis, by taking these as foundational assumptions and proposing policies that adapt to them rather than challenge them, might per haps usefully be seen as one of the academic reflections of the emergence of a new global capitalist class asso ciated with the rise of neoliberal policy biases at a range of spatial scales.

The problematic legacy of the Regulation School

These suggestions take us back to the original political concerns of the early writers on Fordism. How is it that the concepts devised by Gramsci and the early Regu lation School with the aim of exposing the dynamics of capitalism came to be so enthusiastically deployed in their own interest by powerful fractions of capital and the state? Part of the answer seems to lie in the epistemo logical and ontological problems the Fordist account inherited from that diverse group of pioneers. Regulationist analysis (of which there have been many variants) was characterized from the start by the attempt to glue together a structuralist interpretation of the Marxist theory of the economic dynamics of capitalism (with in at least some versions an inexorable tendency to crisis), and a more conventionally empirical notion of the significance of politics and political culture and elite control of institutions. Recognizing that each of these domains has its own set of distinctive dynamics was an attempt to avoid crude economic determinism. But this was often little more than a well intentioned gesture. For the tendency to determinism lingered on in the way that the economic domain tended to be treated as if it was the original source of economic problems, while at the same time a Gramscian tendency to celebrate culture as au tonomous played itself out in ideas about the mode of regulation. Explanations of the decline of Fordism and the construction of post Fordism which built on these on incompatible foundational principles unsurprisingly tended to oscillate between treating outcomes on the one hand the inevitable results of objective mechanistic de terminants and on the other as the effects of contingent struggles and discourses. Gramsci’s original writings on the American system drew attention to the role of culture, and the capitalist penetration of leisure time through commodification and profit seeking. Fordism’s corollary, the rise of a consumer society and the development of pleasure as a market, would bring about a long ‘war of position’ within civil society. Out of this, he hoped, the ideological and insti tutional conditions would emerge (organic intellectuals and new hegemonic forces) for a renewed working class challenge to capitalist hegemony. Gramsci thought that Fordist capitalism made political concessions to labor, empowering trade unions and social democratic political parties. It replaced military models of control with dis cipline imposed through the seductions of commodity consumption. But this only meant that it would eventu ally be confronted in new and more multidimensional ways as the working class developed new ways of life and a political morality fundamentally at odds with the capitalist elite. On the last point at least Gramsci’s high minded expectations (along with Hardt and Negri’s elitist fantasy of the politicization of the ‘multitude’) proved to bear little relation to real events.


Whatever the merits of the Gramscian conception of Fordism, it had a very different purpose and resonance than that of the Regulationist and technology based theories which crystallized out half a century later. The thesis that Fordism had to be replaced took on a life of its own as it became academicized, accreted new em pirical and theoretical claims, and transmuted into a rhetoric supplying a plethora of local policy suggestions to institutions of governance. In Britain, in particular, the institutionalization of the story of the arrival of post Fordism in the late 1990s was closely bound up with the development of an intellectual anti Thatcherite position, especially in the pages of Marxism Today, the magazine of the disintegrating Communist Party. Central to this narrative was the idea that the transition to post Fordism was the latest in a sequence of chapters in the history of capitalism. Although this story greatly exaggerated the extent of change, while leaving the explanation for it profoundly unclear, it served for some to provide a theoretical justification for a new conception of social democracy and the invention of ‘new labor’. Several of its authors later became key players in, or theorists of, the Blair government of 1997–2007.

Conclusion: Post-Fordism Today Over the same period the Fordism into post Fordism narrative became a pedagogic orthodoxy in geography, especially economic and urban geography. But the stron ger claims it makes beg too many empirical and theore tical questions. The descriptive and explanatory usefulness of the concept of Fordism has been thrown into doubt by disputes over how geographically general it was (e.g., differences between US and other countries); over the extent to which mass production prevailed and was para digmatic; over the link between the labor process and macroeconomic conditions in different cases; over how much lingers on or is even growing. Whatever the chronologically post Fordist era is, it is not simply an inversion of everything Fordist. Indeed, much of what defined that earlier era seems to be still prevalent today. Post Fordism as it was advertised in the 1980s and 1990s never really arrived. And the changes it purported to ex plain are often more usefully understood in other terms. Perhaps the most striking fact about recent economic geographical history is that the richest countries and regions of the Fordist era are for the most part the richest countries and regions of the post Fordist era too. The exceptions concern some parts of a very small number of rapidly growing former peripheral economies, notably China and India. And here the story seems to be gen erally less about the arrival of post Fordist flexible spe cialization than about the large scale imposition of Fordist–Taylorist techniques. The Chinese case in

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particular raises the question of whether the Fordist and post Fordist ‘models’ should be seen not as sequential historical scenarios but rather as competing paradigms of socioeconomic management to be selectively deployed by ruling elites (corporate or national) committed to bringing about what they consider to be ‘modernization’ by allowing the expansion of capitalist social relations. The post Fordist narrative, in this perspective, has diverted excessive attention to local geographies of change at the cost of broader geographies of continuity. Big stories have been overlooked in the search for smaller ones which tell the lessons that its exponents have set out to confirm. But the Fordism–post Fordism narrative is still ensconced in geography textbooks as if it describes simple facts and reliable explanations. Part of the ex planation for this academic curiosity must lie in the usual time lag between the emergence of academic ideas and their codification in textbooks. In part it also perhaps reflects the transformation of the university in recent years. Academics are under increasing pressure to es tablish their individual brand identity and competitive ness by associating with theories and claims that are widely debated and appear ‘relevant’ in the political context of the day. As a result, many of the pedagogic orthodoxies of human geography in the 2000s, reflected in this encyclopedia, are essentially the radical political claims of the 1980s, codified, elaborated, academified, depoliticized, and stamped with professorial authority. To this extent the best tools for an explanation of the strange history of the Fordism–post Fordism narrative may perhaps be found in Bourdieu’s analysis of the role of habitus, self interest, group behavior, and fashion among Homo Academicus. Although research, critique, and policy disillusion have robbed the Fordism–post Fordism story of its initial luster it nevertheless remains a suggestive simplification of current trends and imperatives from which to set out. And in the absence of an equally bullet point friendly alternative it is likely to continue to enjoy popularity on the academic fringe and its interface with the world of policy discourse and journalism for some time yet. See also: Fordism; Industrialization; New Regionalism; Regulation; State.

Further Reading Aglietta, M. (1979). A Theory of Capitalist Regulation The US Experience. London: New Left Books. Amin, A. (1994). PostFordism: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Bonefeld, W. (1993). Crisis of theory: Bob Jessop’s theory of capitalist reproduction. Capital and Class 30, 25 47. Cooke, P. and Morgan, K. (1998). The Associational Economy: Firms Regions and Innovation. Oxford: Blackwell. Curry, J. (1993). The flexibility fetish. Capital and Class 50, 99 126.

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Davis, M. (1986). Prisoners of the American Dream. London: Verso. Glyn, A. (2006). Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization and Welfare. London: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (1985). The Urbanisation of Capital. Oxford: Blackwell. Hui, W. (2003). China’s New Order: Society Politics and Economy in Transition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hymer, S. H. (1972). The multinational corporation and the law of uneven development. In Bhagwati, J. (ed.) Economics and World Order, pp 113 140. London: Macmillan. Jessop, B. (1993). Towards a Schumpeterian workfare state? Preliminary remarks on post Fordist political economy. Studies in Political Economy 40, 7 40. Kenny, M. (1999). Marxism and regulation theory. In Gamble, A., Marsh, D. & Tant, T. (eds.) Marxism and Social Science. London: Macmillan. Lipietz, A. (1987). Miracle and Mirages: The Crisis of Global Fordism. London: Verso. Lovering, J. (1990). ‘Fordism’s unknown successor. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 14, 159 174. Lovering, J. (1999). Theory led by policy: The inadequacies of the New Regionalism (illustrated from the Case of Wales). International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23, 379 395. Massey, D. (1995). Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production (2nd edn.). London: Macmillan. McDowell, L. (1991). Life without father and Ford: The new gender order of post Fordism. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16, 400 419.

Murray, R. (1989). Fordism and postFordism. In Hall, S. & Jacques, M. (eds.) New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, pp 38 53. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Pijl, K. V. D. (1984). The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class. London: Verso. Piore, M. and Sabel, C. (1985). The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity. New York: Basic Books. Pollert, A. (1988). Dismantling flexibility. Capital and Class 34, 42 75. Sayer, A. (1989). PostFordism in question. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 13, 666 695. Scott, A. (1988). Flexible production systems and regional development: The rise of new industrial spaces in North America and Western Europe. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 12, 171 185. Stewart, P. (ed.) (1996). Beyond Japanese Management: The End of Modern Times? London: Frank Cass. Storper, M. (1995). The resurgence of regional economies ten years later. European Urban and Regional Studies 2, 191 221. Tickell, A. and Peck, J. (1992). Accumulation, regulation and the geographies of post Fordism: Missing links in regulationist research. Progress in Human Geography 16, 190 218. Williams, K., Cutler, T., Williams, J. and Haslam, C. (1987). The end of mass production? Economy and Society 16(3), 405 439.

Foreign Direct Investment A. Lagendijk and B. Hendrikx, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Export processing zones An area in which a particular set of institutions, buildings and services is set up in order to attract (foreign) businesses for export production. It is often endowed with more favorable institutions and regulations for production (taxes, labor regulation, tariffs) than within other parts of the country. Greenfield investment Direct investment in new facilities on a location where no previous facilities existed. Internalization advantages The advantages for production arising from the internalization of production and other owner specific advantages by firms to avoid market imperfections (i.e., avoiding import tariffs; avoiding property rights enforcement costs; etc.). Location specific advantages The advantages for production arising from country specific assets and resources, such as the presence of a skilled labor force, an optimized institutional context, and low transportation costs. Owner specific advantages The advantages for production arising from assets specific to a firm that give it an comparative advantage over other/domestic firms, such as the ownership of specific technologies, trademarks or patents, specific management and organizational systems, access to spare capacity, etc. Product (life) cycle theory Theory developed by Raymond Vernon that links each of the phases in the development of products to particular spatial strategies. The theory is based on the premise that at each stage of the product-life cycle different types of countries (ranging from the developed to the developing countries) will have comparative advantages in the production of the product. The product life-cycle encompasses four stages: (1) the product’s introduction and development (in the home country); (2) the products growth and maturation (high income countries); (3) the standardization of production (low income countries). TRIMs (Trade Related Investment Measures) National policies aimed to place conditions on foreign investors. TRIMs include policies aimed at bolstering FDI spillovers by creating incentives, regulations, and import barriers to stimulate the local economy. TRIMs may also include measures to ensure a certain degree of sustainability and social responsibility from foreign investors.

A Characterization Foreign direct investment (FDI) is a cross border cor porate governance mechanism through which a company obtains productive assets in another country. Such a link can involve the acquisition of (or merger with) already existing production facilities by getting hold of a majority share, or the establishment of a new facility. The first case is often abbreviated as an ‘M&A’ investment; the latter case is commonly described as a ‘greenfield’ investment (even if it takes place on a ‘brownfield’ location). FDI, as a consequence, differs from portfolio foreign investments and (bank and nonbank) loans, in that it results in a long term relationship between the parent company and the ‘host country’ facilities. Quintessential to this relationship is not the financial transfer, but the establishment of managerial control through the transfer of a bundle of factors and cross border organization of production. Be cause establishing control generally takes place in a step by step process, it is denoted as an ‘establishment chain’ generally unfolding over longer periods of time. Like other forms of cross border investment, FDI is a major driver and constitutive of globalization. FDI is what makes a multiplant cross border company, better known as the multinational or transnational corporation (MNC or TNC; see item on globalization). It is thus a key ingredient in the shaping of global networks of production, trade, finance, and transfer of technology, knowledge, managerial practices, and labor. In doing so, it also contributes to the shaping of economic inter dependencies and resulting in uneven relations, prac tices of cultural transfer and dominance, and the establishment of political hierarchies and ‘power geom etries’, that is, intricate webs of domination and sub ordination across space. What characterizes FDI is that it tends to stretch out further than the flows of financial transfer. While financial globalization remains confined to a limited number of well connected urban hot spots across the globe, FDI also reaches the corners of lesser developed regions and countries. As a result, many peripheral regions depend heavily on the local sub sidiaries of foreign companies. Like financial capital, however, FDI is hardly targeted at the poorest countries of the world. The latter continue to rely, to a large ex tent, on state transfers of technology and finance from donor countries. Not only does FDI reach out further than other forms of capital, it is also less mobile. Since the in vestments target productive assets, they are ‘bolted

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down’, tied not only to fixed capital but also to a local production environment. This results in dependencies between the foreign investor, a particular pool of labor, local state and nonstate agencies, suppliers, distributors, etc. While there is always the threat of disinvestment, the image of being ‘global’ and ‘footloose’ is generally used by investors to increase their leverage over local communities and state agencies, more than as a prelude to actual relocation. Only certain types of investment, such as labor intensive production of staple commod ities, tend to respond quickly to shifts in relative cost levels of labor and inputs by relocation. Rather than full fledged disinvestment, companies often engage in rearranging the division of labor between their affili ates, accompanied by partial restructuring of the local labor pool and asset base. What appears more of a ‘threat’ is the continuing appeal to companies in more developed countries to shift productive activities out to other parts of the world. Al though such outward moves have always been part of spatial process of industrialization, improving connect ivity and the rapid growth of highly skilled labor forces in countries like India and China have given a new impetus to what is now labeled as ‘offshoring’ of activities from ‘West’ to ‘East’. In addition to the more traditional industrial activities by large companies, offshoring in creasingly involves the relocation of back office activities by smaller service companies. The background and im pact of these trends will be discussed in more detail below.

FDI Growth Patterns FDI goes back a long time in history. The practice of founding in company trading representatives in foreign locations is actually as old as the emergence of pecuniary trading networks. The seventeenth and eighteenth century – the heydays of mercantilism and colonialism – provided a major impetus to the development of multi plant companies operating at a global scale through the institutionalization of the ‘firm’, notably in the form of incorporated companies. This did not only result in the rapid development of cross border banking networks in Europe, but also in the establishments of global networks by the British and Dutch (East) India Companies. In addition, many adventurous, and often short lived, trad ing companies emerged that hoped to benefit from new economic relationships with the East (Indian) and West American world as well as Africa. The nineteenth century and twentieth century saw a further growth in foreign expansion, targeting both for eign markets and resources, from minerals and cattle to labor and technology, punctuated by periods of stag nation and decline. This started with the rise of modern

‘multinational’ companies, many of which are still around today (some subsumed in larger companies), such as Lever, Siemens, General Electric, Michelin, Hoechst, Nestle´, and Nobel Dynamite. In the nineteenth century, however, FDI was still dwarfed by portfolio investments that sought to benefit from difference in interest rates and financial investment opportunities in rapidly growing economies. Moreover, investment levels, both direct and portfolio, dropped dramatically during the Depression, starting in 1929, and the period of war that followed. Investment levels started to pick up slowly in the 1960s and 1970s, as a prelude to rapid growth notably in the 1990s up to the boom year 2000. FDI flows stalled in the early 2000s, after which they recovered to the level of 2000 in 2006 notably through the impact of M&A activity. In the post war period, most investment flows continued to take place between developed countries, although the share of less developed countries as re cipients showed a gradual growth, from 20% to 40%, in the 1990s. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, this growth was dented as a result of the financial crises in Southeast Asia and Latin America (see Figure 1). In terms of donor countries, while recent figures show some diversification, what is striking is the persistent dominance of a small number of countries. After UK dominance in the nineteenth century, the USA was the lead spender in the early 1980s (over 40% of the global FDI stock). In the late 1980s and 1990s, the European Union (EU) and Japan have grown in importance, in contrast to the rest of the world (of which the share in world FDI stock dropped from 15% in 1980 to below 10% in the early 1990s). Yet, due also to an increase in flows between developing countries (so called south–south investments), this trend has been reversed in the last decade. While such aggregate figures say a lot about the broad changes in FDI flows and stocks, putting exact figures to FDI is far from easy. Employment figures are relatively straightforward and easy to access, but financial statistics are troubled by a myriad of definitional and classificatory problems. They are also more difficult to access and publish (due to confidentiality issues). Most information is available at an aggregate level through the statistical offices of international organizations such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the Organization for Economic Co operation and Development (OECD), and national stat istical offices. Yet, even at this level data tend to differ markedly, due for instance to other ways of defining territorial ownership (e.g., based on the company regis tration vs. the owners’ nationality), and to varying solu tions to cope with different systems of accountancy and taxing. Such problems need to be taken into account when interpreting FDI data.


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FDI flows 1970−2006 1600000 1400000

Global FDI flows Developed countries Developing countries

Millions (USD)

1200000 1000000

800000

600000 400000 200000 0

Asia crisis 1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

Figure 1 FDI flows, global, developing, and developed countries 1970 2006. Source: UNCTAD FDI database 2007.

Explaining the Flow FDI flows are, in part, triggered by the same factors as international trade and flows of technology, labor and finance. Given the present distribution of resources, markets, and financial conditions across space, a profit can be made by establishing a transnational transaction. From a locational perspective, therefore, there are three fun damental explanations: (1) market opportunities abroad, resulting in ‘horizontal’ expansion; (2) the availability of (cheaper and better) resources (material, services, labor, or technology), leading to ‘vertical’ expansion; and (3) the exploitation of differences in financial conditions and investment opportunities (as manifested by divergent interest rates and exchange rate fluctuations). Initial ex planations of FDI focused, in particular, on market op portunity and resource availability invoking the concept of the ‘product cycle’ (see Figure 2). According to this concept, each phase in the development of a product would correspond to a particular set of spatial strategies. Initial product development will generally take place within the context of a single home country because of the need of proximity to knowledge producers and ad vanced markets. In the next phase, product maturation opens the window for market expansion abroad. Finally, triggered by the rise of competition, further standard ization of production allows for the relocation of pro duction to areas with low cost (and low skill) labor and cheap resources. While necessary, locational factors and endowments do not suffice to explain FDI. It is not only the trans national transaction that needs to be clarified, but also the

specific form of governance adopted. Why is FDI pre ferred to exporting or the licensing of the use of tech nology and brand names to a local firm? Why is, in other words, the transaction ‘internalized’ within a (multi national) company? The international economist John Dunning addressed these questions in his seminal ‘eclectic’ approach that combines market based and firm based perspectives. His approach specifies the way the three sets of components work together in the shaping of particular flows of FDI (see Table 1). First, the abovementioned factors were subsumed under the rubric of ‘location specific advantages’. In addition to markets and labor, two types of advantages of growing significance are, on the one hand, technology and knowledge, epitomized by ‘clusters of innovation’ and, on the other, concentrations of advanced producer (notably financial) services (increasingly confined to the world’s major urban agglomerations). Much in line with the ‘product cycle’ approach, the search for labor, tech nology and capital plays a dominant role in specific sectors in certain phases of development. For more ‘standardized’ products and process, the continuing search for low cost production sites (‘offshoring’) remains an important part of the battle for (global) market shares. For ‘high tech’ activities, on the other hand, inter nationalization has become more important than in the past. Since most ‘high tech’ sectors tend to manifest strong concentrations of knowledge dynamic in different hot spots around the world (like ICT, multimedia, or bio tech clusters), it is important for both upcoming and established firms to have roots in these various locations. Anchoring in various ‘places to be’, as a strategy to

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Innovation and development

Product development in home country

International demand expands

Product maturation production in high-income countries

Increased competition

Product standardization production in lowincome countries

Decline

Innovation and product development .....

Figure 2 Product cycle and spatial strategies of MNCs. Source: Vernon, R. (1966). International investment and international trade in the product cycle. Quarterly Journal of Economics 80, 190 207.

Table 1

Examples of location-specific, ownership-specific, and internalization advantages

Location-specific advantages

Ownership-specific advantages

Internalization advantages

Accessibility and proximity to clients and domestic markets Access: need to be close to local media

Access to markets and transnational clients Access to international capital and financial markets

Quality control over international standards

Availability of skilled/unskilled labor

Supportive role of government

Government regulations

Goodwill

Adaptation to local standards and procedures Customization to local tastes and needs Suppliers (e.g., advanced producer services) Agglomerative economies (knowledge)

Economies of size and specialization Financial strength Control over standards

Oligopolistic strategies among dominant domestic companies

Knowledge intensive technology

Modern management practices

Cognitive market failure and asymmetry of knowledge/ fear of underperformance by licensees Need to pursue international investment strategy To reduce transaction costs with foreign agencies/ coordination gains Managerial capacities Protection against exchange/ political risks Importance of international arbitraging In case of core assets, need for protection from dissipation

Professional skills Source: Adapted from Dunning, J. H. (1993). The Globalization of Business: The Challenge of the 1990s. London: Routledge.

search for, rather than exploit, knowledge, thus also triggers FDI, often in the form of joint ventures. Second, companies possess certain advantages, such as technology, brand names, and marketing knowledge, that give them an advantage over ‘local’ companies in host areas, so called ‘ownership specific advantages’. ‘Owner ship specific advantages’ mark out what a parent com pany intends to exploit by going abroad. If this entails a strong brand name or a technology well protected by a patent, it is easier to use arm’s length contracts (licenses and franchises) than when advantage rests with more tacit forms of marketing or production knowledge. When, on the other hand, a company is thriving primarily on managerial skills and financial assets, ‘in house’ expan sion through the extension of managerial control is an obvious choice. Indeed, the ‘excess’ of managerial and financial capacities is generally seen as a major driver in the transformation in business governance from unitary (business departments like R&D, marketing, and finance) and functional (task units) to multidivisional and multi national (organizational and spatially decentralized product divisions). In knowledge intensive sectors, moreover, it is not only the exploitation of ownership specific advantages, but also the wish to ‘improve’ such advantages that may trigger foreign investments and ventures targeting technological hot spots.

Finally, companies want to employ their ownership specific advantages in the most (cost) effective and secure way. A problem is that international markets generally do not provide suitable mechanisms to meet these criteria through transactions at arm’s length. Mechanisms such as exporting, licensing, and even joint ventures fail to pro vide a (cost) effective way to employ ownership specific advantages in a targeted area. The investor thus has to resort to an ‘in house’ solution, reaping the benefits from what are called ‘internalization advantages’. What is particularly difficult, when crossing judicial boundaries, is to design a governance structure or contractual ar rangement at arm’s length that prevents the undue ap propriation of profits or the unwanted spillover of proprietary knowledge. Firms thus opt for ‘full’ control by establishing or acquiring a subsidiary abroad, or sometimes by creating a joint venture under close supervision of the parent company. The option of a joint venture, in which the acquisition of foreign assets is only partial, is sometimes preferred when targeted location specific advantages of the targeted area are owned by a local company. An example is when a local company has built a strong local marketing network (say in food re tailing) or complementary knowledge (say in medical technology) that a parent company would like to use. By retaining the current managerial control of the targeted


company, the preservation and development of such assets may be secured better (and more cheaply) than by full acquisition. Of the triple set of ownership specific, location spe cific and internalization advantages, the third/last set produces the most complex picture. In addition to the reasons already given for the lack of market based solu tions – no effective governance structure at hand and lack of judicial backing for cross border transactions – nation states play an important and often ambivalent role. On the one hand, nation states encourage FDI by creating barriers to other forms of transactions, notably trade. When a parent company cannot export its final products to a host market due to trade restrictions, it needs to resort to import substitution by investing in local pro duction. When, furthermore, the local assembly of a parent company’s product is subjected to a minimum amount of ‘local content’, also a certain amount of components needs to be bought or produced in the host country. A more subtle form of limiting the trading of final or intermediate products is through voluntary re straints. This has been adopted, for instance, by Japanese companies selling in the US, which induced substantial flows of direct investments from Japan into the US. Which mode of import substitution is chosen will depend on other conditions, such as the availability of companies to buy or to work with in a joint venture, the kind of knowledge and assets that are to be transferred, the in centives for investing in greenfield locations and the broader macroeconomic, political and legal context. It is through the last two categories that the state plays add itional direct and indirect roles. Much FDI has been directly attracted by a range of state subsidies, investment support measures (like the building of infrastructure, business parts, training programs, etc.) and tax benefits, including the establishment of free trade zones (or export processing zones, EPZs). However, what has often re ceived less attention is the significance of indirect factors that bear upon FDI, including monetary and fiscal sta bility, political stability and an adequate protection of proprietary knowledge. The latter is associated not just with patent and (intellectual) property rights, but also with its broader legal and social–political system and the general attitudes toward private property. For high tech companies, an adequate level of property protection is, in general, a necessary condition for any kind of involve ment, whether contractual or in house. While state in duced barriers to trade and investment incentives may encourage FDI, the lack of legal protection of assets and knowledge – or the perceived possibility of that in the near future – tends to deter investors. ‘Internalization’ also refers to the way companies form part of ‘webs of enterprises’. Over time, firms have de veloped ever more sophisticated forms of trading and contracting with other companies, in the search for the

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optimal balance between control and flexibility. The re sult is highly complex vertical chains, in which the re lationship between primary suppliers, providers of parts and services, main assemblers and brand owners, and distributors is governed by a myriad of (hybrid) market, network and ownership relationships. This (inter)organizational competitive world compels companies to swiftly respond to and anticipate each others’ moves in the search for the best and cheapest resources and suppliers, new market opportunities (and their point of access) and seedbeds of new ideas and practices. The playing field for this competitive game is essentially spatial. At a ‘global’ level, companies are chasing each other in the race for similar gains and pole positions. The result is that, notably in mature phases of the industry cycle, waves of FDI inflow are concentrated in particular areas, because of perceived market oppor tunities or cost advantages. Over the last two decades, examples of such FDI ‘growth peripheries’ include countries integrated within the EU (e.g., Southern and Eastern Europe), ‘opening’ economies in Latin America (e.g., Chile and Brazil), Asia (Southeast, and recently China and India) and even Africa (South Africa, Egypt, and Nigeria). However, also the more central areas of the EU and North America host hot spots for investment from each others’ as well as Japanese investors. At a more ‘local’ (national or regional) level, however, investors often seek to carve out their ‘own’ space of production, establishing exclusive access to a local pool of labor and suppliers, and to institutional resources (such as land use and other forms of regulation and support). Waves of investment thus result in the spread out of subsidiaries over a large space, each creating their own domain of control. Such patterns are particularly manifest in sectors with a preference for greenfield locations, such as the inflow of FDI in the automotive sector in countries like Spain (with presence of nearly all major car companies dispersed through the country), USA (European and Asian investors), Eastern Europe and China. FDI, ac cordingly, may induce dramatic changes in regional economic divisions of labor within and between coun tries. Only when there is a stronger inclination toward M&A investments, or when the main incentive is the search for technology, FDI tends to concentrate in major industrial agglomerations, reinforcing existing regional economic geographies.

Local Impacts The impact of FDI on a host region is threefold. First, there is a ‘direct’ effect resulting from the inflow of capital, assets and technology, and the recruitment of local staff, boosting employment. The employment im pact can be gauged in quantitative and qualitative terms.

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The first refers to questions like how many (full time or equivalent) jobs are created, at what pay levels and how many of those are taken up by ‘local’ job seekers. More qualitative issues are: what kind of skill levels are de manded, what kind of training is provided, and what kind of contracts are offered (e.g., part time/full time, open ended/fixed term, flexible, etc.). Second, there is an ‘indirect’ effect caused by the demand for intermediate goods and services, producing an additional stream of finance, technology and demand for labor. This effect is confined to the supply chains in which the foreign investor is locally inserted, and is generally calculated through a kind of input–output an alysis on a detailed level of value added flows. Finally, there is a broader economy wide ‘induced’ effect caused by the consumptive, and potentially pro ductive, expenditures by the labor force working within the subsidiary and its supply chains, as well as the spill over of technology. Income effects can be measured through input–output analysis that encompasses the backward links of the household sector. Technology and knowledge effects can either be assessed through case studies and surveys, or through advanced forms of modeling. So, taken together, such linkage dynamics may underpin virtuous cycles of investment, knowledge de velopment, and strong export growth, resulting in local cluster formation. What compounds these various effects is that they partly depend on the state, notably through the raising of direct, indirect and company taxes. Considerable research has been undertaken to measure and explain these various impacts, although most has been confined to either macroeconomic econometric models or to single country case studies. Apart from the more trivial observations, such as that local content requirements are generally accom panied by a higher level of in house production or local procurement, or that greenfield investments create more jobs than comparable M&A activities, empirical studies show rather mixed results. Given the fact that FDI gen erally unfolds as an ‘establishment chain’ taking place over a long span of time, driven by highly variable business strategies, locational opportunities and state practices and strategies, this should come as no surprise. A final reason why it is so difficult to pin down the impacts of investment is because of the lack of a contrasting case, that is, a comparable setting in which a certain investment has not taken place. Moreover, in exploring the role of impact, the interest has shifted somewhat from impact on employment and capital flows to technology and knowledge flows, items which are more difficult to measure. Such shifts reflect changes in prevailing academic and policy agendas. Although the focus has tended to shift, employment remains one of the most visible and sensitive issues. Especially in the more traditional sectors of resource extraction and manufacturing, and also in back office

activities, foreign investment often takes the form of large establishments, such as mines, automotive or electronics assembly plants, or office towers, generating large num bers of jobs. As a result, in terms of numbers, and primary (wage and contract) as well as secondary (benefits) labor conditions, foreign investors are able to put their mark on a local (or even national) economy. When the main motive for investors is the search for low cost resources, they are often accused of exploiting a dependent labor force or of depleting natural resources. The evidence for such exploitation is not very strong, however, at least not in a direct sense. While obviously investors will benefit from lower wage levels in host territories, from a local perspective they tend to be good employers, offering relatively high salaries and good primary and secondary working conditions. In general, additional investments are made in training and support such as in health, housing and transport. It is not in the ‘direct’ but in the ‘indirect’ impact of foreign investment where stronger evidence of exploitation is found. Overall, wage levels and working conditions in the supplier firms tend to be much less advantageous than in the foreign sub sidiaries. In some cases, however, notably in the textiles and footwear sector, conditions can be truly appalling. Workers face very long working days, under poor working conditions, lacking any basic support or security. A very serious issue is the use of child labor. The critical question is, to what extent foreign subsidiary deliberately or at least knowingly benefits from, or even creates, such conditions through forcing down the prices of inter mediate goods and services. What follows is a deeply ethical question of as to what extent foreign investors, when causing indirect job formation, can be held re sponsible for the qualitative aspects of jobs that are or ganizationally and spatially distant. Impacts on ‘capital flows’ strongly depend on the various financial decisions and steps made along the es tablishment chain. While FDI, by definition, comes with an investment from the parent company into productive assets in the host region, some capital can also be raised locally. In the latter case, an increase in the capital stock under foreign control is achieved without an inflow of FDI. Because of the volumes involved, there is a possi bility that this reduces the possibility for other invest ments. Such an allocative effect also applies to state finance, when the state provides subsidies (either direct or in the form of infrastructure and supporting facilities) to the investor. Subsequently, once a facility becomes (again) fully operational under foreign control, the dis tribution of profits becomes a thorny issue. How much is reinvested locally? How much is locally retained in the form of savings of consumption? And how much is ‘re patriated’? Because the latter is generally subjected to tight forms of state regulation, this points not only to formal and direct transactions, but also to more covert


ways through which parent companies seek to bank in on their activities abroad. Further down the establishment chain, the continuity of the asset structure of the sub sidiary is at stake. Further investments can be made, based on either FDI, the recycling of profits or the raising of local capital. It is also possible that assets are sold with the gains repatriated. The result is an outflow of capital and a corresponding reduction in the capital stock under foreign control. When they result in the closure of an entire plant or industrial complex, such disinvestments may cause societal and political upheaval such as that occurred around the dramatic closures of automotive plants in Belgium. In many cases, however, disinvest ments occur in a step by step manner, resulting in a gradual downgrading of a facility in the overall corporate structure of the parent company. The debate on local impact is strongly centered on the role and transfer of ‘technology’. For recipient areas, foreign investors are seen as the harbingers of efficiency, new technology and knowledge, and possibly local in vestment in R&D. Much research has gone into the question of to what extent FDI has brought on a ‘spill over’ of knowledge and technology into the local econ omy. Whether such an effect can happen depends, in the first instance, on the extent to which FDI is accompanied by the inflow of technology and knowledge that could be of use to local companies and labor. This is only the case when there is not too big a gap between the kind of productive activity established by FDI and activities already existing in the host area. There must be, in other words, sufficient ‘absorptive capacity’ in order to benefit from the inflow of technology and knowledge. When a state of the art car assembly or electronics plant is erected in a largely rural, peripheral area, or in a backward industrial area, the scope for technology ‘copying’ or the emulation of ‘global’ business practices by local companies is minimal. In general, absorptive capacities tend to be better in open economies with a higher level of industrialization. Nevertheless, even in more closed and backward areas, certain mechanisms of spillover might still materialize, for instance, through in company training of local employees and management training provided to local suppliers. Spillover may also be constrained by a ‘lack’ of a knowledge gap. Cross border investments that are primarily geared to the ex ploitation of the ownership of brand names, for instance, often do not carry new technologies with them (save perhaps new marketing practices), comparable to li censing agreements. In some cases, such companies in vest in local R&D, in order to tailor to local market conditions, but this will be of little relevance to local companies. Indeed, what results then is often a reverse flow of knowledge: the subsidiary provides the parent company with strategic knowledge about the host market, including information on competitors. Such a

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reverse flow also occurs when upcoming firms in high tech sectors invest in ‘antenna’ affiliations in the world’s technological hot spots. A crucial factor in creating spillovers is the capacity of the foreign investor to control for ‘leakage’. As argued by internalization theory, FDI is often preferred because it provides the most secure vehicle to prevent the spillover of knowledge. However, this protection only bears on those ownership specific advantages that a company sees as the core of its competitive edge and that are strategically employed in a cross border transaction. Nevertheless, there may still be spillover from other types of knowledge a company possess, such as best practices on supplier linkages, marketing, human re source management (HRM), financial management, etc. When such knowledge is nonstrategic to the foreign company and complementary to host companies, spill over may be seen as beneficial to all parties, notably in the context of supplier links. Especially large multi national companies often have a keen interest in edu cating local workers as well as local companies through dedicated training programs. Not only does this yield direct economic benefits, it is also a sign of goodwill and hence a source of reputation for the investor. Particularly in the case of large investments with prolonged estab lishment chains, continued engagement of a subsidiary within the local economy may yield social benefits to the community even in excess of economic benefits to the investor. Not surprisingly, there is much interest from researchers as well as policymakers to the way sub sidiaries become ‘embedded’ in local economies and play an ‘educational’ role. The extent to which firms can really control pro prietary knowledge – especially when not protected by regulatory systems such as patenting or intellectual property rights (IPR) – remains a subject of debate. Nevertheless, what is clear is that for all firms in cap italist economies, finding the right balance between deploying and protecting their assets is critical to their survival and growth. How this is done, furthermore, depends on the organizational structures and govern ance practices of the corporate organization. Sub sidiaries under tight central control tend to be more protective and less venturing than subsidiaries enjoying a considerable degree of local autonomy. Some auton omy is essential, indeed, for the build up of local research and development activities. The extent of au tonomy is not a matter of principle, however; it is a strategic function determined by the corporate organ ization. By granting subsidiaries their own space for development, in an organizational as well as spatial sense, they can act as sites of learning and experi menting. Learning, on the one hand, often involves the acquisition of knowledge on local market and pro duction conditions, allowing subsidiaries to tailor their

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activities to local circumstances and the corporate organization to improve the company’s international division of labor. Experimenting, on the other hand, involves developing and trying out new products and production practices (techniques, labor relations, logis tics, procurement, marketing, etc.) as part of the wider corporate innovation strategy. In home countries, such experiments are often difficult to instigate because of institutional, cultural and organizational impediments. Seemingly paradoxically, it is in ‘far off ’ host locations that more radical forms of change can be practiced. Examples of such forms of ‘distance’ learning are the ways in which US and EU automotive and electronics companies have experimented with ‘Japanese style’ ‘just in time’ procurement and new employment prac tices in more peripheral locations. Currently, ‘emerging’ economies in Asia and Latin America present seedbeds, notably for product development. However, despite strategic intentions, attempts to bring home the message have often been met by the same kinds of resistance that impeded change in the first place. So while major benefits in terms of (direct and indirect) employment growth, production growth and knowledge spillover accrued from such experiments locally, to the advantage of the host region, effects for the home region often proved to be less than expected. What this shows is that impacts in host areas cannot be seen in isolation from the overall corporate strategies and practices. Besides spillovers, finally, there is also another knock on effect with wider implications on host regions’ economies. By settling themselves in a local production structure, and by becoming active in a local market set ting, foreign investors impose ‘global’ standards upon a local economy. Especially when the host economy is relatively open, such standards, and the competitive set ting in which they are employed, will provide a major incentive to local companies to improve productivity and raise their standards. The latter may be effectuated not only by spillover of knowledge from the foreign sub sidiaries, but also by other means of knowledge acqui sition and incentives. Indeed, the mere ‘exemplary’ function of foreign subsidiaries, and the capacity to break open oligopolistic market structures and induce com petition, is sometimes deemed more important than the channeling in of knowledge. Such a ‘bootstrapping’ effect can only be successful, however, when local firms have the time and space to adjust, for which some degree of temporary protection and support may be warranted. An accompanying approach may be to foster the move of domestic capital and workers from affected, less pro ductive to other more productive sectors through a program of structural readjustment. Overall, the evidence on to what extent and in what ways local companies are able to benefit from FDI remains rather mixed and ambiguous.

National Policies and Regulations Targeting FDI Given the significance of FDI and the scope for local benefits, FDI constitutes a specific target of national policymaking. In an increasingly integrated world, for eign investments are seen as a core vehicle to create jobs, value added and knowledge. In sectors with a high presence of multinational companies, FDI may effect ively represent the primary source of productivity, in novation and market access. National and regional economies specializing in these sectors have thus become more and more dependent on foreign investments. State authorities are making strenuous efforts to lure investors to their territory, to retain them and to maximize the benefits from their activities. This dependency is not one directional, however. Once ‘bolted down’, a foreign in vestor also depends on support from the state and other organizations (such as unions). The support an investor receives is always politically contingent, depending, among others, on issues such as the position of other foreign and domestic companies, prevailing views on foreign ownership and the protection of the ‘national interest’, and the development of the state regulatory system. One could say that, after each investment flow, the recipient state and the investing company are capable of holding each other at ransom. While, at first glance, the investing companies, as vehicles of global capital, may be the dominant partner, once established and embedded, the state can exert considerable influence on local op erations. It is in this political–economic context that the role of FDI policies and regulation should be assessed. Policies and regulatory measures aiming at attracting FDI can be divided into two groups. On the one hand, there are ‘specific’ policies that are designed to attract and support targeted investments and improve their local impact. This includes direct subsidies and incentives (tax reductions, exemptions from trade regulation, etc.), as well as indirect forms of support and privileges (provision of infrastructure, training of the company’s workforce, benefits to suppliers, etc.). Certain countries provide such benefits in the form of a package in spatially delimited EPZs and the so called ‘offshore financial centers’ rep resenting an exclusive regulatory space separated from the national economy. Specific policies can also direct and restrict local operations through formal or informal requirements to undertake certain productive or support activities, to locally procure certain items, or to transfer certain types of technology. On the other hand, there are ‘general’ policies that change the context for productive activities under foreign control. This includes monetary and fiscal policy (setting of exchange rates), trade policy (notably imposition of trade and nontrade barriers to imports), industrial policy (support for sectoral development to businesses and labor


and research centers) and dedicated investments in in frastructure, education, etc. It is through these general policies that certain critical factors for the attraction of FDI and the enhancement of local benefits can be tar geted. Industrial and education policy can help to im prove the local economy’s absorptive capacity expanding the scope for spillover and indirect growth effects. A well attuned industrial and trade policy can help to foster openness and innovation while giving local firms the opportunity to adjust. Monetary and fiscal policies can help to create a stable financial environment both within the national economy and vis a` vis other major markets, as to provide a secure basis for exports. In addition to these incentives, governments use a range of measures to force foreign investors to comply with certain performance requirements and trade restrictions, the so called trade related investment measures (TRIMs). TRIMs include policies aimed at bolstering FDI spillovers by creating incentives, regu lations and import barriers to stimulate sourcing from domestic producers. The idea behind such policies is that active government involvement and regulation is necessary to achieve spillovers and domestic economic development from FDI. FDI policies and regulations can also be classified based on the extent to which they are market conform able or not, that is, to the extent they are decreasing or increasing market imperfections. Because the way FDI is affected by location specific and internalization advan tages, both directions may effectively encourage as well as discourage FDI. On the one hand, ‘increasing’ market imperfection, manifested for instance in a lack of com petition policy, the privileging of particular national champions, a deficient judicial regime, or an instable currency, will enhance the value of internalization ad vantages and hence a preference for FDI. Such imper fections will have negative impact on localization advantages, however. So if market imperfections become too stifling – for instance, in the form of strict ownership, price and remittance controls – this may tip the balance and put off investors. On the other hand, various methods of improving the operation of markets, and hence the ‘reduction’ of market imperfections, may induce more FDI, now pulled by localization advantages. Such methods include the liberalization of trade and financial flows, deregulation of markets, antidumping measures, privatization of utilities and strict enforcement of (in tellectual) property rights. Again, there is also a downside to such methods because they tend to lower the signifi cance of internalization advantages so that firms may opt for trade or licensing instead of FDI. While both in creasing and decreasing market imperfection may boost FDI, the nature of such investments differs markedly. Increased market imperfections will appeal to low tech production destined for the local market, in which a

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company can extend the lifeline of obsolete assets. A more open market, in contrast, is likely to attract export oriented producers which will be compelled to import and use state of the art technology. In other words, where the first case will only yield direct, and some indirect employment, the second will provide scope for knowledge spillover. To what extent spillover really occurs depends on the absorptive capacity of local companies and the inclination and competencies of em ployees working in foreign subsidiaries to spin out and establish new firms. The scope for the latter will, in turn, depend on the extent to which general policies in the field of education, sectoral development, and finance are able to support domestic economic activities.

Global Regulation This ‘carrot and stick’ nature of FDI incentives and regulations reflects the schizophrenic nature of the re lationship between national governments and FDI. It is also one of the most controversial issues in the debates on global FDI regulation, even for the free market organ izations such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO, successor of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT). On the one hand, these organizations hold that only an ‘open economy’ route focusing on improving the general conditions for both foreign and domestic investor will produce a long and lasting impact. Notably, in its recommendations for developing coun tries, the IMF has called for an approach that improves the investment climate in a fundamental, nonselective manner, for all kinds of capital. In line with a neoliberal doctrine, structural change opening up domestic econ omies is preferred to, and considered much more effec tive, than incentives targeting specific firms. The IMF claims, more specifically, that investing in a sound regulatory environment, including the build up of cred ible enforcement mechanisms, is much more (cost) effective than policies and incentives designed to lure FDI. It may, in particular, prevent ‘races to the bottom’ in which foreign investors play out different (national and regional) authorities against each other in seeking a new investment site. What is not denied, on the other hand, is that state policy and action need to respond to more than calls for economic efficiency. In particular, with respect to FDI, tensions may arise between the aim of economic effi ciency and the protection of national sovereignty. Regardless of the openness of their economies, all nation states conceive certain economic activities as ‘strategic’, to which access from abroad should be restricted. Such restriction can be based on the view that activities are of military significance, or that they draw on national

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resources of which the benefits should accrue primarily to domestic actors and the state. The latter includes energy resources, minerals, and fishing grounds. Indeed, while there may be a general trend toward liberalization, restrictions on FDI within activities deemed ‘strategic’ remain rife. In the developed world, the fear for terrorist attack has produced a significant growth in restricted practices. In the developing world, on the other hand, state authorities continue to nationalize the assets of foreign companies in the name of the ‘national interest’ notably in extraction activities. Such expropriations are, at best, partially compensated for, thus posing major risks to companies with a high exposure in politically less stable countries. Despite the perceived need, a regulatory framework concerning state policy and FDI at the global level is actually still wanting. What does exist today is an intri cate web of bilateral, regional, and multilateral agree ments, which operates in a rather uncoordinated and restricted way. Most of the international multilateral agreements on FDI focus on the restraints and require ments imposed upon MNCs by national governments. They particularly address the trade barriers and per formance requirements (TRIMs) aimed to capture FDI spillovers and to protect national economies from nega tive influences of MNCs. Other agreements (bilateral and regional agreements) focus upon the protection of international property and the attraction of FDI. The debate on the international regulation of FDI and TRIMs started in the early 1980s, when protective pol icies and performance requirements became increasingly criticized by investors and MNCs for significantly dis torting global trade and investment flows. Supported by the governments of the industrialized countries (par ticularly the OECD countries), those critics sought to develop an international system of regulation which would achieve a ‘level playing field’ in which foreign investors are accorded the same treatment as domestic businesses. At the same time, the growing belief that FDI had a significant positive impact upon national economies increased efforts by national governments to attract FDI. To prevent a ‘race to the bottom’, in which no country would benefit, it was also argued that an international regulatory framework for FDI was needed. So far, such frameworks have been developed notably at the level of regional common markets such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, APEC, the Mercosur and the EU economic zone. Agreements here generally intend to bolster FDI inflows by establishing a secure multilateral economic policy environment as well as providing access to a larger market. Recent studies on the role of regional cooperation have shown that the level of FDI typically increases when countries join common markets. Less successful have been the attempts to build a regulatory framework to govern FDI on a global level, as

manifested by the problems faced by the WTO in its pursuit for a new agreement on TRIMs. So far, the TRIMs negotiations did not manage to yield more than a weak compromise. The main result of the TRIMs agreement within the WTO was that it affirmed that already existing GATT/WTO regulations now also ap plied for FDI. The most pressing problem in establishing a global regulatory framework for FDI remained the issue of to what extent FDI regulation should reconcile ‘open economy’ aspirations aiming at the free flows of goods and capital with the wish to protect the particular interests of states, labor and the environment. Whereas most developed countries aim to support their ‘national’ industries and firms by arguing for a free and open global economy, many of the developing countries are hesitant to enforce policies that aim for trade liberalization. Besides the critique that trade lib eralization is often rather one sided (aimed at the sin gular opening up of developing economies), the incompatibility of liberalization policies with the more protective import substitution developing strategies of the developing countries remains an important point of conflict. Other groups, such as labor organizations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), are also critical of the ‘open economy’ aspirations of developed countries. Labor organizations, such as the International Labor Organization (ILO), the World Federation of Trade Unions and a wide variety of national labor unions, refer to the negative effects that free trade and investment have upon labor standards. They fear that an increased race to the bottom over FDI might lead to the ‘social dumping’ of international workers’ rights and labor standards. En vironmentalists and environmental NGOs share similar fears for the environment. They argue that protective policies and regulations at both national and inter national levels are necessary to prevent pollution and environmental deterioration. As a result of these tensions, the most recent attempt to establish a multilateral regulatory framework for FDI culminated in a complete breakdown of the FDI regu lation debate. In the late 1990s, the OECD started ne gotiations on a multilateral agreement on investment (MAI). The goal was to provide a strong framework for FDI regulation which had market liberalization, the protection of (foreign) investment and international dis pute settlement as central issues. The MAI would be come a counterpart of the GATT/WTO, where GATT would provide the rules and regulations for international trade and the MAI would provide the rules and regu lations for international investment. This free standing nature of the MAI was underlined, in particular by the US, and it was stated that the MAI would be open to all OECD and non OECD members could also enter. The choice for the OECD as the setting for the negotiations was quite controversial since it excluded the participation


of the majority of developing countries. However, OECD members argued that since 85% of all FDI flows were constituted by OECD member states, the negotiation of the MAI within the OECD would produce the best re sults. Besides that, the preference for the OECD as the main venue to discuss the MAI can also be connected to the disappointment of, primarily, the USA over the re sults of the TRIMs negotiations within the WTO. The MAI generated a fair amount of criticism, in particular from labor and environmentalist NGOs, leading to many demonstrations and protests across the world. In countries such as Canada and France, MAI was seen as threatening local cultures and national sover eignty. This ultimately led to the withdrawal of France from the MAI negotiations in 1998. After the withdrawal of France many countries followed and in 1999 the draft treaty was rejected. Today, the TRIMs agreement within the WTO remains the primary regulatory framework for FDI on the multilateral front.

Outlook Given recent setbacks on the road toward ‘full’ liberal ization, regulatory aspects will remain a key issue in the debate and research on FDI. From an economic geog raphy perspective, this issue has received little attention. There is considerable scope for exploring the links with political geographies of regulation and work on power geometries. Research could focus, in particular, on the persistent, yet changing role of legal borders, the way these borders delimit ‘spaces of regulation’ and how this is changing under the impact of new forms of global and regional (suprastate) agreements. Financial, resource (including labor) and production settings remain strongly spatially differentiated, with nation states continuing in pole positions. As a result, trends toward more inte gration and global standardization are far from automatic, but present, to a large extent, the hard one results of regulatory struggles and arduous institutional building. This will continue to provide a major research agenda for the future. So far, economic geography has made more inroads in the debate on location and organization strategies, in the context of globalization and technological change. A fruitful alliance has developed, accordingly, with the field of international business studies. Economic geography has gained a more dominant role because of the sophis tication that firms have built up in the slicing of activities over space. Not only location strategies, but also own ership (technology and capital) and internalization (control) strategies have evolved quite dramatically in response to the need to operate flexibly in an increasingly volatile global context. While externally firms have de veloped refined forms of outsourcing, licensing and joint

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ventures, internally manufacturing and supply structures have been further opened up. This has produced a shift further away from hierarchical control systems toward network structures, further blurring the boundaries be tween internal and external organization. The result is a separation between brand owners, the production net work consisting of contract assemblers and part suppliers (engaging in what is called ‘distributed manufacturing’) and local distribution companies. Such network con figuration allows companies to tap into multiple sources of innovation, including ‘clusters of innovation’ domin ated by concentrations of (hi tech) small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Originally economic geography contributed mainly through insights on the spatial div ision of labor within large corporations and the mapping of location advantages across space. Geographers are able to bring in vital expertise on the spatial embedding and the development and impact of networks (‘webs of en terprises’ and Global Production Networks) to study these developments. The emphasis on network does not make the older forms of location and impact analysis irrelevant, however. In particular, the relationship between FDI and innov ation continues to present a major, and highly influential, research agenda. The combination of network per spectives and more classical location and impact analysis, moreover, provides a powerful apparatus to elucidate the role of FDI in unfolding geographies of innovation and production. FDI is global in reach but, as explained above, it (re)produces particular geographies, ranging from the bolstering of existing agglomerations to the establishment of new ‘growth peripheries’. FDI contrib utes, in particular, to the webs of relations ‘between’ growth centers and peripheries and hence to the archi pelago structure of today’s global economic geography. See also: Agglomeration; Global Commodity Chains; Globalization and Transnational Corporations; Globalization, Economic.

Further Reading Buckley, P. J. and Ghauri, P. N. (2004). Globalization, economic geography and the strategy of multinational enterprises. Journal of International Business Studies 35, 81 98. Dicken, P. (2007). Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy (5th edn.). New York: Guilford Press. Dunning, J. H. (1993). The Globalization of Business: The Challenge of the 1990s. London: Routledge. Hoekman, B. M. and Kostecki, M. M. (2001). The Political Economy of the World Trading System: The WTO and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lagendijk, A. (1995). The foreign takeover of the Spanish automobile industry: A growth analysis of internationalisation. Regional Studies 29, 381 393. UNCTAD (2007). World Investment Report 2007: Transnational Corporations, Extractive Industries and Development. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Geneva.

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Vernon, R. (1966). International investment and international trade in the product cycle. Quarterly Journal of Economics 80, 190 207.

Relevant Websites http://www.twnside.org.sg/ Anti/alter globalist thirdworld network. http://www.citizen.org/trade/issues/mai/ Anti/alterglobalist website on the MAI.

http://www.imf.org International Monetary Fund. http://www.oecd.org/daf/mai/ Official OECD account on the MAI. http://www.oecd.org Organisation for Economic Co Operation and Development. http://www.unctad.org United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. http://www.worldbank.org World Bank.

Foucauldianism M. Huxley, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Archaeology A historical method for examining systems of thought and regimes of truth in a given society at a given time. Biopower Management of the biological and demographic aspects of a population as a whole – knowledge of, and attempts to regulate, rates of reproduction (births and deaths), health and disease, and risk and accident. Discipline A form of power producing and regulating normalized bodily comportments and individual behaviors. Discourse Archivally identifiable collections of statements and descriptions of practices connected in their expression of underlying historically contingent ‘truths’. Dispositif (Variously Translated as: Deployment, Apparatus, Arrangement, and Disposition) Network of spaces, plans, buildings, institutions, practices, regulations, philosophies, laws, discourses, and associated with particular configurations of power, knowledge, and government. Genealogy A method for bringing to light the exercises of power involved in the installation of particular regimes of truth and the devalorization of subjugated knowledges. Governmentality A dispersed form of power aiming to act on the actions of others and to incite individuals to govern themselves; techniques of government of individuals and groups. Heterotopia A form of space different from the everyday routinized spaces surrounding it and embodying potentials for subverting dominant dispositifs of power, knowledge, and space. Panopticism Bentham’s Panopticon as the ‘diagram’ of a form of ‘disciplinary’ power that incites subjects to monitor their own behaviors: an element of a dispositif that exemplifies modern forms of subjectification of the individual. Power (pouvoir – to be able) As a productive network that runs through the whole social body; contrasted with, distinct from, puissance (‘power over’; sovereign power), and domination and repression. (Productive) power produces discourses, knowledges, and subjectivities. Power/Knowledge (Pouvoir/savoir ) The interrelation between power and knowledge, so that knowledge is made possible through the operation of power in the production of dominant discourses, while power is exercised through the appropriation, distribution, or

restraint of knowledge. (Savoir - ‘know-how’ embodied not only in practices and institutions, but also linked to theoretical texts.) Subject, Subjectification The subject is the historically contingent product of technologies of governmental power that operate to install truths about the self. Processes of subjectification work to form particular subjectivities in individual human entities. Subjects also have capacities to carry out work on the self through knowledge and self-awareness.

Introduction Michel Foucault’s (1926–84) works are diverse and wide ranging, appearing in dispersed forms (books, articles, lectures, and interviews), and defying easy categorization. They could be classed as the works of a philosophically inclined, sociospatial historian, but such a clumsy des ignation barely hints at their richness and complexity. These works engage with histories, philosophies, and philosophical histories of modern knowledge and ‘truth’; of science, psychiatry, medicine, and of the prison; of the state and its legal, administrative, and political insti tutions; of modern European sexuality, and Greek and Roman practices of self formation; and the ways that time, space, and architecture are intertwined in the interrelations of practices and truths. In addition to this diversity of interests, Foucault continually reworked his ideas and revisited earlier studies from different perspectives, disrupting traditional notions of the progressive development of a body of work attributable to a singular ‘author’. Similar indeterminacy exists when attempting to locate Foucault’s writings within a conventional spectrum of philosophical–social–theoretical perspectives: human ism–antihumanism; structuralism–post structuralism– postmodernism; social constructivism–phenomenology; behavioralism–psychoanalysis. This is a problem which derives from seeing his works as attempts to provide accounts of a social whole, and to see Foucault as a ‘grand social theorist’. But while elements of all these ap proaches may be identifiable in Foucault’s work, Foucault does not lay claim to the comprehension of a social totality. My work takes place between unfinished abutments and anticipatory strings of dots. I like to open up a space of

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research, try it out, and then if it doesn’t work, try again somewhere else. y My books aren’t treatises in phil osophy or studies of history: at most, they are philo sophical fragments put to work in a historical field of problems. (Foucault, 1991a: 73 74)

The difficulties in apprehending Foucault’s work and its theoretical position are further exacerbated by the order and rate at which it has been published in France and elsewhere; the problems of translation, retranslation, and yet to be translated into various languages; and the ways in which it has been taken up at different times in different places and by different disciplines. ‘Fou cauldianism’ continues to be, very literally, ‘works in progress’. Foucault’s influence has been extensive but poly morphous – for instance, in France, his work is much more prominent in philosophy than it is in geography, while in Germany there is a wealth of Foucauldian in spired analyses of the state. In the English speaking hu manities and social sciences, there is hardly a discipline that has not been touched, to some extent, by the debates around Foucault’s ideas or their stimulus to research: from the history and philosophy of science to accounting; from the ‘psy’ disciplines to law; from cultural studies to economics; from political theory to architecture; from education to geography – to indicate but a few. Questions of space are implanted in the breadth and depth of Foucauldian concerns, and the development of Foucauldian perspectives on ‘the spatial’, again, takes diverse forms. In Anglophone geography, interest in Foucault’s work has grown since the early 1980s, when Discipline and Punish became the entry point for many geographical engagements with institutional spaces of discipline, control, and reform, especially through Derek Gregory and the department of geography at Cambridge University. Another influence was Ed Soja’s book, Post modern Geographies, which ‘‘gave prominent place to Foucault as a social and cultural theorist helping to correct the long standing marginalization of space in critical social theory’’ (Hannah, 2007: 91). These entry points have given a particular caste to the uptake of Foucault’s works in geography – a point that is elaborated below. The intellectual, temporal, spatial disjunctions and dispersions of Foucault’s influence resonate with his conscious attempts to radically subvert conventional categories of thought, authorship, and academic disci plines. There are thus many ‘Foucaults’, and ‘Fou cauldianism’ should not be understood to refer to any kind of endeavor to produce a unified theory of history or society. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a number of themes that run through these works and their de velopments, and the next section outlines some of these key issues and their significance for geography.

Key Themes Archaeology and Truth; Genealogy and Power Foucault identified one of the continuing strands of his work as a ‘critical history of thought’ that sought to question the taken for granted status of knowledge at a given time in a given society, and to explore under what conditions something could become an object of knowl edge about which true and false statements could be made. There are two aspects of such a critical history: archaeology and genealogy. Archaeology, as undertaken in The Order of Things and reflected upon in The Archaeology of Knowledge, is an ap proach or methodological strategy which seeks to ex cavate the ‘subsoil’ of implicit knowledge in a society to expose the commonalities among disparate philosophical ideas, public opinions, commercial interactions, moral discourses, political practices, social theories, the regu lation of institutions, and legal decisions. It is a ‘‘history of all that ‘contains thought’ in a culture, of all in which there is thought. For there is thought in philosophy, but also in a novel, in jurisprudence, in law, in an ad ministrative system, in a prison’’ (Foucault, 1996: 18). Archaeology places theories, institutions, and practices on the same plane of analysis: it is a synchronic dis interment and assembly of layers of underlying know ledges in a society. In this way, archaeology interrogates ‘truth’ as a his torical category, a culturally specific system of rules through which true and false can be distinguished. Each society has its ‘regime of truth’ that enables distinctions between the Same and the Other; allows certain state ments to be accepted or rejected; determines methods by which such assessments may be made; and valorizes the positions of those who are acknowledged as being able to enunciate the truth. Genealogy, on the other hand, examines how knowl edges and truths are linked to struggles over the exercise of power that sustain and extend, modify and overturn regimes of truth and networks of knowledge. These struggles are simultaneously discursive and material and are present in the mundane programs and practices of prisons and asylums as much as they are in the weighty debates of philosophers and politicians. In Foucault’s rereading of Nietzsche, genealogy traces contingent, in determinate ‘descents’, and ‘emergences’ of discourses and practices, truths and knowledges, rather than seeking ‘origins’ that respond to some predetermined necessity (such as ‘the march of progress’ or ‘the needs of capital’). Foucault’s major genealogical works are Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and Discipline and Punish. They are detailed historical studies which trace practices of psychiatry, clinical medicine, and penal re form as they produce and reproduce truths about the mad, the unhealthy, and the criminal, formulate divisions

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between them as normal/abnormal objects of knowledge, and locate them in relation to normative and spatial boundaries. These genealogies are neither narratives of great events nor histories of ideas: rather, they are illuminations of specific, historically contingent ways of knowing the truth; of commonplace, yet fateful practices, codes, and regulations that are, at one and the same time, the bases of ‘truths’ and reflections of them; and the local spatial and architectural forms – conceptual and physical – that instantiate and modulate such truths. The deployment of knowledges and the circulation of truths involve the exercise of power. For Foucault, power is not a monolithic, monocentric imposition of re pression. It ‘‘traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network that runs through the social body, much more than a negative in stance whose function is repression’’ (Foucault, 2001a: 120). Power and knowledge are implicated in incessant maneuvers, strategies, and tactics around truths and discourses, local knowledges and practices, and actions on the actions of others. If archaeology is the historical examination of underlying ‘regimes of truth’ that make knowledge pos sible in a given society at a given time, and which brings to light ‘subjugated knowledges’, genealogy traces the ways in which dominant truths and knowledges are never stable or uncontested, but are constantly threatened by subversion and recalcitrance. These are conceptions that underpin Foucault’s studies of discipline, biopower, and governmentality.

Discipline, Biopower, and Governmentality Discipline is a form of power focused on the body, which regulates bodily actions, comportments, and aims to in culcate productive, docile behaviors. It is most famously described in Discipline and Punish, Foucault’s detailed historical account of the emergence of the modern prison in the nineteenth century. The dramatic opening de piction of the dismemberment of the body of Damiens the Regicide in 1757 is contrasted with a description of Faucher’s prison timetable from 1838, which, Foucault argues, marks a historical shift in the treatment of criminals (and other categories of ‘abnormal’ individuals). These vignettes are given as exemplars of the contrast between sovereign power that uses violent punishment as a spectacular deterrent, and disciplinary power that seeks the reformation of individuals through incarceration, spatial segregation, bodily training, temporal routines, and constant surveillance. The divisions of space in buildings and the divisions of time in daily routines reinforce the bodily capacities being sought by the disciplinary regime. These techniques are mirrored in

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military organizations, schools, factories, hospitals, and similar institutions. The ‘diagram’ of Bentham’s Panopticon is a central motif in crystallizing the differences between sovereign and disciplinary power: the Panopticon, with its unseen watcher in the central tower, exemplifies the aspirations of disciplinary power to fabricate subjects in whom social duty and individual inclination correspond without fur ther need for training, surveillance, or punishment. In this way, disciplinary regimes and surveillance intersect with, and affect the form of, wider transformations such as the emergence of the social or human sciences, the rise of industrial capitalism, and the making of the modern liberal subject (see below). Discipline is also connected to the emergence of ‘biopower’: while discipline (or ‘anatomo power’) relates to the training of productive individual bodies, biopower focuses of the management of populations – births and deaths, health and reproduction, and environments – and statistical and actuarial ways of comprehending popu lations as objects of knowledge and intervention. At the level of processes that affect populations, biopower is concerned with problems of disease, illness, and death; with old age, infirmity, and incapacity; and with the causal effects of, especially urban, environments or milieux. Most crucially, techniques of power over life – the politics of the body and the politics of populations – intersect around the control of reproduction and the medical and moral supervision of sexuality. Sexuality is a fundamental problem for the production of appropriate moral, social, economically productive bodily comport ments and behaviors, and it is an equally fundamental problem for the reproduction of some populations and the restriction of others. Like discipline, sexuality is implicated in the historic constitution of the modern subject. Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’ traces another aspect of the intersection of the discipline of bodies and the management of populations to examine how methods of sovereign rule, primarily concerned with external threats to the boundaries of territory and the mainten ance of lineage, shifted into modes of government of populations, concerns with the security of the population, and exercises of power through of law and administration. Initially, governmental ‘police power’ of the state mir rored disciplinary powers over the body in seeking to know and regulate all aspects of social and economic interactions in order to increase the wealth and strength of the state. Subsequently, these attempts at the exercise of an all encompassing police power were overshadowed by discourses of biological, social, economic, and political ‘processes’ that signaled a shift in emphasis toward liberal formulations of the relations between strategies of rule, subjects, society, and economy.

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Foucault also shifted his emphasis on governmentality as a mode of state power and expanded the notion to include, more generally, the ways in which individuals govern others and themselves. Governmentality is ‘the conduct of conducts’ – a form of power that, in more or less systematic ways, attempts to act on the actions of others and the self, and which is exercised at dispersed sites – in the family, in schools, in workplaces, in the confessional, and on the psychiatrist’s couch. It en compasses multiple and dispersed practices and ‘men talities’ that aim to produce and incite various bodily comportments and self monitoring behaviors; to regulate populations and their health, reproduction, and ex posures to risks; and to manage environments in which bodies and populations flourish or decline. Times, spaces, and environments are thus central to how programs of government seek to bring about desired outcomes. But the achievement of governmental aims is never guaranteed, since things, subjects, and events are con stantly recalcitrant and the aspirations of diverse governmentalities are not necessarily consistent. In par ticular, liberal forms of governmentality are underpinned by tensions between twin conceptions: on the one hand, of the individual who preexists society and is essentially free willed; and on the other, of the subject as the ‘cre ation’ of various forms of government seeking to foster appropriate exercises of autonomy. In these ‘technologies of government’ lies a link between Foucault’s conceptions of discipline and governmentality, and his conceptions of the historically constituted subject.

The Subject and the Self In Foucault’s concerns with the nonessential nature of the subject, subjects are seen as having capacity for action, while nevertheless not only being fabricated externally with various attributes of identity, but also being able to modify that identity (or identities) through working toward the attainment of self knowledge. These ideas are more than usually scattered, but are most clearly present in Foucault’s later works on ancient sexual practices as forms of self fashioning and an ethics of the self. The constitution of the modern subject is based in humanism, in political understandings of the autonomous individual, and in the privileging of sex as a site of identity. In processes of ‘subjectivation’, subjects come to understand themselves and their social identities through governmental (in the broadest sense) incitements to monitor their own actions in acceptable ways. However, these social identities are not fixed, both because they are formed at situated confluences of disparate processes (the sexual subject and the democratic voter), and because there exists the capacity for the self to work on the self, out of which resistances or counter conducts to attempts

to govern through specific subjectivities (woman, homo sexual, black) can be born. Here again, space and time are elements in the con stitution of subjectivities and the performance of iden tities. In their interconnections in projects of government of others and of the self, local spaces and specific times are actively implicated in evoking or constraining rep ertoires of conduct. Space and Dispositifs Foucault’s claim (2001b; 361) that ‘‘space is fundamental in any form of communal life: space is fundamental in any exercise of power’’ most obviously not only informs his studies of institutions of confinement and reform, but is also a continuous thread in his works. As already noted, the studies of disciplinary, re formative, and healing institutions provide detailed ac counts of how space and time operate in these regimes of control to produce normalized bodily comportments and behaviors. Less restrictive arrangements, such as the Mettray colony, give glimpses of how space is implicated in projects of government of others and of the self in more diffuse settings – not just in factories, schools, or offices, but also in bedrooms, houses, streets, towns, or territories. The term dispositif can be used to indicate how truth, knowledge, governmental technologies, individual con ducts, bodily attributes, built forms, and spaces are enmeshed elements in governmental identification of problems and formation of solutions, to be examined in genealogies of, for instance, sexuality or madness. The study of how such dispositifs are assembled and deployed, therefore, involves the study of ‘thought’ about space as well as the intended and unintended effects of such ar rangements and interrelations. Explorations of the im portance of space to situated relations of power have been central contributions of geography to the develop ment of Foucauldian perspectives.

Foucauldian Geographies As discussed above, the uptake of Foucault by Anglo phone geographers was influenced by the appearance in English of Discipline and Punish and by Soja’s Postmodern Geographies. These two strands – broadly, one historical and the other conceptual – shaped debates in geography for some time and produced much groundbreaking research in historical geography into crucial spatial elements of disciplinary and reformative institutions. However, despite Driver’s (1985: 426) early cautions that ‘‘any attempt to reduce Discipline and Punish to a set of simple ground rules will fail to recognise Foucault’s abhorrence of ‘totalizing’ forms of explanation,’’ many subsequent studies tended to see ‘discipline’ as

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fundamental feature of modern society, that had ‘escaped’ the prison walls. The puzzle of that ‘escape’ was in part a consequence of a concentrated focus on the physical spatial configurations of the prison and the Panopticon (see below). In a parallel fashion, despite the originality of Soja’s arguments about the radical, theoretical, and critical potentials of ‘postmodern geographies’, his claim that Foucault was a postmodern geographer and critical the orist ‘malgre´ lui’ (despite himself) gave rise to debates about the adequacy of Foucault’s conceptions of space and in relation to social and political theory and action. In particular, Soja’s (1996: 159) ‘heterotopology’, and his claim that ‘‘y space was as central to Foucault as it was to Lefebvre, the former inflecting primarily through the nexus of power what the latter persistently parsed through the meanings of social production,’’ aligned Foucault with the search for grand theories of space, power, and society that subsequently affected the way Foucauldian perspectives have been geographically framed. As Philo (1992: 139) notes, ‘‘One of Soja’s weaknesses is his failure to look much more closely at [the] historical treatments of substantive matters.’’ Or as Gregory (1994) puts it: Soja ‘‘severs Foucauldian analytics of space from the genealogy of the subject (p. 297)’’ and fails to ac knowledge that the relations ‘‘between specific rational ities, local knowledges, and forms of subjectivity form a conceptual triangle that has to be central to any serious appropriation of [Foucault’s] work (p. 298).’’ The concept of ‘heterotopia’ caught the attention of geographical theorizing, because of its radical subversion of the primacy accorded to time over space in much Western philosophy, and because of its tantalizing hints of the potentials for positive difference secreted in these ‘other’ spaces. But Foucauldian approaches can be taken further than this, since Foucault ‘‘calls forth a world in which one sees only spaces of dispersion: spaces where things proliferate in a jumbled up manner on the same ‘level’ as one another’’ (Philo, 1992: 139), and all of which are potentially both repressive and liberating. ‘‘y I do not think that it is possible to say that one thing is of the order of ‘liberation’ and another is of the order of ‘op pression’. y Liberty is a practice’’’ (Foucault, 2001b: 354). These conceptual difficulties have continued to attend the reception and use of Foucault’s work in some fields of geography. Latterly, however, and with ongoing publi cation in English, understandings of how the philo sophical and historical aspects of Foucault’s work can be joined with attention to the spatial have emerged. Elden demonstrates this in his important study of the influence of Heidegger on Foucault’s attention to space. Given that Foucault uses power relations to investigate society, y and that power relations are in and through

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space, we can see that questions of space are inherently pol itical y [and] y politics is inherently spatial. y Under standing how space is fundamental to the use of power and to historical research into the exercise of power allows us to recast Foucault’s work not just as a history of the present but as a mapping of the present. (Elden, 2001: 150, 152) (original emphases)

Within and beyond these points of emergence and continuing debates, Foucault’s works have stimulated extensive applications and developments in almost all fields of human geography. In terms of substantive re search, for instance, the emphasis on the deployment of space and time in categorization, training, and normal ization of bodies in disciplinary institutions and through governmental regulations is the source of significant studies in historical geography of asylums, hospitals, workhouses, and prisons; of the planning and adminis tration of the sanitary, health, circulatory, commercial, and moral problems of urban areas; and of territorial demarcation, state formation, and the management of populations, including technologies of statistics, de mography, and cartography. The influence of Discipline and Punish extends into social geographies of policing and surveillance, particularly in studies of current policies and technologies of social control of public space, of terrorism, and of ‘socially excluded’ or other marginal ized groups. ‘Governmentality’ inspires much work in political geography, both in studies of the internal organization and political management of the spaces of the nation state, and in the geopolitics of international relations and globalization. In economic geography, work on neoliberal spaces and subjectivities draws on ideas of post disciplinary societies and the exercise of ‘advanced liberal governmentalities’ that ‘‘link individuals into a society through acts of socially sanctioned consumption and responsible choice, through the shaping of a lifestyle according to the grammars of living that are widely disseminated y’’ (Rose, 1999: 166). Foucauldian approaches are also taken up in post colonial studies of the distributions of discourses of colonial ‘centers’, practices of colonizers, and counter practices of indigenous peoples; in studies of the gov ernment of postcolonial states; and how practices of ex ploration, mapping, and city planning are all implicated in colonial and postcolonial power relations. Questions of the interrelations of spaces, subjects, and identities are particularly pertinent to queer geographies and geographies of sexuality, gender, and feminism. Whether spaces can be designated either as wholly ‘queer’ or wholly ‘straight’, for instance, continues to be debated. For instance, Howell argues that a Foucauldian approach suggests that

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It would be better to say that all space carries traces of heteronormative spatiality, and/or that all space is ac tually queer, in the sense that the norms of heterosexual society are unstable and incoherent. This means, for one thing, that the identification of spaces as either gay or straight is fundamentally mistaken. (Howell, 2007: 310) (original emphases)

Such studies productively highlight ways in which dominant discourses are implicated in the materialities of spaces, even as such spaces offer possibilities for ‘counter conducts’. Current developments thus see all of Foucault’s studies as thoroughly spatialized – not just histories of particular kinds of spaces, but spatial histories and re invigorated historical geographies. Conceptualizations of space as historically contingent pay attention to the significance of diverse, localized spaces and struggles over their configurations in exercises of power, govern mentality, and formations of the self; and examine re gimes of spatial truths underpinning such configurations. In Foucauldian framings, questions of space contribute to unsettling theorizations of its ontology, but equally, and possibly more importantly, they are analytical and po litical lenses through which to critically examine histories and geographies of the present. Critical Debates This subdisciplinary diversity in Foucauldian approaches is evidence of lively and productive deployments and developments of these ideas – ongoing explorations and extensions, rather than static applications of a set of routinized theories and methods. Foucauldian con ceptions taken up in various fields of human geography have been based in quite different readings and different emphases on different aspects of the work, so that it can seem difficult to discern commonalities. So, for instance, queer and sexuality studies focus on subjectivities, identities, and performativity, while surveillance studies have tended to stress the overwhelming presence of the state in disciplinary projects for the control of conducts. While such diversity is to be celebrated, there might also be a case for greater interaction between subdisciplines (or indeed, between human geography and other dis ciplines), especially in exploring the nature and poten tials of their different interpretations. Interfield dialog might also be a productive source of debate and counterargument in relation to critiques of Foucault’s works. Critical commentaries tend to read them as (1) flirting with the ‘dangers’ of relativism, par ticularly in attempting to bypass theories of the subject; (2) focusing on the ubiquity of discipline and repressive relations of power; (3) writing histories from the stand point of the privileged white European male; (4) making

only either metaphorical or restrictively descriptive his torical references to space; and (5) failing to provide ethical political stances or analytical tools for struggles of resistance or progressive politics of place, class, race, gender, and sexuality. Fostering wider dialog about these issues is particularly important, since developments of Foucauldian geographies are dynamic explorations, es pecially in the light of the fact that many of Foucault’s works still await publication and/or translation. Nevertheless, it is the case that many critiques are founded in partial readings of the material that is avail able. The dispersed and extensive nature of these works makes them particularly prone to selective uptake, such that Discipline and Punish, or the essay on ‘heterotopias’, or the lecture on governmentality come to stand for the totality of Foucault’s thinking. Equally, many trouble some aspects of these notions have been ‘tamed’ by their attachment to more generally circulating (dominant) theories, methods, and discourses: generalized ‘concepts’ of ‘governmentality’ or ‘Panopticism’, for instance, are abstracted from space and time, and applied to current events. For example, processes of subjectification are some times seen as forms of social constructivism, but this move underplays the ‘thinness’ of Foucault’s conception of the subject and his focus on regimes of truth, dis cursive formations, and dispositifs, which are radically different from conceptions of a constructing subject. Similarly, the search for theories of resistance and struggle become trapped in notions of resistance to re pressive power, and by the romance of struggles of marginalized ‘victims’ against such power. In such ana lyses, instead of being provocations to rethink power and resistance, Foucauldian conceptions of ‘counter conducts’ and strategies of self formation become diluted and inadequate versions of other theorizations. Most notably, both Panopticism and governmentality have been adopted in ways that subvert much of what is different and difficult about Foucault’s treatment of these concepts. The Panopticon was ‘invented’ by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) as the ideal and economical form of a building that would reform criminals by the simple method of never allowing them to know whether or not they were being watched, so that inmates would come to behave in corrected ways without the need for costly and inefficient gaolers. Foucault’s use of the qualities of the Panopticon is thus not to emphasize the punitive, repressive architecture of a real prison, and to see it as such, as many commentators do, is to miss the purpose of its description in Discipline and Punish. It is, rather, a ‘diagram’ of a productive form of power. He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he

Foucauldianism inscribes in himself the power relation in which he si multaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault, 1979: 203)

The Panopticon is the ‘‘figure of a political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use’’ (p. 205). In it can be seen the shift toward a discourse of ‘disciplinary’ (not ‘disciplined’) society of subjects in whom, as Bentham hoped, duty and interest would co incide – a modern liberal society in which subjects are ruled and rule themselves as if they are free. Such a reading of the significance of the Panopticon resonates with notions of governmentality and the ways in which subjects are brought to invigilate their own comportments and behaviors. But governmentality, too, is often attached to other, more readily available, con ceptual positions. It is, for instance, conflated with ‘gov ernance’ in which the state divests itself of many of its welfare and collective consumption functions, and op erates through ‘partnerships’ with ‘stakeholders’ in the private, voluntary, and community sectors. In these for mulations, governmentality is continuous with the state, and becomes another way of looking at state–civil society relations, but with the added advantage of highlighting ways in which the state produces – fairly unproblem atically – new subjectivities of a neoliberal kind. How ever, as outlined above, governmentality is not principally aligned with the state, even if the state is now becoming increasingly ‘governmentalized’. It is a form of power seeking ‘the conduct of conducts’, dispersed across multiple sites and programs, with no necessarily unified set of objectives and no certainty of intended outcomes. Debated and often contradictory as these develop ments are, it is now hard to imagine a geography that does not in some way engage with the issues raised by Foucauldian approaches. Discussions over the signifi cance of Foucault’s works and their deployments in multiple geographic fields will continue and mutate as further lectures and essays are published and translated into other languages. Happily, however, differences are unlikely to be resolved, since Foucauldian projects do not seek such closure.

Conclusion In his historical studies of the interrelations and struggles of truths, powers, knowledges, and spaces, of practices, conducts, and counter conducts, and in unsettling and politicizing notions of the subject, Foucault opens up a space that geographers enter with enthusiasm. Geo graphical ‘Foucauldianism’ is producing much valuable work, both theoretically and in projects of substantive research, in foregrounding the centrality of spatial con cerns that are often neglected in other disciplines. On the

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other hand, what are missing from many of the docile ‘Foucaults’ to be found in certain developments of his work, are genealogies of particular sites and localized practices of regulation, surveillance, of subjectification, and of government. But ‘Foucauldianism’ is, if nothing else, work in prog ress. As more lectures are published and translated, further directions for research and debates are opened up. Studies of postdisciplinary biopower and new medical technologies; explorations of geopolitical gov ernmentalities and ‘advanced liberal subjectivities’; race and nation; postcolonial powers and spaces, all draw on, and contribute to, the emergence of new Foucauldian geographies. In all of these, Foucauldian sensibility requires the careful excavation and construction of critical and effective spatial histories that provide tools for thinking and acting differently in the present. The things which seem most evident to us are always formed in the confluence of encounters and chances, during the course of a precarious and fragile history. y They reside on a base of human practice and human history; and y since these things have been made, they can be unmade, as long as we know how it was that they were made. (Foucault, 1988: 37)

See also: Biopolitics; Governance; Governmentality; Structuralism/Structuralist Geography; Surveillance.

Further Reading Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds.) (1991). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. Crampton, J. and Elden, S. (2007). Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate. Driver, F. (1985). Power, space, and the body: A critical assessment of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 3, 425 446. Driver, F. (1993). Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834 1884. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elden, S. (2001). Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History. London: Continuum. Foucault, M. (1967). Madness and Civilization. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1972). The Order of Things. London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1976). The Birth of the Clinic. London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1979). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972 1977. (Rabinow, P., ed.). Brighton: Harvester. Foucault, (1984). The order of discourse. In Shapiro, M. (ed.) Language and Politics, pp 108 138. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, Spring 22 27. Foucault, M. (1988). Critical theory/intellectual history. In Kritzman, L. (ed.) Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, pp 17 46. New York: Routledge.

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Foucault, M. (1991). Questions of method. In Burchell, G., Gordon, C. & Miller, P. (eds.) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp 73 85. London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In Burchell, G., Gordon, C. & Miller, P. (eds.) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp 87 104. London: Harveser/Wheatsheaf. Foucault, M. (1996). The order of things. In Lotringer, S. (ed.) Foucault Live, pp 13 18. New York: Semiotext(e). Foucault, M. (2001). Truth and power. In Faubion, J. (ed.) The Essential Works of Foucault 1954 1984, Vol. 3: Power, pp 111 133. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (2001). Space, knowledge and power. In Faubion, J. (ed.) The Essential Works of Foucault 1954 1984, Vol. 3: Power, pp 349 364. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (2003). Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975 76. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977 78. London: Allen Lane. Gregory, D. (1994). Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell. Hannah, M. (2000). Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth Century America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hannah, M. (2007). Formations of ‘Foucault’ in Anglo American geography. In Crampton, J. & Elden, S. (eds.) Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, pp 83 106. Aldershot: Ashgate. Howell, P. (2007). Foucault, sexuality, geography. In Crampton, J. & Elden, S. (eds.) Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, pp 291 316. Aldershot: Ashgate. Huxley, M. (2006). Spatial rationalities: Order, environment, evolution and government. Social and Cultural Geography 7(5), 771 786. Matless, D. (1998). Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books. O’Farell, C. (2005). Michel Foucault. London: Sage. Ogborn, M. (1998). Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680 1780. New York: The Guildford Press.

Philo, C. (1992). Foucault’s geographies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10(2), 137 162. Philo, C. (2004). A Geographical History of Institutional Provision for the Insane from Medieval Times to the 1860s in England and Wales: The Spaces Reserved for the Insane. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soja, E. (1989). Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. Soja, E. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Relevant Websites http://www.cartome.org Bentham texts and images, Cartome. www.ucl.ac.uk Bentham Project UCL Bentham Project, University College of London. http://www.michel foucault.com Extensive sources and links, michel foucault.com. http://www.foucault.info Extracts from texts, extensive links, Michel Foucault, Info. http://www.foucault studies.com Online Journal Foucault Studies. http://www.surveillance and society.org Online Journal Surveillance and Society. http://images.google.com Panopticon, Google Images. http://www.ucl.ac.uk University College London’s ongoing project for the publication of the complete works of Jeremy Bentham (including little known conceptual image of the Panopticon idea).

Fractal Analysis N. S. Lam, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Fractal Brownian Motion (fBm) A mathematical model governed by a zero mean Gaussian process with different levels of stationary increments that can be used to simulate curves and surfaces of various fractal dimensions. Fractal Dimension A parameter similar to the Hausdorff–Besicovitch dimension used to describe the complexity of forms and processes; the more complex the form, the higher the fractal dimension. Hausdorff–Besicovitch Dimension Noninteger dimension values first extended by mathematicians Hausdorff and Besicovitch to describe forms and processes. Self-Similarity The property where each portion of a form or pattern looks like a reduced-scale of its whole. Steinhaus Paradox The dilemma of measuring complex forms that occurs when the result of the measurement depends on the measurement scale used; for example, the smaller the step size used to measure the length of a curve, the longer the length of the curve.

asking: how long is the coastline of Britain? The answer to this question depends mainly on the step size of the walking divider used to measure the coastline from the map; the smaller the step size, the longer the coastline. This ‘Steinhaus paradox’ is related to a number of fun damental issues that have long plagued geographers, ecologists, and geoscientists, such as the issues of scale, scale dependency, map generalization, and landscape measurement, representation, and characterization. The fractal theory is intimately related to chaos, complex theory, and nonlinear dynamical systems. Lit erature on these is abundant and can be overwhelming, with new research continuing to appear. While there have been many successful applications and valuable contributions, there are also major misunderstanding, problems, and misuses of fractals. The following focuses on fractal analysis as applied in geography; it explains the key concepts, major applications, issues and challenges, and future directions. We hope this brief overview will facilitate a better understanding and appreciation of fractal analysis in geography.

Key Concepts Fractal Dimension and Self-Similarity

Introduction It has been three decades since Mandelbrot coined the term fractals in 1977. Since then, fractal analysis dom inated the scientific literature for more than two decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, studies on fractals can be found literally in every major discipline, ranging from physics, chemistry, engineering, geosciences, and geography to music, arts, movies, and video game industry. Its impacts have been far and deep, and its significance is comparable with, if not exceeding, the development of the concepts of entropy, chaos, and Gaussian distribution. It was once claimed that no one would be considered scientifically literate if the meaning and scope of fractals was not understood. Fractal analysis has a very close tie with geography and the broader environmental science. In fact, fractal geom etry was derived by Mandelbrot mainly because of the inefficiency of classical geometry in describing complex shapes and phenomena that we observe everyday, such as clouds, terrains, settlement patterns, coastlines, and river networks. In his 1967 influential article that subsequently led to the derivation of fractals, Mandelbrot posted a question that geographers and cartographers have been

The main parameter in fractals is the fractal dimension D, which is used to represent the complexity of objects, forms, and processes. In classical geometry (i.e., Euclid ean geometry), a point has a dimension value of zero, a line is one dimensional, an area has two dimensions, and a volume three dimensions. This is called topological dimension, and is defined by integer values. In fractal geometry, the fractal dimension of a point pattern can be any noninteger value between zero and one, a curve between one and two, and a surface between two and three, depending on the complexity of the pattern. The more geometrically complex the pattern, the higher the fractal dimension. This concept of fractional dimension was first formulated by mathematicians Hausdorff and Besicovitch. Mandelbrot later coined it as fractal di mension and defined fractals as ‘‘a set for which the Hausdorff–Besicovitch dimension (D) strictly exceeds the topological dimension (DT).’’ In defining the fractal dimension, Mandelbrot em ployed a concept called self similarity. Many spatial forms such as curves and surfaces are self similar, meaning that each portion can be considered as a re duced scale of the whole. The degree of self similarity is used to define the theoretical fractal dimension as

263

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follows: D¼

log N logð1=r Þ

½1

where r is a similarity ratio (i.e., scale reduction factor) and N is the number of steps needed to traverse a curve. The relationships between fractal dimension (D), number of steps (N), and similarity ratio (r) are illustrated in Figure 1. Figure 2 shows an example of Peano curve that is self similar. This type of curve is also space filling, meaning that by increasing the density of grids, the same curve can be generated that will eventually fill in the space, going from one dimensional to two dimensional. Since most natural forms, curves, and surfaces are not strictly self similar but rather statistically self similar, the fractal dimension will need to be estimated statistically through the regression technique. In general, the em pirical D value of a curve (e.g., coastline) is estimated by regressing between the length of the curve and the step size used to measure the length of the curve, using the following equations: log L ¼ K þ B log d D¼1

B

½2 ½3

where L is the length of the curve, d is the step size, B is the slope of the regression, and K is a constant. D is a function of the regression slope B. The more irregular the curve, the greater the increase in length as step size decreases, hence the steeper the negative slope, leading to higher fractal dimension. The D value of a surface can be estimated in a similar fashion, but using the following equation instead of eqn [3]: D¼2

B

½4

There are quite a few algorithms in the literature for estimating the fractal dimension of curves and surfaces, N = 4, r = 1/4 D = log N/log(1/r) = 1

N = 5, r = 1/4 D = log N/log(1/r) = 1.16

N = 8, r = 1/4 D = log N/log(1/r) = 1.5

Figure 1 Relationships between similarity ratio (r), number of steps (N), and fractal dimension (D).

Figure 2 Space-filling, self-similar Peano curves generated using the ArcInfo GIS software on a 16 16 and a 256 256 grid.

and the results from applying these algorithms can vary substantially. This discrepancy is a result of different realizations of the fractal theory into practice by different researchers. As discussed below, this has been a major problem in utilizing fractals effectively for measurement and characterization of real curves and surfaces. Fractional Brownian Motion The other side of the coin in fractal analysis is how to simulate the processes and patterns that the fractal model is meant to describe. Measurement using the fractal di mension is the first step toward scientific understanding

Fractal Analysis

Algorithms There are quite a few algorithms for measuring and simulating the fractal dimensions of curves and surfaces for geographical analysis. The following describes an algorithm for each type of operation. The algorithms selected for discussion below are based on their sim plicity, applicability, and performance. The computer programs of all the algorithms discussed can be found in Lam and De Cola’s edited volume Fractals in Geography, first published in 1993. Fractal Curve Measurement For curve measurement, the walking divider method is the most straightforward and intuitively simple, as it corresponds directly with the original definition of frac tals. The method is sensitive to the irregularity of the curve and hence it is considered the most accurate. The method generally takes more computational time than other ‘approximate’ methods such as the box counting and equipaced polygon methods, but computation time is no longer considered a major problem now given that fast computers are generally available and quite affordable. Given a curve (e.g., coastline), the walking divider method will begin walking the dividers along the curve using an initial divider length (step size). The number of steps it takes to traverse the curve is counted. The initial step size is usually one half of the average distance be tween every pair of adjacent points of the digitized curve. Intermediate points are interpolated using ordinary tri gonometric functions and distance calculations. The next

1.0996

log (length)

of complex forms and processes. Simulation often fol lows, which can further our understanding if it success fully mimics reality. In searching for a stochastic model that can mimic fractal patterns closely, Mandelbrot em ployed the Brownian motion model in physics. Brownian motion refers to the irregular movements of small par ticles, the time series of which often shows a highly autocorrelated sequence, indicating long time depend ence of previous movements. Because of the similarity between fractals and the Brownian process, the latter can be used as a model to simulate fractal curves and surfaces. Brownian trails are in fact fractal sets, with a fractal di mension of 1.5 for a Brownian curve and a fractal di mension of 2.5 for a Brownian surface. Mandelbrot later modified the ordinary Brownian functions using the concept of self similarity, and the combination of these two leads to a generalization called fractional Brownian functions. From these functions, curves and surfaces of other dimensions can be generated; hence, they are called fractional Brownian motion (fBm) curves and surfaces. Examples of fBm curves and surfaces are shown in Figures 5 and 6.

265

0.7011

LOUISIANA

50 km −1.8539

N

Gulf of Mexico log (step size)

−0.3487

Figure 3 Computation of the fractal dimension of the Louisiana coastline, digitized with 485 points from a map of scale 1:1 350 000. The measured D is 1.2 with R 2 0.98.

step size doubles the preceding one, such as 2, 4, 8, 16, and so on, and the number of steps needed to walk through the curve is recorded for that step size. These two variables are plotted on a double log form, and a linear regression is applied to determine the slope of the regression line and the goodness of fit R2 value. For a reliable regression es timate, at least five step sizes should be used. Figure 3 shows the computation of the Louisiana coastline and its corresponding log–log plot. The computed D value for the coastline is 1.2 with R2 of 0.98, compared with a computed D value of 1.0 for a circle with a low R2 of 0.49, and 1.2 for Koch snowflake with an R2 also of 0.98. The theoretical D values for circle is 1.0 and for Koch snowflake is 1.26. This simple example shows that there are some discrepancies between the theoretical and computed D values. Ambi guity in this method arises from decisions on two par ameters: how many steps one should use, and how to determine the break point where the log–log plot is no longer linear (i.e., scale range). Fractal Surface Measurement Measuring the fractal dimension of a surface presents a greater challenge than measuring curves, because adding a dimension makes the task of measurement much more complex and ambiguous. Similar to measuring the length of a curve, the area of a surface is measured to indicate surface complexity. The isarithm method for measuring the surface dimension is a direct extension of the walking divider method, except that the curves measured are now isarithms (e.g., contours) derived from the surface. In ex tending the method from curve to surface estimation, two additional considerations are needed: how many isarithms should be used to represent the surface, and how should these isarithms be averaged to derive a composite D value. Although the isarithm method is intuitively simple and quite accurate, because of these ambiguities, another method, the modified triangular prism method, is

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presented. The modified triangular prism method was found to be the most accurate and reliable method for estimating the fractal dimension of remote sensing image surfaces, and there is no additional parameter needed to be specified other than choosing the number of steps to be used in deriving the fractal dimension. Given a surface defined by a mesh of grids with x, y, and z values, the modified triangular prism method cal culates the total surface area defined by triangular prisms at each step size. For a given step size (defined by the length of a square grid, step size is 1 for 1 1 grid, 2 for 2 2 grids, and so on), the triangular prisms are con structed by connecting the heights or z values of four adjacent pixels to the center height, which is the average z value of the four adjacent pixels (Figure 4). The sur face area of the top of the prism is then calculated, and the procedure is repeated across the image to derive the total surface area. This procedure is repeated for each step size. The logarithm of total surface area is then re gressed against the logarithm of step size, and the fractal dimension calculated as 2 minus the slope of the re gression line as in eqn [4].

random component. The random component is con trolled by the following parameters: a roughness factor with values ranging from 0 and 1, a scale factor specific to the scale and resolution of the sample data, and a random value between 1 and þ1. Statistical self similarity is maintained by ensuring that the deviation between the interpolated and the actual midpoint is proportional to the distance between the end points. Figure 5 compares the results of the generated curves using two different roughness factor values. Unlike the surface simulation method discussed below, this technique does not provide a mechanism whereby a D value can be specified at the beginning of the simulation process.

Fractal Curve Simulation Fractal curve (and surface) simulation is often used for both visualization and analytical purposes (which will be elaborated in the next section). Simulation of regular objects such as the Koch curve can be achieved by a set of equations based on the principle of strict self similarity. Simulation of realistic curves such as coastlines will need to incorporate a certain degree of randomness, since strict self similarity is rare in nature. A commonly used algorithm is the midpoint subdivision method introduced by Carpenter in 1981. Given a curve defined by a few points, the method adds details by recursively sub dividing the curve by adding midpoints in the line seg ments. The x, y coordinates of the midpoint are the average x, y values of the endpoints of the segment, with the exception that the y coordinate is displaced by a

Z

Y a

d b

c

X Step size = 2

Figure 4 An illustration of the modified triangular prism method for calculating the surface area at each step size.

Figure 5 Two fractal curves (609 points) generated from (a) a simplified US boundary defined by 20 points; (b) curve with roughness factor 0.2, estimated D 1.07; and (c) curve with roughness factor 0.8, estimated D 1.48. Reprinted from Lam, N. S.-N. and De Cola, L. (eds.) (1993). Fractals in Geography. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

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Fractal Analysis

Fractal Surface Simulation

½5

where E[zi z(d þ i)]2 is the expected variance between two points having a distance d. The fractal dimensions of the simulated surfaces are equal to D ¼ 3 H. Figure 6 illustrates three simulated surfaces (D ¼ 2.1, 2.5, and 2.9) generated from this algorithm.

4

4 Ro 3 ws

3 2

2 1

1

0

0

5

5 4

4 Ro 3 ws

3 2

2 1

1 0

s

mn

lu Co

0

Applications

z-Value

D = 2.9

−0 72 145

Applications of fractals that are broadly related to geography generally fall into two groups. The first uses the fractal model to simulate real world objects and patterns for both analytical and display purposes. Typical objects or patterns simulated include coastlines, ecotones, river networks, time series, terrains, clouds, natural landscapes, settlement patterns, urban hierarchy, dif fusion patterns, and remote sensing images. Fractal simulation is frequently used in computer graphics and movie industry because they can simulate life like landscapes and objects for video games, movies, and a variety of virtual reality applications. Spectacular images generated by the fractal technique and enhanced by computer graphics rendering have fascinated many people and made the fractal model a very popular tool. Famous motion pictures such as Star Wars and its sequels have used the fractal model to create artificial landscapes and objects. The Mandelbrot set, derived in 1980 and now bears his name, was reportedly the most complex mathematical set discovered in the literature and has since become an icon of fractals. In addition to their sheer beauty and visual impacts, the simulated objects and patterns help unveil some of the properties of complex dynamical systems that have seldom been visualized before. Analytical uses of fractal simulation have been valu able. At least three types of analytic applications have been made. First, simulated fBm curves and surfaces are

s

mn

lu Co

D = 2.5

z-Value

zðd þiÞ 2 ¼ jd j2H

5

5

−0 72 145 217

E½zi

z-Value 0 90 181

D = 2.1

A widely used method for surface simulation is the shear displacement method. The method starts with a matrix of square grids with zero z values. A succession of random cuts across the surface is then generated, and the surface is displaced vertically along each random line to form a cliff. This process is repeated until several cliffs are created between adjacent sample points. The set of ran dom lines generated has the property that their points of intersection form a Poisson point process, while the an gles of intersection are distributed uniformly between 0 and 2p. The heights of the cliffs are controlled by the parameter H, which has values between 0 and 1. H de termines how the variance between two points relates to their separation distance, and is defined as

5

5 4

4 Ro 3 ws

2

2 1

1

0

3 s mn

lu Co

0

Figure 6 Three simulated surfaces (D 2.1, 2.5, and 2.9) generated from the shear displacement algorithm using a 50 50 grid.

regarded as ideal theoretical test data sets for testing a number of geographic models and algorithms. In car tography and geographic information systems (GIS), for example, fractal surfaces have been used as test data sets to examine the performance of various spatial inter polation methods and the efficiency of different data structures. Second, the fractal simulation technique has been employed as an interpolation method itself to generate coastlines and curves based on a few sample points (Figure 5). This curve generation process can be seen as an inverse of curve generalization, and could be implemented in a GIS for automated cartographic dis plays with varying levels of cartographic generalization.

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Fractal Analysis

In human geography, fractal simulation technique has been applied to simulate central place hierarchy, urban morphology, and urban growth. In physical and en vironmental geography, elaborated algorithms for de riving river networks from simulated fractal surfaces were developed to help understand the various properties of geomorphic processes. The third type of analytical uses of fractal simulation involves hypothesis testing. Fractal surfaces could serve as a null hypothesis terrain or norm whereby further simulation of various geomorphic pro cesses can be made to investigate the effects of different landform processes. The second group of applications is related to fractal measurement. Fractal dimension has been frequently used as an index for describing the complexity of curves and surfaces, which can then be used to interpret and infer the underlying spatial processes. For example, fractal dimensions computed for different parts of a coastline can be utilized to infer the underlying coastal processes that shape the coastline. A smooth coastline may indicate the dominance of large scale coastal process such as ocean currents, whereas a contorted coastline is likely a result of local deltaic deposition and land sub sidence. The power functions, as typified in fractal an alysis, have been employed to describe many phenomena that exhibit similar power relationships, such as the power function between stream length and basin area, the time series of river bedload transport, and the city rank size rule. In addition, in a pioneer article in 1980 that established the first application of fractals in geography, Goodchild demonstrated that fractal dimension can be used to predict the effects of cartographic generalization and spatial sampling, a result which may assist in deter mining the optimum resolution of pixels and polygons used in remote sensing and GIS studies. The fractal model has been applied to distinguish different types of land cover from remote sensing images, and the results indicate that urban land cover generally has higher di mension than agricultural or forest land cover. Other studies found that fractal dimension could be used to indicate the degree of human disturbance in natural landscapes; the higher the fractal dimension, the least disturbed the landscape by humans.

Major Issues The fractal model is no doubt a fascinating tool for simulation. However, its use as a technique for measuring and characterizing spatial phenomena has raised criti cisms. First, reducing the description and analysis of complex phenomena into a single fractal dimension value will always run the danger of oversimplification and overgeneralization. On the other hand, one could argue that fractal dimension as a descriptor is no different from

any other single statistical descriptors such as mean and standard deviation. Using just the mean or standard de viation value alone is not sufficient for interpreting a data set or a spatial pattern. The same is true for fractals where the fractal dimension reflects the complexity of forms and patterns only. In fact, one could further argue that why not use the fractal dimension as a standard descriptor for any spatial patterns, just like the func tions of mean and standard deviation for a statistical distribution. The second problem, which is more specific to frac tals, refers to the fundamental concept of self similarity. Strict self similarity assumes that the form or pattern of a spatial phenomenon remains unchanged throughout all scales, which further implies that one cannot infer the scale of the spatial phenomenon from its form or pattern. This has been considered unacceptable in principle and has been rejected by a number of researchers. Empirical studies have shown that most real world spatial phe nomena are not pure fractals with a constant D, but in stead, D varies across a range of scales. Rather than using D in the strict sense as originally defined by Mandelbrot, many researchers, including Mandelbrot himself, realize that strict self similarity is rare in natural phenomena, and that self similarity must be estimated statistically and at certain scale ranges. Instead of regarding the scale dependency of fractals as a shortcoming, some researchers suggested that information on the changes of D with scale could indeed be used to reveal the scale dependency characteristics of the phenomenon and help interpret the underlying processes at specific ranges. The third problem refers to the technical aspect of fractals. First, the fact that self similarity exists only within certain ranges of scales makes it difficult to identify where the break points are during the compu tational process. The location of break points affects the final D value, which is then used to characterize the curve or surface. Second, extension from curve measurement to surface measurement is not straightforward. Different researchers employ different interpretations and sam pling strategies in their surface measurement algorithms. The end results are not encouraging, as these algorithms frequently yield different fractal dimension values for the same surface. How to determine which computed value is the most accurate one? This leads to the third problem, which is how to determine the statistical significance of a computed fractal dimension value. If two surfaces are computed with D values of 2.21 and 2.29, would they be considered to be statistically the same, thus indicating the same degree of complexity? What are the confidence limits and their corresponding statistical significance? Monte Carlo simulation may ultimately be needed to determine statistical significance. Fourth, a major im pediment to utilizing fractal measurement is that there

Fractal Analysis

are very few algorithms readily available to researchers for experimentation. Although this problem is somewhat alleviated recently because of increased availability of ready to use algorithms, the same frustration remains that the results from applying differing algorithms often contradict with each other. A thorough evaluation of the various fractal measurement algorithms is necessary be fore they can be used to reliably characterize curves and landscapes.

Recent Advances in Geography Significant progress regarding fractal analysis in geog raphy has been made recently. First, computer software for fractal analysis is increasingly available, which makes testing of existing algorithms and exploration of new applications easier. The development of a software package called Image Characterization and Modeling System (ICAMS) by Lam and others is one example. ICAMS provides algorithms for computing fractal di mensions for surfaces and images, generating fractal surfaces, as well as computing a number of related spa tial/textural statistics such as wavelets, lacunarity, spatial autocorrelation, and variograms. Furthermore, bench mark studies comparing fractal measurement algorithms have also been conducted, which lead to further improvement or correction of existing algorithms. The modified triangular prism method, as described above, is an improved algorithm and is a direct outcome of being able to utilize the software for such studies. Fractals and scale are two inseparable concepts. In response to the problem of strict self similarity and uniform scale implied by the original fractal concept, recent applications have focused on using fractals to determine the scale ranges of different spatial phenom ena. Another significant advance has been the develop ment of multifractals and local fractals, both are designed to better represent complexities. In particular, local fractal dimensions computed for small moving windows in remote sensing images were used to detect land cover changes. This new local approach is designed to over come the problems of using a single fractal dimension to represent an entire study area. By applying the calcu lation in a small window area, the variations and com plexity can be better captured. These local modules have already been implemented in ICAMS. Recent studies have also advocated the need to use fractal dimension as part of the metadata for spatial data, especially remote sensing images. The argument is that if mean and standard deviation are basic nonspatial de scriptors for spatial data, why not use the fractal di mension as an index of spatial complexity to add the missing spatial information that conventional nonspatial statistics do not provide. Such information will help

269

speed up the mining of large image databases and the selection of appropriate imagery for many applications. Increasingly, fractal analysis is used as part of a group of texture indices that can be used for image classification and change detection, which has resulted in dramatic increase in image classification accuracy. Unlike many spatial indices used in landscape ecology, fractal dimen sion can be computed directly from unclassified images. This property makes fractal analysis a useful tool for changing detection without the need for prior image classification, which then paths the way for future auto mation in image classification and change detection.

Future Directions The beauty of the fractal model lies in its simplicity, which is to use a simple index to represent complex forms and systems. Useful modifications such as multi fractals and local fractals have significantly expanded its applicability. At the same time, it is recognized that using a single index may never be sufficient to represent all aspects of a complex system. Adding more complexity to the original fractal model, however, could defeat the original purpose. This ‘fractal paradox’, as coined here, is the dilemma we are facing that may inhibit the progress. What are the best ways to utilize such a fantastic concept and make progress toward utilizing fractals to advance geographical sciences? Here we suggest three directions for future research. First, more research should focus on developing stat istical vigor for the computed dimension values by identifying the confidence limits and statistical signifi cance. Second, fractal dimension alone is not sufficient to represent all aspects of spatial complexity, additional related indices such as wavelets, lacunarity, spatial autocorrelation, and others, are needed to help in de scribing complex system. Hence, the complementarities among these various indices should further be explored. Third, with improved and corrected algorithms be coming increasingly available, more studies are needed to explore the relationships between fractal patterns and their underlying processes. Further studies will be nee ded to determine whether fractal dimension alone, or in conjunction with other indices, can be used to suggest various conditions of curves, surfaces, and landscapes, such as the degree of human disturbance in natural landscapes, the degree of biodiversity after major dis turbance, or the social and health conditions of a region. Fractal analysis, deeply grounded in the concept of complexity, should in turn be used to unveil and explain complexities. See also: Chaos and Complexity; Complexity Theory, Nonlinear Dynamic Spatial Systems; Scale Analytical.

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Further Reading Arlinghaus, S. (1985). Fractals take a central place. Geografiska Annaler 67B(3), 83 88. Batty, M. (1985). Fractals geometry between dimensions. New Scientist 105(1450), 31 35. Batty, M. and Longley, P. (1994). Fractal Cities: A Geometry of Form and Function. London: Academic Press. Clarke, K. C. (1986). Computation of the fractal dimension of topographic surfaces using the triangular prism surface area method. Computers and Geosciences 12(5), 713 722. Feder, J. (1988). Fractals. New York: Plenum Press. Goodchild, M. F. (1980). Fractals and the accuracy of geographical measures. Mathematical Geology 12, 85 98. Goodchild, M. F. and Mark, D. M. (1987). The fractal nature of geographic phenomena. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77(2), 265 278. Lam, N. S. N. (1990). Description and measurement of landsat TM images using fractals. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 56(2), 187 195.

Lam, N. S. N. and De Cola, L. (eds.) (1993). Fractals in Geography. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Lam, N. S. N., Qiu, H. L., Quattrochi, D. A. and Emerson, C. W. (2002). An evaluation of fractal methods for measuring image complexity. Cartography and Geographic Information Science 29, 25 35. Lam, N. S. N. and Quattrochi, D. A. (1992). On the issues of scale, resolution, and fractal analysis in the mapping sciences. The Professional Geographer 44(1), 89 99. Mandelbrot, B. B. (1967). How long is the coast of Britain? Statistical self similarity and fractional dimension. Science 155, 636 638. Mandelbrot, B. B. (1983). The Fractal Geometry of Nature. New York: WH Freeman. Peitgen, H. O. and Richter, P. H. (eds.) (1986). The Beauty of Fractal Images. New York: Springer Verlag. Peitgen, H. O. and Saupe, D. (eds.) (1988). The Science of Fractal Images. New York: Springer Verlag.

Francophone Geography G. Benko, Universite´ Pantheón-Sorbonne, Paris, France C. Desbiens, Universite´ Laval, Que´bec City, QC, Canada & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Espace Veću (‘Lived Space’) Armand Fre´mont’s concept offers an alternative to the abstract logic of spatial analysis by proposing that humans do not live in space ‘as it is’ but rather in space ‘as they represent it to themselves’. As a result, a distinction emerges from the set of spaces individuals use on an everyday basis (espace de vie) and the social relations they form in these spaces (espace social). GREMI ‘European Research Group on Innovative Environments’ (Groupe de recherche europeén sur les milieux innovateurs). This European/North American research team was created in 1984 by Philippe Aydalot, professor at Paris 1, to study the relations between technical innovations and territories. According to these researchers, companies do not preexist in the local milieu but are generated by it. Innovative Environments Innovative environments (milieux innovateurs) enable the creation of innovation networks and are the source of their dynamism by generating a context for their formation, development, and diffusion. Proximity The ‘French School of Economic Proximity’ is based on the hypothesis that geographic proximity is not just a matter of physical distance, that is, it is not solely conditioned by natural constraints but is socially constructed, if only through the presence of infrastructures. Semiotics Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, both individually and grouped in systems. It includes the study of how meaning is constructed and understood. Drawing from this approach, cultural geographers have used semiotics to analyze landscapes as sign systems.

The Formation of the French School of Geography: An Overview Francophone geography traces its origins to the end of the nineteenth century, which also coincides, in Europe, with the emergence of human geography as a separate discipline from physical geography. In the early days of the French school, German thinker Carl Ritter’s (1779– 1859) attempt to underscore the unity of diverse phe nomena across the surface of the Earth exerted a strong

influence. In addition, Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), and his concept of anthropogeography, represented a signpost for this early period. The publication, in 1859, of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species raised new questions concerning the links between human diversity and evolutionism; these issues called for original ways of re flecting on the relationship that ties humans not only to their environment, but also to each other. Early French geography eventually drew more of its insights from neo Lamarckism, which posits the existence of a feedback effect within evolution, but the political context that prevailed in France at the end of the nineteenth century must also be accounted for as a factor in the creation and expansion of a school of human geography: as Paul Claval (1932–) notes in his Histoire de la geógraphie française de 1870 a` nos jours (1998), France’s defeat in the Franco Prussian War (1870–1871) which resulted in the annex ation of Alsace Lorraine by Germany gave rise to a wave of patriotism. During this movement, the production of knowledge about France’s people and territory became synonymous with duty toward the mother country (patrie) and the State was particularly active in developing a geography curriculum, as well as in fostering the cre ation of tools for teaching this curriculum. In this first generation of French geographers, E´mile Levasseur (1828–1911) was a notable figure. Due to his background in economics, demography, and statistics, his approach to geography relied on density maps as sources of information and tools of analysis. Studied at different scales and in a comparative perspective, patterns of human clustering in space pointed to key aspects of the nature of the human relationship with the various elements that made up the environment. To this, he added an economic analysis of the networks of pro duction and distribution that also model human density across the globe. Though the cultural aspect is largely absent from his work, he provided a useful system for mapping the placing of human settlements and the re lationship between them. E´liseé Reclus (1830–1905) was another important figure from this period. A student of Carl Ritter, his holistic approach to geographical knowledge is evident in the title of his major works such as Nouvelle geógraphie universelle: la terre et les homes (1875), or L’Homme et la terre (1905–08). Despite the extensive breadth of these ana lyses, his approach also encompassed an attention to micro scale phenomena such as was demonstrated in his book Histoire d’un ruisseau (1882), which can be regarded

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as a precursor to the ecological sensitivity that became widespread in the latter part of the twentieth century. In studying the Earth, his chief interest was to understand humans and the various inequalities that exist among them. As a result, power relations and political geography are important dimensions of his contribution to geog raphy, which partly explains the renewed interest for his work at the dawn of the second millennium.

Vidal de la Blache Despite the importance of these – and several other – contributions, Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918) is regarded as the chief artisan of the consolidation of the French School of Geography at the turn of the twentieth century. Like Reclus and others around him, he found much of his early inspiration in the works of German geographers, most notably Carl Ritter and his concept of geographic unity. If all geographic phenomena are uni fied at their root, one important element nevertheless comes to the forefront in Vidal de la Blache: it is that of ‘positioning’. Indeed, the position of one element of human geography relative to others near and far largely determines its role in a totality. With this perspective, landscapes emerged as layered spatial units where every object acts and is acted upon differently within the whole. Spanning more than three decades, Vidal de la Blache’s work is multifaceted. If fieldwork was an integral part of his approach, his contribution must also be understood in light of his development of a pedagogy specifically adapted to geography. True to Ritter, physical geography and ecology inform his analysis of human geography, but it is the geopolitical dimension that reaches most widely across his major works. At a time when European nations were in flux, the construction of national coherence and unity out of heterogeneous populations and lands fueled much of his research on the national character of France. His work Tableau de la geó graphie de la France (1903) created a portrait of France as a gathering of distinct but complementary regions that strongly anchor the country in its territory and history. By describing the processes of human adaptation specific to each region, the main goal of Vidal de la Blache was to represent the ‘geographic personality’ of France. The two concepts that form the overarching structure of his work are those of ‘milieu’ and ‘genre de vie’. The sum of the physical characteristics that shape human adap tation to, and exploitation of, a given locale, his notion of the milieu which is the sum of the physical character istics that shape human adaptation to, and exploitation of, a given locale offered a counterpoint to determinism. Indeed, the concept of milieu is influenced by Friedrich Ratzel’s idea of possibilism, which posits that ‘‘Nature proposes and humans dispose.’’ As a result of his

extensive research in the Mediterranean region throughout the 1880s, his concept of genre de vie became more precise, referring essentially to how agricultural and pastoral people develop the tools and techniques necessary to draw their sustenance from their environ ment. These processes, Vidal de la Blache (1911) pro posed, accumulate and sediment themselves to give rise to landscapes that are original and specific to the people who, through interaction with their milieu, make them: As [the genres de vie] have prevailed over broad stretches of land, they are highly evolved formations that, without having taken on the fixity of animal societies, represent a series of accumulated efforts that eventually become cemented. Man is a creature of habit more than a crea ture of initiative (Annales de geógraphie).

Toward the end of his life, Vidal de la Blache at tempted to synthesize his vision of human geography in his Principes de geógraphie humaine (1922) but passed away before its completion. The sum of his oeuvre set the agenda for Francophone geography for decades to come; yet, critical perspectives started to emerge with the fas tening pace of industrialization in France and around the world as the twentieth century unfolded. Imbued with a certain traditionalism, his concept of genre de vie seemed ill adapted to the analysis of modern ways of exploiting the resources of the environment and to the growing role of cities as places of human dwelling and structures of interaction with the milieu.

The Interwar and Post-War Period: Emergent Themes and Subdisciplines Even with the momentum imparted to the discipline at the turn of the century, World War I significantly slowed down the blossoming of human geography in France. As the State was busy with national reconstruction, few re sources were available for the expansion of geographic education or the hiring of geography professors in in stitutions of higher learning. Still, various people worked to give the discipline a more formal structure, chiefly through the role of associations and scientific journals. The creation of the International Geographic Union (IGU) before the war brought about the formation of a French National Committee; the latter was initially presided by Emmanuel de Martonne (1873–1955) who eventually served several mandates as head of the IGU. The work of the IGU and its national committees helped focus geographic research in France and foster its links with other countries but it was the continued expansion of the Annales de geógraphie (created in 1892) that created a forum and a means of diffusion for professors and re searchers in the field. Founded in 1821, the Socie´te´ de geógraphie de Paris also represented a meeting ground for


French geographers but its focus on exploration was at times at odds with the production and diffusion of sci entific knowledge outside the logic of colonial expansion. Due to the continuing influence of Vidal de la Blache, rural geography remained a dominant theme for French geographers during this period. Although traditional methods and approaches remained important, new issues – among them, the mechanization of techniques, the depopulation of rural areas, or the growing linkages be tween countryside and urban centers – began to draw attention and called for original modes of inquiry. As the countryside seemed to lose some of its economic vitality and human resources to urban centers, territorial man agement and the rational development of planning structures became an important area of teaching and research for French geographers. The period following the events of May 68 also saw the beginning of a diversity of foci and methods that led to the gradual firming up of different specializations. These pulled researchers into increasingly well established subdisciplines in the mid and latter decades of the century, including, but not limited to, economic geography, political geography, and cultural geography.

Economic Geography At the turn of the twentieth century, there were two schools of thought in economic geography. Long before the advent of geographers, some economists had inte grated into their reflections, the role of space through different aspects of economic life such as communi cations, circulation, or the establishment of industry. On the other hand, geographers described, but rarely ex plained, the distribution of economic activity in the world. Economic geography was often linked to specific demands, such as the establishment of business and distribution frameworks. Many geographers worked in business schools and provided useful information to companies, a practice known as utilitarian geography. Yet in this period, the works of Vidal de la Blache, especially his Principes de geógraphie humaine (1921), pro vided a rich departure point for economic geography, particularly his suggestion that every society is con fronted with the same dilemma: individuals group toge ther to share the advantages of the division of labor, but at the same time they must face difficulties inherent in this grouping. Vidal de la Blache was also interested in the role of transportation and the concentration (or polar ization) of economic activities and cities as structuring elements of regional space. Geographers insisted on the role of competition and agreements altering it, as well as on the forces of conglomeration and dispersion. During these early years, geographers contributed little in the way of textbooks or research on economic

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analyses. The work of Pierre George (1909–2006) was the one most frequently referenced: his Prećis de geógraphie ećonomique (1956) went through five editions between 1956 and 1970. Its first sentence provided the author’s view of the subdiscipline: ‘‘Economic geography is the study of different types of production and location of consumption of various products existing in the world.’’ It was essentially a catalog of various economic activities grouped by sectors. George presented an annotated statistical table that became quickly outdated without analyzing the economic logic that transforms the world. There was no mention of any work on ‘new geography’, nor was regional science mentioned. It was during this period that Paul Claval emerged as a leading figure of human geography, and its various subdisciplines, in France. Through his contact with Anglo Saxon geog raphy on the one hand and modern spatial economics or regional science on the other, he wrote a text in 1963 entitled Geógraphie geńe´rale des marche´s and, in 1968, he wrote Re´gion, nations, grands espaces. With these works, he introduced new ideas in spatial analysis and proposed a renewal of the discipline through spatial economics. In the 1970s, France, like many Western countries, was hit by an economic crisis and the limits to the Fordist development model. It became increasingly hard for the State to produce policies of regional development. By combining development with the ‘environment’, geog raphers working within the Groupe de recherche europeén sur les milieux innovateurs (GREMI) research group analyzed how innovative environments are embedded in territories and local economies (among others, Gilly and Torre (2000); Pecqueur and Zimmermann (2004)). Gabriel Colletis (1955–) and Bernard Pecqueur proposed an an alysis of spatial competition factors that put forward the idea of territorial specificity in supply. Economic geog raphy was undergoing such a transformation that it was being referred to as a ‘new social economic geography’. Research was meant to respond to social demands and explain the spatial behavior of capitalism. Interacting with these various influences, research was conducted by a team from Grenoble on ‘localized industrial systems’ under the supervision of Claude Courlet and Bernard Pecqueur. The sum of these contributions yielded a new school of thought on the notion of proximity emphasizing geographic and organizational proximities through in stitutions and collective learning.

Political Geography Within the general framework of Vidalian thought, one finds a geopolitical dimension. By painting a broad pic ture of France’s geography, he answered some essential questions relating to the existence of this country and its frontiers. Also of note during this period was the work of

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Camille Vallaux who published a two volume book en titled Geógraphie sociale : the first volume was La Mer (1908), and the second Le sol et l’E´tat (1911). Much of his inspiration came from Ratzel, but Vallaux took care not to fall into the determinism that French readers criticized in his Politische Geographie. Between the two world wars, French geographers offered an original contribution to geopolitical thought by approaching the problem of international relations from a perspective of balance and peace rather than from a standpoint of power. With Espace et pouvoir (1978), Paul Claval helped broaden the framework of political geography by pro posing that each set of institutionalized relationships is structured, in part, by power relations. His interpretation was structured around the Weberian distinction between pure power, authority, and different forms of influence and domination. Jean Gottmann’s (1915–94) book, The Signifiance of Territory (1972), showed that the dominant forms of the political organization of space in the world emerged only in the seventeenth century. This theory was embraced by Bertrand Badie (1950–) in Fin des ter ritoires (1995), but he added a new theme: the practice of sovereignty, the foundation of the classic state, was ero ded by the multiplication of players on the international scene and by the appearance of supranational sover eignties. New avenues of inquiry in political geography were in the making. Yet, the spread of a new political geography belongs to Yves Lacoste, in large part through the launch, in 1976, of a new journal known as He´rodote. During the same year, he published a book called La geógraphie, ça sert, d’abord, a`faire la guerre. Lacoste focused on the geo graphical position of a given area and analyzed it from several perspectives. He described its natural and social characteristics, which was the classic part of the ap proach. Then he presented the players, exploring the way they viewed situations, perceived challenges, and developed their strategies. In the French geographic community, nobody remained indifferent to this con troversial study. Claude Raffestin (1936–) also proposed a global perspective on power in his book Pour une geó graphie du pouvoir (1980) where he focused on techniques of space management to analyze the territorial nature of power, which is in large part determined by modalities of access to resources. Starting in the 1980s, political geography made in roads into the field of the geostrategy of nuclear deter rence. Jacques Le´vy (1952–) and his colleagues also emphasized the significance of globalization and ex panded their analysis to reflect on global political ethics. In the 1980s and 1990s, electoral studies multiplied and were renewed: with the rise of the urban metropolis and its expanding political role, the perspective on internal geopolitics developed by Beátrice Giblin Delvallet (1947–) and Yves Lacoste led to questions on the

strategies of parties and elected members, as well as on the evolution of voting.

Cultural Geography Notwithstanding the continued influence of the Vidalian approach, cultural geography in France expanded its perspectives in the latter part of the twentieth century to envision the concept of genre de vie within a larger ana lytical framework. In line with their Anglo Saxon col leagues, French geographers attempted to develop a more complex notion of culture in order to grasp in tangible realities such as lived and symbolic space, or landscape as both a material and symbolic object. Many cultural geographers drew from semiotics in order to study the importance of language, myths, symbols, and images in the relationship between humans and their environment. Landscape was no longer seen simply as a component of a biological or regional whole but was also approached as a cultural production: as a result, geog raphers needed to understand the role of: perception, imagination, sign systems, power strategies, and the play between the different orders of reality (Claval, 1998: 362).

In doing so, they developed a multifaceted perspective on humanized spaces. In his book, La re´gion espace veću (1976), Armand Fre´mont (1933–) proposed that humans do not live in space ‘as it is’ but rather in space ‘as they represent it to themselves’. He draws from literature in order to analyze how spaces are narrated and how these narrations (rećits) in turn influence the experience of everyday environments. Fre´mont’s approach brought so cial geography to the center of cultural research while also offering an alternative to the abstract logic of spatial analysis. Other cultural geographers studied collective representations of space in order to explore notions of place and identity, as well as culturally specific geo graphical perceptions and concepts: notable among them were Joe¨l Bonnemaison (1940–97) and his studies of Vanuatu as well as Augustin Berque who has written extensively about Japan. Among many other contri butions, their work allowed geographers to bring dom inant conceptions of nature, space, landscape, territory, or the environment into a globalized dialog between dif ferent cultures. By making the human experience of space a central component of their analyses, French cultural geographers have, in the last 30 years, greatly expanded the purview of their discipline. In this regard, Jean Robert Pitte (1949–) charted a wholly original course through his research on sight, taste, and smell as central components of how humans apprehend, use, and represent space, an approach that is also strongly an chored in historical geography.


Indeed, cultural geography is not isolated from other subdisciplines in France: its impact is also found in tro pical geography, led by Pierre Gourou (1900–99) whose extensive body of work contributed to defining the field of tropical studies in France as well as elsewhere. Gourou’s initial research centered on the Tonkin region of Vietnam but eventually spanned the rest of Asia as well as Africa in his efforts to draw a global image and synthesize the human and economic dynamics of the ‘tropical countries’ (Les pays tropicaux 1947). The work of Gourou is strongly anchored in the colonial politics of his time: after World War II, he contended that the colonial enterprise had accomplished the triple objective that, in his view, legitimized it: it maintained order and peace; developed a communications network; and kept disease epidemics under control (Remarques, 1952: 97). In Pour une geógraphie humaine (1973), he posited that the human interaction with the landscape proceeds through a series of encadrements (enframings) much more than through the tools and techniques that are used to transform the environment. In this regard, his vision opposes that of Vidal de la Blache, despite his early association with the Vidaliens. In the postcolonial era, French geographers had been ill at ease with Gourou’s legacy as his work was seen to have driven a wedge between the temperate and tropical worlds by presenting the former as rational, or ganized, and progressive while the latter, following the dynamics of orientalism described by Edward Said, was overly represented as its exact opposite. Thus, French cultural geographers in the late twentieth century chal lenged the static view of culture as the ‘unique’ quality of a place and people, to apprehend it instead as an evolving – and often subjective – set of practices, perceptions, and power relations that shape the surface of the Earth.

Francophone Geography Today: The Continued Broadening of an Intellectual and Physical Space Throughout these subdisciplines, urban geography and historical geography were also well represented. In add ition, Francophone geography has been developed over the last century through the contribution of Francophone geographers outside of France, whether in Switzerland, Belgium, Quebec, or other locales of the francophonie, notably in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbeans. In Quebec, Louis Edmond Hamelin – who co founded the geog raphy department at Laval University – has been a leading figure since the 1950s chiefly through his work on nordicite´, a term he coined to describe both the physical, cultural, and political characteristics of Canada. Not withstanding its European influences, Francophone geography in Quebec is strongly North American due to its cross fertilization with English Canadian and

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American universities. Also, the presence of aboriginal cultures in Quebec and Canada means that native and postcolonial studies have been better represented than in France. Whether in Quebec or in France, however, one of the subdisciplines that has been left aside by Franco phone geographers is that of feminist geography. Al though many female geographers – among them Caroline Desbiens, Cynthia Ghorra Gobin, Beátrice Giblin Delvallet, Anne Gilbert, Damaris Rose et Marie Claire Robic – have contributed to the blossoming of French human geography, their work has not yet emerged into a well established feminist core in Francophone geography. Paired with emerging interests in studies of the environmental, global dynamics or even geopoetics, Francophone geography therefore will have no shortage of fruitful research avenues in the years to come. See also: Anthropogeography (After Ratzel); Cultural Geography; Determinism/Environmental Determinism; Ecology; Economic Geography; Environment; Geopolitics; Historical Geography; Lamarck(ian)ism; Landscape; Political Geography; Possibilism; Reclus, E.; Regional Science; Ritter, C.; Rural Geography; Social Geography; Spatial Analysis, Critical; Tropical Geography; Urban Planning and Human Geography.

Further Reading Badie, B. (1995). Fin des territoires: Essai sur le de´sordre international et sur l’utilite´ sociale du respect. Paris: Fayard. Benko, G. (1998). La science re´gionale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Benko, G. and Lipietz, A. (eds.) (2000). La richesse des regions. La nouvelle geógraphie socio ećonomique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Berdoulay, V. (1981). La formation de l’ećole française de geógraphie (1870 1914). Paris: Bibliothe`que nationale Comite´ des travaux historiques et scientifiques. Berque, A. (1982). Vivre l’espace au Japon. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bonnemaison, J. (1996). Les fondements geógraphiques d’une identite´ L’archipel du Vanuatu: Essai de geógraphie culturelle. Paris: ORSTOM. Bowd, G. and Clayton, D. (eds.) (2005). French tropical geographies. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 26(3), 271 374. Brosseau, M. (1996). Des Romans geógraphes: Essai. Paris: L’Harmattan. Claval, P. (1968). Re´gions, nations, grands espaces. Geógraphie geńe´rale des ensembles territoriaux. Paris: M. Th. Geńin. Claval, P. (1969). Geógraphie geńe´rale des marche´s. Paris: Belles Lettres. Claval, P. (1978). Espace et pouvoir. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Claval, P. (1998). Histoire de la geógraphie française de 1878 a` nos jours. Paris: Nathan. Claval, P. (2001). Histoire de la geógraphie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Collignon, B. (1996). Les Inuits: ce qu’ils savent du territoire. Paris: L’Harmattan. Fall, J. (2007). Lost geographers: Power games and the circulation of ideas within Francophone political geographies. Progress in Human Geography 31(2), 195 216.

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Fre´mont, A. (1976). La re´gion espace veću. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. George, P. (1956). Prećis de geógraphie ećonomique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Gilbert, A. (1999). Espaces franco ontariens. Ottawa: Le Nordir. Gilly, J. P. and Torre, A. (eds.) (2000). Dynamiques de proximite´. Paris: L’Harmattan. Gottman, J. (1973). The Significance of Territory. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Gourou, P. (1947). Les pays tropicaux. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Gourou, P. (1952). Remarques sur les plans de mise en valeur des re´gions ećonomiquement attardeés. Symposium intercolonial. Bordeaux: Delmas, 97 10. Gourou, P. (1973). Pour une geógraphie humaine. Paris: Flammarion. Hamelin, L. E. (1975). Nordicite´ Canadienne. Montreal: Hurtubise HMH. Lacoste, Y. (1985). La geógraphie, ça sert, d’abord, a` faire la guerre. Paris: La Dećouverte. Lefebvre, H. (2000). La production de l’espace (first publ. 1974). Paris: Anthropos. Pecqueur, B. and Zimmerman, J. B. (eds.) (2004). Ećonomies de proximite´. Paris: Lavoisier/Hermes. Pitte, J. R. (1983). Histoire du paysage français. Paris: Tallandier. Raffestin, C. (1980). Pour une geógraphie du pouvoir. Paris: Litec. Robic, M. C. (ed.) (2000). Le Tableau de la geógraphie de la France de Paul Vidal de la Blache: dans le labyrinthe des formes. Paris: Comite´ des travaux historiques et scientifiques. Reclus, E´. (1982). L’homme et la terre (first publ. 1905 1908). Paris: Maspero.

Reclus, E´. (1995). Histoire d’un ruisseau (first publ. 1869). Aix: Babel Actes Sud. Staszak, J. F. (1995). La geógraphie d’avant la geógraphie: Le climat chez Aristote et Hippocrate. Paris: L’Harmattan. Vidal de la Blache, P. (1911). Les genres de vie dans la geógraphie humaine. Annales de geógraphie 20(111 112), 193 212, 289 304. Vidal de la Blache, P. (1922). Principes de geógraphie humaine. Paris: Armand Colin. Vidal de la Blache, P. (1979). Tableau de la geógraphie de la France (first publ. 1903). Paris: Tallandier.

Relevant Websites http://www.editions sedes.com Annales de geógraphie, Editions SEDES. http://www.cgq.ulaval.ca Cahiers de geógraphie du Que´bec. http://www.espacesetsocietes.msh paris.fr Espaces et socie´te´s. http://www.enec.paris sorbonne.fr/index.html. Espaces, nature et culture. http://www.ville saintdie.fr Festival international de geógraphie Saint Die´ des Vosges. http://www.herodote.org He´rodote. http://www.socgeo.org Socie´te´ de geógraphie de Paris.

Functionalism (Including Structural Functionalism) J. E. Castro, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Dysfunction The opposite of function: mechanisms, roles, effects, utilities, and conditions that do not contribute to or may even negatively affect structural stability. Function Mechanisms, roles, effects, utilities, and conditions that contribute to the maintenance of a given structure. Functional Differentiation Process of specialization of the parts or mechanisms of a given structure to perform different functions. Functional Equivalence When the same function can be performed by different parts or mechanisms of a given structure. Functional Requisites The critical conditions needed for the existence of a given structure. Holistic Functionalism Functionalist approaches that place the emphasis on the explanation of macrostructural social processes. Individualistic Functionalism Functionalist approaches departing from the assumption that social structures exist for the benefit of the individual. Social Darwinism The application of Darwinian concepts and principles for the explanation of social processes. Teleofunction A function that is goal oriented, intentional, and consciously performed.

Introduction Functionalism is one of the major traditions in scientific analysis and explanation. It has its main origins in biology and has been very influential in the development of the social sciences, including human geography. Func tionalist approaches have also been very important in a wide range of other disciplinary fields, including psych ology, engineering, architecture and planning, and archeology. This article places emphasis on functionalism in the social sciences, looking at the development of its main strands: functionalism and structural functionalism. It also provides a brief discussion on the concept of function, as well as a reference to the reemergence of functionalism in system theories, and more recently in neofunctionalism. The main tenet of functionalism is that scientific an alysis and explanation must focus on the functional

integration of the differentiated component parts of a given structure or whole. It places the emphasis on the role played by functions or consequences of substructures and processes in fulfilling the needs of the system of which they are part. The earliest forms of functionalist explanation were developed in biology and focused on the functions played by the different organs in the maintenance of vital equilibrium in living beings. Bio logical or organismic functionalism became the model that inspired the development of functionalism in other scientific areas, most particularly in sociology and an thropology. However, although functionalism is often understood to be a unified school or approach, in fact, the functionalist field is home to divergent and even mutu ally contradictory positions, which has fueled protracted and still unresolved controversies. The divergence con cerns in particular the balance in the emphasis that dif ferent strands of functionalism place either on functions or structures. Thus, when the focus is mainly on the former, the analysis seeks to explain the role that a cer tain component plays in the maintenance of the totality of which it forms part; while in the case of the latter, the aim is to explain the persistence of the structure under consideration by focusing on the functions played by one or more component parts. Moreover, the concept of function itself is the object of continued controversy, as it has often been applied with very different and even contradictory meanings. Functionalism, and its re formulation as structural functionalism, provided the prevailing paradigm for the social sciences during the 1950s and 1960s, but became the object of sustained criticism since the 1970s in a context of theoretical and methodological diversification. Although functionalism lost its dominant position, functionalist principles con tinue to inspire the development of a rich diversity of theoretical frameworks, including systems theory, some strands of Marxist analysis, and neofunctionalist approaches in the social sciences.

The Development of Functionalism in the Social Sciences Although the genealogy of functionalist theorizing can be traced back to Greek philosophy, the development of systematic functionalism in modern scientific thought is associated with the work of the French paleontologist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) who eventually became the father of functionalist biology. In his study of animal fossils, Cuvier developed the notion that animal organs

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can be explained by their functions as parts of the ani mal’s integrated whole. He rejected the evolutionary theories of the time, such as Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s, because he believed that any transformation of an ani mal’s component parts would adversely affect the func tional integration of its organism and hamper its very survival. Cuvier argued that there exist certain functional conditions (‘conditions of existence’) that restrict the form that animals can take given that the form and function of each animal part is integral to the organism as a whole. A different conceptual source of functional analysis in social science can be traced back to the Ro manticist and historicist traditions, and particularly to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel’s concept of the uniqueness of the absolute spirit inspired an idealistic notion of structure, with component parts, interrelations, and functions derived not from organismic analogies but from a philosophical conceptualization of human history. Along these lines, the sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) developed an influential body of work where the concepts of structure and function played a central role. Nevertheless, functionalism in the social sciences has been mainly shaped by biological thinking. Thus, it would be another Frenchman, August Comte (1798– 1857) who would get inspiration from biological func tionalism to develop a functionalist science of society, which he called initially ‘social physics’ and later ‘soci ology’. Comte’s main preoccupation was to understand the principles underlying social order in the context of rapid social transformation characterizing nineteenth century Europe. He proposed that the study of society should distinguish between social dynamics (social change) and social statics (social structure), and he adopted the language of biological functionalism mainly for the latter. He assumed that there is a correspondence between social and biological matter in analytical terms, and comparing society with a biological organism he argued that social structures can be explained by focusing on how their component parts (i.e., individuals, families, religions, and social classes) contribute to the mainten ance of the body social. The systematic application of biological functionalist principles to explain social order was further advanced by Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), a leading exponent of social Darwinism. Spencer also established an analogy between social and animal organisms as systems that evolve through a process of increasing structural com plexity and functional differentiation. According to him, social institutions mirror animal organs and would have the function to meet the survival needs of the social system. However, though Spencer shared Comte’s con cern with identifying the functional requisites that make social order possible, he departed from different as sumptions and produced a very different response. He

accepted that in the case of organic matter the parts have the function to preserve the systemic whole, but he counter argued that in the case of society the whole exists for the benefit of the individual members. Spencer’s so cial Darwinism was a combination of evolutionary theory, functional analysis, and individualistic liberalism. Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) rejected Spencer’s so cial Darwinism but relied both on Spencer and Comte for developing a theory of society modeled on the main principles of organismic functionalism. Durkheim’s main concern was centered on identifying the mechanisms of social integration that are needed for the preservation of social systems, which he believed could be classified as the cultural, structural, interpersonal, and cognitive functions of integrated social structures. For him, the explanation of social facts, which are the objects of study in sociology, requires identifying both their causes and their functions in relation to their relevant social struc tures. Durkheim applied this approach to a wide range of ‘social facts’, such as the incest taboo or crime punish ment, seeking to identify existing correspondences be tween these facts and the needs of the social organism. Thus, for instance, according to Durkheim the punish ment of crimes is caused by the intensity of the collective sentiments offended by such acts, but in turn punishment is a social fact that has the function of maintaining the level of intensity of such sentiments in the body social, which might otherwise be weakened and affect the in tegrity of the social system. For Durkheim, the main focus of sociological analysis should be on the mech anisms of solidarity and cohesion that help to explain the persistence of harmonious social systems. A central principle derived from biological func tionalism for the study of society is the notion that social systems tend to maintain a state of internal equilibrium (homeostasis), which underlies the works of Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim. One of the key social theorists that developed this principle further was Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), who built on León Walras’ (1834–1910) economic theory of general equilibrium. Pareto argued that equilibrium was the normal state of social systems, and focused on the functions or ‘utilities’ of particular social phenomena in the achievement of overall systemic stability. He emphasized the importance of (a) social elements, (b) their distribution, (c) their change over time, and (d) their combination and interdependence with other elements in the process leading the social system toward its normal state of equilibrium. The heteronomous interaction between different elements of the system would lead to unintended, incidental effects that may have utility for the equilibrium of the system but are independent from the interests, intentions, sen timents, or desires of social actors. An additional con tribution of Pareto to functionalist analysis was the further specification of the notion of functional


alternatives or equivalents, that is, that the same systemic function can be fulfilled by different social mechanisms. He applied this concept in his theory of political elitism, where he argued that the maintenance of political equi librium by the ruling elite takes place through a number of mechanisms, including co optation, diplomacy, fraud, corruption, and force (complex forms of coercion). Through these alternative but nonexclusive mechanisms the ruling elite enforces its monopoly of power, which is the natural state of the system, although this equilibrium is not enduring and is subject to periodic revolutionary changes leading to the replacement of the ruling elite (elite circulation). The development of a systematic functionalist an alysis in anthropology was mainly due to Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), who both drew on and intro duced significant modifications to Durkheim’s frame work. In particular, Malinowski went beyond establishing an analogy between organic matter and society to ac tually ground his analysis on the biological needs of human beings. For him, social institutions and cultural traits are functions developed by society to fulfill primary biological needs, such as nutrition or reproduction, thus reversing Durkheim’s efforts to base the explanation of social facts exclusively on other social facts. Moreover, Malinowski also rejected Durkheim’s derivation of functions from their role in maintaining social structures and adopted a utilitarian and psychologistic approach to the definition of social functions. Thus, Malinowski’s functionalism postulated that traditions, social activities, and collective processes were in fact developments ori ented at the satisfaction of individual needs, which to some extent restated the principles of Spencer’s indi vidualistic functionalism.

Functionalism and Structural Functionalism Although the interrelation between the notions of func tion and structure is part and parcel of functionalist thought, the relative weight given to them in the analysis has led to the distinction between functionalism and structural functionalism, where the latter places greater emphasis on structural aspects such as systemic inte gration. The foundations for the emergence of structural functionalism can be traced back to Durkheim, and es pecially to the work that he carried out in collaboration with his disciple and nephew Marcel Mauss (1872–1950). In particular, in their work on human forms of classifi cation and symbolic thought they developed the argu ment that the human mind derives its systems of mental classification from existing social structures. In their perspective, the existing groupings and divisions in the social structures determine the modes in which the

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human mind develops its own system of classification. For instance, the notion of time in this perspective is shaped by the particular social structures characteristic of a given social group, and therefore it will differ between different societies. Thus, for Durkheim a calendar reflects the actual rhythm of social activities in a given social system, while in turn it has the function of ensuring the regularity of such activities. This work would exercise a powerful influence on the development of the structural functionalist approach, which is primarily associated with English anthropologist Alfred R. Radcliffe Brown (1881– 1955). He claimed that there is no functionalism as such but only structural functionalism, and argued that the concept of function necessarily implies that of structure, namely a system of interrelated components that is maintained by the activities of the different parts. Rad cliffe Brown also held that social structures are natural systems of their own, composed of the mutual inter relations between individual members. In addition to Radcliffe Brown, the British school of structural functionalist anthropology was also populated by other key figures such as Meyer Fortes (1906–83), Edward E. Evans Pritchard (1902–73), and Max Gluckman (1911–75). However, structural functionalism reached its height with the work of American sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–79), who had become acquainted with the work of Durkheim during the 1920s as a student of Malinowski. Parsons went on to elaborate a complex synthesis of the work of Durkheim, Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto, and Alfred Marshall, aimed at providing an integrated and holistic theory of society. Parsons’ holistic functionalism brings together elements of a voluntaristic theory of human action, derived mainly from Weber, Pareto, Marshall, and a particular reading of Freud, with Dur kheim’s concern with the integration of social systems. Thus, Parsons recognized the importance of individual agency and will in the pursuit of goal oriented behavior, with individual human beings having the capacity of making choices to achieve their objectives, but he maintained that the choices available to individual agents are circumscribed by the physical, cultural, and social environment, and shaped by social values and norms. Parsons defined functions as those mechanisms that allow the adjustment of the system to the external environ ment, and postulated that all social systems have four functional requirements, namely (1) adaptation, (2) goal attainment, (3) integration, and (4) latency (systemic equilibrium). According to him, complex socie ties are structured as a hierarchy of systems and sub systems, where each specific system must meet the four functional requirements in order to (1) adapt to the physical environment by securing the resources needed to achieve its goals, (2) appropriately manage such re sources, (3) provide for the effective coordination of the

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system’s components and interrelationships to secure integration, and (4) maintain the system’s overall equi librium. Complex social systems develop specialized, highly differentiated means to respond to these four functional requirements, where the key mechanism is the adaptation of individual members of society to the sys tem’s social values and norms through socialization. Parsons normative functionalism and his emphasis on system stability informed much urban planning and design since the 1950s, heavily influencing the physical shaping and social organization of urban landscapes. Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) reviewed Parsons’ theory in a number of areas. First, he provided a coun terbalance to what was perceived to be an overemphasis on structure in Parsons’ approach, and placed more weight on the concepts of ‘manifest’ and ‘latent’ functions that give individual agency a higher profile in the overall configuration. Merton further specified these concepts: manifest functions are those mechanisms that contribute to the adjustment and adaptation of the system and are the result of intentional, conscious human actions, while latent functions are those that are neither intentional nor consciously carried out by the actors. Second, Merton also reviewed a number of implicit assumptions in clas sical functional analysis, such as that all components in a social structure fulfill certain functions needed for the stability and survival of the system. He argued that there exist certain components that do not fulfill any functions, while other elements that he called ‘dysfunctions’ may actually have a negative effect on the system (also termed malfunctions). Conversely, he also reasserted the prin ciple of functional equivalence, namely that the same function can be performed by a number of different components of the structure. Through the work of Parsons and Merton, structural functionalism became the dominant sociological orien tation in the US during the 1950s and 1960s. It came to include a significant number of prominent sociologists, such as Kingsley Davis (1908–97), Wilbert Moore (1914– 87), David Aberle (1918–2004), Lewis Coser (1913– 2003), and Marion Levy (1918–2002) among others. The structural functionalist school also became very influential in the development of the social sciences in developing countries during the post World War II per iod. For instance, the Italian sociologist Gino Germani (1911–79), who spent a period at Harvard University working with Parsons after escaping from Fascist Italy in the 1940s, significantly contributed to the establishment and development of sociology in Latin America since the late 1950s from his base at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. During the same period in Brazil, Florestań Fernańdez (1920–95) developed a highly re spected school at the University of Sao Paulo, blending classical Marxist and Weberian sociology with func tionalist analysis.

The influence of the functionalist and structural functionalist traditions in human geography has been less conspicuous in terms of prominent figures or the devel opment of schools of geographical thought. It is perhaps in the field of political geography, and particularly in the study of territorial boundaries and international relations, where an explicitly functionalist geography can be found. Thus, keynote geographers, such as Russian born French geographer Jean Iona Gottman (1915–94), developed functionalist explanations in the fields of urban and political geography, and particularly in his studies on the roles (functions) played by geographical (topography, hydrographic networks, etc.) and social (economic, cul tural, and political) forces on international political sta bility. Gottman argued that the political partitioning of the world can be explained as the balance resulting from the interaction of two main forces, circulation (com munication and movement) and iconography (the shared system of symbols of a given population). Along similar lines, the American geographer Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) put forward his theory of territorial inte gration where he postulated that the main role of states would be to maintain stability by counteracting de stabilizing centrifugal forces, such as disruptive physical features (e.g., mountains, forests) or social characteristics (e.g., low population, language barriers), that provoke the fragmentation of political units and foster intranational conflicts. Building on both Gottman and Hartshorne, American geographer Stephen Barr Jones (1903–84) proposed a unified field theory aimed at bridging the gap between morphology and function in political geography. Functionalism has also been influential in the fields of urban geography and planning, where an explicitly functionalist conceptualization has been applied to a range of issues, including the study of neighborhoods, communities, and urban areas, housing policies, and territorial governance. Despite the fact that there are few other references in the literature to an explicitly ‘func tionalist’ or ‘structural functionalist geography’, and that an in depth debate about the impact or implications of functionalism and structural functionalism for human geography is largely missing, many principles and con cepts associated with the approach have been integrated in different ways in the work of human geographers. In particular, functionalist concepts have informed much urban geographical work on the spatial dimensions and scales of social order and disorder, organization, and conflict.

Criticism, Demise, and Revival of Functionalism Since the 1970s functionalism, and in particular struc tural functionalism, became the subject of strong


criticism on a number of fronts. First, because of its organismic analogies in the conceptualization of social systems and its emphasis on structural equilibrium and social order functionalist analysis was charged with been unable to account for social change. Second, for similar reasons functionalism was criticized as being an in trinsically conservative approach because of its emphasis on system integration, stability, and social consensus that would render unobservable the internal contradictions of social systems. Third, according to the critics func tionalists would be unable to account for the causes driving the process of structural and functional differ entiation that is at the center of functionalist analysis and they would have conflated the concepts of cause and function. Moreover, most functionalist explanations would be either tautological (the existence of a given function is explained as a response to structural needs, while the maintenance of the structure is explained as being the result of the functions) or teleological (the emergence of structures is explained as a response to the ends or needs existing in a given system). These and other criticisms of functionalism became increasingly louder during the 1970s, at the same time that the social sciences were experiencing a rapid diversification and fragmentation of theoretical and methodological ap proaches. According to some commentators this process would have led to the demise of functionalism to the point that it would have almost disappeared from the social sciences by the 1980s. However, despite its critics functionalism has survived in several areas of scientific analysis and explanation. For instance, the work of functionalist political geographers like Hartshorne has been influential in the development of research on comparative border studies and regional integration (and geopolitical studies at large), a very dynamic interdisciplinary field, particularly in contin ental Europe. More generally, the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927–98) developed a radical re formulation of Talcott Parsons’ approach aimed at pro viding a comprehensive theory of society by bringing together elements from cybernetics, neurobiology, and German idealist philosophy that has also influenced de velopments in human geography. Luhmann proposed a theory of social systems whereby human beings are conceptualized not as part of society but as part of its environment. For this reason Luhmann’s theory has been labeled posthumanist, as its main thrust is to de link the social from the human, breaking away from classical anthropocentrism. In turn, society is defined as a closed communication system, self referential and reflexive, and the function of the (economic, legal, political, and other) subsystems is that of reducing the increasing complexity of information flows to ensure system stability and survival. He also stressed the centrality of functional equivalence in the maintenance of systemic equilibrium.

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Luhmann’s theory has informed new work in human geography, particularly in Europe and especially in Germany, aimed at developing new theoretical ap proaches to sociospatial analysis, although these authors do not draw as much inspiration from Luhmann’s func tionalism as they do from his sophisticated intertwining of systems theory and neurobiology. While Luhmann’s functionalism has clear conservative overtones, Oxford philosopher Gerry Cohen has argued for the application of functionalist analysis within the framework of Marxist theory. For Cohen, although functional analysis could not help to explain the original cause of a certain social structure (i.e., an institution or cultural trait that contributes to the reproduction of the capitalist social order), it helps to explain the perman ence of such structure over time. An ongoing debate prompted by Cohen’s work focuses on the compatibility of functionalist principles with the Marxist analytical framework. In this connection, some commentators have pointed out the influence of functionalist concepts in the work of Marxist geographer David Harvey, for instance in his explanation of suburbanization processes and their role in contributing toward the stability of the capitalist system by fostering consumption, commodity fetishism, and preempting revolutionary change. However, perhaps the most explicit and comprehensive attempt to revitalize and reformulate functionalist analysis has been carried out by sociologists Jeffrey Alexander and Paul Colomy, who have actually termed their approach ‘neofunction alism’. These authors aim at reinvigorating Talcott Parsons’ ambitions of producing an integrated and multidimensional theory of society by relating it to other theoretical frameworks, preserving and at the same taking critical distance from Parsons’ functionalism. These efforts have encountered significant resistance and prompted and ongoing and open debate about the use fulness and soundness of functionalism for contemporary social science.

The Concept of Function One of the main criticisms to functionalism is the fact that the very concept of function is ambiguous, a carrier of multiple meanings, and is often applied in an unri gorous fashion without properly defining its specific content. Already in the 1940s Robert Merton warned about the terminological confusion affecting functionalist approaches, which often used ‘function’ as synonymous for a range of terms, including use, utility, purpose, motive, intention, aim, effect, and consequences. How ever, it is worth noting that this confusing application of ‘function’ has not been a preserve of the social sciences, and has also been identified in other areas, including biology and techno scientific disciplines. As discussed

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above, in the particular case of the social sciences one the main precisions introduced to specify the concept of function is that of manifest (conscious or intentional, also called teleofunctions) and latent (unintended and inci dental) functions. While the former places emphasis on agency and goal oriented social action, the latter is concerned with structural, unplanned effects, on social systems. In a recent methodological debate Mahner and Bunge have identified several distinct but logically interconnected meanings of ‘function’ used in biology, the social sciences, and techno scientific disciplines. An important specification of the concept proposed by these authors is that ‘function’ can refer either to the mech anisms that are responsible for a given fact or process or to the roles and effects of a given social element in re lation to the social system. The distinction is that while the former would allow to develop proper scientific ex planations, as it identifies a mechanism that explains how and why a given fact or result has occurred, the latter would at most offer descriptive accounts or exemplifi cations of known patterns of phenomena, but not scien tific explanations because they lack a reference to the mechanism responsible for the fact or process under analysis. See also: Darwinism (and Social Darwinism); Determinism/Environmental Determinism; Gottmann, J.; Hartshorne, R.; Harvey, D.; Lamarck(ian)ism; Posthumanism/Posthumanistic Geographies; Structuration Theory; Structurationist Geography; Systems; Systems Theory.

Further Reading Alexander, J. C. (ed.) (1985). Neofunctionalism. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Cohen, G. A. (1978). Karl Marx’s Theory of History. A Defence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cummins, R. (1975). Functional analysis. Journal of Philosophy 72, 741 764. Davis, K. (1959). The myth of functional analysis as a special method in sociology and anthropology. American Sociological Review 24, 757 772. Gottman, J. (1951). Geography and international relations. World Politics 3(2), 153 173. Gregory, D. (1978). Ideology, Science, and Human Geography. London: Hutchinson. Hartshorne, R. (1950). The functional approach in political geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 40(2), 95 130. Jones, S. B. (1954). A unified field of political geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 44(2), 111 123. Knox, P. and Pinch, S. (2000). Urban Social Geography. An Introduction (4th edn.). Harlow: Prentice Hall. Koch, A. (2005). Autopoietic spatial systems: The significance of actor network theory and systems theory for the development of a system theoretical approach of space. Social Geography 1, 5 14. Lippuner, R. (2007). Coupling, steering, differentiation. The geography of social systems. Erdkunde 61(2), 174 185. Luhmann, N. (1982). The Differentiation of Society. New York: Columbia University Press. Mahner, M. and Bunge, M. (2001). Function and functionalism: A synthetic perspective. Philosophy of Science 68, 75 94. Merton, R. K. (1949). Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press. Pahl, R. E. (1967). Sociological models in geography. In Chorley, R. J. & Haggett, P. (eds.) Models in Geography, pp 217 242. London: Methuen. Parsons, T. (1937). The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press. Radcliffe Brown, A. R. (1965). Structure and Function in Primitive Society. New York: Free Press.

Relevant Websites http://www.intute.ac.uk Intute: Social Sciences. http://www.sociosite.net The Socio site. http://www.socioweb.com The Socio Web: A guide to sociology and sociological research. http://www2.lib.udel.edu/subj/soc University of Delaware Library: Sociology.

Fuzzy Set and Fuzzy Logic Y. Leung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Fuzzy Logic Nonstandard logic for approximate reasoning with imprecise premises. Fuzzy Set Set with imprecise memberships, often characterized by a membership function. Linguistic Variable Variable which takes on linguistic terms rather than numbers as its value. Regional Boundary Line or transition zone, often imprecise, that separates regions. Regionalization Grouping of spatial units into regions. Rough Set Set with rough boundary, often characterized by a pair of lower and upper approximations. Spatial Decision Support System Computer system that supports decision making by coupling human intelligence with the capabilities of the computer.

Introduction Geographical systems are generally complex systems with omnipresence of incompleteness, imprecision, and subjectivity. While fuzziness is common in these systems, it has been avoided for the sake of precision and value free principle cherished in physical science. In the pur suit of precision, geographers conventionally assume that the systems are well defined, and we describe spatial behaviors by rigid mathematical models, which make no provision for the imprecision and subjectivity in the cognition, perception, and decision making processes. In the description of spatial behaviors, we commonly use terms with artificial precision which fail to account for the intrinsic fuzziness of our natural language. In the treatment of space, precision in the subdivision of, and grouping for, regions is usually enforced, although re gional boundaries are generally fuzzy. In spatial eco nomic analysis, it is generally assumed that there is no fuzziness in our rational preference–utility–choice structure so that different goods or places can be pre cisely discriminated and selected. In achieving optimal choice, information on the availability of resources is usually assumed to be exact and perfect so that objectives and constraints can be precisely specified. In the con struction of and operation on spatial databases such as geographic information systems (GISs) and remote sensing systems, two valued logic is commonly em ployed, although imprecision is rampant in spatial

information processing. In spatial reasoning, truth of a statement is absolute, and fuzziness of valuation is not permitted. Binary logic again is employed as the back bone of inference, albeit our reasoning is mostly based on common sense embedded with imprecise terms or expressions. With such relatively unrealistic assumptions, con ventional spatial models often tend to be oversimplified, too mechanical, or too inflexible to explain and plan for the real world. To obtain a better approximation to and control of our spatial systems, it is essential to build theories or models which mimic human values, reasoning, and behaviors. Instead of de emphasizing or avoiding fuzziness, spatial scientists should directly deal with it in a rigorous manner. Such a view leads to a fundamental shift of paradigm in geographical analysis. In recent decades, researchers have argued for the significance of formulating spatial models through fuzzy sets theory so that human spatial behaviors can be better approximated. It appears that fuzzy sets models are more general, realistic, and flexible in analyzing human spatial reasoning and behaviors. The purpose of this article is to provide a state of the art scrutiny of the fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic approach to spatial analysis over the years. The discussion ranges from the analysis of fundamental spatial concepts – the very basic aspect of spatial analysis – to the construction of intelligent spatial decision sup port systems – the most recent advance in geoinformatics and spatial decision analysis. A paradigm for spatial un certainty analysis and directions for further research are given in the conclusion.

Fuzzy Spatial Concepts Every scientific discipline has a set of fundamental con cepts on which analyses are based, and geography is no exception. Concepts such as ‘distance’, ‘direction’, and ‘connection’ have long been identified as basic ter minologies for the analysis of spatial phenomena. Tra ditionally, the formalization of these terms are based on the definitions given in the theories of mathematical analysis, such as those in the Euclidean or Minkowskian space. Under this system, the concepts are exact and their operational definitions have precise connotations. How ever, human behaviors have been demonstrated to be a function of the cognitive evaluative structure in which imprecision prevails. Consequently, traditional math ematical definitions of such concepts are inadequate in conveying the imprecision of human cognition and

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valuation. In place of the physical length of a given dis tance, the meaning of that length to the decision maker becomes more important in determining his behavior in space. A given cognitive term, such as ‘long’, places a restriction on the range of the possible values a base variable, such as physical distance, can take. Con sequently, the study of spatial connotations of our com mon language is necessary in the understanding and prediction of human behaviors in space. The concept of a linguistic variable based on fuzzy sets theory is thus appropriate for such a task. Since fuzzy terms such as short or long can be em ployed to describe cognitive distance, the fuzzy concept ‘distance’ can then be treated as a linguistic variable with linguistic terms, such as long and short, defined on the base variable (physical distance) as its values. Lin guistic hedges such as not, very, somewhat, and ex tremely are employed as operators in modifying the primary terms to create new linguistic values. Oper ations such as union and intersection can also be applied to combine terms together to form new terms. All of these constitute the syntactic rule. The meaning of each linguistic value is a fuzzy set defined on the base variable. In spatial analysis, the study of connectedness of ob jects often involves terms such as contiguity and ad jacency. The concept of contiguity can be exact or fuzzy. In the spatial context, when we say two objects are contiguous we usually mean they are in actual contact along a boundary or at a point. Thus, either two objects touch or they do not. There is no fuzziness involved. However, when we say two points are near, the conno tation is then fuzzy. Similarly, in the temporal context, contiguous in time ordinarily means next or near in time. This definition then becomes the definition of adjacency. In describing adjacency, words such as ‘close’ or ‘remote’ often have fuzzy spatial connotations. Therefore, re gardless of whether the context is spatial or temporal, linguistic characterization of the concepts of ‘connection’ appears to be a more appropriate method in defining the degree of connectedness between objects. The method of linguistic variable is thus appropriate. Like distance and connection, the cognition of ‘direction’ also possesses fuzziness. Thus, linguistic characterization of this concept is again appropriate. In addition to distance, connection, and direction, other spatial concepts such as cognitive points, lines, paths, and polygons of various geometric shapes can also be represented by the similar method. In addition to defining concepts, linguistic variables may also be em ployed to unravel spatial images on the location of points and lines, as well as shapes of different geometric figures. Leung and Yan, for example, have formulated a frame work for representing fuzzy points, lines, and polygons in GISs.

Regional Concepts and Regionalization Regions are fundamental analytical units on which most spatial analyses are based. Conventionally, a region is treated as a spatial construct which can be precisely identified and delimited. Therefore, boundaries separ ating regions are assumed to be clear cut. Contrary to this common conceptualization or practice, regions however may not be precisely identified and boundaries generally exist as gradients and should appear as zones rather than lines. The implication then is that a region is generally a fuzzy concept and a boundary is generally a fuzzy line. The justification for such an argument is given by Leung in 1985. First, it is difficult to delimit precise boundaries separating regions and nonregions over a space on which phenomena distribute or vary in a more or less continuous manner. Regions merge into one an other along the boundaries to a certain extent, because regions are part of a continuum in space. It is thus difficult to find a precise line that can separate two neighboring regions in a clear cut manner. Hence, a precise boundary does not appropriately reflect such a phenomenon. Sec ond, terms such as ‘hot’ and ‘dry’ are adjectives with imprecise physical denotations. When they are used to classify regions, the corresponding boundaries become fuzzy. Third, regional differences are differences in de gree rather than kind. Intermediate areas usually exist between regions. Therefore, regional boundaries are generally fuzzy and they separate regions to a certain extent. Under such situation, regions can be characterized by linguistic propositions with mathematical translations which are essentially fuzzy sets. Since such character ization has fuzzy spatial connotations, the core and boundary of a region may not be precise. Under this situation, the core of a region is the points or area in space whose characteristics are most compatible to the linguistic proposition characterizing it. The boundary of a region is in fact a zone including all points in space whose char acteristics are more or less compatible to the character ization of the corresponding region. That is, we are indeterminate on the precise value at which an individual characteristic can be considered insignificant with respect to a designated region. Therefore, boundaries exist as gradients rather than lines. Nevertheless, the boundary becomes a crisp line if imprecision vanishes. Since boundaries are fuzzy, regions can only be sep arated to a certain extent. Applying the separation the orem, Leung gave in 1987 the concept ‘degree of separation’ which shows the extent to which regions can be separated. If they are completely different, then they can be fully separated. If they are similar to a certain extent, then they can only be separated to a certain de gree. Thus, attached to a boundary is a measure which


shows the degree of separation between two regions. Such conceptualization is more realistic and informative. It has led to a series of studies on spatial objects with indeterminate boundaries. Under fuzziness, defuzzifica tion is possible if one wants to force a complete sepa ration of regions even though they cannot be completely separated. Nevertheless, information loss will be experi enced as a consequence. Once regions have been characterized, we can assign spatial units to appropriate regions. A regional assignment procedure consists of a rule, or a set of rules, through which a discriminatory assignment of elementary spatial units to a set of predetermined regions can be performed. When both spatial entities are fuzzily characterized, it is natural to expect that a spatial unit can be assigned to several regions with varying degrees of possibility. In additional to regional characterization and regional assignment discussed above, fuzziness also exists in the grouping for regions. Differing from fuzzy isodata an alysis, partitioning of fuzzy relations via the concept of a fuzzy graph was proposed by Leung in 1984 to construct a flexible regionalization framework that groups spatial units into regions which are homogeneous or functional, hierarchical or nonhierarchical, disjoint or nondisjoint with either qualitative or quantitative information. It should be noted that the fuzzy set regionalization pro cedure becomes the conventional zero–one grouping procedure when there is no fuzziness involved in the similarity or distance measure.

Spatial Economic Behavior and Planning under Fuzziness Conventionally, spatial economic theories and models are constructed on the assumption that individuals are cap able of making clear cut discrimination of different goods or places. Consumers and producers are assumed to possess perfect information and precise cognitive and decision making capabilities so that individual or group preference is exact and the associated utility and choice structures are precise. In general, such preference–util ity–choice structures have unrealistic presumption. The information available is usually imperfect and individuals are often vague in making a decision because they are unable to discriminate perfectly between goods or places. It has been argued that preferences and perceived util ities are often vague and the all or nothing preference and utility structures are just a special case of the more overwhelming fuzzy structure found in reality. Employing fuzzy relations concepts, Ponsard defined in 1979 a consumer’s strict preference structure as a binary fuzzy relation which is antisymmetric and max– min transitive, that is, a fuzzy nonstrict order. The in difference structure is expressed as a similitude relation

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which is reflexive, symmetric, and max–min transitive, and a consumer’s preference indifference structure can be defined as a fuzzy preorder. The fuzzy preference struc ture allows for the gradation of preference intensity, and it is a generalization of its counterpart in classical theory. In classical spatial economic analysis, a consumer maximizes his utility with respect to a budget constraint, while a producer maximizes his profit or utility of profit subject to a technological constraint. Due to imperfect information, inexact cognitive and decision making pro cesses, and incomplete control of inputs and outputs, the budget and technological constraints often cannot be precisely specified. Thus, a consumer may have to maxi mize his fuzzy utility function subject to a fuzzy budget constraint, and a producer may have to maximize his fuzzy utility of profit subject to a fuzzy technological constraint. In general, this specification involves the maximization of a fuzzy objective function subject to a fuzzy constraint. In addition to spatial equilibrium analyses, a variety of fuzzy spatial economic problems has also been analyzed. By modeling fuzziness in a rigorous manner, flexibility and realism of spatial economic models can be sub stantially enhanced. Analytically, its higher level of generalization makes the fuzzy sets approach both philosophically and mathematically appealing. Urban and regional planning is similar to the re gionalization and spatial equilibrium problems in that it often involves quantitative and/or qualitative infor mation, subjective valuation, and imprecise decision making processes. Conventional methods are not flexible enough to effectively analyze problems with inexact ob jectives and constraints. For example, instead of imposing a maximum permissible resource usage a, a real number, decision makers may only be able to restrict it to a tol erance region ‘approximately’ a, a fuzzy subset. Instead of maximizing an objective function, planners may prefer to specify a fuzzy satisfaction region within which the optimal value of the objective function may be achieved. The maximization of a fuzzy objective function subject to fuzzy constraints is naturally a fuzzy optimization prob lem. Such an approach is especially important when the original nonfuzzy problem fails to yield an optimal so lution due to the incompatibility of objectives and con straints, or when the time varying parameters are to be incorporated into the optimization framework. The framework of fuzzy mathematical programming has been employed to solve spatial optimization problems with fuzzy and/or nonfuzzy objectives and constraints.

Spatial Information and Intelligent Spatial Decision Support Systems With respect to logical foundations, present day GISs are predominantly based on Boolean logic. It is especially so

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in data retrieval and overlay operations. It is well known in the GIS community that overlay by Boolean logic generally ends up with loss and/or misrepresentation of information. It forces artificial precision on the otherwise imprecise thought processes. It arbitrarily screens out intrinsic imprecision in the database which might be essential in the analysis. It fails to communicate the ex tent of imprecision or error to users. Therefore, results of overlay unravel more questions about data quality and boundary mismatch than they solve. Similar problems also exist in other GIS operations and cartographic modeling exercises. It is thus imperative to have a more appropriate logical system for the design of GIS. Such a system should be able to handle and communicate pre cise and imprecise information. It should also be instru mental in the design of intelligent spatial decision support system. Fuzzy sets in general and fuzzy logic in particular can play an important role in this area of re search. Fuzzy logic is a nonstandard logic within which an inference is a deduction of imprecise conclusions from a set of imprecise premises. It can in a way be regarded as a ‘fuzzification’ of standard logic because it introduces fuzzy predicates and fuzzy truth values into the classifi cation system. It reinstates the importance of impression in natural language and human cognition, perception, and thought. Fuzzy logic, like standard logic, depends on some rules of inference to deduce conclusions from a set of premises. In standard logic, the antecedent in the minor premise (usually a fact) has to confirm or match exactly with that of the major premises (usually a rule) before the consequence of the major premises can be regarded as the conclusion. This, however, is not flexible and realistic enough to model human inference in which the ante cedents of the major and minor premises might be ap proximately equal. In this situation, the best we can say is that the conclusion could only be approximately equal to the consequence of the major premises. In knowledge based GIS, the following is a typical example: Major premise: If temperature is high, then pressure is • low. Minor premise: The temperature in pixel X is quite • high. Approximate conclusion: The pressure in pixel X • should be quite low. Here, the major and minor premises are imprecise be cause they involve fuzzy terms high, low, and quite high which can be represented as fuzzy subsets with nonsharp boundaries. The conclusion would not be possible under stand logic because high a quite high and low a quite low. However, such a reasoning process agrees with our intuition and can be handled by fuzzy logic through approximate reasoning.

Unlike standard logic, fuzzy logic allows the existence of fuzzy predicates in both the premises and the con clusion. We can deduce through fuzzy logic possibly imprecise conclusions from a set of imprecise premises. Given a major premise, we can theoretically deduce from minor premises with approximately equal antecedents, conclusions which are approximately equal to that of the major premise. This is a natural, flexible, and efficient way to manage inference in knowledge based GIS. Through fuzzy logic, we can implement essential features such as data structure, knowledge representation, a query language, rules of inference, acquisition of knowledge, and systems and user interfaces in intelligent systems. To make GIS a more effective tool for spatial analysis and decision making, human intelligence has been re garded as a must, and knowledge based GIS has thus emerged in the research agenda. Domain specific expert systems for geoinformation processing and inference have been discussed or constructed in recent years. The possibility of employing fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic to build knowledge based GIS has been extensively investigated.

Conclusion This article examined the development and applications of fuzzy sets theory and fuzzy logic in spatial analysis and planning. It has been demonstrated that the fuzzy sets approach provides an effective means to model human behaviors in space. It is especially versatile when the systems are embedded with intrinsic fuzziness. We have seen major theoretical and practical advancements in the last few decades with impressive results. As argued by Leung in 1988, uncertainty in space and time can be due to randomness, fuzziness, or both. While probability theory is the paradigm for the analysis of randomness, fuzzy set is a theory for the formalization of imprecision. It is further realized that uncertainty can be caused by incompleteness and roughness of spatial in formation that can be formally described by the concept of rough set. Therefore, geographical uncertainty can be a result of randomness, fuzziness, or roughness with different frameworks of analysis. They are philosophi cally and mathematically different. However, uncertainty can be due to randomness and/or fuzziness and/or roughness. Under this situation, integration of the three paradigms will construct a comprehensive picture of uncertainty in geographical phenomena and processes. Such integration is depicted in Figure 1. Therefore, fuzzy set and fuzzy logic play an important role in geo graphical analysis under uncertainty. It should also be noted that the successful integration of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic with other paradigms such as neural networks and evolutionary computation is a


Source

Randomness

Fuzziness

Roughness

Subject

Occurrence

Connotation

Granular information

Method

Probability theory

Fuzzy set theory

Rough set theory

Measure

Probability measure

Fuzzy measure

Lower and upper approximation

Paradigm of randomness

Paradigm of fuzziness

Paradigm of roughness

Integration

Probability and fuzzy set

Probability and rough set

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Figure 1 Integrated framework for the analysis of spatial uncertainty.

profitable direction for further development of the field. It leads to the formulation of more effective frameworks for system complexity analysis. For example, the inte gration of fuzzy logic and neural network for spatial in ference, spatial data classification, and rule learning have been demonstrated to be successful in recent years. The development of genetic algorithms for fuzzy rule ex traction has also been investigated. To make spatial de cision making efficient and effective, a general framework can be constructed for the development of hybrid con nectionist expert system which integrates rule based in ference, neural networks, and genetic algorithms into a seamless whole. Based on the trend of development, more significant results in the applications of fuzzy set and fuzzy logic in spatial knowledge acquisition, spatial learning, spatio temporal change detection, data com pression, and spatial reasoning are expected in the years to come. See also: Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems.

Further Reading Alexandra, G., Vassilios, A. T., Evangelos, V., Christos, P. and George, S. (2006). Combining geographic information system, multicriteria evaluation techniques and fuzzy logic in siting MSW landfills. Environmental Geology 51, 797 811.

Altman, D. (1994). Fuzzy set theoretic approaches for handling imprecision in spatial analysis. International Journal of Geographical Information Systems 8, 271 289. Bellman, R. E. and Zadeh, L. A. (1970). Decision making in a fuzzy environment. Management Sciences 17, B141 B164. Burrough, P. A. and Frank, A. U. (eds.) (1996). Geographic Objects with Indeterminate Boundaries. Taylor and Francis: London. Fisher, P., Wood, J. and Cheng, T. (2004). Where is helvellyn? Fuzziness of multi scale landscape morphometry. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29, 106 128. Guesgen, H. W. and Albrecht, J. (2000). Imprecise reasoning in geographic information systems. Fuzzy Sets and Systems 113, 121 131. Leung, Y. (1982). Approximate characterization of some fundamental concepts of spatial analysis. Geographical Analysis 14, 29 40. Leung, Y. (1984). Towards a flexible framework for regionalization. Environment and Planning A 16, 1613 1632. Leung, Y. (1985). A linguistically based regional classification system. In Nijkamp, P., Leitner, H. & Wrigley, N. (eds.) Measuring the Unmeasurable, pp 451 486. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Leung, Y. (1987). On the imprecision of boundaries. Geographical Analysis 19, 125 151. Leung, Y. (1988). Spatial Analysis and Planning Under Imprecision. Amsterdam: North Holland. Patrick, B., Donald, K. and Fred, P. (2005). Fuzzy sets in database and information systems: Status and opportunities. Fuzzy Sets and Systems 156, 418 426. Ponsard, C. (1979). On the imprecision of consumer’s spatial preferences. Papers in Regional Science Association 42, 59 71. Robinson, V. B., Petry, F. E. and Cobb, M. A. (2003). Special issue on incorporating fuzzy sets in geographic information systems. Transactions in GIS 7, 1. Zadeh, L. A. (1965). Fuzzy sets. Information and Control 8, 338 353.

G Gardens and Gardening David Crouch, University of Derby, Derby, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction The garden has been an informing metaphor for geo graphical thought for sometime and as an affective ma terial object and gardening as a process in the figuring and refiguring of space. It has represented an ideal environ ment and culture, a rather pre cultural, pre human state in a number of world religions, and continues to reappear in contemporary geographical discussions of the sacred. These leitmotifs of human geography are significantly theorized through ideology, discourse, and power, where ‘the garden’ becomes iconic. Signifying identity as well as status, cultural capital and social difference, as well as social/cultural relations, the garden and ways of gardening emerge as expression. A more complex conceptualization of the garden and gardening emerge in debates concerning consumption, commodification, and identity. In recent decades, the garden as artifact has been increasingly transformed to gardening as practice and as significant in developing critical conceptual approaches to a range of ‘new’ cultural geographies. These shifts and developments accompany the increasing geographical interest in process, practice, and performance. The ‘nature’ dimensions re lating to, and perhaps informed by, gardens and gardening emerge in new ways in terms of reconceptualizations of nature where significance and meaning may emerge through practice, and in relation to the nonhuman; and debates concerning the ethical and moral in human geography, including shifting symbolism of the garden and of gardening in relation to war and peace. These devel opments in human geographies have been enmeshed with wider humanities and social science thinking and beyond these, from art theory and social anthropology to en vironmental debate.

Mesopotamia and in Muslim traditions, the date palm, material object, was considered the tree of life in the Gar den of Eden. Ancient summer palaces of China incorpor ated in their gardens shapes to reflect and to contain cosmological visions, magic powers, and feng shui. The garden, as Eden, symbolized the originary and pre Fall, pre cultural, a particular notion of nature. Paradoxically com bining reference to such appeals to purity with excuse, or opportunity, for erotic display, Renaissance painting fre quently used religious or classical imagery in rendering the garden as idyllic playground, its own version of the garden. More secularly, the garden became a signifier of Englishness, generally conservative and redolent of or ganic rural values. It was used and understood to sym bolize English identity and its contribution to global civilization during the English country house period of the last three centuries. Such design power sustained into the twentieth century, during which gradually a more mechanized engagement with modernity was developed, symbolizing a new iconography of progress that became increasingly widespread across Europe. Sometimes echoing this European version, the garden as yard in North America displayed status; idealistically combined individuality with community at the front: family and home values at the rear. Persistent return to the sacred dimensions of what the garden signifies is prevalent in photography, art and literature; gardens as sacred spaces were depicted in cultures diversely across the world and in the geographies of world religions. A particular version of nature as perfected by cultivation’s civilizing imprint pervades such models, but there can be also a more re lational vision where the garden is used to represent a more relational mix with culture and human action, in cluding a mixture of control and liberation.

Garden Iconographies, Materiality, and Sacred Space

The Garden, Ideology, Discourse, and Power

The significance of the garden in world religions is perva sive, demonstrating its power to define space. In ancient

As the Italian Renaissance garden, later copied but refigured in English garden design, was set aside as apart

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from the world, its iconography was also significantly deployed in the pursuit of power by wealthy landowners. Particular components of layout and design, iconographic in themselves of a particular version of high culture; of orderly adaptation of nature; and their security and pri vate character open only to select guests ensured their role in display of importance to those permitted to view them, as they became associated with the ordered leisure time of the upper class. They were used to confer status. Beyond their boundaries these significant garden spaces emitted their power through their associated delimitation of boundaries, and clearances of ordinary inhabitants in their wake, to provide more space and cleanse [sic] the view. This iconography was affirmed through a very visual manner – in their physical design and visual consumption. Thus the garden played a political dis course of class and its appropriated culture. This was the garden as landscaped for purpose. The focus upon the garden in these ways helped progress critical discourse in cultural, humanistic geographies and drew attention to the compound of vision, space, and power. These features combined with critical reappraisals of art, especially painting, and its deployment in garden design, to which they were often prototypes. Paintings as objectification of discourse played a symbiotic role with the objectification of discourse in the garden. While holding on to notions of the sacred even if formalized culturally, these gardens, like the paintings, also served as opportunity for erotic display, for example, in sculpture, often drawing upon classical motifs. A wider range of iconography of the garden has more recently emerged, problematizing earlier versions of landscaped garden to reveal new geographies. These formal gardens have been identified as key influences on everyday contemporary gardens. However, these inter pretations may be reductive as other influences deserve note. Such gardens include: the garden as necessitous to feed the household and at the same time provide sensory delight; and the iconography of individuals’ small, mixed, and cottage gardens, community gardens known vari ously worldwide as allotments, vacant lot gardens, klei negarten, or petits jardins. The latter may be considered ‘compensatory’ for the absence or lack of either a garden space adjacent to the home, as rented rather than owned, or ‘replacing’ larger cultivable spaces following its ap propriation (enclosure of common lands, urbanization). Moreover, they may be considered gardens of particular social and cultural opportunity. Together, these more avuncular spaces provide dis tinctive examples of the vernacular that combine cultural context with a distinctive iconography: the mixed use and unselfconscious layout of small parcels of land to sustain the household; and the plot of land usually separate, or distant, from the house. More broadly the the vernacular character of household garden spaces speaks of distinctive

identities, values, meanings, and attitudes. Their design and outward appearance can make a narration of complex social and cultural influence and projection, everyday production and popular imagery. Each of these ‘mundane’ gardens and their work produces distinctive ground for interpreting space and culture; and present a complexity of significance, context, and action in their geographies. They contain their own character of nature, sacred identity, and political dis course. In Cuba, the garden has become resonant of political struggle, holding onto Cuban identity and sub verting trade embargoes. In Berlin, New York, Russia, and Britain the community garden is significant in the politics of land, development, and identity.

Garden, Gardening, and Cultural Identity Acknowledging the complexity and diversity of the gar den, especially in contemporary modernity, continues to be a focus of geography and across the humanities and social sciences as well as depictive of landscape in art work, in increasingly diverse ways. For example, the garden has been a focus of debate concerning gender, the domestic and ‘the home’, and ethnicity. Class underlined the distinction of the landscaped garden across Europe and its colonies, notably India. In the twenty first century, class remains significant, dem onstrated in the use and deployment of distinctive design, plants grown, and evidence of display. Gardens bear distinctive forms of ethnic identity. In their design and in plants grown, ethnic identity can be conferred. Caribbean and Bangladeshi gardens in Eng land, for example, contain once exotic crops only just becoming popular and commonplace in once more temperate gardens. In Oslo, Norway, allotments can be geographically separated according to Turkish growers with high intensity clear ground food cultivation and a Norwegian middle class white population more intent on decorative planting, with accompanying cultural–polit ical tensions. Gender, household, and familial relations linked with ideas of the domestic, the home, emerge in geographies of the garden. Gendering in the garden, curiously stereotyped by men growing food and women flowers [or by men for ‘the wife’], includes also ways in which the articulation of garden and indoor space are constituted in gendered ideas of the domestic, expressed in the use, design, apportionment, and demarcation of activity and distribution of labor. During the nineteenth century, gardening was familiarly and habitually part of women’s work in the domestic division of labor among both working class households and where land work as small scale farming was done by men. More recently, the wider evolution of garden from space essential to the welfare of


the family/household to spaces of display has made this domestic, gendered relationship more complex and nu anced, and potentially contested. It is possible too that age and generation can be distinguished in the way in which these elements are distributed. However, the garden and ethnicity and other social divisions and distinctions are not merely significant in terms of different, distinctive ways of cultivation but in terms of values and gardening as process. Social and cultural identity and distinctiveness remain just as sig nificant in the practice of gardening as in the garden as idea and object.

Consumption, Commodification, and the Identity Process The study of space in terms of consumption has prompted and been informed by work on commercialization on the character of participation in gardening and what the garden means in contemporary culture. Attention has been drawn to the increasing importance of commodifi cation of the garden. The garden has become objectified as a commodity underlined and contextualized by its commercial, marketing imagery, open to manipulation as material culture. In this way the garden arguably becomes narrowed to its purpose in status making – particular styles of garden and plants, planting, and cultivation an exercise in achievement. Garden objects, as plants, fur niture, and design contextualized, are given value and meaning through the construction of style in the com modity – monetary value, fashion, and the act of purchase conferring significance, cultural identity, and status. Such extension of the garden connects notions of domesticity and the increasing significance of the home in ‘commodity culture’. Commodification of the garden and gardening is accompanied by more widely mediated cultures in spe cialist gardening and gardens, and more popular maga zines and other literature, through the global spread of television ‘garden makeover’ programs, as well as both more earnest and more stylized bespoken garden infor mation. Thus the garden and gardening are transformed along commercialized and stylized discourses, trans planting significance and materiality from other more popular and everyday impulses. However, this emphasis on commodification in con sumption may deliver an over reductive discourse. Consumption includes refiguring of the value of com modities, and their reworking in relation to the indivi dual’s life, and its intersubjective territory. In this more active process of the consumer doing work, constituting meaning and value with the purchased objects and ideas, individuals may engage these prefigured values associated with purchased products in their own ways, through their own lives, and identities confer their own values and meanings.

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Moreover, there is a significant current in gardening and in the use and signification of gardening that derives its significance from intersubjective and cooperative practice. Gardening is familiarly, still in the twenty first century, an act of friendship and communality; informal networks of knowledge and practice; and of sharing ideas and informal, cooperative, soft competition. Competition as evidenced in flower shows can be highly competitive but not always so. Ideas on garden design, what to grow, and how to grow can be shared and convivial, partly informed by the garden media and commercial seduc tion, but refigured socially and culturally. Communal networks through gardening practice convey further so cial and collaborative practical ontology. Practicing gardens includes garden visits possibly to encounter demonstrations of ‘high culture’ (such as landscaped gardens typical of much of Europe and their transplants in North America and elsewhere) and everyday gardens often included in locally available ‘gardens open to the public’ schemes. Such may be re garded as exemplars of stylization and accompaniments to commodification. Yet, this may not necessarily be so. Their respective significance may be considered as ex ercises in sightseeing and in relation to exploring iden tities, rediscovering individual or shared, local and national histories and heritages, and in complementing leisure interests in gardening. Gardens emerge from these discourses as both private and public. Familiarly, the front garden, at the front of the house is on view to the public anytime as a site for dis play. The back garden is a back space concealed from wider observation and surveillance. However, the back garden may be also the site of significant social inter course, barbecue, and relaxed intersubjectivity where friends are invited. The front garden may play a similar role in sociality as the site where gardening combines meeting people passing by on the street. The community garden is significantly a public and a private space; a site of public encounter and private re flection. Typically situated among anywhere between 20 and 100 small garden plots, often rigidly gridded in or derly delivery of land ownership, these spaces may profer relative isolation in their opportunity for individuality in cultivation, wider practice, and relaxation. However, they are frequently also open to collective view among other plot holders; and they may offer view from surrounding areas. While they continue a heritage of domestic re lations (traditionally a male exercise, less so today), the informality of community gardens and their location outside notions of domestic space and bespoken designer mediation make their opportunity for alternative, even subversive design and cultivation possible. Thus, these small spaces are characterized by an often makeshift opportunity as a distinctive self expression, a vernacular landscape, and as an allotment aesthetic.

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Gardening as Embodied Practice and Performative Process In both a distinctive departure and yet bearing traces of earlier garden discourses in human geography and re lated fields, more recently, the idea of the garden has become reactivated anew in cultural geographies and geographies of embodied practice and performance. The garden has been verbalized into gardening, cognizant with the increasing geographical attention to process and subjectivities. Through writing on practice, performance, dwelling, and lay geographies, these contributions reen gage the active process of human encounters; the re working of cultural context and refiguring of geographies, and conceptualizations of nature as well as the non human. Moving somewhat beyond the visually geared inter pretations of the garden as iconography, new cultural geographies of gardening articulate the importance of practice, in consideration of so called nonrepresentational geographies, in acknowledgment of the complex and nu anced iteration between embodied practice and contextual representations. Phenomenologically encountering the world and its spaces bodily subjectively and inter subjectively, multisensually, and expressively, the world becomes perceived through both feet as well as eyes. Practice is enlarged through a consideration of perform ance: ritualistic, stylized, encountered in a life journey of exploration as well as self identification in performativ ities, with potential to ‘hold on’ and to ‘go further’ in one‘s life through mentally reflexive embodied encounters and interplay with memory. Gardening participates in a making of lay geography, temporal, complex, and contingent. It holds the potential of difference, of becoming, incompletely constrained by context and prefigured iconography and significance. Gardening holds potential for creativity, rather than merely mundane continuity and confinement in available garden categorizations. Objects encountered, made or responded to, in gardening may be significant in the ways in which doing gardening may be felt to be important. Objects convey their material culture in ways that may bear prefigured significance. Individuals may negotiate and reconstitute these prefigurations in the process. Gardening is thus a bodily process of active reflexivity. This process may include a component of well being through physical activity, mental stimulation and re flection, and particular rhythms. Private and community gardens can be used as therapeutic schemes for offenders and the mentally ill. Arguably working with and along side plants may confer an open experience of relational care. Yet, countering idealization, garden space may be used and valued very differently. It may be the location of storage, accumulation of domestic materials, including the discarded, where no interior space is available, and

gardening a chore of simply keeping tidy, a site for coping or the expression of not coping with life. Gardening may offer opportunity for attention to physical matter of material culture – and nature – in a more visceral way. The practiced lay geographies of gardening provide an example of practical ontologies, constituting and negotiating identities relationally with the formally prefigured identities of cultural contexts. Furthermore it may offer opportunities for relational ontologies with nature that circumvent the formal ontologies of nature as idealised, set apart, pre cultural. Thus nature may be constituted through gardening and its embodied, visceral performance with imagination, metaphor, and fleshy materiality that are familiarly en countered in garden practice.

Back to Nature and Beyond The garden emerges historically in powerful icon ographies of purity, cosmology, religion, and the sacred; a moralistic existence of the pre Fall; and the pre cultural. It was the garden not wilderness that signified perfection. It represented a particular contract of pre cultural, pre human perfection through cultivation that combined a complex discourse concerning human–nature relations. This powerful story persists in world religions, and nonreligious beliefs, even in contemporary artwork, with distinctive moral and ethical import. Over the last cen tury, the reemergence of a more ecologically sensitive and aware discourse repositions this thinking. With ref erence to the garden as more than private space, as generic symbolization of human–nature relations, a re valuation of ethical responsibility emerges. Gardening can offer opportunity for ethically sustainable practices and nature relations, yet not exclusively. The last 100 years of experience suggests its equal opportunity to af fect an ethics of control and exploitation even at a do mestic level. Recent discussion includes the relation between gardening as a human directed act, and the ways in which the nonhuman, plants, and their growth interact and influence human activity and reflection. The non human is conceptualized as deserving ethical respect. Wilderness accompanies this garden vision as a softening of technocratic, modernized, mechanical domination. Gardening and the garden familiarly involve negotiations of threads of control, domination, and power; liberation and enabling, soft management; cooperation; and active relation and respect. Nature’s effect on and through performance and sig nification in gardening can be significant too. Distinct hybridities of practice, feeling, and possibility emerge through the multiple interplay of human and nonhuman actants. Nature can be constituted through doing; through relationships built and imagined with the


materiality and felt experience of the nonhuman. Thus gardening is not static, but its action and meaning con stituted in the process of its doing. This process includes a practiced relationship with nature and wilderness – a negotiated control and cooperation. Moral geographies can pervade thinking on the gar den and gardening in terms of their association of correct ethical use, appropriate display, and iconography: the landscaped garden of the wealthy landowner and the painted landscape; the ordered domestic garden; and the owner authorized tidy rented plot. Because of the semiotic depth of gardening, these moral judgments and conflicts persist. Gardening is familiarly linked with reverie; sacred significance, and poetics. Poetics of gar dening include reference to gardens’ iconography and emerge through action. Poetics can be conferred in art, literature, and formal design. It can also emerge through performance, practice, and human–nonhuman relationality. The garden, and gardening, may be interpreted as a foundational trope of fixity – originary human civil ization in settlement and continuity. Yet, this is only one version. Gardening, in its processual and potentially performative modes, can offer an exploration of life – identity and creativity, memory and possibilities – in perpetual contingency and active refiguring as well as an imagined permanence. The iconographic power of the garden to signify peace as well as practical and poetic possibility in pro viding nourishment, offering exercises of beauty, and expression of hope has been rendered in gardens made in war time, in war zones of extreme social, political, eco nomic, and cultural conditions made in, for example, Warsaw and other ghettos during World War II; in prisoner of war and civilian internment camps; the recent Gulf Wars; and behind the trenches, by soldiers, during World War I, as both humanized landscapes and ex perience. Again the garden metaphor and materiality of performance is echoed in similar ways in the cemetery, where the significance of the garden and gardening the cemetery and graveyard are given acute significance in the working of memory.

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See also: Body, The; Landscape; Nature.

Further Reading Alfrey, N. and Daniels, S. (2005). Exhibition catalogue The Garden. London: Tate Gallery. Chevalier, S. (1998). From woollen carpet to grass carpet: Bridging home and garden in an English suburb. In Miller, D. (ed.) Material Culture: Why Some Things Matter, pp 26 46. London: Routledge. Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds.) (1988). The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crouch, D. (2003). Performances and constitutions of natures: A consideration of the performance of lay geographies. In Szerszynski, B., Heim, W. & Waterton, C. (eds.) Nature Performed, pp 15 30. Oxford: Blackwell. Crouch, D. (2003). Spacing, performance and becoming: Tangles in the mundane. Environment and Planning A 35, 1948 1960. Crouch, D. (2004). Gardening as a construction of landscape. In Shneider, U. & Wolshke Bulmahn, J. (eds.) Gegen den Strom, pp 57 72. Hannover: University of Hannover. Crouch, D. and Ward, C. (1988). The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture. London: Faber and Faber. [5th edn., revised 2007, Nottingham: Five Leaves Press.] Francis, D., Kellaher, L. and Neophytou, G. (2005). The Secret Cemetery. Oxford: Berg. Groening, G. and Shneider, U. (1999). Design versus leisure: Social implications of functionalist design in urban private gardens of the twentieth century. In Crouch, D. (ed.) Leisure/Tourism Geographies, pp 149 163. London: Routledge. Hitchings, R. (2005). At home with someone non human. Home Cultures 1, 169 186. Helphand, K. (2006). Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press. Ingold, T. (2004). Culture on the ground: The world perceived through the feet. Journal of Material Culture 9(3), 315 340. Jackson, J. B. (1994). Sense of Place/Time, pp 119 134. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jones, O. and Cloke, P. (2001). Tree Cultures: The Place of Trees and Trees in Their Place. Oxford: Berg. Lee, R. (2000). Shelter from the storm? Geographies of regard in worlds of horticultural consumption and production. Geoforum 31(2), 137 157. Longhurst, R. (2007). Plots, plants and paradoxes: Contemporary domestic gardens in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Social and Cultural Geography 7(4), 581 593. Westmacott, R. (1993). The gardens of Afro Americans in the rural south. In Hunt, J. D. & Wolshke Bulmahn, J. (eds.) The Vernacular Garden: Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture 14, pp 77 105. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. Whatmore, S. (2002). Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures and Spaces. London: Sage.

Garrison, W. R. Morrill, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Garrison, William (1924–) Bill Garrison is perhaps the single geographer who had the greatest influence on the transformation of the dis cipline into a modern science in the latter half of the twentieth century (Figure 1). Born in 1924 in Tennessee, he started college at Peabody in Nashville in 1940, but service with the US Air Force in the Pacific as a me teorological officer intervened. He returned to Peabody for a BSc and then an MA in geography, then on to Northwestern, receiving his PhD in 1950 in urban geography – a quite traditional geographical training. Indeed, the then radical notion of developing theories of location and movement, and the use of statistics and mathematical models, did not develop until some time after he came to the University of Washington in 1950. A visiting research appointment at the University of Pennsylvania (1952–53) was the trigger for a vision of a revolution for economic and urban geography, following Garrison’s interaction with economists and statisticians. Back at the University of Washington he offered a geography course in statistics in 1954 (probably the first

Figure 1 W. Garrison. Courtesy of Dr. Garrison, W.

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of its kind in the world), and in location theory in 1956, as well as revising transportation geography along these lines. The underlying goal was the search for explan ations of the economic landscape, to understand the patterns of urban and rural land use, of economic ac tivities and of transportation and movement, as well as the spatial processes that created them, and to test these theories/explanations with appropriate methods. We stress this as Garrison was (correctly) uncomfortable with the term ‘quantitative geography’ that later became at tached to the endeavor, as it was really a concern with theories of spatial process. Garrison’s new direction was supported by other key faculty, and by one of those accidents of academic history, the arrival, between 1954 and 1960 of a group of graduate students who became the so called ‘space cadets’, who fervently accepted the theoretical–statistical challenge, and took the responsibility to proselytize the discipline as they took positions across the country: for example, Brian Berry, Duane Marble, John Nystuen, Richard Morrill, Michael Dacey, William Bunge, Arthur Getis, and Waldo Tobler. Internal interaction within the group was intense, and external communication was furthered by Garrison’s critical support of the informal departmental discussion papers that circulated around the world. Garrison was devoted to interdisciplinary study, and expected his students to take advanced courses in eco nomics, business, sociology, and other fields. This interest took the form locally of interdisciplinary seminars and research groups and externally by joining the new field of regional science. Garrison and his students (e.g., Marble and Tobbler) were pioneers in the early beginning of computer use and programming, including what later became geographic information systems and computer cartography. Most significant in his future career – and to these early students – was active participation in inter disciplinary funded transportation research (geography, business, civil engineering, and planning). From this came Garrison’s seminal publications: ‘The benefits of rural roads to rural property’ in 1956, ‘Economic impacts of highway improvements’ in 1957, ‘Geographic impacts of highway improvements’ in 1958, ‘Estimates of the spatial parameters of spatial interaction’ in 1956, ‘Connectivity of the interstate highway system’ in 1960, and a book – Studies of Highway Development and Geographic Change in 1960 – which included chapters from student disser tations. These pioneering studies solidified Garrison’s lifetime concentration in transportation. His concern for

Garrison, W.

a much wider conception of the costs and benefits and spatial consequences of transportation innovation and investments proved perhaps as unorthodox to the tradi tional transportation establishment, as did his dedication to science in geography. Garrison helped further change geography through joint publications with his students, sometimes providing the first theoretical–statistical study in a given field, as was the case with Brian Berry (four famous studies on central place systems in 1958), with Duane Marble (agriculture in 1957), and Richard Morrill (models of movement in 1960). Particularly important was Garri son’s introduction into geography of the revolutionary ideas of spatial theory and statistical method, as in Ap plications of Statistical Inference to Geographic Research in 1956, and Spatial Structure of the Economy in 1959 and 1960. In 1960 Garrison moved to Northwestern University, with even stronger programs in transportation, not to mention better access! His 7 years at Northwestern brought more converts and aided in the growth of many Midwestern centers of the new geography, furthered by a series of National Science Foundation sponsored sym posia and workshops in scientific geography. Key contri butions of the work at Northwestern were in the analysis of transportation networks. Influential publications in cluded Toward a Simulation Model of Urban Growth and Development in 1963, Quantitative Geography (edited with D. Marble in 1967), and The Structure of Transportation Net works (with D. Marble in 1968). A joint appointment in civil engineering, becoming Director of the Transportation Center and involvement with large transportation research studies and national transportation research committees helped bring about his move from geography to transportation by his move to civil engineering, at the University of Illinois, Chicago (1967–69). One important activity from this period in cluded starting a long term involvement and service with the National Research Council and the Transportation Research Board, and with a broad interest in the role of science and technical innovation (including but not just transportation) in regional development and social change. In 1969 Garrison moved to become Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, a period of continuing concern with inno vation and of the management of technology (e.g., ‘Technology and urbanization’ in 1971), and the early implementation of environmental impact analysis. Geography was not forgotten, however, and he contrib uted a significant essay ‘Future geographies’ in Chorley’s 1973 collection Directions in Geography. Garrison’s final and longest tenure was in the Trans portation Program at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1973, through and past his retirement in 1991. Broad interests, exemplified by such publications as

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‘Future evolution of urban transportation systems’ in 1976, ‘Innovation for transportation’ (in Space and Time in Geography, 1981), Tomorrow’s Transportation Changing Cities, Economies and Lives (with Ward in 2000), and The Trans portation Experience : Policy, Planning and Development (with Levinson in 2005), balanced heavy involvement in crit ical urban transportation issues and decisions, and more technical publications like Transportation Systems Man agement in 1977, Transportation in 1984, and Transportation Planning, 1985. Although working in centers for trans portation studies in his later career, Garrison remained a loyal and dedicated geographer. An award to this effect was created in his honor by the Association of American Geographers (AAG): the biannual award for best disser tation in computational geography. Garrison was a quiet revolutionary, who led a funda mental transformation of human geography during the period 1955–70. Although the movement was dubbed the ‘quantitative revolution’, as it indeed led to widespread adoption of statistical methods and of mathematical modeling in human geography, the greater significance was the emphasis on geography as a normal science, on the search for theory and explanation of human spatial behavior, and the evolution of the landscape. Within the broad field of human geography, Garrison’s greatest substantive and policy contributions have been in the field of transportation, especially in metropolitan regions. In the present era, in which science has become devalued in geography and technology attacked, Garrison’s career and writing remains inspirational and creative, a contri bution highly valued by his students and friends, and in the long run, the discipline as a whole. See also: Berry, B.; Central Place Theory; Quantitative Revolution; Race.

Further Reading Garrison, W. (1959). Spatial structure of the economy. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 49, 232 239; 471 482. Garrison, W. (1960). Connectivity of the interstate highway system. Proceedings of the Regional Science Association 6, 122 137. Garrison, W. (1960). Spatial Structure of the Economy: III, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 50, 357 373. Garrison, W. (1963). Toward a simulation model of urban growth and development. Lund Studies in Geography, Lund Haaken Ohlssons, Series B 24, 91 108. Garrison, W. (1973). Future geographies. In Chorley, R. J. (ed.) Directions in Geography, ch. 11, pp 237 249. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd. Garrison, W. (1977). Transportation System Management: Promise, Performance and Prognosis. Berkeley, CA: Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Garrison, W. (1979). Playing with ideas. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 69, 118 120. Garrison, W. (1981). Innovation for transportation. In Woldenberg, M. J. (ed.) Space and Time in Geography, pp 215 236. Lund: Gleerup, C.W.K. Garrison, W. (1984). Transportation technology. Transportation Research A 18, 267 276.

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Garrison, W. (2000). Innovation and transportation’s technologies. Journal of Advanced Transportation 34, 31 63. Garrison, W. (2002). Lessons from the design of a life. In Gould, P. & Pitts, W. (eds.) Geographical Voices, pp 99 123. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Garrison, W. and Berry, B. J. L. (1958). A note on central place theory and the range of a good. Economic Geography 34, 304 311. Garrison, W. and Berry, B. J. L. (1958). The functional bases of the central place hierarchy. Economic Geography 34, 145 154. Garrison, W., Berry, B. J. L., Nystuen, J. and Morrill, R. (1959). Studies of Highway Development and Geographic Change. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Garrison, W. and Levinson, D. (2005). The Transportation Experience, Policy, Planning, and Deployment. New York: Oxford University Press. Garrison, W. and Marble, D. (1967 1968). Quantitative Geography, Studies in Geography, no. 13 and 14. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University. Garrison, W. and Marble, D. (1968). The Structure of Transportation Networks. Washington, DC: Office of Technical Services, U.S. Department of Commerce.

Garrison, W. and Souleyrette, R. (1994). The relationship between transportation and production. Transportation Quarterly 48, 257 265. Garrison, W. and Ward, J. (2000). Tomorrow’s Transportation: Changing Cities, Economies, and Lives. Norwood, MA: Artech House. Spatial Structure of the Economy: II (1959). Annals of the Association of American Geographers 49, 471 482.

Relevant Websites http://cutc.tamu.edu CUTC; Awards; Award Recipients; Award Recipient Biographies. www.aag.org The biannual William Garrison Award for Best Dissertation in Computational Geography. www.ce.berkeley.edu UC Berkeley Department of Civil Environmental Engineering. www.ce.berkeley.edu William Garrison: research and teaching areas. Policy; New Technology; Planning; Freight.

Gated Communities/Privatopias R. Atkinson, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia S. Blandy, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Definition Defining gated communities is difficult and contentious. There are two aspects of such residential neighborhoods which make them distinct from other examples of secured accommodation (such as high rise condominiums with concierge staff or individual houses with gated access). The first aspect is, of course, the physical constitution of such neighborhoods, but even then there may be differing degrees of ‘gatedness’. In some gated communities we may find gates or booms across the road and in others it may be that gates block car access (or theft) while adjacent pedestrian thoroughfares are not controlled in the same way. The main differentiating physical feature of gated communities is that where access would ordinarily be expected in an ‘open’ neighborhood, it is restricted or available for control in a gated community. The second key hallmark of gated communities is their legal constitution. As developers have built gated communities they have effectively created privately or ganized neighborhoods with their own infrastructure, including internal roads, common spaces, and services such as refuse collection. Unlike open neighborhoods, where roads are managed and repaired by the local state, gated communities are run by residents’ management committees, known as homeowners’ associations in the US. These governance organizations are often controlled by the developer in the first instance, and are then taken over by residents who pay an annual contribution for the maintenance of infrastructure and services provided to residents. These services may also extend to the em ployment of maintenance staff and security personnel and the use of closed circuit television (CCTV) systems. Many gated communities also have their own amenities such as gyms and swimming pools, or are built around golf courses or sailing lakes, which are also paid for and managed by the residents.

The Development of Gated Communities It is important to remember that freedom of access has always been a negotiated aspect of urban life. In medi eval towns throughout Europe, as in Italian city states of around the eleventh century onward, the surrounding walls provided a fortified barrier to entry by outsiders. However, unlike today’s gated communities, this barrier applied to the city as a whole, and access to streets and

neighborhoods within the city was a right enjoyed by all citizens. Just as walled cities no longer operate to ex clude outsiders, true gated communities established in the past may be seen with hindsight to have been a temporary phenomenon. For example, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, gated squares and private streets were common in London and other English cities. By 1900 most of the barriers had been removed in order to allow freedom of movement for an increasing volume of traffic. The relatively more recent trend toward purpose built gated developments as the preserve of the affluent began in nineteenth century North America, and has accelerated over the last 50 years to the point where in some US states it is now almost impossible to purchase a new dwelling that is not located in an enclosed private neighborhood. It would be wrong to conclude that the parallel growth of gated communities worldwide has necessarily been influenced by developments in the USA. However, such developments are now common both in countries where this type of built form represents a relative novelty, as well as in regions, notably China and the Middle East, where inward looking, multi occupied residential developments have always been part of the architectural heritage.

Drivers for the Increase in Gated Communities It is clear that in some instances the state, at both national and local levels, has played an important role in the de velopment of gated communities. For example, McKenzie has shown how the growth of gated communities in North America was orignally driven by developers and builders but was later significantly boosted by the state’s en couragement of homeowner associations as the legal framework for collective ownership and management of property. These developments are in the interest of American municipalities, which derive fiscal advantages from affluent private neighborhoods combined with low demand for local state services from the residents. Even where government is concerned to regulate the manage ment of multi occupied developments, as in Taiwan, it also benefits from the devolution of neighborhood man agement to the homeowners associations as a devolved and private form of local governance. In the absence of gov ernmental or financial encouragement to create self

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managed gated communities, developers are nonetheless keen to build them as gating adds a cachet which translates into higher property values, and hence profitability. This has led to some concern that the growth of gated com munities may be driven by supply side marketing, rather than genuine demand from potential purchasers though disentangling these issues remains difficult. Gated communities are also increasingly common in countries undergoing economic and political transition, such as China and some Eastern European countries, where a desire for security has grown within contexts of economic and social change. However, enclosed and guarded housing developments have also been emerging in stable Western European countries with low crime rates, requiring an explanation other than, or in addition to, pure security. One view is that private neighborhoods with their legal frameworks which give residents control over private resources, reflect a growing disillusionment with the ability of government to provide the desired quality of services. Hence, drawing on club goods theory, gated communities have been characterized as private, localized economies which respond to desires for private aggregations of common interest to achieve the provision of distinctive goods, in this case secured neighborhoods not provided by local or central states. This explanation in turn has been criticized as inadequate to explain the historically and regionally specific development of gated communities. Gated communities appear to vary in their form and overall extent according to the national context they are found in, and there appear to be complex rea sons for such variations. Gated communities can be broadly differentiated between three types of development, each meeting dif ferent consumer needs. ‘Prestige’ gated communities enable their residents to enjoy an urban lifestyle while providing complete security. ‘Lifestyle’ developments incorporate exclusive leisure and other facilities, while the third type is the ‘security zone’, an inner city or inner suburban area retro fitted with walls, gates, and other security features, usually at the request of residents. Subsequently, analysis of the 2001 American Housing Survey has undermined the usual assumption that gated communities are the preserve of wealthy homeowners, by showing that low income, non white, renters are now more likely to live in gated developments than owner occupiers. A national survey in England established that there is considerable diversity in terms of the built form of gated communities, the type of housing provided, and their location. So far as the motivation of purchasers is con cerned, research has found that the issues of security, exclusivity, and prestige were often subsumed into a more general desire by purchasers to buy property which will maintain its value. Marketing materials, unlike in America, very rarely refer to the ‘community’ aspect of

living in a gated community. In England, gated com munities appear to appeal to predominantly young af fluent singles and older couples. However, this varies according to particular locations and the relative avail ability of certain types of accommodation. For example, in London many new build and converted spaces that have been turned into gated communities consist largely of flats which are unlikely to be suitable for families. In both England, North America, and Australia there are growing markets for gated developments catering ex clusively to retired people. Further research is needed on the profile of gated community residents in other countries. It is apparent that in all global regions, however, gated communities are popular with expatriate communities and transnational elites, providing a secure and insulated residential base for their business dealings, as well as luxury leisure pursuits.

Crime and Other Effects From residents’ points of view, in high crime societies like Latin America, the USA, and South Africa, the re cent increase in gated communities can be seen as a relatively rational response to a fear of violent disorder and personal harm. This has meant that stronger forms of fortification have been witnessed. In particular the gated communities of South Africa and cities like Sao Paolo have shown a marked tendency toward fortification in affluent areas where armed guards checking entrants and private policing of such spaces, outside the view or regulation of publicly monitored forces, has become common. The small amount of evidence on whether gated communities prevent crime or not for such neighbor hoods is contradictory. Where some have found that such ‘target hardening’ has reduced crime, others have found that crime rates are no different to other similarly high status neighborhoods. In South Africa, emerging evi dence has suggested that gated communities have dis placed crime to less affluent neighboring areas leading to the impression of a geography of risk connected with relative affluence. In short, this solidifying of patterns of segregation may reinforce positive effects for residents of gated communities while further disenfranchising resi dents outside the gates. Nevertheless, evidence in both the UK and California has suggested that many gated communities exist within surrounding areas which are also highly affluent, if not necessarily gated. Finally, gated communities can be seen to provide spaces of contained wealth which may be attractive to potential house breakers seeking neighborhoods rationally containing potentially greater rewards, though systematic evidence on these patterns has not yet emerged.


Life Behind the Walls Gated communities appear to be growing in their prevalence by appealing to people with concerns about crime, as well as delivering prestige and privacy for those motivated by such issues in their residential decisions. However, the limited anthropological evidence available so far tends to show that, in fact, the residents of gated communities are highly susceptible to fear of crime directed at those outside the boundaries of gated com munities, as well as at service personnel who continue to connect these spaces of relative privilege with less well off communities outside, and who are therefore also viewed as a possible threat. Since gated communities have not been a regular feature of urban life until perhaps the last 15 years, and then predominantly in Latin America, South Africa, and North America, the longer run implications of social life in these kinds of neighborhoods have not been fully thought through. However, some writers have begun to ask what will happen to children who grow up in the kind of predictable, racially homogenous, and privileged spaces of gated communities. These fears, of a with drawn, shy, fearful, and affluent class have recently been realized in cities like Moscow where the growth of a super rich social elite has led to the protection of their children in gated communities, as well as being trailed by personal bodyguards. Again, the implications of these lifestyles for the future views and social politics of af fluent classes brought up in protected neighborhood environments is unlikely to be positive, with possible impacts on a lack of empathy with people from different social backgrounds, as well as a fear of such difference. Although internal relations between residents may be good, the fact that gated communities are self managed does not seem to inevitably lead to strong feelings of community cohesiveness. Everyday life within a gated community is largely regulated by legal documents, which set out the rules with which residents must comply, and the arrangements for self governance by the home owners. These non negotiable legal instruments under mine the concept of gated neighborhoods as voluntary communities able to develop their own informal controls and sanctions. Existing evidence on life within gated communities thus suggests a high degree of regulation that must be accepted in order to find distinctiveness and safety for the purchaser’s household. Such developments may offer security or privacy but in a context in which, ironically, the freedoms of residents need to be sacrificed to achieve the apparent benefits of ‘gated’ living. North American examples of these problems abound, including restrictions on the maximum size of dogs and cases in volving residents prevented from flying flags outside their homes. Research in England found instances of disputes and tension, including families subjected to letters of

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complaint from the residents’ management committee for leaving their childrens’ toys on lawns. The self regulating aspect of gated communities may also mean that children are seen as less desirable to the extent that some of the legal documents governing these developments include a prohibition on children playing anywhere other than in the designated areas. A further problem for the residents of gated com munities has been that many lack a full awareness of the ways in which private government may impinge on their daily lives. The necessary legal documents are signed in order to complete the purchase, but interview data sug gest that few purchasers read these thoroughly or ap preciate that their own conduct and use of their property will be constrained by the contents of these legal docu ments for years to come. Evidence is emerging, for ex ample, in North America, Taiwan, and England, that gated communities are not necessarily havens of like minded residents. Disputes do arise, between owners, between individual owners and homeowners associations or residents management organizations, and between owners and professional managing agents. Further, as some analysts have begun to point out, the apparent benefits of these secessionary modes of private neighborhood governance have in certain instances been undermined by the increasing costs of private mainten ance. Individual residents can be faced with a large annual charge which if not paid might lead to their eviction. Examples where the residents are legally bound to pay their contribution include expenditure arising from un foreseen occurences such as minor earthquakes destroying internal roads, or more frequent instances of large but foreseeable items of expenditure like re roofing a swim ming pool, but where no sinking fund has been put aside. In some of these cases a return to public governance has been mooted by the dissatisfied homeowners, and more than one North American state has now passed legislation requiring vendors to warn purchasers of the legal impli cations of buying a property in a gated community.

Gated Communities in Literature Gated communities have figured in significant literary examples. For J. G. Ballard, collectively privatized neighborhoods have formed a significant setting for many of his novels, particularly Running Wild, Super Cannes, and Cocaine Nights. In fact the idea of enclosure and rarified environments in which often affluent residents run amok outside the normative restraints of mass society has be come a recurring theme for Ballard. Much of this is drawn from and inspired by Ballard’s own confinement during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, which formed the basis for his semi autobiographical Empire of the Sun, also turned into a film. More recently T. C. Boyle has

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used the desires of an affluent community to gate their estate as a literary device in The Tortilla Curtain, in which an affluent young couple are confronted by their own fear and prejudices as they encounter desperate poor Mexican migrants on the US border. As fears of the Mexicans increase, fueled by the prejudices of a minority of resi dents, a surrounding fence and gates are finally installed against their instinctive rejection by the story’s ambiva lent hero. Dystopian fictional treatments like these highlight the way in which gating can be seen as a zeit geist through which we understand a series of wider social and physical transformations affecting an increas ing range and number of cities.

Wider Implications This privatization of what would otherwise be public spaces has driven wider debates about the relative influ ence of gated communities on social life in urban areas which have, particularly in the European context, been associated with the diversity and democracy of the street. This raises a broader question about the implications of forting up for the character of Western urban life. If we take away freedom of access to the street what does a city become? For example, some commentators have that this form of hyper segregation and fortification represents a new and critical moment which has transformed cities with earlier histories of open and democratic public spaces into a series of enclaves which protect affluent residents, while leaving an envious and poorer class of residents outside these protected bubbles. Poorer groups in these ghettoized spaces remain vulnerable to a variety of forms of street crime and violation in the home in economies which have seen freefall generated by austerity measures imposed by international financial institutions. Gated communities are also notable for their growth in societies characterized by lower prevailing crime rates and higher levels of social cohesion. In this sense such ‘communities’ may be seen as social barometers indi cating much deeper undercurrents of social fear and aspiration toward ex territoriality as the signifier of membership to an affluent and secure class. In this con text the significance of gated communities lies less in their number and more in what they say about a wider bundle of social forces that are directing where and how people live. Nevertheless, the continued growth of gated communities suggests that they are an increasingly sig nificant proportion of dwellings, both responding to and perhaps also generating anxiety. For sociolegal scholars, gated communities provide a clear illustration of both the power of property law and the ease with which it can be pressed into the service of developers and homeowners seeking seclusion, security, and prestige. The legal framework which creates and

maintains these private neighborhoods places an invisible perimeter around the self managing residents, echoing the line of the physical boundary, both of which serve to demarcate the residents of the gated community and its exclusive services and amenities from outsiders who re main reliant on publicly provided facilities.

The Future It seems likely that perceptions of rising crime will lead to more of this kind of secured development, in the absence of public planning interventions and along with rising real incomes for the middle classes of many de veloping countries – seeking prestige and the securing of their new found wealth. As transnational property markets have been opened up this has fuelled interest in an urban form capable of offering security ‘in absentia’ for owners, as well as insulated tourist bubbles for those visiting cheap but hostile zones. The impression of growing disorder in some contexts in the West and sig nificant and real increases in crime and vulnerability in parts of the majority world have undoubtedly raised the prospect of further gating and securitization in the future. As gated communities have become common, the growth of gated cities in Southeast Asia has also been observed. In the resurgent tiger economies, gating has been used to create secure compounds for foreign workers. In these contexts it is less clear whether fear or a desire for social distinction is the driving force for such development but the longer run impacts in terms of a division between an emerging middle class and wider society appears to be increasingly running in tandem with processes of security which demonstrate a high degree of emerging social segregation. This appears to be a depressing outlook, given the impact of gated com munities on urban sustainability and the continued sep aration of affluent classes from the social life of cities touched by this kind of development. See also: Community; Defensible Space; Governance, Urban; Law and Law Enforcement; Neighborhoods and Community; Private/Public Divide; Public Spaces, Urban; Segregation, Urban; Social Justice, Urban; Transnational Elites; Transport and Accessibility; Urban Regimes.

Further Reading Atkinson, R. and Blandy, S. (eds.) (2006). Gated Communities. London: Routledge. Atkinson, R., Blandy, S., Flint, J. and Lister, D. (2004). Gated Communities in England. London: Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Blakely, E. J. and Snyder, M. G. (1997). Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States. Cambridge, MA; Washington


DC: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; Brookings Institution Press. Bohle, H. G. (2002). Special Issue: Vulnerability Geographica Helvetica 57(4). Caldeira, T. (2000). City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in Sao Paulo. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Geographica Helvetica (2003). Special issue on gated communities. Geographica Helvetica 58(4). Gero, J. and Purcell, T. (eds.) (2002). Special issue: Cognitive Modelling in Design. Environment and Planning B 29(3). Glasze, G., Webster, C. and Frantz, K. (eds.) (2006). Private Cities: Global and Local Perspectives. London: Routledge. Housing Studies (2005). Special issue on gated communities. Housing Studies 20(2). Low, S. (2003). Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. London: Routledge.

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Marcuse, P. (1997). Walls of fear and walls of support. In Ellin, N. (ed.) Architecture of Fear, pp 101 114. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. McKenzie, E. (1994). Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sanchez, T. W., Lang, R. E. and Dhavale, D. (2005). Security versus status? A first look at the census’s gated community data. Journal of Planning Education and Research 24, 281 291.

Relevant Websites http://www.cf.ac.uk Cardiff School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University. http://www.gatedcomsa.co.za Gated Communities in South Africa.

Gay Geographies V. Miller, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Cottaging A term used in the Gay community to describe the act of picking up partners in a public lavatory for the purposes of sexual activity. Cruising A term used to describe the act of deliberately seeking a sexual partner in a public place, often for anonymous sex. Gay Ghetto A term sometimes used to describe an area, usually urban, in which a large number of gay people live and focus their commercial and leisure activities. Gay ghettoes are focused around a significant number of gay-oriented institutions, commercial establishments and leisure spaces, and normally include a surrounding residential population that is substantially gay. Heteronormative The assumption that heterosexuality is the only ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ sexual orientation. Thus, implying that all other forms of sexuality (such as homosexuality) are abnormal or unnatural, and therefore wrong. Homophobic Discrimination against, fear of, or aversion to, homosexuals or homosexuality in general. Liminal Space Spaces characterized by openness, indeterminacy, or ambiguity. Stonewall Riots A series of violent conflicts in New York City that lasted the week of 28 June 1969. The conflict was brought about by a police raid of the popular gay club, the Stonewall Inn. It is seen as a watershed in the worldwide gay rights movement.

In past centuries, extreme prejudice and repression meant that gay life was restricted to only the largest cities, and to clandestine networks of private and public spaces which were largely unknown to ‘straight’ society. However, the urbanization process of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the social and legal reforms of the late 1960s onward, have allowed spaces which are much more visibly oriented to the gay community to develop. These spaces have now become an increasingly common feature within the inner areas of medium sized and larger cities of North America, Europe and Australasia, as well as the largest cities of South America and Asia.

Introduction: Invisible Cities – Gay Geographies in Historical Context Historically, the two most defining characteristics of gay geographies are their urban locations and their ‘invisible’

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or ‘clandestine’ qualities. Due to the subordinate or taboo status of homosexual activity in a largely hetero normative Western world (a status that was more often than not enforced through sometimes very harsh legal repression and punishment), gay geographies have ten ded to consist of a network of both private spaces and commercial establishments. Constellations of private homes, clubs, cafe´’s bars, hotels, as well as public spaces such as lavatories, parks, and certain streets that estab lished a local reputation (through personal links, rumor, and social networks) as ‘cruising’ or ‘cottaging’ areas, have tended to be the focal points for gay geographies through the centuries. These areas tended to be more clandestine or semi clandestine in that their use by gay men was usually not widely known by the public, nor were they advertised in a public domain. Chauncy stated this situation eloquently: Gay men had to contend with the threat of vigilante anti gay violence as well as with the police. In response to this challenge, gay men devised a variety of tactics that allowed them to move freely about the city, and to construct a gay city in the midst of, yet invisible to, the dominant city. (Chauncey, 1994, p. 180)

The understanding of these places as ‘gay’ only by ‘those in the know’ was intentional due to legal re pression, and also because of the desire for anonymity among many gay men. Anonymity was an often necessary condition to escape not only legal punishment but also social ostracism for their sexual activity. Brown refers to these types of spaces as ‘closet spaces’, an appropriate metaphor to describe the schizophrenic spatial lives of gay men who are not (or not yet) visible or ‘out’ in public spaces. As a result, a primary characteristic of gay geographies throughout history (and still largely true today) is that they were a combination of specific private spaces where gay men could feel comfortable expressing their sexu ality, and specific public spaces (such as cottages and cruising sites) where men could meet in anonymity. Higgs’ anthology Queer Sites has many examples of how gay geographies were constructed historically through these networks of ‘invisible’ public and private spaces in several major cities. For example, in that vol ume, Michael Siblais charts the shifting historical geog raphy of gay Paris from 1600 to the present. Illustrating this mix of closed and private spaces of cafe´’s, bars, and public spaces centered around the Tulieries Garden, the wooded parklands of the original Champs Elysees, the

Gay Geographies

banks of the Seine, and, from 1830, the famous ‘vespa siennes’ or public urinals. The second characteristic of gay geographies within a historical context is that they were (and still are) over whelmingly ‘urban’ geographies, and occurred primarily in large cities such as Paris, London, Amsterdam, New York, Sydney, or Toronto. There are several reasons for this. First of all is the simple issue of numbers. Relatively larger populations are needed to sustain gay oriented commercial establishments because not all gay men are public or ‘out’ enough to openly visit an establishment like a gay bar. Thus, proportionally more gay men are needed to support an establishment. For example, it has been suggested by American research that roughly 50 000 people are needed to support one gay bar, and by British research that 50 000 men over the age of 20 are needed. These figures are significantly higher than the population levels needed to support similar ‘straight’ establishments. Second, heteronormative discourses in society, along with antigay oppression, meant that it was only in large cities where: 1. There existed enough anonymity among the popu lation, and enough diversity within the population to create an environment in which there is a threshold of cosmopolitan tolerance among the mainstream population. 2. There were enough liminal or marginal areas (such as ‘red light’ districts) for gay spaces to exist in either ‘open’ or ‘clandestine’ forms. In these liminal zones, there tends to be an increased tolerance for all manner of ‘unconventional’ or ‘undesireable’ behavior on the part of the general populace and, more importantly, law enforcement. As a result, the more marginalized areas of larger cities such as docks, working class areas, and, in general, places which were seen as a locus for other marginal activities such as prostitution or vice areas, have tended to tradi tionally be the foci for gay geographies as well. The period of urbanization associated with the In dustrial Revolution and the early modern period of course saw a significant rise in the numbers and sizes of large cities throughout the Western world. The creation of the great industrial cities in Europe and America, and the rapid expansion of settlement and urban development to the western half of North America all helped to create cities with large, mobile, and diverse populations. This gave many cities the kind of cosmopolitan backdrop which helped to sustain more pronounced gay spaces. This can be seen in urban places that had acquired a link to alternative lifestyles, such as bohemianism and the cultural avant garde of the early twentieth century. Often these areas provided gay, or at least gay friendly, spaces within the urban nexus. For example, Chauncey charts the development of Greenwich Village, New York in the

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early 1900s into America’s most famous Bohemian community, populated by ‘unmarrieds, artists, free lovers, and anti materialists’, making the Village a safe and even congenial place for gay men and lesbians to live. This then led to the development of a substantial gay enclave and a somewhat visible gay presence. Theoretically, the Chicago School of Sociology was one of the first to systematically study these liminal urban zones and their relationship to gay space. For ex ample, Nels Anderson argued that the social and spatial configuration of the transient, male dominated ‘hobohe mia’ district of Chicago in the 1920s gave rise to a set of same sex sexual practices unique in the urban context. Overall, the Chicago school tended to link mobility with ‘social disorganization’ and the proliferation of non normative sexual practices and spaces. Thus, in the famous ‘co centric zone’ model of urban ecology by Er nest Burgess, the co centric zones themselves suggested an outward progression of increasing social and moral organization in which non normative sexualities, in cluding homosexuality, were confined to the inner zones and in particular the ‘zone of transition’. These were the areas with the most mobile populations: bohemian en claves, racialized ghettoes, vice districts, and ‘the world of furnished rooms’. Although there were periods (such as the 1920s) and occasional spaces where homosexuality was more or less tolerated, gay geography still tended to adopt the ‘in visible city’ model given that the repression of gay men was still very much a concern. The marginal legal and social status of gay men meant that the toleration of open homosexuality in an area like Greenwich Village was always provisional and thus subject to moral panics and crackdowns on ‘immoral’ behavior. It was not really until the late 1960s that this situation changed. This was largely due to the civil rights move ments of the 1960s, along with the gay liberation move ment, which were largely successful in helping to change the legal status of homosexuality in many countries, le galizing homosexuality in countries like the UK in 1967, and Canada in 1969. Several US states also saw changes in such discriminatory laws. In addition, the ‘Stonewall riots’ in New York in 1969 were a fundamental inspir ation in the gay liberation movement and signaled a more militant desire to attain equality legally and socially, and perhaps more importantly, it coalesced a desire for visi bility and openness. In this respect, it is really only after ‘Stonewall’ and the legal reforms of the late 1960s that ‘gay ghettoes’ as such can properly emerge.

The Idea of the ‘Gay Ghetto’ One of the first systematic discussions of the idea of a ‘gay ghetto’ within an academic context was by Martin

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Levine. Levine used the criteria set out by Robert Park and Louis Wirth of the Chicago School of Sociology, who used the term ‘ghetto’ to describe neighborhoods in habited by people possessing a distinct culture and who are socially segregated from the mainstream community. Park and Wirth were primarily referring to ethnic groups in their discussion; however, Levine applied their criteria to the burgeoning gay areas which had gained some no toriety in the large American cities of Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles through the late 1960s and 1970s. Park and Wirth had argued that ghettos had four key features: 1. Institutional concentration: that is, a concentration of social spaces, commercial and religious establishments. 2. Culture area: referred to the dominance of the mi nority culture within a particular urban area. 3. Social isolation: in which the ghettoized group in question is segregated from meaningful social re lations with the wider mainstream community. 4. Residential concentration: which signified a significant spatial concentration of homes or residences of the minority group in question. Levine applied these criteria to cities and the neigh borhoods within them which, at the time, were reputed to have large populations of gay men: Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. ‘Institutions’ (such as bars, clubs, bookstores, steam baths, restaurants, churches and movie houses catering to the gay com munity, as well as cruising areas) were mapped to dem onstrate institutional concentration. ‘Culture area’ was determined though a qualitative analysis of the preva lence of ‘gay culture’ manifested through a domination of males in public places, billboards, posters, shop signs, and ambient conversation which utilized gay cultural traits and terminology. To this, Levine also added the ubiquity of ‘gay fashion’ in certain areas. ‘Social isolation’ was also determined qualitatively through interviews which demonstrated that many of the gay men in these areas only had sporadic contact with ‘heterosexual society’ and that their social lives revolved primarily around gay spaces. Lastly, ‘residential concentration’ was inferred through secondary media sources such as gay oriented magazines and anecdotal evidence, both of which implied a large concentration of gay males in certain areas. Levine argued on this basis that there were three fully fledged ‘gay ghettoes’ in the United States: the West Village in New York City; The Castro Village in San Francisco; and ‘Boys Town’ (aka West Hollywood) in Los Angeles. In addition, there were a further 12 neighbor hoods in the cities studied that could be considered on their way to achieving such ‘gay ghetto’ status. While methodologically problematic, Levine’s work was fundamental in articulating an increased visibility

and social prevalence that gay life was having in certain (particularly North American) cities. He argued that such spaces were born of two social processes: the con tinuing societal antipathy toward homosexuality, and the modicum of tolerance afforded to gay men under the more liberal social and legal environment of the late 1960s and 1970s as compared to the almost total sup pression of homosexuality in the decades before. In terms of methodology, Levine’s work also high lighted a fundamental problem with studies of sexuality and urban space: the measurement of residential con centration. Ultimately, secondary and official data sources such as the census do not provide data on sexual orien tation. Thus, perhaps the most fundamental part of the ghettoization process, residential segregation, when ap plied to gay communities, must be inferred from other indicators such as single or dual male households, or collected though primary (almost always qualitative) data, which is often dubious from a quantitative stand point. In short, gay ghettos are often hard to ‘prove’ using the traditional yardsticks of urban geography. A short time after Levine, the spatial expression of the gay community of San Francisco was investigated by Manuel Castells. Similar to Levine, Castells charted and mapped the spatial dimensions of gay institutions and facilities but expanded on the relationships between space and power, arguing that an area like the Castro not only manifested increased visibility, but also served to aid in political struggle. In addition, Castells work also pos ited a link (elaborated below) between gentrification and the development of gay neighborhoods. While bringing the discussion of gay space more firmly into mainstream discussions of urban space, Cas tells work was heavily criticised by subsequent re searchers for two reasons. First was Castells rather essentialist conception of the difference between gay male and lesbian spatial structure, which he argues was the result of a ‘male territorial imperative’ versus a fe male tendency to concentrate on relationships and net works. Second was the criticism that Castells analysis was somewhat simplistic, neglecting larger structural aspects which meant that the spatial expressions of the gay community were not chosen as much as they were a result of the marginality of status gay men within society, and the marginality of the spaces they occupy within the urban fabric. The idea of a ‘gay ghetto’ was seen as a peculiarly American (and then North American) phenomenon. In European major cities such as Paris and London, gay space still tended toward the ‘invisible city’ model of closed and private spaces, as well as clandestine public spaces, usually concentrated around several nodes in a given city. For example, Siblais argues that gay night life in 1960s and 1970s Paris revolved around the areas of the Rue St. Anne, as well as Monmartre and Saint Germain des Paris, with a

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number of parks and public conveniences thrown into the mix. Residentially, the gay population of Paris was still scattered throughout the metropolitan region, drifting into the above areas during leisure hours. However, Siblais demonstrated that by the mid 1990s, Le Marais had be come established as Paris’ first gay ghetto, and had become the focal point of gay life in Paris both commercially and residentially.

The Functions of a ‘Gay Ghetto’ Early studies of gay ghettoes and enclaves took the ap proach of viewing such spaces in a similar manner to spaces dominated by oppressed ethnic minorities. As such, there was a focus more on the development of gay ghettoes as partly (or even primarily) a response to the prejudice of heterosexual society. Typical of this is David Bell’s use of Fredrick Boal’s argument that ethnic resi dential clusters provided four basic functions: ‘Defense’, in terms of physical and mental security • which is produced in areas of ethnic or racial homo

• • •

geneity. The feeling that there is ‘security in numbers’, and the ability to organize defenses on such a basis. ‘Avoidance’ for social adaptation, serving as ‘ports of entry’ into the host society. Such enclaves provide low pressure areas in what can be considered a hostile and alien world. ‘Preservation’ of culture, way of life through insti tutions present (one could include here the notion of institutional completeness). ‘Attack’ in terms of political and social struggle through political lobbying and voting power, or through insurrectionary activity in the case of violent struggle.

Such functions were expressed in a number of studies, where, for example, many argued in terms of ‘defense’ that gay urban space becomes a locus of safety from verbal, physical, and even legal harassment of which gay men have historically been the victims. Security is pro vided simply through there being ‘safety in numbers’ as well as through the establishment of a zone of liminality in which more marginalized sexual behaviors and dis courses are tolerated. In this secure environment, gay men and lesbians can test the limits of their sexual rights and experience the comfort of expressing a controversial identity among those they feel are similar to themselves, or are at least open minded and sympathetic to their plight. Under the rubric of ‘avoidance’ functions, gay ghettoes also act as ‘ports of entry’, in the sense that such spaces allow for ‘closeted’ gay men to ‘come out’ or introduce themselves overtly to a larger gay community from which that may have been isolated both physically and

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metaphorically. For example, it is not uncommon for gay media, particularly newspapers and magazines, to have a significant impact in easing isolation for those who are not yet ‘out’ or who live in areas where no obvious gay presence is felt. Gay oriented print media such as The Advocate in the United States or The Pink Paper in Great Britain contain descriptions of places and communities as a major component of their content. Often it is through such media where the reputations of ‘gay ghettoes’ are established and brought to the attention of people out side a local context. The end result is that places which acquire these reputations become akin to pilgrimage sites and migration destinations for closeted gay men who wish to lead a more open life. This has certainly been the case for San Francisco, West Hollywood, and the West Village in the United States, London and Manchester in Great Britain, Sydney, Australia, and Paris, France. Sev eral studies within the geographic literature have dem onstrated how gay enclaves in large urban centers become a focus for migration, while others have exam ined the role of media in the process of ‘defining’ certain spaces as ‘gay’. Gay enclaves also function to provide specialized commercial and social services. From the work of Levine onward, such institutional provision has been seen as the most fundamental characteristic of the gay ghetto. In particular, social spaces such as bars, clubs and cafe´’s, as well as bookstores which stock gay oriented media are seen crucial. In addition, more overtly sexual establish ments such as bathhouses, pornography outlets, and cruising areas are usually referenced. Of course, the larger and more well established gay spaces will often have a commercial core that houses the full range of services that any small community or neighborhood would provide – clothing retail, lawyers, taxi services, hairdressers, charity headquarters, real estate agents and so on – but will usually be gay owned and focus on a gay clientele. Themes of ‘preservation of culture’ within studies of gay space are often related to the commercial and social infrastructure they provide. As a result of oppression, lesbians and gay men have traditionally adopted strat egies to pass as straight in the outside world. This can make it extremely difficult for them to meet friends, sexual partners, and lead an open life in general. Gay spaces provide, or consist of, social networks where gay men and lesbians can meet each other as gay, and lessen the isolation people can feel in an overtly heterosexual society. Thus, Gay ghettoes provide their users with the freedom not to act straight. In that way, these places have been said to be inextricably bound with gay identity and its expression. This idea of expression is important, as a basic and fundamental issue for gay men and lesbians is visibility. As a result, one can speak of the role of such urban spaces

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in helping to ‘create’ culture and identity, as opposed to merely preserving it. As many have argued, the devel opment of gay ghettoes plays an integral part in gay culture building, demonstrating the expressive potential which space can hold. Thus, while it can be argued that these enclaves do provide defense and attack functions in rare cases, gay enclaves certainly do not ‘preserve’ culture in the same sense as an ethnic enclave might be said to. Their efforts are more likely to ‘create’ a common gay culture or identity. This desire for territory from which a common identity can emerge can be seen in the more ‘proactive’ collections such as Queers in Space: Communities, Spaces, Sites of Resistance and Mapping Desire which more or less invite gay men and lesbians to ‘take’ space and culture. Another function of gay enclaves often discussed in the literature is related to political struggle. Residential enclaves often serve as a basis for power for gay men in that by concentrating in certain areas, a ‘gay voting block’ can be established, thereby giving gay men a collective voice and a greater influence on local politics. The broader literature on ‘gay urban studies’ evidences many examples of how a marginalized group has been able to ‘colonize’ space and gain access to economic and political power. Knopp depicted how local gay entrepreneurs, press and political agents in Minnesota mobilized their political–economic power to establish social reforms at the local scale. More generally, Lauria and Knopp depict how gay men mobilized voting in residential concen trations in gentrified areas to obtain sympathetic ears on city councils in eight American cities.

The Political Economy of Gay Spaces in a Postindustrial Age Studies such as those above, often inspired by Marxist thought and political economy, began to examine gay enclaves in the wider context of urban space in general, noting that urban space was not ‘natural’ but instead ‘constructed’ by the people and forces embedded in a capitalist and increasingly global society. In that sense, studies of gay urban spaces became less essentialist, and viewed gay men as actors who are influenced by capital processes, production, consumption, and symbolism. Gentrification The late 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of the so called ‘urban renaissance’ of which gentrification was a major process. Gentrification (briefly) referred to a new type of settlement pattern in which persons of high socio eco nomic status (professionals, management and adminis tration workers) migrated into what would traditionally have been lower income inner city neighborhoods and turn of the century industrial districts. Investments of

capital would follow these ‘urban pioneers’ resulting in an overall upgrading of many inner city neighborhoods into high income enclaves which enjoyed the amenities of city center living. Early on, gentrification had been linked with gay homeowners who were often among the first wave of these ‘urban pioneers’. Even Castells’ early work on San Francisco pointed to the upgrading and renovation of inner city housing stock by gay men connected to a relatively prosperous service economy and relatively few financial responsibilities in terms of family. Lauria and Knopp’s groundbreaking work demonstrated this link in the greatest detail. Looking at the political economy of the gentrification process, they argued that gay men and lesbians were over represented in the main demographic characteristics of gentrifiers: people (and couples) with out children, and working in the burgeoning new ad ministrative, managerial, and service sector employment growth occurring in large city centers. This, combined with affordable, low cost, renovatable housing in de pressed city center neighborhoods, gave gay men the opportunity to develop a territorial and economic base within the urban structure. In general, the argument that links gay men with the gentrification process revolves around three main points: 1. Gay men and couples tend to have high disposable incomes due to a tendency to be involved in (com paratively well paid) professional and service sector employment. This combines with a tendency to have fewer family responsibilities in terms of children. Thus, gay men are more likely to have the financial resources to renovate older properties to add value. 2. Gay men often prefer to reside in city center areas as such neighborhoods are often more socially diverse (and therefore more tolerant) than suburban areas. In addition, their proximity to the amenities and night life of downtown makes these areas more vibrant and therefore preferable. 3. The marginalized status of gay men gives them fewer options but marginalized areas in which to build a community. However, it must be maintained that these points are quite simplistic generalizations. One must consider that, just as any community, the gay community is eco nomically and socially diverse and includes not only people of low income, but couples with children and those who prefer a more suburban as compared to urban lifestyle. In addition, a study of gentrification in Toronto’s ‘Cabbagetown’ area demonstrated an interesting dis tinction between gentrified areas populated by a sub stantial number of gay men, and ‘gay ghettoes’, both of which, it was argued, were the results of substantially different lifestyle ambitions within their respective populations.

Gay Geographies

As we saw in the previous section, several studies have depicted how the gentrification process helped local gay entrepreneurs and gay men in general to gain access to local power structures. Perhaps the most impressive ex ample of the relationship between gentrification and the empowerment of gay men on the local scale is of West Los Angeles, where gay entrepreneurial participation in local redevelopment schemes, along with gay and lesbian movement coalitions with other lobby groups of renters and senior citizens, led to the incorporation of West Hollywood as a city in its own right in 1984. This ul timately resulted in the election of the first West Hol lywood city council which was made up by a majority of gay members. Following this, there was a rapid sub sequent expansion of gay commerce in the new city.

Postindustrial Revitalization, Urban Renewal, and ‘Gay Villages’ The link between gentrification and the development of gay ghettoes demonstrated how the establishment of gay spaces could be linked to processes of urban renewal. In recent years, the link between gay men and urban re newal more broadly has become explicit enough that Governing (a magazine for state and local government officials in the United States), ran a cover story in August 2003 entitled ‘Chasing the rainbow: Is a gay population an engine of urban revival?’. Citing the work of Richard Florida among others, the article is premised on the ar gument that there is a link between the size and visibility of a local gay population, to the size of a ‘creative class’ in a given locality, and therefore to the potential economic well being of a locality in a postindustrial, globalized age. Political–economic work on gay space in the 1990s has gone beyond accounts of gentrification to consider the place of gay men (and in particular, the spending of gays, or the ‘pink pound’ as it is often referred to), within a wider urban and global context of urban revitalisation, cosmopolitan branding, and tourism in a cultural economy. In this respect, more recent studies have focused on the development of gay spaces under a less acrimonious atmosphere and within a context where local councils and entrepreneurial powers (both gay and straight) ac tually cooperate with their local gay communities in creating gay oriented urban spaces. This is done in order to attract inward investment, migration, and tourism from national and even international sources into struggling postindustrial cities. For example, Jon Binnie examined the development of gay spaces in London’s Old Compton Street and in central Amsterdam within the context of the early 1990s economic recession. He depicted both of these revital ization strategies as ‘an alliance between queer politics

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and pink capital’ whereby inner city businesses in Lon don were keen to court gay custom in a competitive re cession era environment. Similarly, in Amsterdam, local government support of gay rights and businesses was linked to the desire to market Amsterdam internationally as a gay capital to the lucrative gay tourism market. The development of the Gay Village in Manchester, UK illustrated this process very well. Quilley argues that the creation of ‘The Village’ as the UK’s only gay village by local authorities was heavily linked to the Central Manchester Development Corporation’s desire to re develop the inner city Canal Street district and promote the Village, and Manchester more generally, to inter national tourists under a banner of ‘cosmopolitan diver sity’. Plans for the development and marketing of similar districts are now being devised for other UK cities such as Newcastle and Birmingham, and similar efforts have been made in many cities around the globe. This shift in attitude (embodied in the shift in ter minology from the popular usage of the defensive and pejorative term ‘gay ghetto’ to the somewhat more positive ‘gay village’ phrase) in which gay visibility has come to be seen in many circles as a positive, revenue enhancing feature of a city is undoubtedly due to the increasing recognition of the economic value of the gay community as a whole. Thus, gay men have managed to use existing political and economic power structures to carve out spaces, rights, and visibility within a post industrial context. Such an achievement, within an often unsympathetic society, is no doubt a positive accom plishment. However, as many have pointed out, such victories can be seen as tenuous, based on whether ‘pink capital’ is wanted or needed at a given point in time.

Issues The previous sections have shown an overall historical shift within gay geographies from clandestine or under ground networks of spaces, to the more visible and open ‘gay ghettoes’, and finally to more contrived and formally recognized ‘gay villages’. These shifts have been largely due to the larger economic processes of industrialization, urbanization and postindustrialism, as well as socio political changes, namely an increased societal and legal tolerance, and in some cases open acceptance, of homosexuality. Clearly, the development of visible gay ghettoes and villages provides many benefits to the gay community in terms of expression, visibility, and power; however, these developments have not been without controversy. Some argue that on the one hand, ghettoization opens up new possibilities in terms of a collective strength to be visible and for gay men to express themselves in public, but on the other, ghettoization as a process continues to set gay

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men apart from their fellow citizens. Thus, the continued development of gay ghettoes runs the risk of helping to continue the social marginalization that created the con ditions for their development in the first place, making the marginalized status of gay men a permanent one. Others within the gay community make the opposite point, and are critical of the increasingly visible, socially acceptable, consumption oriented gay culture that is being embodied within these new gentrified ‘Village’ spaces. Many argue that these consumption oriented spaces glorify a ‘mainstream lifestyle’ which is pro gressively eroding any sense of a distinct gay identity. Many also point to the exclusionary aspects of these new consumer oriented spaces which are dominated by young, clean cut, wealthy, white men at the expense of the poor, older men, ethnic minorities, and those gay men who are less ‘mainstream’ in general. In this respect, many feel as though the diversity, identity, and radicalism of previous decades have been lost in the name of con formity and consumerism. While such discussions will no doubt continue, it is nevertheless clear that spaces oriented around aspects of gay culture and/or lifestyle continue to play an ever more significant part in the fabric of contemporary cities. See also: Chicago School; Gentrification; Heteronormativity; Lesbian Geographies.

Further Reading Bell, D. (1991). Insignificant others: Lesbian and gay geographies. Area 23, 323 329. Bell, D. and Valentine, G. (eds.) (1995). Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities. London: Routledge. Binnie, J. (1995). Trading places, consumption, sexuality and the production of queer space. In Bell, D. & Valentine, G. (eds.) Mapping

Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, pp 182 199. London: Routledge. Bouthillette, A. (1994). Gentrification by gay male communities: A case study of Toronto’s Cabbagetown. In Whittle, S. (ed.) The Margins of the City: Gay Men’s Urban Lives, pp 65 83. Aldershot: Arena. Brown, M. (2000). Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe. London: Routledge. Castells, M. (1983). The City and the Grassroots. London: Edward Arnold. Chauncey, G. (1994). Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890 1940. New York: Basic Books. Heap, C. (2003). The city as a sexual laboratory: The queer heritage of the Chicago School. Qualitative Sociology 26, 457 487. Higgs, D. (ed.) (1999). Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories since 1600. London: Routledge. Ingram, G., Bouthillette, A. and Retter, Y. (eds.) (1997). Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance, p CA. San Francisco: Bay Press. Kenney, M. (2001). Mapping Gay LA: The Intersection of Place and Politics. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Knopp, L. (1987). Social theory, social movements and public policy: Resent accomplishments of the gay and lesbian movements in Minneapolis Minnesota. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 11, 243 261. Knopp, L. (1994). Social justice, sexuality, and the city. Urban Geography 15, 644 660. Knopp, L. (1995). Sexuality and urban space: A framework for analysis. In Bell, D. & Valentine, G. (eds.) Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, pp 149 164. London: Routledge. Lauria, M. and Knopp, L. (1985). Towards an analysis of the role of gay communities in the urban renaissance. Urban Geography 6, 152 169. Levine, M. (1979). Gay ghetto. Journal of Homosexuality 4, 363 377. Siblais, M. (1999). Paris. In Higgs, D. (ed.) Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories since 1600, pp 10 37. London: Routledge. Swope, C. (2003). Chasing the rainbow: Is a gay population an engine of urban revival? Governing. http://governing.com/textbook/ gays.htm (accessed on February 2008). Quilley, S. (1997). Constructing Manchester’s ‘new urban village’: Gay space in the entrepreneurial city. In Brent Ingram, G., Bouthillette, A. & Retter, Y. (eds.) Queers in Space: Communities, Spaces, Sites of Resistance, pp 275 293. San Francisco, CA: Bay Press. Whittle, S. (ed.) (1994). The Margins of the City: Gay Men’s Urban Lives. Aldershot: Arena.

Gender and Health J. Wiles, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction – General Trends Geographers are increasingly interested in how inter connected physical and social dimensions of health play out in and through place. Recent geographical work highlights connections between place, aspects of identity and social status (such as gender), and health. Gender is generally used to refer to socially constructed differ ences, such as the set of qualities and behaviors expected from a male or female by a society, or one’s subjective sense of self as masculine or feminine. Gender roles are thus socially determined; they are learned and vary widely within and between cultures, and over time. In contrast, sex is generally used to refer to biology and anatomy, and the objective categorization of a person’s physiological status as male or female. Of course, such a simple distinction (social vs. biological) is arbitrary and problematic, even though it is useful for the purpose of clarification for this article. For example, gender can also be thought of as something that is ‘practiced’, or performed, within and against the constraints of social norms as well as physiological structures. Moreover, gender is always influenced by both social and physical aspects of identity, such as age, sexuality, region, and ethnicity. Disease prevalence, and lay and official responses to disease, differ across geographic locations and for dif ferent social groups, and gender differences in health are a good example of this. Moreover, meanings attached to places and regions themselves also influence how specific health issues are understood or represented. A good ex ample is Elizabeth Chacko’s work on Pellagra, a disease associated with low income and poor nutrition whose victims were mainly black, low income women in the American south. Chacko argues that perceptions of the South as a ‘regional’ ‘Other’ were combined with reluctance to acknowledge widespread deprivations in the region by Southern leaders and inadequate scrutiny of the racial and gender dimensions of the disease. This meant that those most adversely affected by the disease were those who experienced the combined effects of a Southern regional identity, low socioeconomic status, an African American heritage, and female gender. This re lationship worked at different scales to confuse the way officials and health professionals interpreted and there fore dealt with the disease. This is a good illustration of how place is not simply a container or backdrop to the interplay of gender and health, but actively involved as an important factor in and of itself, and why geographers

have important contributions to make to better under standing of gendered health issues. As Isabel Dyck and her collaborators have argued in a work on Geographies of Women’s Health, health geographers recognize the interconnections between biological, physiological, social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions of health and illness. Far from being neutral scientific and medical phenomena, health and disease are understood within specific social, cultural, and spatial frameworks. As one among many overlapping frame works, gender is not only associated with different risks and protections for specific illnesses, but also produces different behavior when ill. As the sociologist Judith Lorber has suggested, gender elicits different responses in health personnel, affects the social ‘worth’ of patients, and influences priorities of treatment, research, and fi nancing. Gender not only has an impact on health, but gender relations are in turn impacted by health and well being. The provision of both paid and unpaid healthcare is gendered, so that who provides what kind of care when and where, and the meaning and value that is given to that care, contributes to formal and informal economies of healthcare and social status. Recognition of the socially and spatially contextual nature of health and healthcare moves our consideration as geographers firmly away from a biomedical focus. While a biomedical approach regards health as the op posite of illness and disease, a social approach to health understands health as a complex set of social constructs, recognizing wellness as something more than the simple absence of disease. This redefinition of health has broadened the topics covered by geographers interested in health and gender, necessitated new methods to ex plain and understand relationships between gender and health, and led to a more explicit engagement with critical theory. These developments reflect the growing theorization of gender with respect to health, and a general progression from ‘add women and stir’ approaches of the 1970s and early 1980s to more complex analyses and interpretations of the meaning of gender, sex, and sexuality. Early studies of geographies of gender and health typically focused on women’s health. Frequently research developed out of a need to challenge the traditional focus on men or ‘gender neutral’ studies which ignored either sex or gender dif ferences. While some work focused on understanding trends in women’s health in comparison and contrast to men’s health (such as female and male patterns of mor bidity or mortality), others focused on women’s

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reproductive health (most often maternity and infant issues). Less frequently, geographical researchers have studied male specific health issues, although there is a growing body of work related to masculinities, health, and place. Early attempts to explain health related differences between women and men, whether in health outcomes or access to and use of services, tended to focus on different gender roles between men and women. For example, certain occupations such as nursing and teaching are more typically done by women than men. This is partly because of social norms and expectations relating to gender roles, such as traditional stereotypes that women are ‘naturally’ more nurturing and better equipped for providing care than men. Women are also more likely to juggle multiple roles including paid and unpaid work and responsibilities for caring for children and older people. These role differences have implications for women’s health, including the types of work that are available to them and the relative income they earn. For example, health outcomes may be related to specific occupational health risks or implications. Alternatively, the greater stress of juggling multiple roles or holding specific roles may be related to increased morbidity. Later explanations focused on gender relations and inequalities, querying gendered wage differences, or how gender relations in households shape distributions of labor, responsibility, and power. Recently, researchers have theorized gender as even more complex, interacting with factors such as ethnicity, age, stage in life course, wealth and class, and sexuality, among others. This has led to a destabilizing and de centering of gender as a category for under standing health differences, so that gender is not neces sarily the most important category of difference but one of many interacting aspects of individual and group identities and social structures. Gender is understood to be embedded in social systems and practices, whether family, political, medical, or legal systems, or cultures. The premise in such work is that the ways we think about and ‘do’ gender have a significant effect on the physical, social, emotional, and mental health, well being, and illness of individuals and social groups. These more complex theorizations are reflected in the range of research in the area of gender, health, and geography. While in the past the primary focus of re search on gendered health was issues related to repro ductive health, this has now broadened to include other aspects of health and healthcare. Moreover, while the primary focus was traditionally on women and health, only more rarely was there a focus on men. There is now a growing interest in masculinities and health which is quite different to the research which assumes the ‘clinical norm’ is male. Geographers have moved beyond docu menting patterns of difference on the basis of sex to explore how social constructions and powerful norms of

masculinity, difference, and power have (frequently negative) impacts on men’s health. More rarely, re searchers are finally moving beyond the binary of male/ female to explore different forms of gendered and sexualized identities as they relate to health and place, such as transgendered spatialities, or more multiple and fluid forms of sexuality and gendered identities. The remainder of this entry will cover four main arguments: 1. there are gendered differences in health experiences and outcomes; 2. access to and use of services is gendered; 3. roles in provision of healthcare (as formal care pro viders or as informal care providers) are gendered; and 4. gender differences in health occur at a range of interrelated scales. Health Outcomes Health could be considered in terms of the spatial and temporal spheres in which individuals and groups interact on the basis of their gender. For example, Nancy Davis Lewis and Edith Kieffer, writing about the relationship between gender and health for women in developing countries, point out these might include biological re production, agricultural production and formal and in formal work sectors, social reproduction and unpaid work, and time allocation and different responsibilities. In less developed countries, women (especially poor women) face health burdens in reproductive health, care for young, literacy, access to clean water, fertility issues, and power issues. In situations of poverty, the work women typically do has negative implications for their health. Activities such as hauling water for long distances, or tending toxic or smoky fires based on coal, dung, or crop residue indoors using stoves that do not combust well or in places with poor ventilation, mean women are exposed to health risks on a prolonged and daily basis. Health risks include respiratory infection and disease such as tuber culosis and asthma, and cancer including lung cancer. In wealthier countries, male mortality rates tend to be higher than female mortality rates at all ages. Yet female morbidity and use of medical care are usually reported as being higher than those of men. There are important characteristics to this data. Although men have typically tended to have higher rates of conditions such as is chemic heart disease, leading to their higher mortality rates, women have tended to have more acute short term illnesses and more chronic non fatal conditions such as arthritis. The latter are less likely to result in death but are associated with need for medical care. Recent statistics suggest that even some of these trends are showing convergence, for example as women show higher rates of heart disease, perhaps related to trends in smoking and types of stress.

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These sex differences in health have been explained in a wide range of ways. They may be linked to biological risk or some intrinsic difference between men and women conferring differential risks of morbidity. They may be related to acquired risk, such as risk of injury associated with work or recreation, lifestyle and health habits such as smoking, exercise and nutrition, stress, and unemploy ment. A third explanation relates to illness behavior, or the psychosocial aspects of how people perceive symp toms, assess what to do about them and are able to do this. A fourth explanation is health reporting behavior, in cluding how people report their health to interviewers, while a fifth explanation focuses on prior healthcare re ceived and how this influences subsequent health and illness. Broader structural explanations focus on the interaction of aspects of difference and context. For ex ample, power relations between men and women are shaped by class, culture, age, and context. These messy relations shape gender roles and relations (e.g., role status, role satisfaction, and stresses), and gendered inequalities, for example in access to resources, or in responsibilities and opportunities. However while we consistently see gradients of health related to relative wealth, these do tend to be shallower for women than for men. This sug gests the greater reported morbidity rates of women relate mostly to acquired risks such as stress and their gender related roles, and much less to their attitudes toward health and illness and greater use of healthcare services (which may in fact protect them from greater morbidity). One outcome of this is that women tend to live longer than men, and are more prone to disability and illness associated with older age. Age is associated with ill health through accumulated risks up to present (social) and gradual physiological decline (biological). Older women in general are a particularly vulnerable group, with high levels of poverty (much of which is kept ‘hidden’). As populations in wealthy industrialized countries are aging, older people in general are healthier and have a higher quality of life. But we are also seeing greater incidences of diseases and illnesses associated with aging, over more sustained periods of time. Access to and Use of Health Resources Margaret Stacey and Virginia Olesen, introducing a special issue of Social Science and Medicine on women’s health, submit that most healthcare takes place in a social domain located between the domestic sphere of family and the public realm of the marketplace and state. It is difficult to separate out these formal and informal, or public and private places, of healthcare. For this reason it is suggested that it is more useful to talk about gendered access to and use of health ‘resources’ rather than more specific health ‘services’. Health resources encompass unpaid care as well as knowledge about health and access

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to healthy behaviors (such as nutritious food habits or healthy exercise), in addition to the range of formal and informal (e.g., alternative or traditional) services and materials provided by health professionals and paid providers. Health resources extend from state provided services (including housing and housing regulations, a justice system, and education in addition to more direct public health and health service provision) to the specific resources to which an individual has access (whether this is knowledge and information, social support, the time to practice healthy behaviors, or access health services, or material resources such as money, or a healthy body and mind). The possession of, access to, and use of health resources are inherently gendered and have specific geographies. Not only do men and women typically have differential access to these resources, but other social relations interacting with gender further shape access to and use of health resources. Statistically, women use health services more often than men, and they are more likely to use a wider range of health services and resources. Middle aged, well educated, relatively affluent women in particular are high users of alternative, traditional, or complementary therapies, as are those suffering from chronic illnesses or terminal illnesses. There are a range of proposed reasons for this greater use of services. One is that, given their higher reported rates of morbidity, women are in greater need of health services. This may be because they are more vulnerable or sus ceptible to illness and disease (perhaps for physiological or biological reasons such as physical reproduction, but also perhaps as a result of inequalities, gendered hierarchies, gender roles and responsibilities, and power relations). The latter types of explanation suggest that in ‘typical’ roles as carers and nurturers women are likely to be supporting and facilitating others’ use of services as well as their own, or may be more likely to report illness because they are more attuned to the efficacy of care and prevention. Other ill ness behavior explanations suggest that women’s use of services is preventative, or at an earlier stage in the pro gression of illness, whereas men tend to present later but pose an even greater burden on the healthcare system. Others argue that it is more to do with the intersection of gender and socioeconomic status, so that it is actually persistent wage gaps, and higher poverty levels among women and particularly older women, that are responsible for the greater need for and hence use of services. Provision of Healthcare Resources The provision of healthcare is gendered. The majority of healthcare providers are women, even more so if we include informal, ‘lay’, and/or unpaid healthcare. Even within the formal healthcare system, there is a strong hierarchy to healthcare provision. The majority of formal (paid, professional, and trained) healthcare providers is

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women, yet women are disproportionately represented in the lower status and lower paid healthcare professions, while men are disproportionately represented in higher prestige positions. Even those women who are in pro fessions such as medicine are more likely to be clustered in certain specialties such as obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, and general practice. The concept of the glass ceiling, where women can rise only so high in a career relative to their male colleagues, is well known in medicine, where expectations about other roles such as parenting are placed on women, just as supposedly es sentially ‘female’ characteristics such as nurturing and caring are used as reasons for encouraging women into specific specialties and professions such as nursing. An equally gendered phenomenon, the ‘glass elevator’, has also been described whereby those few men who do enter predominantly ‘female’ occupations such as nursing move swiftly to positions of seniority and status. The historical evolution of gendered health provision and power is deeply bound up in these social constructions of gender, power, and identity. Given these gendered differences in the provision and use of health services, the medical encounter itself is also structured by gender relations and power. Typically, the relationship between patients and providers is one where providers are viewed as having the most knowledge and therefore power, and as an asymmetrical relationship. This is challenged by suggestions that while health pro fessionals have expert knowledge about disease and wellness, patients contribute expert knowledge about their own bodies and personal contexts. Some work has shown different communication styles between male and female health professionals, although this research walks a difficult line between ‘essentializing’ characteristics of men and women. For example, there is often little rec ognition of the performative nature of gender whereby individuals conform to (or challenge) gendered norms but also have these norms imposed on them. Assumptions about the gendered nature of health and of social re lations filter into the arena of health provision. For ex ample heart disease is frequently associated with men even though it is among the leading causes of death for women, and often goes undiagnosed among women. As sumptions about the work roles of men and women mean that men may be encouraged to go back to work whereas women are encouraged to stay at home after an illness. By far the majority of healthcare takes place through informal care or on a lay basis through ‘medical con sultations’ with family, friends, and acquaintances, through knowledge sources such as the internet, or through unpaid care. Health service use statistics reveal only ‘the tip of the iceberg’ of health problems, and many problems are informally treated by self, family or friends, or use of alternative medicines whether from trained providers or self administered supplements. With shifts

in the geographical location and the qualitative nature of care (e.g., from institutions to ‘community based’ care, and from in hospital to day surgery and ambulatory care), the importance of ‘lay’, unpaid, or kin or friend based care is increasingly obvious. Research confirms that the majority of informal care providers are women, and that the experience of providing care on an informal basis is inherently gendered. Even those men who provide informal care report that they frequently experience discrimination on the basis of their gender, such as as sumptions that they are somehow less competent carers. The reasons for women providing the majority of in formal care are related to ways societies tend to think about gender, such as perceptions and stereotypes of women as inherently more nurturing, or that informal care reprises many of the tasks, skills, and competencies that are typically associated with women, who may therefore simply feel more competent or able to take on the role. At the household level, decisions about who provides care may be based on women typically earning lesser wages in a household or being more likely to have a flexible or part time job and therefore able to incorporate the role. At an individual level, many carers – both male and female – report that they derive considerable per sonal satisfaction and a source of identity and validation from this role, in addition to struggling with the psy chosocial and physical problems associated with ‘care giver burden’. Health and Gender at Different Scales The material discussed above describes gender and health issues at the scale of households, neighborhoods and communities, cities, and regions and nations. In this section, how gender differences in health occur at a range of interrelated scales from the body to the global scale is discussed. The body, or the ‘geography closest in’, has become a key focus for health and gender. Drawing from the strengths of work on disabilities, researchers have ex plored the relevance of work on bodies for gendered health geographies. For example, while pregnant bodies are often treated as though pregnancy is a medical con dition, feminist geographers have argued that there are problematic consequences in thinking of pregnancy in this biomedical frame, and explored the social and spatial aspects of pregnancy. Others, in exploring the social construction of health and illness, have critiqued as sumptions that experiences of particular illnesses are universal, or that access to a healthcare service is uni versally the same for those at a certain distance away. Similarly, they contest the notion of such a thing as a ‘neutral’ dispassionate observer or healer. Instead they argue for understanding knowledge as embodied and material, through the corporeality of bodies and an

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increasing emphasis on experience. Recently, researchers have been attentive to the idea of embodied conscious ness, or embodied subjectivity. Rather than focusing on either the purely biomedical approach, or a purely social constructionst way of thinking, they argue for under standing the materiality of bodies as they are ‘produced’ in specific historical and geographic contexts. They see individuals as ‘part of ’ larger assemblages, whether net works or relationships, and the body itself as a phe nomenon of physical constraints, options, and choices. Violence must also be understood as an aspect of gendered health. Gendered and sexualized violence oc curs from the micro scale (such as interpersonal violence, domestic violence, and street crime) right through to the macro scale (such as ethnic aggression, seizure of land, and other resources such as water or oil, or war and na tional aggression), and for social, economic, or political reasons. Cynthia Cockburn, discussing gender and vio lence in a paper for the World Bank, argues that the gendered effects of violence are produced in three interrelated ways: through the bodily specificity of males and females, through the characteristic roles in society of males and females, and through gender ideologies. In armed conflict, for example, while the highest rate of direct death is among young men, women and children typically bear high rates of indirect death. Indirect death as a result of conflict is caused by damage to health sys tems, whether because health facilities and workers are targets, or through the effect of sanctions on economically vulnerable groups, and especially women and children. Other impacts are epidemics and the spread of disease from one place to another, which is exacerbated by mal nutrition, poor sanitation, and inadequate water supplies. Environmental harm through exposure to chemical war fare and substances, whether nuclear testing which has an effect on reproductive health, or exposure to landmines, may affect women and children more through their ac tivities and the spaces they occupy. More specific gender issues include sexual violence, with rape, torture, muti lation, and sexual exploitation; prostitution and slavery are common occurrences in conflict areas. In addition to the mental health issues involved in gendered responses to war, trauma and displacement is the inordinate care burden placed on women by the ravages of war. Finally, it is important to consider gendered health issues at the global scale. The benefits of globalization, for example, have been unequally distributed across the globe and between different groups. The feminization of poverty is one such example of the unequal distribution of wealth, whereby increasing proportions of the world’s poor are women and female headed households. This is due, among other things, to persistent wage gaps and dis crimination and stereotyping in the labor force, to en forced gender stereotypes and distributions of power in general, and to conflict and violence at the individual right

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through to international level. Another example is the global shift in the spaces and nature of production. This has gendered implications such as the migration of job opportunities from the central city to the suburbs, from more industrialized to lesser developed nations, or from more industrialized to more service oriented economies. The resulting change in employment patterns has severe impacts on health – for those men who lose jobs (and their families and communities), and the increasing numbers of women who are employed in ‘flexible’ positions with de teriorating work conditions and unsafe environments with little job security, whether in ‘maquilladora’ style factory sweatshops or in various precarious forms of employment. A further example of international trends affecting gender and health is the internationalization of neoliberal market based policies for social services and free trade in general. The privatization of formerly state owned services and decreased public spending on social services dis proportionately affects women, both as employees and as those in need of services.

Summary The relationship between gender and health is complex, and is mediated by and shapes many social relations (age, sexuality, and socioeconomic status) and various socio spatial contexts (environmental, political, social, and economic). While we can observe a number of gendered patterns of health and health outcomes across space, there are a wide variety of ways to conceptualize and explain these, drawing on different ways of understand ing gender itself, in addition to increasingly complex approaches to health. See also: Care/Caregiving; Gender, Historical Geographies of; Health Geography; Masculinities; Medical Geography; Nature, Social; Pregnancy and Childbirth; Welfare Reform.

Further Reading Chacko, E. (2005). Understanding the geography of pellagra in the United States: The role of social and place based identities. Gender, Place and Culture 12(2), 197 212. Cockburn, C. (1999). Gender, armed conflict and political violence. The World Bank. http://www.genderandpeacekeeping.org/resources/ 3 gender armed conflict and political violence.pdf (accessed in April 2008). Doyal, L. (1995). What Makes Women Sick. London: MacMillan. Dyck, I. (2003). Feminism and health geography: Twin tracks or divergent agendas? Gender, Place and Culture 10(4), 361 368. Dyck, I., Lewis, N. D. and McLafferty, S. (eds.) (2001). Routledge International Studies of Women and Place: Geographies of Women’s Health. London and New York: Routledge. Earth, B. and Sthapit, S. (2002). Uterine prolapse in rural Nepal: Gender and human rights implications: A mandate for development. Culture, Health and Sexuality 4(3), 281 296.

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Geoforum (1995). Special Issue: Geographies of Women’s Health. Geoforum 26(3), 239 323. Laws, G. (1995). Understanding ageism: Lessons from feminism and postmodernism. The Gerontologist 35, 112 118. Lewis, N. D. (1998). Intellectual intersections: Gender and health in the pacific. Social Science and Medicine 46(6), 641 659. Lewis, N. D. and Kieffer, E. (1994). The health of women: Beyond maternal and child health. In Philips, D. & Verhasselt, Y. (eds.) Health and Development, pp 122 137. London: Routledge. Lorber, J. (1997). Gender and the Social Construction of Illness. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Macintyre, S. (1993). Gender differences in longevity and health in Eastern and Western Europe. In Platt, S., Thomas, H., Scott, S. & Williams, G. (eds.) Locating Health: Sociological and Historical Explorations, pp 57 73. Aldershot: Avebury. Pearson, M. (1989). Medical geography: Genderless and colourblind. Contemporary Issues in Geography and Education 3, 9 17. Stacey, M. and Olesen, V. (1993). Introduction: Special Issue on Women’s Health. Social Science and Medicine 36(1), 1 5. Verbrugge, L. M. (1989). The twain meet: Empirical explanations of sex differences in health and mortality. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 30, 282 304.

Gender and Rurality J. Little, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Sub-discipline Geography as a discipline has long been broken down into recognised sub-disciplines reflecting particular areas of research and writing. Such sub-disciplines are fluid and tend to have widely varying rates of instiutional acceptance as well as theoretical and intellectual development.

Introduction Discussions of the development of rural geography in the 1970s and 1980s have frequently noted the seeming re luctance within the subdiscipline to embrace new theo retical perspectives. While human geography, in general, was discovering a new social relevance and political awareness, exploring inequality and power relations through the application of Marxist and political economic perspectives, rural geography remained largely descriptive, slow to apply and develop the kinds of ‘cutting edge’ theoretical debates characterizing much of the rest of human geography. The study of gender was no exception and the examination of difference and social inequality based on gender only ‘arrived’ in rural studies once it was well established in human geography. Similarly, key de bates surrounding the relevance of feminist theory to the study of human geography were firmly rooted in urban studies and only rehearsed in a rural context some years after being adopted by urban geographers. In other disciplines, notably rural sociology, two areas of research had identified the relevance of gender to the study of rural social and economic relations. The ‘com munity studies’ common in the early and mid twentieth century had highlighted the different family and com munity roles of men and women in the ethnographies of daily life in the English village. Similarly, studies of agriculture had recorded the role played by women in petty commodity production and the survival of the family farm. In neither area, however, was gender the central focus of research and any acknowledgement of gender difference was simply in recognizing the particular characteristics of the lives of women and men as they contributed to the operation and organization of the rural society. Both areas, the organization of domestic and com munity life and the operation of the family farm, were, however, to prove important foci of gender studies as they emerged in rural geography. As rural geography began to

pay more attention to issues of welfare, inequality, and resource allocation in the 1980s and to begin to place such work in theoretical frameworks of power, studies started to build on these early descriptions of men and women’s roles in the development of specific gendered and feminist perspectives. The following two subsections will outline the development of work on gender in the two key areas of farming and community. Such a separation of work is, in part, reflective of a division in rural geography from the mid 1980s between agricultural and nonagricultural re search. These were not, however, discrete areas of intel lectual endeavor, at least not in the area of gender research, and the exchange of ideas between those working in agriculture and those working on the rural community was vital to the development of understanding of gender relations and identities and to the application of feminist perspectives. The material discussed in these sections is drawn mainly from the UK and the US but with a rec ognition of the more recent and growing contribution of studies from Australia and New Zealand and parts of Europe, notably Scandinavia.

Gender and Agriculture In common with other areas of geography, the intro duction of gender issues in the study of agricultural geography began by documenting the roles of men and women and drawing attention to the neglect of women’s lives by academic perspectives that tended to subsume their activities into those of men. This documentation, while essentially descriptive, implicitly sought to chal lenge the assumption of men’s work and men’s lives as ‘the norm’ against which women were measured, judged, or simply ignored. The fundamental inequality of such an approach was further highlighted in the case of agri culture and the family farm, in particular, by an assertion that in neglecting or downplaying gender difference, the essential role of women in the economic profitability and viability of the agricultural enterprise was, in fact, being ignored. A focus on women in agriculture was needed, it was argued, both to understand how women lived their lives and how their activities and responsibilities differed from men’s, but also to fully comprehend the economics of the farm business and the ways in which the pressures and demands of agricultural production on the family run farm were managed. The initial recognition of women’s ‘invisibility’ within the agricultural production process gave rise to a number of studies in the UK, the US, and Europe which sought to

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identify the nature of women’s contribution to agricultural work and to calculate its economic centrality to the farm business. Women, it was argued, occupied widely differing positions regarding the amount and type of labor they performed but, regardless of what they actually did, their labor was universally treated as less important than that of the man. Just as importantly, women were found to undertake a whole range of tasks that, although critical to the running of the farm (tasks such as secretarial work, feeding the farm workers, caring for small animals, and providing emergency labor), were not recognized within the wider definition or evaluation of agricultural ‘work’ and were certainly not regarded as important to the business itself. As was the pattern in geography more generally, this initial concern to document the lives of farm women started to give way to the development of theoretical frameworks to explain the gender difference. In particular, studies questioned classic Marxist and political economic interpretations of the labor process and argued that the particular position of women in agriculture needed to be conceptualized more broadly in terms of gender relations as well as (or instead of) labor relations. Researchers ar gued for the adoption of theoretical frameworks that fo cused on the operation of patriarchal gender relations in order to explain the lives of farm women and to draw attention to the largely unvalorized role of the repro ductive sphere in the organization and operation of the family farm. What was required, it was argued, was some understanding of the gendered power relations that were central to all aspects of the economic and social repro duction of the family farm. Rather than simply examining the work of farm women, studies turned to look at the relational nature of men and women’s roles, showing how gendered power relations were woven through not only the practical organization of agricultural tasks but also the underlying recognition of the status and responsibilities of men and women on the farm. During the 1990s, the emphasis of feminist geography shifted away from ‘grand theories’ of explanation toward more small scale, localized, and fluid notions of gender difference. A questioning of what were seen as the pri orities of white, middle class, Western feminism in the academy encouraged a recognition of the multiple and varying lives of women and men and steered academic work toward the study of gender identities and the dif ferent ways in which the roles of men and women were constructed. In rural geography, studies of gender in agriculture in Western economies recognized the con struction of a dominant ‘farming woman’ identity (through, e.g., showing how women are associated with particular parts of the business and women’s role in farm diversification). They also explored ways in which some women’s identities differed from the dominant form, showing how women carve out alternative identities and

challenge expectations about their role within and con tribution to the farm business. While new work on farming and gender identities has encouraged important work on difference and identity construction, some re searchers have argued for the continued relevance of patriarchy in understanding common experiences of men and women involved in agriculture and articulating broad structures and patterns of power within farming.

Gender and the Rural Community As noted above, work on gender and rurality also de veloped in another direction in a separate series of studies on the rural community and nonagricultural household. A similar pattern unfolded in which initial work sought to draw attention to the particular issues faced by rural women – specifically in relation to access to resources and opportunities. It was argued that rural women were doubly disadvantaged in a rural context; as rural residents, they suffered the problems of remoteness and poor services but these problems were exacerbated by gender and the fact that, as women, they were responsible for the domestic reproduction of the household. Studies of employment claimed that rural women’s disadvantage was particularly evident in the labor market where a lack of available jobs combined with an absence of childcare and other services further limited opportunities, particularly in full time and professional employment. Following this articulation of gender difference and of the issues and problems faced by rural women, work moved on to attempt to explain gender roles through the application of feminist theoretical perspectives. Such work focused on gender relations and sought to place rural women’s roles within a broader understanding of power and, specifically, the operation of patriarchy. In so doing it drew widely on feminist geography, asserting that it was not the rural location that led to women’s inequality (e.g., in relation to job opportunities or access to services) but rather the power relations that existed between men and women and, in particular, the assumption that women were chiefly responsible for the domestic sphere and for associated issues of childcare. This work also argued, however, that while it was gender, and not rurality, that was responsible for women’s inequality, rural society im posed a particular set of assumptions on the operation of gender relations that ensured the endurance of conserva tive attitudes to the roles of men and women. Families, households, and wider rural society were organized along traditional lines that saw women as the ‘lynch pin’ of the rural community and the center of the domestic realm and, as a result, any involvement in paid labor by women was seen as secondary to their main role. Through the 1990s, as questions of gender identity became more central to feminist studies (as described

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above), rural geographers shifted away from the examin ation of the domestic division of labor and the operation of the community in the development of work on the con structions of rural femininity and masculinity. Taking up ideas on the operation of a particular form of rural patriarchy, studies argued that it was possible to identify specific rural constructions of gender identity. Initially, such work concentrated on the examination of what sev eral authors termed the ‘cultures of rural womanhood’, showing how constructions of rural femininity articulated certain values and expectations about the rural community and that such constructions created/reinforced a hege monic form of rural femininity that downplayed difference and resistance. They described how highly conservative assumptions about the domestic work of women and the importance of the family dominated, particularly among older women, and how ideologies of rural motherhood were central to the gender identities of rural women at the individual and household level. Such studies linked the construction of traditional femininity with dominant cul tures of rurality, arguing that the idea of a rural idyll served to keep in place and valorize moral assumptions surrounding rural gender identities and the family.

Gender and Rural Sexuality With the development of work on rural gender identities and ‘otherness’ came an explicit focus on sexuality. Again, rural geographers tended initially to lag behind urban geographers in recognizing the relevance of space to the construction and performance of sexuality. Such tardiness was only in part due to a lack of engagement with the wider debates around sexuality and space, also reflecting, it may be argued, the construction of the rural as a less consciously sexualized space. While urban geographers explored the increasing visibility of gay spaces and examined the emergence of new kinds of relationships between sexuality and space, rural geographers found little comparable challenge to the traditional sexual identities in rural spaces. Thus it was only when notions of otherness and marginalization began to be taken seriously, that rural geography began to take note of hidden identities, among them gay and lesbian identities. This absence of visible ‘gay spaces’ in rural areas meant that studies of lesbians and gays were character ized initially by an absence. While some rare exceptions identified gay rural communities, particularly in the US, the majority of studies examined problems faced by those identifying as gay or lesbian in finding networks and establishing friendship groups. They concluded that the lack of a visible presence reinforced and was reinforced by an absence of services, activities, and support for gays and lesbians, exacerbating a sense of marginalization and a belief that homosexuality had no place in the rural

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community. Kramer’s study of gay men living in the Midwest of the US, for example, revealed the difficulties they faced in small conservative rural towns in finding places to meet potential partners. The research went on to suggest that the absence of an identifiable gay space forced many men away from rural areas to live in more tolerant and diverse societies. What emerged from these studies of social exclusion of rural gays and lesbians was the importance of placing the examination of homosexuality within a broader under standing of rural sexuality. Research on the experiences of those living (or trying to live) gay and lesbian lives in rural communities needed to be conceptualized in a recognition of the dominance of a particularly conservative and family based heterosexuality in which there existed a lack of tol erance toward other, ‘deviant’ sexualities. Thus studies moved from a rather narrow focus on the identification and examination of the lives lived by rural homosexual men and women to an exploration of constructions of hetero sexuality and its reproduction in all areas of rural society. Rural society, it was argued, is dominated by a belief that the natural sexuality of rural communities is het erosexuality. Many of the practical and ideological characteristics of the rural community are based on an assumption of the implicit superiority of the nuclear family as the dominant form of social organization. Such arguments showed how central to the rural idyll is the interrelationship of family and community. Just as pre vious research had highlighted the importance of tradi tional gender relations to the operation and survival of the rural community (reliant as it was on women’s unpaid labor), so more recent work showed how heterosexuality and community are mutually dependent and reinforcing. Assumptions about the dominance of the family in rural society help to create a moral geography in which any variation from hegemonic forms of heterosexuality is seen as deviant. Thus, it is not only homosexuality that is seen as inappropriate in a rural context but other forms of non family based sexuality. The rural is constructed as a space of morally superior and benign sexual relations, in contrast to the deviance of the urban. Acknowledge ment of the rural as a place of active sexual relations tends to stress the cheery ‘love among the haystacks’ image of jocularity and inexperience. While the coun tryside may be a place of sexual experimentation and relative freedom among the young, the sexual experi ences that take place are seen as largely innocent and unthreatening and far removed from more seedy and potentially dangerous urban encounters. Research has shown how this very powerful con struction of the rural as heterosexual and unthreatening is reflected in dominant versions of rural masculinity and femininity. Much of this work has focused on masculinity and on the links that can be drawn between the rural landscape and environment and a certain form of

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traditional and stereotypical masculinity. Thus work on agriculture, forestry, and on military training has shown how ‘real men’ are constructed, in a rural context, as men who are fit and tough and can cope with the physical challenges of the outdoors (whether in relation to making a living as a farmer or surviving as a soldier). As Woodward points out, rural nature is seen as a ‘test’ for rural masculinity and control over nature (through sur vival) evidence of the ability to perform as a man. She describes how, among soldier recruits, to be beaten by nature is to fail as a man and be accused of being soft or a fairy. A real man in this rural context, then, is definitely a heterosexual man. Fewer studies have looked directly at rural femininities, yet there is frequently an assumption in work on rural sexuality, in general, of an equally strong set of rural ‘qualities’ surrounding the construction of the rural woman. Work by Little, in 2003 and 2007, for example, explores the expectations articulated by single farmers in their attempts to find a partner/wife. Strong assumptions about the ‘right’ sort of woman are clearly articulated by the farmers – thus, true country women possess a knowledge of nature and rurality that make them acceptable partners. But, inter estingly, this understanding of the countryside is linked to other qualities in the rural woman – a stability, homeliness, and practicality. Rural women are low maintenance and sensible and often, it seems, have a style and appearance that reflects these qualities. Other work on rural femininities has explored how the idea of ‘acceptable’ rural femininities becomes established within the identities of young girls growing up in the countryside. Such work includes oral histories of women growing up in the rural UK in the 1960s, and shows how rurality imposed particular constraints on the performance of femininity and how young girls resisted and negotiated those constraints at times, particularly when they moved beyond the spaces of the village. Other research has looked at the relationship between femininity, space, and rurality in the identities of rural teenagers and shown how strong moral assumptions surround the association between place and sexuality with a belief among both young men and women of the moral superiority of the countryside in the context of sexual identities. The various studies of rural sexuality have demon strated the relational nature of constructions of masculinity and femininity. The rural is shown not only as both the site for the performance of sexuality but also as a factor in its construction. Certain rural structures and institutions, such as the family, church, and community, are seen to reinforce and anchor heterosexuality, offering little option of devi ation from highly conservative norms and expectations. The ideas that support these more concrete structures relate, it is argued, to a wider rural ideology that underpins an idyllic construction of rurality. Thus, heterosexuality is firmly embedded in rurality as an idea and a way of life.

The final short section of this discussion of gender and rurality concerns recent developments in the study of embodiment as they have translated to rural geography. Such developments have been partly inspired by a greater emphasis on performativity within cultural geography and, in particular, within gender studies on the related notion of gender as reiterative and constantly becoming. The body, as part of the performance of gender, has started to occupy a prominent position in the work of geographers whose attention has turned, un surprisingly, to the role of space in shaping and mediating the embodied performance of gender.

Gender and the Rural Body As noted, some work has made reference to the rural body in drawing attention to the stereotypical embodi ment of masculinity and femininity associated with dominant constructions of rural sexuality. In addition, other authors have begun to look at the body as part of the growing importance attached to the understanding of the role of emotions in constructions of place. For ex ample, work on adventure tourism agues that new forms of tourism (such as bungee jumping and whale watching) provide a different form of experience in which the tourist is allowed/required to be much closer to nature. The emotional engagement with nature is enhanced, it is suggested, when the tourist becomes, bodily, part of the nature they are experiencing. While arguably not directly gendered, the ability to engage in some of the ‘oppor tunities’ of adventure tourism is strongly inscribed with assumptions about the gendering of bodies and of the competences required for more extreme activities. Work on surfing and snowboarding has also extended these debates about the relationship between gender, the body, and competence within outdoor, rurally based activities. The body is brought back into the mainstream discussion of rural social relations and the cultural construction of rurality in an examination of the representations of the rural body. It is argued that such representations have served to reinforce the rural community as a place of stable and unthreatening gender relations. The unthreatening portrayal of the rural body in the (now flourishing genre) of naked calendars is further evidence, it is suggested, of the un contested and benign nature of rural heterosexuality. Rep resentations of the rural body in the calendars tend to be jocular, often older and rounder than the classic images seen in the traditional calendars. Poses are tasteful, demure, or saucy, reinforcing the ‘love among the haystacks’ image discussed earlier and there is no space for more raunchy or seedy depictions of the body. This article started with an assertion that rural geog raphers tended to be slow to respond to new developments

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in the study of gender and place. There was a reluctance, in particular, to strive for new theoretical directions and the emphasis of early rural work on gender seemed always to be on applying ideas initiated in an urban context. While distinctive rural dimensions were noted to, for ex ample, the organization of gender roles and the operation of patriarchy, the rural itself did not seem to offer par ticularly fertile ground for more original discussions of gender difference. Recently, however, there has been more of an interest in developing distinct and innovative dir ections in rural gender studies. Work on nature and gen der, for example, has brought novel perspectives to issues of sexuality and the body, while debates around the pro duction and consumption of local food have also seen the development of new avenues of work on gender in relation to health, nutrition, and eating practices. Yet, there remain many underdeveloped areas of rural gender research and the rural offers considerable potential for new agenda setting work in the field of gender studies. See also: Agriculture, Sustainable.

Further Reading Bell, D. and Valentine, G. (1995). Queer country: Rural gay and lesbian lives. Journal of Rural Studies 11, 113 122. Brandth, B. (1995). Rural masculinity in transition: Gender images in tractor advertisements. Journal of Rural Studies 11, 123 133.

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Campbell, H., Bell, M. M. and Finney, M. (eds.) Country Boys: Masculinity and Rural Life. University Park, PA: Penn State Press. Elswood Hollard, K. (2005). ‘We used to scrump the apples, we used to have our knickers full of ‘em’. Growing up in the countryside: Forging femininities in rural Somerset c: 1950 1970. In Little, J. & Morris, C. (eds.) Critical Studies in Rural Gender Issues, pp 123 140. Aldershot: Ashgate. Fellows, W. (1996). Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Mid West. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Hughes, A. (1997). Rurality and ‘‘cultures of womanhood’’: Domestic identities and the moral order in village life. In Cloke, P. & Little, J. (eds.) Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalization and Rurality, pp 123 137. London: Routledge. Liepins, R. (2000). Making men: The construction and representation of agriculture based masculinities in Australia and New Zealand. Rural Sociology 65, 605 620. Little, J. (2002). Gender and Rural Geography: Identity Sexuality and Power in the Countryside. Harlow: Pearson Education. Little, J. (2003). ‘Riding the rural love train’: Heterosexuality and the rural community. Sociologia Ruralis 43(4), 401 417. Little, J. and Austin, P. (1996). Women and the rural idyll. Journal of Rural Studies 12, 101 111. Little, J. and Leyshon, M. (2003). Embodied rural geographies: Developing a research agenda. Progress in Human Geography 27(3), 257 272. Sachs, C. (1983). The Invisible Farmers: Women in Agricultural Production. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenfield. Saugeres, L. (2002). The cultural representation of the farming landscape: Masculinity, power and nature. Journal of Rural Studies 18, 373 404. Woodward, R. (2000). Warrior heroes and little green men: Soldiers, military training, and construction of rural masculinities. Rural Sociology 65, 640 657.

Gender in the City Linda Peake, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Affect A term referring to an emotional state – love, hope, fear, anger – without any specific reference to an object (such as love of one’s neighbor or hope for peace), indicating that it is a nonrepresentational mode of thought. Gender The social construction of masculinities and femininities. It is increasingly recognized as a problematic term that does not translate easily into other languages. Global South Underdeveloped countries that have been locked out of economic and social advancement by processes of imperialism and the economic policies of wealthier nations. LGBTTQ This acronym refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexed, and queer folk. It is increasingly seen as a problematic term, referring to both gender and sexuality for its defining features. Masculinity Studies An interdisciplinary field of study concerning men, masculinity, gender, sexuality, and their associated politics. NIDL New international division of labor. Urbanization The process of a country’s population becoming urban and of cities becoming the engines of growth of the economy.

Introduction From the outset, gender in the city has been an inter disciplinary field that has attracted both academics and professional practitioners, with the earliest conference session probably being the 1976 UN Habitat conference in Vancouver that led to the production of the Women and Environments magazine, which has recently celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. In the discipline of Geography, gender in the city is a field of study that has chiefly interested feminist geographers. Although research about gender and the city need not necessarily focus on women (it can, for example, examine the structures of power and material discourses that work to produce inequality be tween women and men), the predominance of feminists in this field goes a long way to explain why the vast bulk of research has centered on women, although this is now starting to change given the inroads that are being made by LGBTTQ and Masculinity Studies. And it has been the predominance of white feminists, and the hegemony of Anglo American geography, that explains the focus on

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white women in Western cities, although this too is changing. So in the twenty first century, when the interests of feminist geographers and other feminist scholars, including historians, political scientists, soci ologists, planners, and architects, can no longer be neatly defined or categorized, the field of gender in the city refuses easy overview.

Something Old, Something New? Feminist perspectives are relatively new to Urban Studies, a field which started in continental Europe in the 1870s. Anglo American feminist geography emerged a century later in the early 1970s – a result of second wave feminism – and there is widespread agreement that its longest standing field of enquiry has been gender in Western cities, especially its social, economic, and political di mensions. Thus, the first feminist geography publications (in Area and Antipode) were on urban topics, respectively, a study of the childcare needs of single mothers and a critique of Marxist conceptions of production, social re production, and urban form. These articles were also il lustrative of the diverse interests that would come to preoccupy urban feminist scholars, ranging from simply enumerating and comparing the everyday lives of women and men, to making distinctions between sex and gender, to developing feminist urban theory. The specific factors behind the development of the topic of gender in the city were, on the one hand, the influence of second wave feminism on (Anglo American based) feminist geog raphers and, on the other, the overwhelming focus by the critical left in Geography on urban economic based theories of capitalism – itself a result of the fact that in advanced industrialized societies most aspects of everyday life took place in cities and towns. But this is not the whole story. It is often forgotten that at the same time feminist scholars looking at issues of development in the Global South also turned to studies of gender in the city. Moreover, these studies of gender in urban places in the Global South have, increasingly, come to encompass studies that originate in the South, giving rise to a vibrant literature. Literatures on women in Western cities and women in the urban Global South, however, have tended to follow separate trajectories and rarely acknowledge each other. This is by no means unusual; the discipline of Geography is replete with accounts of subdisciplines talking past each other. In this case, it may be explained by Anglo American feminist scholars’ preoccupation with the development of critical urban theory while the focus

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in the Global South has been primarily on poor women’s lives in towns and cities. A surficial review of the research in this field might lead to the assumption that much remains the same. Certainly, some of the topics of enquiry appear reassuringly familiar and date back to the late 1970s, as Table 1 shows. The first studies of women in Western cities developed from the oretical engagement with processes of urbanization and of the gendered dimensions of urban form, especially issues of city centers being regarded as sites of masculinity/ production/ paid work and suburbs as sites of femininity/ social reproduction/ unpaid work. As so much of the work was initiated by feminist planners and architects aspects of built form, such as urban planning, design, and archi tecture, including those related to domestic spaces and the home, were also of interest. Studies also focused on labor market and work–home links, as well as access to facilities such as childcare and transportation. Much of this work was already theoretically sophisticated, building as it did on critiques of Marxist, neo Marxist, and Weberian ac counts of the development of urban form. Given the focus on critiques of capitalism it was hardly surprising that, at least in Britain, feminist research in Geography came to be dominated by studies of the interlocking axes of power of gender and class, with socialist feminism being the predominant theoretical focus. From this socialist, feminist theoretical base, urban feminist geographers in the mid 1980s expanded their repertoire into urban politics

Table 1

(including women’s participation in formal and informal spheres of politics and in urban social movements), housing (especially in relation to homelessness and gen trification), urban based identities (including gender, class, ‘race’ and ethnicity, and urban geographies of patriarchies), and women’s fear in, and of, urban places. Other research clusters, not having as long a heritage in feminist work, established themselves from the early 1990s onwards, as a result of feminist geographers’ in creasing engagement with theoretical developments in the social sciences such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, psychoanalytic theory, third wave feminism, and critical race theory, resulting in critiques of earlier work for its lack of engagement with feminisms outside the socialist orbit. Urban geographies of women of color started to appear, especially of immigrant and refugee women, First Nations and Aboriginal women, as well as a focus on specific groups of women workers such as domestic workers and sex workers. Other topics emerged because of the increasing attention being paid to alternative sexualities to heterosexuality such as to queered urban spaces. The work of geographers of sexuality also led to an intense interest in embodied urban geographies. Accounts of urban public space joined those of urban form. And there has, increasingly, been space for studies of women’s agency in relation to urban consumption and women’s spaces of pleasure/leisure, as well as those of spaces of urban poverty.

Gender in the Western city research foci

Gender in the Western city research foci

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

Gender and urbanization; urban form: city center versus suburbs; processes of production (paid work) versus reproduction (unpaid work); urban restructuring Labor markets and work home links, including childcare; transportation and access to facilities; (as well as from the late 1990s with studies of parenting, childhood and children, care giving and the ethics of care) Urban planning, design, and architecture Women and urban politics; urban social movements; women’s political participation (as well as from the late 1990s with issues of citizenship). Domestic spaces; the home Urban-based identities of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality; urban geographies of patriarchies; social constructions of difference, especially in relation to femininities and masculinities (with the introduction in the late 1990s of issues of racism, whiteness, and transnationalism) Women’s fear and urban places (with the introduction in the 2000s of issues of surveillance) Urban poverty Housing: homelessness and gentrification Immigrant women, First Nations, Aboriginal women in cities; a focus on specific groups of workers such as domestic workers and sex workers; (with the introduction in the late 1990s of issues of racism, whiteness, and transnationalism) Lesbian and gay urban geographies; LGBTTQ spaces Embodied urban geographies Urban public space (though earlier studies on, e.g., women’s access to parks and women-only buildings date back to the late 1970s) Women’s spaces of pleasure/leisure, the flaneur Urban emotional geographies

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x x

x x

x x

x x

x x

x x

x x

x

x

x

x x

x x x

x x x

x x x

x x x

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x x

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Two trajectories, however, lead to a critique of the view that the field of gender in the city in the new millennium is merely more of the same. First, since the late 1990s new topics that emphasize the diversity of women’s experiences have made their way into the lexicon of feminist geog raphers including urban citizenship, racism and whiteness, children’s urban geographies, urban emotional geographies, and visual methodologies. Second, established topics are being addressed through new tensions. A renewed focus on the work–family nexus through studies of parenting, childhood, caregiving and the ethics of care is replacing earlier studies on home–work linkages and women’s dual role. In addition, the consideration of transnationalism has necessitated a blurring of boundaries and the imploding of seemingly fixed hierarchies; a focus on migration, house hold reproduction, family policy, and marginalized workers is indicative that the Global South is no longer the sole reserve of development geographers as Western cities have become increasingly integrated and inculcated with global flows of people, capital, goods, and ideas. The field of gender in the city in relation to cities in the Global South commenced, in the 1960s, with studies of rural women’s migration to urban centers, as well as on the role of women’s work in the informal sector in urban areas (see Table 2). In the 1970s, research started to make inroads questioning the representations of women in these earlier studies, especially in relation to their sexuality and engagement in prostitution. The focus also turned to women’s roles within households but it was not

Table 2

until the late 1970s that feminist research developed momentum. In the 1980s, studies continued with a focus on women’s triple role as mothers, workers, and com munity organizers. In particular, women’s efforts to se cure housing and to upgrade their homes, as well as accounts of their daily lives in urban slums and squatter settlements, united with studies of urban politics to in vestigate how women organized to secure services for their communities. Studies of household structures and accounts of urban poverty formed another set of interests, especially investigations of how resources were distrib uted within the household. In the 1990s, this theme merged with studies of the impact of structural adjust ment policies on low income households. The survival strategies that households devised to cope with the economic violence unleashed on their lives emerged alongside studies of women’s experiences of domestic violence. The latter overlapped with studies that looked at the health concerns of women, especially reproductive health, and the lives of urban youth and children. An interest in specific groups of women workers led, in particular, to studies of sex workers and transnational migrant workers. Studies also began to emerge on the gendered nature of urban space and on urban environmental issues, such as women’s engagement in urban agriculture, the impact on women’s lives of the degradation of urban environments, and urban feminist political ecology. Most recently, in the 2000s, studies of alternative sexualities have started to appear.

Gender in the urban Global South research foci

Gender in the urban Global South research foci

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

Women and urbanization processes, especially rural to urban migration, urban marginalization/culture of poverty (with its focus on the immorality of women and an emphasis in the 1960s on modernization policy) Women and work: formal and informal sectors; women as active in production and reproduction (in the 1970s, with a focus on basic needs policy and, in the 1980s, with a focus on the implications of the NIDL); feminist critiques of prostitution Land, housing, and human settlements; urban poverty; women’s triple role Household structures; household survival strategies; distribution of resources within the household (with a focus from the 1990s on transnational households) Urban politics, especially squatter movements; urban service provision such as water, childcare, transportation Urban crisis survival strategies; impact of SAPs (structural adjustment programs); urban citizenship Urban violence, domestic and economic Specific groups of workers, especially transnational migrant workers and sex workers; Urban environments: degradation of urban environments; women farmers in urban areas; urban feminist ecology Gendered nature of urban space Urban health; women’s reproductive health; AIDS/HIV Urban children and youth Sexualities and queered urban spaces

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x x

x x

x x

x

x

x

x

x

x x

x x

x

x

x x x

x x x x

NIDL ¼ New International Division of Labor.

Gender in the City

Gendered Understandings of Urban Form and of Gendered City Lives In the second half of this entry I turn to brief accounts of some of the major current themes that have been high lighted by feminist scholars in the field of gender in the city. The Restructuring of Urban Form and of Women’s Lives Feminist concerns have focused on both the role played by social relations, especially those of gender and class, in the production and reproduction of urban form, and the extent to which the social position of women has im proved with urbanization. Data on sex ratios in urban areas reveal that women outnumber men, but for cen turies there have been various attempts (not least sym bolically) to assign women to the private sphere of the home and even to prevent them from entering public spaces. While the association of women with the private and men with the public is now recognized as more of an ideal, or ideology, as opposed to a reality, the concept of ‘separate spheres’ has been a powerful one. Work on the effect of segregated land uses – of home and work – in post World War II Western cities, emphasized how women tended to be housewives and men, breadwinners. Many (white) feminists have thus, argued that Western urban forms, in particular the mid twentieth century divide between city center and suburbs, have served to increase women’s subordination by facilitating the re moval of job opportunities from women and relegating them to the domestic world of the home. More recently though, postmodern feminists have emphasized the eco nomic, social, and sexual freedoms and opportunities that have arisen from urbanization. The rise of department stores in the nineteenth century, for example, gave women a legitimate right to be in public spaces, as did libraries, museums, and galleries. Critiques of the dichotomy of male/public and female/private spaces also came from African American feminists who argue that women of color have a long engagement with the public sphere through waged work. The destabilization of these het erosexualised male and female spaces is also evident in other various ways; from the gentrification of neighbor hoods and lesbian and gay pride parades, that LBGTTQ folks assert their presence in the urban environment. Besides the focus on waged work, research on women (historically and in the present) providing housing for themselves and their children, has also contributed to studies of changing urban forms. Perhaps, in recent years, gentrification has been the major topic related to housing that has drawn the attention of feminist geographers. The regeneration of run down, inner city areas has afforded single women and female headed households the op portunities to live downtown in mixed use areas where

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accessibility to job and services is maximized. The lit erature on gentrification, however, tends to downplay the libratory potential it holds for women; despite the op portunities central downtown locations hold for women to live outside the confines of the nuclear family, the diversification of household forms in the suburbs and the apparent increase in paid domestic help in high income dual earner households, suggests that changes in gender relations may well be taking place faster in places that were, traditionally, considered bastions of the nuclear, heterosexual, middle class family. Women’s increasing entry into the labor force in the latter half of the twentieth century further added to urban restructuring through the emergence of new spatial div isions of labor. Firms have been shown to change their locations to attract female employees, such as relocating to suburbs or to public transportation hubs (given that women use public transport more than men), and also moving to countries where wages are lower. However, research on how the latest round of neoliberal, urban governance is reconstituting urban space and gendered identities in Western cities is only at an early stage. Studies have examined how women who are mothers juggle life–work balance in urban arenas. Men’s and women’s roles as par ents have come under increasing scrutiny as have the schedules and strategies that households develop to cope with restructuring (and uncertainty). The ways in which households are becoming more implicated in each other’s social reproduction, through both paid and unpaid rela tionships is also under investigation. The rise of com modified caring is being examined both in relation to children and elder care. And although the majority of women live lives very much rooted in place, studies of the ways in which women maintain transnational households, both from positions of privilege and disadvantage, have increased. What these studies reveal is that it is clearly at the micro urban level that we begin to understand how race, family structure, class, and stage of life cycle affect women’s mobility and opportunities. What is known about urban restructuring under neoliberalism, characterized by public–private sector partnerships (what some refer to as the ‘shadow state’), is that it has resulted in increasing social and economic polarization and has greatly increased the burdens on many women’s lives, due, partially, to the rise of pre carious employment. There have also been major impacts on women’s service organizations which have been forced to focus more on service delivery and to relinquish advocacy roles to maintain state funding. The divides between women in Western cities with professional, well paid, unionized jobs with pensions, versus those in low paid, part time, and (in some cases) home based jobs with no recourse to benefits have substantially increased, while in cities in the Global South, there has been a rise in work in informal sectors as the formal sectors in many

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countries have collapsed under the burdens of structural adjustment policies and neoliberal governance, resulting (in both the West and the Global South) in the femi nization of poverty. Increasing engagement in the in formal sector, though, has also included, for example, more women starting home based businesses based on food services, attempting to sell produce grown in community or home gardens, and providing care for children and the elderly. Thus, the collapse of formal sectors, also presents ‘opportunities’. For example, women in the barrios in Lima, Peru, formed community kitchens and the Glass of Milk program for children (that was ultimately taken over by the municipal government). Urban Planning and Design The literature on urban form has been very closely aligned with that of ‘women and planning’ where the focus has been on the practicalities of women’s everyday lives as mothers, household members, workers, and ac tivists. Some feminist planners have argued that urban planning is preoccupied with the need to control the city and, inter alia, women; it is, they argue, as much an ideology as a technical practice. With its origins in nineteenth century scientific rationalism, planning has searched out logical solutions to the allocation of scarce resources in attempts to create ‘order out of chaos’. However, the rational comprehensive planning focus has long been usurped by other paradigms, including com municative planning, radical planning, insurgent plan ning, and by feminist practitioners whose emphasis is on the emancipatory and just city and on democratic par ticipation in reshaping the city. Many feminist planners consider the interrelationship between land use and transportation to be a key factor in determining the degree of ease with which women can live their daily lives. The rigid imposition of zoning, the separation of land uses, and the development of urban sprawl in Western cities have created arduous time/space activity patterns for women, given their responsibilities for childcare and the home. Studies have shown that inequities in access to transportation still constrain the life chances of large numbers of women. For example, while the mobility of disabled, working class, and im migrant women is severely restricted and they are ‘spa tially entrapped’, professional women often spend the same amount of time commuting in their journeys to work as their male counterparts. Transportation has also been the focus of urban movements such as the Bus Riders’ union in Los Angeles, led by women demanding equity for poor and visible minority women without access to automobiles. Although regulatory mechanisms are less rigid in many cities in the Global South, the problems experienced by women are exacerbated by nonfunctional social and physical infrastructures, as well

as an increasing inability of national and local govern ments to manage and regulate urban life. Since the 1970s, there have arisen vibrant, loosely knit women and planning movements in both Western and Global South cities in which women have often tried to bridge the informal/formal sectors through activism that occurs at a range of scales from the home/neighborhood to the city, region, and transnational/international. Often combining professional and community based women, these movements have given rise to a sustained feminist critique of urban planning issues such as housing, child care, disability, retailing, safety, sport and leisure, tech nology, and transport. They have illustrated the positive role feminist planners can play in the reproduction of social relations through alternative visions of urban life and the creation of new urban spaces. They have dealt with issues as mundane (but vital) as the provision of public toilets, as well as creating city wide movements focused on reducing violence against women. They have also emphasized women’s historical contribution to urban planning, for example, in North America where women’s contributions to planning and the construction of nine teenth century cities (often linked to temperance and abolitionist movements) led to the development of settlement houses, shelters, and women’s clubs. But women centered planning policies are few and far be tween. Currently, in many places, the professional (and invariably masculinist) culture of planning, combined with a scarcity of resources and a feminist backlash, has further served to marginalize feminist perspectives in planning as, ironically, have the fashionable tropes of environmental sustainability and human rights in the urban Global South. Poverty, economic restructuring, armed conflict, and en vironmental degradation are all resulting in increased mobility and moves to urban areas where millions of people live in squatter settlements and shanty towns in the Global South. Here the focus has been on studies of the regularization of illegal/informal settlements and the everyday difficulties facing women such as securing the provision of services and employment. Urban Public Space and Urban Citizenship Some of the most analytically exciting work on urban public space, originating in the 1990s, has drawn attention to the changing contours of the relationship between gendered public and private spaces. Feminist geographers have questioned recent concerns about the decline of urban public space and the consequences of this for democratic practices, and have also questioned the fixed meanings that have been attached to public space, in particular, that of the correlation between the public and masculinity. Focusing on specific groups of women in various historical periods, they have revealed the constant slippages between feminine–masculine and public–private

Gender in the City

divides. Some have argued that as women traversed the boundaries of the private, the so called masculine spaces into which they were intruding became feminized in order to neutralize such a potentially disruptive act. Hence, what is commonly perceived to be the decline of public space is the feminization of such space, usually as commercial space. However, while women may in creasingly be included in such spaces, others are not, such as the poor, the homeless, and people of color. Feminists have thus investigated the implications of urban public space for identities and citizenship, pointing out how urban spaces, throughout time, have been regulated in order to control the social reproduction of groups con sidered in need of control – women, the working class, the homeless. The attempts by groups to reclaim these urban spaces have also been well documented, from such or ganized resistance such as Take back the Night Marches by women, and gay and lesbian pride parades, to routine everyday practices, such as breastfeeding in public. Feminists have also highlighted the contradictory na ture of women’s experiences of urban space with historical research revealing how middle class women’s experience of public urban spaces – through their physical presence in spaces of leisure and shopping – was imperative to capitalist reproduction while working class women were heavily engaged in production. Recent studies on the revitalization of old urban centers through landscapes of consumption and spectacle have explored the impact on gendered identities, emphasizing that, even in landscapes that actively promote diversity and democratization, tra ditional gender roles, unequal gender relations, and nor mative sexualities can still hold sway. Even the glamorous, liberated, affluent (and white) single women in the hugely popular US TV show Sex and the City ended up happily married. Feminist research on moral geographies of the street, which has focused on the regulation of sexuality through research with and about sex workers, has also challenged the notion of urban public spaces as ones of democratic encounters. Most recently, there has been increasing interest in how bodies move through, and oc cupy, changing urban spaces and how the form and ideology of the public are mutually constitutive of shifts in cultural inscriptions of the body (see Figure 1). Closely aligned with work about urban public space is research concerned with urban politics, and most recently with the concept of urban citizenship. Feminist work on urban politics has been longstanding, but spotty. While there has been increasing recognition of women as polit ical actors, given their incursions into the public spheres of local and national politics, so much of what women do – for example, urban community activism – has not been considered worthy of analysis. Hence, feminists have ar gued that it is necessary to separate the content of activ ities from the spaces in which they are conducted. Doing so not only reveals the broad range of women’s activism

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but also sharpens understanding of the public–private divide and of what is considered political activity. For example, marginalized women using place based identities to engage in urban environmental justice movements are not to be dismissed as women engaging in domestic ac tivities, but rather as an example of a mobilized civil so ciety engaging in democratic practices. Feminist urban political research has also turned to new possibilities for oppositional politics in urban public space and the notion of citizenship as a sense of belonging. In both Western cities and those of the Global South over the past 30 years, women as urban citizens have formed and led movements to acquire resources to meet the needs of everyday life, have been able to enter local state politics, and have created space for feminist policies and women’s rights to representation, as well as forging transnational networks that have expanded concepts of citizenship.

Housing/Homelessness/Homes Research has emphasized the various ways in which women house themselves, including through women’s co operatives, and the impact in Western cities of neo conservative agendas on women and children’s access to housing. In the eyes of some though, the field of women and housing in Western cities, has become moribund, preoccupied with women’s access to the neoliberal dominant form of owner occupation, and lacking in analytical potential. Hence, some have recently argued for a rethinking of housing as ‘living room’, and for an exploration of the entanglement between culture and nature – between human and nonhuman actors – in the creation of housing. Indeed, there is a nascent field of urban feminist political ecology that is explicitly ex ploring the ways in which, for example, water supplies and gardens form affective links between humans and housing stocks and how houses are saturated with links between the organic, material, and emotional realms. In the Global South, however, where rates of urbanization exceed those of the West, and where millions of people are accommodated in informal housing, living in slums and squatter settlements, the focus has been on women’s attempts to upgrade their homes and secure the provision of services for their neighborhoods. Unlike housing, the topic of women and homelessness in larger and smaller cities, in both the West and the Global South, has attracted increasing interest as the numbers of homeless women increase and as their relative invisibility in relation to men becomes better understood. In the Global South, research is increasingly focusing on the situation of homeless (and often stateless) refugees, millions of whom live in squalid and dangerous conditions in camps that often resemble large towns in their size, although often lacking any services and employment.

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Gender in the City

Figure 1 Some sympathetic and less sympathetic embodied representations of women in the city. (a) Alison Lapper Pregnant, a sculpture by Marc Quinn occupies the ‘fourth plinth’ in the Northwest of Trafalgar Square, London, England. The sculpture was unveiled on 15 September 2005 by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, at a public ceremony with both the artist and Alison Lapper in attendance. (b) ‘The Endless Bench’ by Lea Vivot, Unveiled 7 July 1984, donated by the artist to the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada. (c) Neon Yellow Lady Sign for Club Paradise (Gentleman’s adult entertainment club), 1313 Bloor St., Toronto, Canada. Image courtesy: Kathryn Travis.

More recently, the attention of some Anglo American feminist researchers has focused on the complex and contradictory emotional geographies of home and do mestic spaces. The home is predominantly still viewed as a site of domesticity and social reproduction despite its in creasing incorporation into worlds of employment, whe ther high paid computer based work or low paid domestic or contract work. But there is also increasing recognition of the role of technological developments, particularly access to the Internet and telecommuting, in reconfiguring home–work spaces. Although this access gives working women more flexibility in the timing of activities over the working day, research shows that rather than challenging normative gender roles it has tended to cement them. The home has also received attention as both a material and an affective place – a site of belonging and of alienation, of loving relationships and of violence. Recent research has focused on the affective nature of particular places in the home, such as kitchens, and the ways in which particular artifacts, such as photographs, reveal the symbiotic nature of

the construction of female subjectivities and urban spaces. There is also an escalating research trajectory relating to transnational geographies of home(s). Women’s Fears and Pleasures in the City Within this small but burgeoning field, the dominant theme has been that of how cities contain and oppress women, enhancing their fear of violence. Yet, there has also been substantial and sustained women’s resistance to this framing from the early 1980s to the present; going beyond women’s fear it focuses on women’s interventions in policy and programs and in the creation of alternative service re sponses. While research on urban women’s fear started with a focus upon improving urban design to make urban places safer for women it has now moved on to the mutual con struction of identities and urban space. Researchers are also seeking to further conceptualize understandings of an apparent ‘spatial mismatch’, namely, while studies have revealed that women have a greater fear

Gender in the City

of being assaulted in a public place they are at greater risk of being sexually assaulted in the ‘privacy’ of the home by a male of their acquaintance. Most recently post struc turalist understandings of subjectivities, which resist the notion of gendered roles and identities as fixed, and thus, see femininities as being discursively produced through a variety of material practices, have been employed to show how an individual woman may or may not be enticed to challenge dominant discourses such as that of patriarchal social control. Others have illustrated how constructions of white women’s fears fail to take into account feelings of fear dealing with encounters with racialized men. Race shapes women’s experience of fear and safety, both at the scale of the city and in discrete public spaces, but there is no simple reading of ‘race’ and fear. Racialized experiences of fear are strongly mediated by class identities and urban form, adding to our understanding of the complex and multiple origins of fear. Most recently, literature on women’s fear has turned to two different trajectories. First, studies in the post 9/11 world have turned from the op pressive nature of the male gaze to the technological gaze. In urban space women are more likely to be looked at than men, both in terms of face to face encounters and medi ated gazes, such as that of the surveillance camera, re vealing the deeply gendered nature of new urban surveillance technologies. Other studies have also turned to the very real consequences of the male gaze, focusing on male violence against women, such as recent studies of the disappearance and murders of maquiladoras in Mexican cities and of sex workers in Vancouver. This analytical view of the city as a space of contain ment for women has been challenged by those who put forward a view of the city as a contradictory and shifting space that allows women opportunities. The enjoyment that the anonymity of the city affords, for example, is a theme that has been explored through the trope of the flaneur. This paradigmatic figure has been reappropriated by lesbian analysts who have explored how women throughout time have been able to explore the city in ways that are not mediated through men. Research has also shown how women have made numerous attempts to create their own urban spaces, from nunneries and women’s housing co operatives to lesbian bars. Probably the most significant in current times are the initiatives that have emerged around women’s safety, such as half way houses and refuges for battered women. But it is not only through engagement in material city spaces that women have challenged the patriarchal structuring of urban social space; women have also created imaginary urban places, such as the urban utopia, Herland, of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Dolores Hayden’s Non Sexist City model. See also: Feminism and Work; Feminist Geography, Prehistory of; Gay Geographies; Gender, Historical

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Geographies of; Gentrification; Ghettos; Home; Homelessness; Housing; Immigration II; Modern City; Patriarchy; Planning, Urban; Poverty; Public Spaces, Urban; Slums; Squatter Settlements; Urban Design.

Further Reading Bashevkin, S. (2006). Tales of Two Cities: Women and Municipal Restructuring in London and Toronto. Vancouver: UBC Press. Bell, D., Binnie, J., Longhurst, R. and Peace (eds.) (2001). Pleasure Zones: Bodies, Cities, Spaces. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Bondi, L. and Rose, D. (2003). Constructing gender, constructing the urban: A review of Anglo American feminist urban geography. Gender, Place and Culture 10, 229 245. Dandekar, H. C. (1993). Shelter, Women and Development: First and Third World Perspectives. Ann Arbor, MI: George Wahr Publishing. Fincher, R. and Jacobs, J. M. (eds.) (1998). Cities of Difference. New York: Guilford. Garber, J. A. and Turner, R. S. (eds.) (1995). Gender in Urban Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Greed, C. (2003). Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets. Oxford: Architectural Press. Grosz, E. (1992). Bodies cities. In Colamina, B. (ed.) Sexuality and Space, pp 241 254. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. Hayden, D. (1981). The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Design for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Little, J., Peake, L. and Richardson, P. (eds.) (1988). Women and Cities: Gender and the Urban Environment. Basingstoke: Macmillan. MATRIX (1984). Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment. London: Pluto Press. McDowell, L. (1997). Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Miranne, K. B. and Young, A. H. (eds.) (2000). Gendering the City: Women, Boundaries and Visions of Urban Life. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Moser, C. O. N. and Peake, L. (eds.) (1987). Women, Human Settlements and Housing. London: Tavistock. Moser, C. O. N. and Peake, L. (1995). Seeing the invisible: Women, gender and urban development. In Stren, R. & Kjellberg, B. J. (eds.) Perspectives on the City, vol. 4: Urban Research in the Developing World pp 279 348. Toronto: Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto. Pile, S. and Nast, H. (eds.) (1996). The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space, and Subjectivity. New York: Routledge. Rendell, J. (2000). Gender and Architecture. Chichester: Wiley. Sheldon, K. (ed.) (1996). Courtyards, Markets, City Streets: Urban Women in Africa. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Walkowitz, J. (1992). City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wekerle, G. (1984). A woman’s place is in the city. Antipode 16, 11 20. Wekerle, G., Peterson, B. and Morley, D. (eds.) (1980). New Space for Women. Boulder, Co: Westviwe Press. Wilson, E. (1991). The Sphinx in the City; Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wilson, E. (2001). The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Women. London: Sage.

Relevant Websites http://www.gendersite.org This website comprises a cross disciplinary database of bibliographic references, policy documents and web resources relating to issues around gender and the built environment. http://www.shehr.org This website Shehr is Urdu for city addresses gendered urban research in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.

Gender, Historical Geographies of L. Price, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Dualistic Gender The belief in a binary or categorical distinction between men and women. Essentialism A biologically determinist argument determining gender inequalities to be an essential biological difference between men and women. Feminist Geography Scholarship dating from the late 1960s which, in general, aims to demonstrate the construction and significance of sexual differentiation as a key organizing principle and axis of social power, as well as a crucial part of the constitution of subjectivity. Gender and Geography The study of the various ways that geographies and genders are mutually constituted. Gender Order A regime or order consisting of distinguishing relations of power, production, and emotional attachment. Gender Relations Inequitable relations of gender based on material social practices. Gender Roles The spatial and temporal socially defined arrangement of gender characteristics. Patriarchy Within feminist scholarship, the system by which men as a group are assumed to be superior to women as a group and so to have authority over them. Postmodern Gender Identity A hybrid notion of unstable, mixed, and multiple ideas of individual identity. Representation The ways in which meanings are conveyed or depicted. Separate Spheres The separation across time and space of the social worlds of men and women into arenas such as public/private and home/work. Sexuality A term emerging in the late nineteenth century to refer to patterns of behavior associated with sexual expression.

Introduction Historical geographies of gender can be said to have four key strands. First, the historiography of the geographical discipline itself from its inception in the nineteenth century onwards has been critiqued from feminist, gender perspectives as encompassing a white, male, Eurocentric gaze which has impacted on ways of knowing and prac ticing historical geography. Second, gender perspectives have led to a revisiting of themes and connections be tween space and time with the ‘adding in’ of women to historical lenses of enquiry from the medieval period

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onwards. Third, feminist theorization of spatially variable gender relations from the 1970s onwards had led to new and exciting historical geographies illuminated by gender which are rethinking the links between the development of Western industrial capitalism, urban spatial evolution, and relations of gender. Finally, ontological and meth odological approaches to historical geography and the ways in which the past impacts upon the present are being influenced by postmodern ideas of gender identity and representation. Thus, historical geographies of gen der continue to draw on conceptualizations of gender from across the social sciences providing new ways of linking the past and the present over space and time.

The Geographical Discipline A key impetus to reexamining the historiography of human geography arose in the 1990s when an article by Mona Domosh criticized the discipline for ignoring feminist theory and the formulation of geographic knowledge from women’s ways of knowing. A rebuttal of Domosh’s assertions by Stoddart in the same year sparked a debate as to the extent to which geography’s histori ography required feminist infusion. Importantly in 1995, Gillian Rose highlighted how the geographical tradition had reflected paternal lines of geographers which served to erase women from the structures of the discipline. This, it was suggested, rendered women invisible in historical geographic accounts of places over time. Hence, Living stone’s highly acclaimed 1992 book of the geographical traditional was criticized for only mentioning two women in the 500 years of Western geographies it covered. Much work in historical geography has been subject to reexamination and shown to be highly influenced by the male perspectives of its members. For example, it was contended that Victorian societal structures precluded women from traveling alone; to publishing under their own names or to having independent incomes and that this would naturally exclude them from geographic time specific practices and organizational structures. Therefore, as they were not ‘there’, a rewriting of geo graphy’s historiography is considered unnecessary from such a perspective. A view now largely consigned to history. It has been suggested that as the early European nineteenth century geographers attempted to establish the academic boundaries of the discipline around scien tific, rational, and exploratory endeavors in the field of colonial imperialism, geographers in the Western World

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developed complicated hierarchies of empiricist classifi cation and ordering of artifacts and ideas from far and distant places. A key point made by the Women and Geography Study Group in their 1991 book is that the knowledge derived from such exploratory endeavors is male centered as it developed from institutional discip linary practices which largely excluded women. An initial impetus to highlighting historical erasure of women from the geographical tradition has found researchers re vealing a number of women such as Isabella Bird and Mary Kingsley who, when funds were available, were able to engage in nineteenth century travel and ethnographic fieldwork. They made social connections and revealed realities of colonized people in new and uncharted territories across the globe. Such exploits, re vealed through personal diaries, continue to be dis covered and published by researchers. Such revelations contribute to the ongoing revision of the historiography of the geographical discipline. Thus, criticism remains that it was the ethnographic practices themselves that were seen as nonscientific and nonmale, failing to fit into the scientific, quantitative, and cartographic rigidity of the newly institutionalized Royal Geographical Society. Despite women being eligible for entry into the Scottish Royal Geographical Society (SRGS) in 1884 and initial entry into the London based Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in 1892, opposition by committee members to the 1892 RGS entry meant that women in the United Kingdom remained largely excluded from the society until 1913. An institutional legacy and bias which many of those involved in writing the Women and Geography Study Group book argue continues to this day within the experiences of female, professional geographers.

Adding Women to Historical Geographies of Gender As American civil and equal rights movements began to influence early feminist geographers from the 1970s onwards, historical geography became infused with new gendered perspectives critical of male centered know ledges and was keen to offer new descriptions of changing places over time. Gender initially equated to ‘women’ and thus the traditional foci of historical geography on human–environment relationships began to be infused with gender analysis. This challenged previous views of geographies and their relationships to the present by adding women into fields of vision. Everyday spatialities of women’s lives in the past began to be revealed as new conceptions of ‘work’, for example, began to influence political and socioeconomic historical geographies. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘geography of women’ and has a close relationship with the development of feminist

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geography more generally. Drawing on ideas of essen tialism, where social roles are derived from perceived biological differences between men and women, histor ical geographies based on how such gendered male/ female roles differentiated spheres of operation began to be revealed. Traditional topics of interest to historical geographers such as medieval agrarianism and economic settlement patterns have been shown to be highly reliant on the work, organization, connections, and experiences of women. Jane Humphries, for example, has demon strated how enclosure and the erosion of common rights in the eighteenth century contributed to the prole tarianization of families and the development of men as the industrialized familial breadwinner. Drawing on market records, it was shown how previously women were dealers and manual workers as their menfolk worked in other occupations, often within the home. Many other traditional areas of historical geographical enquiry which focus on the socioeconomic labyrinth of global connections over space and time have been reex amined with a gendered lens of enquiry. Examination of gender embedded in complicated, global relationships has been shown to be crucial to an understanding of the temporal rise of colonialism and global industrialization. For example, justifications for slavery and imperialism have been exposed as being framed within the banner of the civilizing of savage peoples which was persistently based upon a vision of non Western women as more suited to manual work. The perceived lack of morality of non Western women has also been shown to have led to a justification for sexually deviant activities by male colo nial plantation owners. Western imperialism was reex amined, therefore, for the ways in which colonization of so called ‘savage’ peoples was justified in opposition to ‘civilized’ people and presented as such in nineteenth century geography school texts. Notions of civility have been illuminated with the aid of gender perspectives. This demonstrates that it was the idealization of women as the ‘angel in the house’, producing superior offspring which contributed to the idea of colonial improvement. In corporating gender into historical geographies has also opened up new ways of seeing which challenges notions of migration as predominantly led by men. When women’s migration patterns are examined via a gender lens women’s colonial practices are often revealed as being pioneering. For example, women played a vital reproductive role in providing and socializing a new breed of colonials loyal to a superior vision of the home country, thus contributing to colonial institutions and practices. Such practices by women associated with Western dip lomatic service have a wide audience in a variety of media. Joanna Trollops’ 2006 novel, for example, Brit annia’s Daughters draws on historical letters and diaries to provide a new view of geographies of women’s journeys in the past as diplomat’s wives, nurses, and even prostitutes.

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Historical Geographies of Gender Relations and Capitalism As feminist geography continued to theorize gender into the 1980s, a move away from gender conceptualized as natural biological sex differences between male and fe male to ideas of socially constructed gender characteristics based on a dichotomous and symbiotic relationship be tween male/female, masculinity/femininity began to in fluence historical geography. The concept of hegemony became crucial to an understanding of such theorization as the male side of this dualistic relationship was deemed to be hegemonic over the female. Influenced by critical human geography derived from Marxism, feminist re searchers highlighted how a re reading of historical geographies might now be engaged in to challenge geog raphies of gender which were seen to be culturally, spa tially, and temporally specific. Therefore, depending on when and where you lived, it is suggested that the ex perience of being male or female would have been dif ferentially guarded by physical and social boundaries of operation and behavior. Key thinkers in this area, such as Linda McDowell, add to our knowledge of historical geographies of gender by revealing the gendered organ ization of space which reinforces unequal gender social relations. A key link between gender relations and the evolution of capitalism was made by groundbreaking theorists, such as Sylvia Walby, as it was now realized that capitalism was dependent upon gendered economic and consumptionist processes which relied upon the temporal relations between Western men and women being re lational, differentiated by gender and by being patriarchal. Hence, rather than merely a description of where women were, what they were doing, and their contri bution to topics and incorporation into historical geog raphies, a gender relational explanation of global economic temporal development could now be engaged in. Such engagement aids historical geographers to understand the changing nature of gender orders over time and space. The sociologist Rob Connell has referred to such time–place geographies of gender relations as ‘gender orders’ evolving social relations of power, pro duction, and emotional attachment that have influenced thought within feminist, historical geography. Historical geography now came to look at such topics as global ization, industrialization, and urbanization utilizing the idea of patriarchy as based in Marxist historical materi alism whereby individual’s thoughts and relationships derived from their gender positioning within relations of materialist production. Hence, debates mirrored those in sociology as to the extent to which capitalism and patriarchy remain single, dual, or intertwined systems. The integration of ideas of patriarchy and power formulated by social theorists such as Doreen Massey has been highly influential in demonstrating how, historically,

male power over women is embedded in patriarchy. This power is seen to derive from the place specific variations in the gendered spatial division of labor and relations of production. In an important text, considering the nine teenth century coal, linen, and agricultural industries in the United Kingdom, McDowell and Massey reinforced that place certainly does ‘matter’ when it comes to men and women accepting their societal position and rela tionships and that this acceptance is essential to indus trial evolution. What such academics have also achieved, however, is to demonstrate how such historic place specific operations of gender relations have left a legacy which is visible to this day. For example, restructured Western industries such as mining and agriculture have left a legacy of gender relations. Working class men are now struggling to cope with the loss of their manual industry breadwinner role with the ensuing status and patriarchal power that accompanied it. The impact of such a historic legacy of geographic gender relations is being viewed today, therefore, with the aid of such gender perspectives which makes an understanding of past and present geographies of gender richer and deeper. Researchers are noting, for example, how men and women are now struggling to redefine their relational masculinities and femininities as capitalism in the twenty first century is taking advantage of the plethora of female, traditionally lower paid workers in the North of England and the valley towns of Wales. Thus, the legacy of Victorian industrialization is a present day ready supply of cheap feminized labor which is increasingly being drawn on in service industries. For example, call centers are purposely locating to capitalize on an abun dant female workforces in areas of heavy industrial de cline. Capitalism, it is suggested, relies on men and women accepting their gender differentiated work roles and the relations of gender which ensue and is derived from Victorian ideas of separate spheres of operation for men and women. Hence, historical geographers have reexamined the rise of the Western city, industrialization, and globalization. Historical geographers utilizing epistemologies of gen der have suggested, therefore, that the rise of industrialized gendered relations of production and consumption facili tated and promulgated Western industrialization. However, these areas remain open to future research. The 1999 book Modern Historical Geographies, while not specifically con taining work on gender, provides chapters where present and future integration of gender research would be useful. Researchers acknowledge, for example, how little attention has been paid to historical geographies of the patterns of use of preindustrial cities or the impact of Victorian ideologies of the gendered separation of home and work on urban spatial planning. Therefore, exciting work is awaited by historical geographers now fully embracing gender as a key socioeconomic devisor and organizer. For example, the


rise of industrialization has been considered to be dependent upon the shrinking of space by time in a factory system that required huge rural to urban migration and the reorganization of home and work. Victorian beliefs per taining to gender orders, reflected in ideals of the home as a feminized space of consumption, socialization, and respite from the rigors of capitalism have also been acknowledged. The separation of work from the home and the social ization of new capitalist workers and managers, it has been suggested, derived from a middle class gendered ideal largely dependent on women remaining in the home in an increasingly suburbanized city. The integration of ideas of space and place into women’s histories is adding to an understanding of Western industrialization as requiring a middle class ideal of morality and home ownership where the production lines increasingly provided technologies and trappings for the home. However, such accounts informed by theorization of gender relations became heavily criticized in the 1990s for relying on a historical geography where theorization was ‘top down’ and incorporated into a metanarrative where differentiation within and between women was lost. Hence, working class women could be said to have little in common with the middle class ‘angel in the home’ ideal and more in common with working class men. But what geographers continue to suggest is that whatever their social positions, as Western indus trialization took hold from the eighteenth century on wards, women experienced patriarchy, a loss of power, and that this was as a result of the social relations of production.

Postmodern Influences The final set of theoretical influences upon historical geographies of gender occurred from the 1990s onwards and can be situated within the so called postmodern and spatial turn within social sciences generally. These new perspectives have had an influential impact on historical geographer’s ways of knowing, asking, and writing. The whole notion of the concept of gender has come to be criticized as a ‘performative’ fiction where identities are mutually constructed through, for example, race or age. Theorists such as Judith Butler, influenced by psycho analysis, have contributed to new understandings of how geographical identities are formed and experienced. Thus, a fundamental shift occurred in the 1990s, both in the theorization of gender itself and its relevance to the his toricity of geographies of gender. Hence, sexuality as a matter of choice away from essentialist dualisms has de stabilized the concept of male/female genders. This has promoted a move toward situated knowledges away from objectivist epistemologies. Postcolonial geographers, for example, have been critical of the Eurocentric feminist

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imposition of colonial geographies. Such geographies fail, it is argued, to acknowledge the individual histories, stories, and acts of agency which resisted colonialism. Thus, a range of examples of how gender intertwined with such resistances, as, for example, within Bedouin women has been explored. Thus, the influence of post structuralist thought and the perceived breaking of ties with socioeconomic modernist, industrial structures of gender relations attached to specific places have given way to a flourish of research interested in destabilizing writing on geographies of the past written from the Western center. Such work traces both the impacts of the processes of colonization in the place of the colonizer but also identifies the agency and subversive powers of the colonized in the making and transformation of colonial societies. This research has drawn on new sources chal lenging the perceived masculinity of previous know ledges. Ways of knowing, it is contended, cannot be separated from ways of asking and writing. Hence, re search as process with an emphasis on the nonprioritiza tion of the researcher over researched has been promoted in collaborative projects aimed at revealing new geog raphies of the past in oral testimonies, diaries, and auto biographies thus resisting official and high cultural textual historical sources. A challenge has ensued, therefore, for researchers in historical geography. This challenge poses itself as to the extent to which revealing patterns of gender inequities of the past situated within wider socioeconomic, spatial patterns, as outlined in the previous section, can be reconciled alongside a new view of past people as pos sessing their own historical situated knowledge’s which are contingent upon context. Such a challenge is em bedded in work developed around postmodern gendered, cultural representations which revisit how we view the past according to the sources available. Since the 1990s, feminist geographical journals such as Gender, Place and Culture have been at the forefront in leading the post modern challenge of retheorizing capitalism and pro cesses of social class. Spatial metaphors are now the vogue as in between spaces and ideas of hybridity have largely replaced a two dimensional gendered view of past geographies as possessing processes and patterns ex perienced across the Western world. The integration of the ‘cultural turn’ has been crucial to this new way of knowing and approaching gendered geographies of the past. Whereas the Berkeley School of cultural geography drew on the collision of social and cultural geography to describe patterns and cultural in fluences on the landscape, other historical geographers have been engaged with the contested nature of culture and its representation in a variety of texts. Thus, theo rization within a newly encultured geography recognizes the politics of representation. Culture is seen as a sig nifying system, whereby power relations are enacted and

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meanings contested. This has particular resonance for historical geographers working with concepts of gender identities. Hence, the historical geographies of landscape and nature and their representation have been interro gated for the ways in which they reflect ways of seeing. Historical landscapes, for example, from the sixteenth century onwards are deemed to be both physically and symbolically drenched with gendered symbolism which in turn shapes the physical and social world around us. This means that landscape art is not just a product, but that it aids a focus on the visual senses acting as a politics to gendered representations of the past. This, it is con sidered, impacts on representations and social realities of the present. This culturally infused ‘turn’ has led to a reex amination of the Western landscape esthetic. Ideas of gender have been integrated into an arena where his torical geographies have been influenced by gender perspectives. If a landscape is to be viewed, this view is deemed to have come from somewhere. Hence, the dominant gaze has been considered to be male. It is at this point that theorization again divides some re searchers as they contend that women can, in fact, sub vert the male gaze, particularly white women adopting a free and superior position in colonial lands. Other re searchers, drawing on spatial metaphors of belonging and place, feel that the Western landscape esthetic reflects historical geographies where landscapes reflect masculine traits of prioritizing the visual, the lineal, and the femi nization of landscape and nature. For example, gendered reading of Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa pub lished in 1897 could be read as a partial view of the world around her from within the confines of ideas of feminine sensibilities where women lacked the freedom to be outdoors, to draw, and to paint openly. Or they could be said to offer a different view of the botanic world which subverts a male gaze. But what historical geographers have emphasized is that at different times Western societies in different places have shared views about ways of seeing, organ izing, and feeling about the environment based on ideas about gender. Thus, the much oft studied Gainsborough painting of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews’s from 1789 has been read as a text, associating ideas of nature with women and ideas of culture with men. Thus, Mrs. Andrews is seated in an iconographic, submissive position reflecting her position as wife. Mr. Andrews, gun in hand, is positioned within the agrarian landscape he owns, projecting power and authority over the virgin Earth behind him. Mrs. Andrews has been viewed as being part of nature, a static figure, symbolizing fertility beneath an oak tree. Thus, it is contended, that this vision of the female from the male gaze continues to be reflected in contemporary art where the male gaze is privileged over the feminized ‘other’ by a male spectator.

The Future Other exiting areas are beginning to be developed from this perspective where, for example, ideas of the body, imaginations, memory and heritage, and war are im pacting on physical memorials to the past which draw on past and present understandings of male and female bodies and their relationships to society and economy. For example, we might like to consider where statues are located, how men and women are remembered, and if such representations really provide a view into the past gendered geographies of men and women. Heritage in dustries in Ireland have been noted to be particularly apt to situating statues and memorials of migration according to the perceived historical gender contributions and movement of men and women, while work in the rural arena is beginning to consider how gendered ideas of the past impact on present idealizations of rural countryside, economy, and society. Historical geographies of gender remains an area, therefore, open to new and exciting explorations. Views of the present impacted by the past and connections over time and space are revealed and interrogated via a range of theoretical gender perspectives. While theoretical evolution may appear to be linear, in reality it is not such a neat progression. A variety of gender perspectives continue to debate ideas of gender roles, relations, and identities and the ways in which historical geographies are constituted. New topics aligned to these perspectives continue to be investigated in debates, for example, over the extent to which research into historical geographies of gender is feminist; can include men; or is transgen dered. Discussions of an era of post feminism continue to be tempered by radical perspectives highlighting gen dered legacies of industrial capitalism on the present day landscape, new patterns of global immigration and labor, along with the gendering of work roles. This remains, therefore, an area in human geography open to new de bates and lenses of enquiry where immense scope to investigate the impact of the past on the present and connections across space and time exists. See also: Critical Geography; Cultural Turn; Empire; Feminism/Feminist Geography; Feminist Groups within Geography; Feminist Methodologies; Finance, Historical Geographies of; Geography, History of; Hegemony; Hybridity; Landscape; Marxism/Marxist Geography I; Marxism/Marxist Geography II; Masculinities; Medieval Historical Geographies; Nature; Patriarchy; Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies; Representation and Re-presentation; Sexuality.

Further Reading Blunt, A. (1994). Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. London: Guildford Press.


Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. London: Routledge. Connell, R. (2002). Gender. Oxford: Blackwell. Domosh, M. (1991). Toward a feminist historiography of geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16, 95 104. Graham, B. and Nash, C. (eds.) (1999). Modern Historical Geographies. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Humphries, J. (1990). Enclosures, common rights, and women: Proletarianization of families in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Journal of Economic History L(1), 17 42. Livingstone, D. (1992). The Geographical Tradition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Massey, D. (1984). Spatial Divisions of Labour. London: Macmillan. McDowell, L. (1999). Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Oxford: Blackwell. McDowell, L. and Massey, D. (1984). A woman’s place. In Massey, D. & Allen, J. (eds.) Geography Matters!, pp 28 147. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, G. (1995). Tradition and paternity: Same difference? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20, 414 416.

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Stoddart, D. (1991). Do we need a feminist historiography of geography and if we do, what should it be? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16, 484 487. Trollope, J. (2006). Britannia’s Daughters: Women and the British Empire. London: Pimlico. Walby, S. (1990). Theorising Patriarchy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Women and Geography Study Group (1997). Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference. Harlow: Longman.

Relevant Websites http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0966369X.asp Gender, Place and Culture. http://www.rgs.org/OurWork/Research þ and þ Higher þ Education/ ResearchGroups/Research þ Groups þ N þ þ Z/ Women þ and þ Geography.htm The Women and Geography Study Group.

Genealogy and Family History S. M. Otterstrom, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Genealogist One who works to gather, organize, and compile names and records of related persons or families who are deceased. Microfiche A small sheet of plastic film that has a large number of pages of printed matter that have been shrunk to fit onto the dimensions of the film. Microfiche sheets are read using special machines that magnify their image. Microfilm The process and product of photographing records and shrinking them to a much-reduced size for more space-efficient storage. Microfilm rolls are viewed using a machine that magnifies their image. Pedigree A listing of family lineage or ancestry beginning with a single individual. Proxy Someone who acts on behalf of another. Vital Records Data giving specifics concerning the births, marriages, and deaths of members of a population.

Introduction Every person who has lived on this Earth has imprinted a personalized geographic history on the landscape. Each individual is born in a discrete location and dies in an exact place. These spatial markers can begin to tell the story of one inhabitant, but the narrative is much richer. With each additional shred of vital history the portrait of the studied becomes more detailed. Such data can be overtly geographical such as the location of homes and workplaces over the life course, place of marriage, and city of birth for children. But helpful biographical facts can also be informational such as recorded life experiences, occu pational history, and personal and family names, including the names of the parents, spouse, and children. These additional clues concerning the character of the individual in question are often couched within a cultural context that encourages an investigation of the historical geog raphies that the person passed through in life. This article explores how historical geography inter sects with family history and genealogy. It outlines the development of the practice and the growth of seeking out the past geographies of deceased relatives over the past 160 years. It also shows how this cultural phenom enon has spawned its own human and spatial dimensions. Family history and genealogy are related terms. Family history is the documentation of the life events and

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experiences of individuals and families, while genealogy is often more narrowly focused on determining pedigree relationships using vital record data. In this article the two terms are used interchangeably. Interest in genealogy is not new. Different cultures around the world have preserved the memory of their ancestors by the written word and orally. The Chinese with their jiapu system of recording family histories began many centuries before Christ. The Old Testament in the Bible contains recorded genealogies of many generations of the Israelites and the early patriarchs. Royal lineages in Japan, Europe, and elsewhere were also faithfully recorded through the middle ages. Additionally, oral traditions in parts of Africa and the islands of the Pacific have preserved the names of some forebears in these areas. Notwithstanding the historical practices of recording family relationships by various means, the development of genealogical related activities into a growth industry with millions of hobbyists has been of relatively recent date. It was not until 1844 that the world’s first genea logical society was established in Boston (the New England Historic and Genealogical Society). It was fol lowed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society (1869) and the Genealogical Society of Utah (1894). The following year the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania was organized. Since that time, a multitude of other societies have been founded around the world to promote the preservation of local genealogical records and historical records, or to strengthen the practice of genealogy among certain ethnic or racial groups. These historical societies are key resources for genealogists.

Popular Family History and Genealogy Substantial interest in family history and genealogy ac tivities is exhibited by a growing segment of the public that spends vast amounts of time in genealogical pursuits as a hobby or for religious purposes. Three broad types of people exist who use genealogy and family history data. The first is the hobbyist who pursues his or her own family history and pedigrees because of an abiding per sonal interest. These people range from the weekend enthusiast to the highly knowledgeable family expert. The second type of genealogist is the professional who is paid to research and trace other people’s relatives. He or she can be certified by an accrediting organization, and may have a specialty such as Ohio (USA), English, or German records. The third group is the segment of

Genealogy and Family History

historians, geographers, demographers, and other re searchers who use genealogical data to explicitly study the past. This section looks at various facets of genealogy that the amateur and paid genealogist participate in along with the relationships that develop between people and places from different times. The following section focuses on academic research that reveals diverse historical geographies utilizing genealogical data. The practice of family history and genealogy is in trinsically historical geography, because it necessarily deals with people within the context of their past ex periences both socially and locationally. Those who pursue this avocation or career find themselves often referring to historical maps and gazetteers as they at tempt to locate ancestors. For example, it matters to the genealogist that Du Page County in Illinois was created from Cook County in 1839, if they are looking for a progenitor who lived in that area before 1839. They also discover that knowledge of historical, economic, and societal conditions for their areas of interest can benefit their search. For instance, if an ancestor who lived in Cook County, Illinois in the 1840s disappears from the local records, it may help to know about the migratory tendencies during the period to nearby and distant western territories. When a family history hobbyist discovers that an ancestor emigrated from a far off place there is often a desire to learn about the history and geography of the locale. They may ask a variety of questions such as: What did my ancestor do for a living? Did he play any important role in the local society? Why did he leave the community? Of his sisters or brothers, who stayed in the area and who migrated? They may also find out about the religious persuasion of the people there and the town government structure. In essence, while reconstructing the picture of the life of an ancestor who resided in some distant (or nearby) land, the family historian actually produces an individualized mini historical geography for one time period of a country, village, or city. A geneal ogist who combines many of those family biographies ends up with geographical and genealogical documen tation that covers widely separated times and places. Of course, a full life history on all ancestors is not a realistic goal. Often, little more than names and dates can be recovered from the incomplete records that fill the shelves of government and genealogical society of fices. In those cases, the genealogist has to find some measure of contentment in the information that is available even while hoping for more to materialize. Generally, the further back in time one reaches, the greater the likelihood that only partial data on an an cestor will be found, if anything is to be found at all. However, at some fortunate junctures a progenitor is discovered who was either famous or infamous, and who therefore warranted more than a cursory notation in the

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local church registers. At other times, a family Bible or a pertinent local history with many generations of names turns up to aid the genealogical enthusiast. Thus the process of constructing a personal ancestral historical geography is, by its nature, always a work in progress whose spatial and historical limits are continually being tested and refined. As genealogists extend their temporal record of family relationships they often develop the desire to travel to their ancestors’ countries, towns, and neigh borhoods in search of records and/or to enhance or create an emotional attachment to an ancestor through being exposed to the same physical environment where the progenitor lived, although time delayed. This is true even though exponential growth of online historical records databases has reduced the need to be on site to gather family data. The reasons for this phenomenon are twofold. First, not all local records are accessible on the Internet. Second, increased knowledge about an ancestor spawns curiosity about his home and environment. As a result, a subtype of heritage tourism has developed where enthusiastic descendants of often obscure citizens in little known villages flock to these places of ancestral origin to see what remains of the geography that existed in the past life of the relative. Local government court houses, libraries, churches, and cemeteries are some of the places where these tourists visit, which set of places contrasts markedly from the itinerary of a more tradi tional visitor. Another way that people celebrate and strengthen their familial connection with their ancestors is the formation of family societies. These organizations usu ally garner membership by recruiting the descendants of one prominent progenitor or couple. Activities of these groups often include periodic family reunions, family newsletters, and book writing projects. In the process, a shared identity is developed among cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and siblings. In some cases, families may gather near the birthplace of a particular ancestor or near his or her childhood home. Intense research into the lives of common ancestors can occur so that very detailed descriptions of past life geographies emerge. Because of natural increase, over the years the family organizations have ever increasing numbers of potential members, people that have a direct family tie who can in turn rediscover the historical geography of someone who matters to them. The membership geog raphy of such societies also shows how much the des cendants of particular people have dispersed across the countryside. Data sources for family historians and genealogists are diverse but are almost always place specific. This asso ciation with geographic locales is crucial because the place attaches a marker to a person that helps identify them positively. Thus a successful search through

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disparate sources, such as censuses, cemetery indices, probate and other court records, county history biog raphies, newspaper indices, immigration lists, newspaper obituary notices, land records, voter lists, church mem bership rolls, ship passenger lists, county vital records, and other historical records, requires one to proceed with some knowledge or even an educated assumption re garding ancestor location. Consequently, even a begin ning genealogist soon learns that geography is inextricably connected to their ancestors, and that knowledge of these past geographies increases their po tential for success in finding the ancestor in question. Besides the millions of genealogical hobbyists, there is one group of people who pursue the accurate collection of their family records and ancestors with a religious objective. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints (whose members are commonly called Mormons, or Latter day Saints) have been interested in preserving pedigrees and other genealogical records since soon after the church’s founding. Beginning in the 1840s in Nauvoo, Illinois where the church was head quartered, members were taught by their church presi dent, Joseph Smith, that they should be baptized in proxy for relatives who had died without being baptized. This belief was tied to both Jesus’ teaching in the Bible (John 3:5) that all should be baptized and to Paul’s words (1 Corinthians 15:29) when he discussed the practice of baptizing for the departed in New Testament times. Feeling a religious responsibility to perform church ordinances for their deceased ancestors, Mormons have developed one of the most extensive genealogical record depository and library systems in the world. Thus the Genealogical Society of Utah was established (1894) to help Latter day Saints in Utah seek out their own ge nealogies. Not only was it inaugurated early in the dif fusion of genealogical societies, but the Utah society, because of its religious orientation, has sought to collect records from all over the United States and world, in contrast to many other genealogical societies that are more localized in their focus. At first, the Genealogical Society of Utah library was only open to paying members, but after many years the church incorporated it into its administrative structure (1944), and the library’s holdings became available to the public. Subsequent growth of this genealogical library in Salt Lake City has been significant. Now called the Family History Library, it has over 742 000 microfiche, 310 000 books, and 4500 periodicals, and 2.4 million rolls of microfilm, with some 4100 rolls of microfilm and 700 books and 16 electronic resources being added to the collection every month (in 2003). Much of the ongoing growth in microfilm collections comes from the efforts of church missionaries and employees who have traveled to over 110 countries, territories, and possessions, to film vital records and other historical documents.

Besides the main Family History Library in Salt Lake, the Church has established some 4500 branch family history libraries around the world. Most of these libraries are located within Mormon church meeting houses, and are staffed by volunteers from the local church membership. They are open to church members and the public, and these patrons are assisted by li brarians in both doing basic and more advanced re search. One can also order any one of the microfilms from the main library in Salt Lake City, and search them using the microfilm reader in the local Church family history library.

Historical Geography and Genealogy Many academic avenues tied to historical geography can be explored related to family history and genealogy. The potential of applying geographic approaches to historical problems using genealogical data has been recognized for some time. As technology and record availability have radically improved over the last few decades, even more opportunities for understanding past people and regions are now available. The topics that are studied in this area fall into two basic categories. The first is re search in the historical geography of migration, other demographic factors, kinship ties, and the cultural markers of personal names. The second topic is the exploration of the historical geographies related to the process and cultural implications of the practice of ge nealogy and family history. Geographers and other academics usually have a broader goal in mind than the genealogical hobbyist. They want to reveal larger social and environmental processes, while a genealogist is interested in only certain limited groups of people, namely sought for ancestors. This difference in approach underscores the fact that genealogical and family history data sets must usually be reconfigured to meet the needs of academics before they can be successfully used. However, once the limitations of incomplete and incorrect genealogical associations are recognized and accounted for and the data reformatted, genealogical records can be very powerful resources for those interested in reconstructing past places. Historical migration researchers have used a variety of data sources to depict patterns of past population movements, but tracking these migrations has been dif ficult because few primary resources have sufficient in formation to show more than general migratory trends. For example, beginning in 1850 the United States Census started recording state or country of birth for each in dividual in their tabulations. These data were helpful for those interested in knowing the birth origins of popu lations, but the data do not reveal where the person might have lived in the intervening years between birth and the


census. That is where efforts to match people between censuses or between other data from other years have been used. The matching exercise is very tedious and time consuming, even with modern technological ad vances, so the potential appeal of using extant geneal ogies to illustrate and analyze migration is apparent. Although genealogical data sets tend to be narrower in scope than matched records between census years, they can show multigenerational migration streams. This is not possible with other methods (see Figure 1). With pedigrees that are now available digitally, the migration patterns of multiple people who settled in one area and their descendants can potentially be mapped and ana lyzed. As multiple genealogical data sets that contain birth, marriage, and death dates and locations are com bined and reordered to reflect temporal, relational, and spatial order a powerful analytical tool will result. The potential of such an effort to describe historical migration streams across the sea and over land, and to extrapolate larger general patterns is great.

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Other historical geographies tied to demographic characteristics can also be constructed. A related factor in migration research is the role that kinship plays in whether one decides to migrate. For example, geneal ogies can contain data that show multiple siblings moving to the same neighboring county or emigrating to the same distant country. Additionally, these same relational ties could help explain why extended family members did not migrate in some communities. For those who study fertility, marriage, mortality, and family structure among other demographic factors published genealogies of certain communities and families can depict a detailed local portrait of life events that are often missed through the traditional reliance on other historical sources such as censuses and local church birth and death records. When using genealogical data with migration research, poten tial statistical errors and biases (e.g., omissions of children who died young, or false family links) must be taken into account when applying population analysis methods to genealogical tabulations.

Humboldt Co. Tehama County, California

Ukiah Kelseyville

Los Angeles, California Placer Co., California

Colusa Co. Lower Lake

Caldwell, ldaho Moscow, ldaho

Middletown Woodland

Asbill family migration 10

Sacramento

First generation 7 Second generation 4 1

Third generation Fourth generation

San Francisco

Figure 1 Locations of four generations of Asbill family descendants in northern California using genealogical data.

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Closely allied with migration studies is the utility of name data to show the diffusion of certain family or ethnic groups. For example, tracking the spread or dias pora of individual surnames of French origin, such as Thibodaux, across the state of Louisiana in the United States can show the multiplication of family descendants and their spatial spread, especially when the name can be traced to one or two original settlers in a region. Add itionally, certain surnames can be studied to find their locational origin. Depending on the type of surname, this research approach can be especially helpful in illustrating the historical geography of family clan areas (e.g., the MacLeans in Scotland), or physical geography features at the point of origin (e.g., Nordstrom (north stream)) in Sweden, or the occupational structure of the earliest people in those source areas who had these names (e.g., Fisher, Shoemaker, Schmidt), although the first bearers of these names may be lost from recorded memory. Studies of the experiences of people attempting to connect with their past through genealogy is the second major area of historical geography research. Some of the issues that can be explored in this vein may include the experiences themselves of those participating in heritage tourism activities; how collective memories constructed by genealogists shape the accepted historical geographies of past people; the process of people seeking a particular ancestral identity through genealogical research and the effect that has on their personal cultural conception; and the spatial genealogical interconnections that have arisen from the fertile combination of ongoing technological innovations with an active cohort of family historians eager to interact with others holding information on a common family relation. Additionally, with the growth of heritage tourism tied to the locations of ancestors, communities, small and large, with long histories and rich historical records can be identified and even encouraged to take advantage of their potential attraction to traveling genealogists.

Effects and Geographic Ramifications of New Technologies on Family History Research A dizzying explosion in the digital and other technolo gical areas has expanded the research possibilities and accessible resources for genealogists and historical geographers studying family history. From the advent of the earliest genealogical societies in the mid 1840s to the early spread of the personal computer, tracing ancestral ties was a very slow and laborious process. Letters had to be written or phone calls made to distant relatives, his torical archives, family societies, or government offices in search of tidbits of family information. Long waiting was often a requisite to obtaining new and helpful records.

Large paper indices of censuses or microfilms had to be scoured in the hopes of finding the correct relative. It often required a large dose of patience on the part of the researcher. All of these slow methods are still used and have value, but computerized innovations, especially the Internet, have spawned a tremendous surge in digitally available resources and powerful online search mechanisms. Com plete censuses of the United States and other countries have been digitized and indexed, thus drastically cutting the need to consult the original microfilmed records. Censuses are just one of a multiplying list of sources that are being made available to the general public, both freely and in some cases only to a paying membership base. Genealogical societies, government agencies, for profit companies, family organizations, and enthusiastic indi viduals are all involved in expanding this data bank. Practically any type of primary genealogy data that one can name is found on the Internet in one form or another, ranging from scanned newspapers from the 1800s or be fore to obituaries published only days before a search. Of course, availability of different types of data varies by lo cation, but new sources are being added daily. Addition ally, whole websites are dedicated to the relations of certain family groups or individuals where many people with common research interests can interact and cooper ate successfully. So too can one search for specific living relatives around the world using a variety of online data bases. The result is an international collection of indi viduals collaborating across space to better reconstruct the historical geographies of shared ancestors. Digital historical maps and gazetteers have also added a beneficial research resource to genealogists and histor ical geographers working with family history data. Old scanned maps provide a wealth of knowledge about the past environment that can give family historians clues to the whereabouts of the people they are seeking. Digital mapping projects of county, state, and other historical boundaries have made it much simpler for one to see what governmental jurisdictions used to cover a progenitor’s home. So also have benefits come from online gazetteers that have links to previous place names and their period of use formatted in an easily searchable platform. An example of the great push to increase record availability digitally is that of the Mormons. With the rapid development of the Internet, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints has constructed a free website that gives the public access to hundreds of millions of names of people who have died (FamilySearch.org). One of the distinct searchable databases that is available at the site is the International Genealogical Index (IGI). The IGI is essentially the complete database of names (with dates, places, and family relationships) of people who have died and who were Mormons or the dead whose ordin ances have been performed for them by proxy in one of


the church’s temples. The website now has over 1 billion names that can be searched for possible family ties. Not only have the Mormons made available to the public their digital records through their website, and their genealogical microfilms through their system of family history libraries, they are now working to put their microfilms and other primary records online for more efficient family history searches. Their church owns the largest collection of genealogical data in the world, and their microfilm records contain over a billion names copied from censuses, probate records, church records, and other historical documents. The original films are stored in the Granite Mountain Records Vault, which was constructed by blasting tunnels into the side of a canyon east of Salt Lake City. The church’s end goal is to have their 2.4 million plus rolls of microfilm records scanned, indexed, and then placed on their Family Search website. Efforts to connect people with their ancestors using genetic evidence instead of written records have been growing. For example, adopted children searching for their parents can use DNA tests to determine whether someone who they have made contact with is actually their father or mother. Additionally, these tests can also show if two people with the same last name share a common ancestor. At a more expansive scale, projects tracking the historical migrations of people using genetic markers have revealed important geographic connections among various cultures and time periods around the world. These large scale efforts are less interested in tying people to their direct ancestors by name than the cases where direct blood relatedness is in question. Shared genetic markers are tracked on the straight pa ternal line using Y chromosome DNA tests, while direct maternal ancestors are followed using mitochondrial DNA tests. Tracing one’s paternal or maternal ancestry using key genetic markers ties their unique DNA to certain hearths in the distant past allowing a DNA link into the main human migration stream. Research col lecting this type of data includes the National Geo graphic Society’s ‘Genographic Project’, which initiative is working to illustrate historical migrations over the millennia using a large collection of genetic data.

Genealogy and Historical Geography and Its Future Rapid developments in computer and Internet technol ogy have combined to transform genealogy and family history research. The ability of genealogists and re searchers to use computers to quickly search through a growing collection of names and places has accelerated the pace of successful searching and has more efficiently united far flung individuals interested in common ties. Thus, multiple matching criteria have made searching for

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specific ancestors a faster process and have greatly opened the avenues for population related research by historical geographers. There are two main directions that genealogists track relatives of individuals: back through time with ever ex panding cohorts of ancestors, and forward in time from a progenitor and his multiplying descendants. Regardless of temporal direction of the search, location and place are vital to the success of this type of detective work. Thus, historical geography both adds local context to the every day life experienced by deceased relatives and provides clues concerning the possible movements of these people across regional and national borders. As the popularity of genealogy grows, and as digital resources and search technologies multiply, the natural overlap that exists be tween historical geography and family history will most likely catalyze greater success in both arenas of endeavor. See also: Demography; Emigration; Heritage and Identity; Immigration II; Migration.

Further Reading Bieder, R. E. (1973). Kinship as a factor in migration. Journal of Marriage and the Family 35, 429 439. Dennis, W. J. and Lynch, K. A. (1982). Genealogies and population registers. In Dennis, W. J. & Lynch, K. A. (eds.) Sources and methods of historical demography, pp 109 131. New York: Academic Press. Dyke, B. and Morrill, W. T. (eds.) (1980). Genealogical demography. New York: Academic Press. Earle, C. V., Otterstrom, S. M., and Heppen, J. (1999). HUSCO 1790 1999. (Historical United States County Boundary Files on CD Rom). Baton Rouge: Geoscience Publications, Louisiana State University. Haley, A. (1977). Roots. New York: Dell. McWhiney, G. and McDonald, F. (1983). Celtic names in the Antebellum Southern United States. Names 31, 89 102. Macpherson, A. G. (1984). Migration fields in a traditional Highland community, 1350 1850. Journal of Historical Geography 10, 1 14. Morgan, P. (1990). Locative surnames in Wales: A preliminary list. Nomina 14, 17 23. Nash, C. (2002). Genealogical identities. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20, 27 52. Smolenyak, M. and Turner, A. (2004). Trace your roots with DNA: Using genetic tests to explore your family tree. Emmaus, PA: Rodale. Timothy, D. J. and Guelke, J. K. (eds.) (2008). Geography and genealogy: Locating personal pasts. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. West, R. C. (1986). An atlas of Louisiana surnames of French and Spanish origin. Baton Rouge: Geoscience Publications, Louisiana State University. Widdis, R. W. (1998). With scarcely a ripple: Anglo Canadian migration into the United States and Western Canada, 1880 1920. Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press. Zhao, Z. (2001). Chinese genealogies as a source for demographic research: A further assessment of their reliability and biases. Population Studies 55, 181 193.

Relevant Websites http://www.ancestry.com Ancestry.com. http://www.cyndislist.com Cyndi’s List of Genealogy Sites on the Internet.

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http://www.familysearch.org Family Search. http://www.gendir.com Genealogy Directory and Message Board. http://www.onegreatfamily.com One Great Family.

https://www3.nationalgeographic.com The Genographic Project, A Landmark Study of the Human Journey, National Geographic. http://www.usgenweb.org US GenWeb Project. http://www.werelate.org We Relate.

Genealogy Method ´ . Crowley, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Co Kildare, Ireland U & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Discourse A social boundary defining what can be said and what cannot be said. Episteme Systems of thought and knowledge (or conceptual frameworks) which define a system of conceptual possibilities that determine the boundaries in a given period. Subjugated Knowledge Knowledge that has been discounted, disqualified, or low ranking.

Situating Genealogy In order to situate and better understand genealogy as method, this article briefly considers some of Michel Foucault’s early works. When engaging in such a peri odization or categorization, however, it is important to stress that Foucault himself regarded his work as in tensely unified, part of a single enterprise, though marked by transitions. The first period of Foucault’s published works deals with a series of historical case studies that are mainly concerned with the emergence of a range of modern human sciences. In Madness and Civilisation (1961) (the history of the asylum and the emergence of the modern concept of mental illness), The Birth of the Clinic (1963) (a critique of modern clinical medicine), and The Order of Things (1966) (an examination of the evolution of thought, reason, and unreason), Foucault introduced a method of analysis he referred to as archaeology. The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) provides a methodological summation of archaeology as method and a challenge to the ways in which knowledges are traditionally analyzed in the human sciences. Archaeology is a process for working through the archives of a society (parliamentary debates, prison re cords, chronicles, diaries, journals, logbooks, official re cords, grand theories, popular knowledge, subjugated knowledge, and so on) and, like genealogy, is concerned with ‘the history of systems of thought’; the history of societal structures (or epistemes in Foucault’s terminol ogy) that have produced and shaped the boundaries of knowledge, ideas, truths, representations, and discursive formations in different historical periods. Archaeology as method isolates and deconstructs components of ac cepted knowledge. It exposes the randomness of inter pretation, the ordered procedures that made discourses possible and what conditions their unity by providing

alternative accounts and uncovering popular knowledges, local beliefs, and understandings that traditional history has disqualified. Foucault was not so much concerned with determining whether the knowledge systems of the human sciences were true but rather with contextualizing and historicizing notions of truth, knowledge, and ra tionality. He examined their conditions of emergence, how and why a society in a given era considers some things knowledge, how and why some procedures are judged rational and others not. Foucault was interested in tracing out an historical ontology of the individual in relation to concepts of truth, for it is through such con cepts that people constitute themselves as subjects of knowledge. In Discipline and Punish (1978) and The History of Sexuality (1979) (historical critiques of the discourses of criminology and sexuality) Foucault rethinks and refines his analytical method, shifting from an attempt to develop a theory of rule governed systems of discourse to a more explicit focus on power, knowledge, and the body. Fou cault deploys Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis of the development of morals through power as a starting point for developing a method that includes an examin ation of complex power relations between institutional practices, bodies, and systems of thought. This more re fined analytical method is not a replacement method for archaeology – the analysis of discourse, the demonstration of discontinuity and shifts, and the rejection of a totalizing view of history remains central to the genealogical ana lytic – rather archaeology and genealogy are two halves of a complementary approach, alternating and supporting each other.

Genealogical Analytics Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Volume 1 demonstrate Foucault’s most thorough application of his genealogical analytics. In these works Foucault redefines the problematic of power and marks a fundamental break with conventional theorizations. Foucault was particularly interested in the way in which power oper ates through the construction of particular ‘knowledges’ and argued that it is through discourse that power/ knowledge is realized. Conceptions of truth and know ledge are fundamentally products of power. This com bination of power/knowledge and the embedding of reason diffuses through the social body producing what people are and what they can do, structuring the ways things are thought about, how people see themselves and

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others, and how they relate to the world around them. There is, however, no general theory of the character of power in Foucault’s genealogies or indeed any attempt to provide one. He instead provides a tool kit for the analysis of power relations, writing ‘for users, not readers’. In traditional conceptions of power, power is ascribed to and exercised by agents. Power is equated with domination, cause and effect, oppressed and oppressor. For Foucault, however, there is no binary and all encompassing oppos ition between rulers and ruled at the root of power re lations, rather it is the multiple of relations that take shape and come into force throughout society. Power is not an institution, a structure, a strength people are endowed with, something that can be held or transmitted. Power is not simply imposed in a repressive way from the top of a visibly demarcated social hierarchy, through the state or major dominations (e.g., religious authorities, dictators, and so on) in society. Power works from diverse places and at different levels, working in and through space, among individuals, families, social groups, in institutions, simultaneously constraining and enabling. Power is incessant, constant, and wholly relational. That power is permanent and self producing is simply the overall effect that emerges from the multiplicity of force relations. For Foucault the sov ereignty of the state, of legislation, of rule in society is not a ‘given’, something that has been there from the outset; rather they are simply the ‘terminal form power takes’. Within a genealogical perspective power is viewed as much more diverse, subtle, and complex than the nega tive and transparent relations of oppression, prohibition, and censorship (it is important to note, however, that Foucault does not reject the occurrence of repression but does reject its theoretical primacy). Power is productive; it produces subjects, it makes things happen, and achieves outcomes. Power operates discretely and subtly, as well as ambiguously and through ostensibly freely adopted practices, determining individuals’ behavior not simply by coercion or repression but rather by controlling in dividuals’ decisions to behave. Power does not have a single identifiable point; the power is the network itself. Discipline and Punish In Discipline and Punish Foucault maps the historical transformation in the exercise of power (and by inference the use of space) through an examination of the under lying principles, aims, and organization of the prison. It charts the changes in theory, practice, and social function of disciplinary institutions and practices that emerged in Western society in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen turies. In particular, it provides an insight into how space is used politically in relation to deviant and nonconforming others and focuses on a microphysics of power where

bodies are targeted as the site in which the most mundane social practices and local power relations feed into the constitution of large scale social and institutional power relations. Much of this book, however, is not about the punishment of criminals rather it is concerned with new modalities of regulation, with surveillance, control, and policing of modern Western society. Foucault opens his genealogy of the penal system with a description of the public torturing, dismemberment, and execution of a regicide, Damiens, in Paris in 1757. The detailed, shocking, and gruesome contemporary account of his torture and execution is immediately followed by a description of a meticulous, tedious, and regimented routine, where young offenders are subjected to constant and pervasive supervision and observation in a reformatory in Paris 80 years later. These very different methods of punishment frame the parameters of Fou cault’s method, namely to explore the implications of the change from the feudal regime of power based on col lective fear and built on violence and spectacle to one that is more subtle and gentler, regulating and discip lining individuals through procedures of observation, judgment, standardization, calculated punishment, or correction of perceived behavioral abnormalities. This transformation from feudal forms of power to disciplin ary power in the eighteenth century is epitomized in the Panopticon (as designed by Jeremy Bentham), a 12 sided polygon prison building with a central tower through which the supervisor (unobserved) can observe and monitor the behavior of inmates. The Panopticon was designed to effect the moral transformation of its inmates by carefully controlling time, space, and bodies. Although the Panopticon was never built, Foucault argues that its conceptual construction and operation reveal a lot about the use of space and nature of social control in modern Western society. Foucault was particularly interested in the transfor mation in the scale and continuity of the exercise of power, the involvement of much greater knowledge of detail, and the uninterrupted constraints imposed in practices and processes of discipline and training. While acknowledging the element of genuine progressive reform during this period of transition, Foucault mocked as superficial supposedly enlightened views that purported to show the emergence in the West of a humane and liberating reason. Instead of uninterrupted progress toward an increasingly caring society Foucault identifies differing styles and practices of social control in response to changing socioeconomic circumstances. He argued that the complicity of power/knowledge created a plethora of experts (doctors, social workers, probation officers, and so on) and institutions of discipline – prisons, schools, fac tories, hospitals, asylums, and so on, which though often promoted in the name of improvement, in reality con solidated and legitimated administrative authority and

Genealogy Method

bureaucratic regulation. This new model of discipline became a model of control for an entire society and ap plicable to all forms of social governance. A crucial element of Foucault’s account of disciplinary power is that it functions positively (and also oppres sively) to shape individuals as particular subjects. Power through torture, blood sanctions, and executions destroys their target while power through discipline and training targets the soul, and the submission of bodies through the control of ideas reconstructs its subjects to produce new actions, habits, and skills and ultimately new kinds of people, reformed, normalized, rehabilitated, and prepared to return to society. Discipline and surveillance is inter iorized to the point that each individual is his or her own overseer. For Foucault it is the formation of subjectivity that constitutes the whole rationale of disciplinary and punishment techniques. The History of Sexuality Foucault’s other major genealogy, The History of Sexuality, commences an inquiry into the conditions of emergence and success of sexuality as an organized discourse or ap paratus for constructing and controlling human subjects – a strategy for directing social relations, classifying and examining bodies, authorizing and legitimizing specialized knowledges and experts (e.g., medicine, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and so on) and multiplying sexual per versions (the masturbating child, homosexuality, nym phomania). The History of Sexuality keeps continuity with the microphysics of power, the concerns of governments and societies, and a focus on the relationship between power and knowledge. This work, however, places less emphasis on direct surveillance and the creation of docile bodies through discipline and provides a greater insight into how individuals’ internalize norms laid down by the social sciences and truth discourses. The emphasis is on how people participate in their own subjectification and come to recognize themselves as particular types of sub jects, judging and monitoring themselves and others in an attempt to conform to the norms of society. It is this focus on the body as a site of self scrutinization, self regulation, and self subjectification; as a site where both power and struggles are enacted that opens up a role for resistance that was not made explicit in his genealogy of the prison. In The History of Sexuality Foucault attacks the ‘re pressive hypothesis’; the common thesis that sexuality was repressed in Western society (particularly during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) and argues that on the contrary there was a fixation with sex. He charts how governmental practices came to explicitly focus on sexual morality as a key target of social intervention, or ganization, and normalization. During this period there was, in Foucault’s words, a ‘political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex’ – an explosion of

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discussion about sex (including both social and criminal acts). There was a flood of reports, policy documents, medical guidebooks, religious treatises, and legislation concerning sexual and moral matters, the emergence of social purity organisations, a strengthening of the network of institutions dealing with sexual ‘deviants’ (peniten tiaries, reformatory schools, asylums, prisons, and so on). Illegitimate sexualities would only be tolerated in speci fied locales – the brothel, the mental asylum. The claims to truth inherent in these discourses (e.g., the Catholic Church claimed an infallibility in regard to its moral teaching that was binding under pain of sin) offered knowledge to people about how to behave, how to be moral, how to care for themselves and for others. Subjects were increasingly educated to make themselves the subject of their own gaze, constantly monitoring theirs and others’ bodies, behaviors, actions, and feelings and thus perpetuating and reproducing the authority of the regime’s discourses. What materialized, for the first time in modern history, was an intimate symbiosis be tween government and civil society. It involved a move from government by the state to self government, self regulation, and self discipline. The basic thesis of Foucault’s genealogy on sexuality is that sexuality is not a natural reality but a creation of a system of discourses and practices that form part of the increasing surveillance, regulation, and control of indi viduals in modern society. If, however, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality are interpreted in too simplistic, rigid, or extreme a fashion, one risks connecting and conflating power with domination in the very manner Foucault was questioning. His historical exploration of the prison and sexuality is merely an interpretive perspective, offering insights into our social worlds. The basic disciplinary logic (practices of normalization and internalization of discipline) materializes differently and unevenly in different circumstances and is always only imperfectly realized in practice. Foucault’s conception of a disciplinary society should not be mistaken for a disciplined society where discipline is seen as an in sidious, monolithic force enveloping all relations, where power has a repressive and relentless hold on its subjects, where resistance seems futile, and citizens conform to the demands placed upon them. Foucault was interested in the techniques of power more than in the nature of power and rather than viewing power as something to be overthrown, he provides the conceptual tools to utilize, exploit, and transform power. Genealogy as method is a mind tool – a tool to stimulate thinking and cognitive curiosity.

Genealogy in Practice Over the last two decades geographers and spatial the orists have been influenced by Foucault and have used his

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works as reference points for further theoretical argu ments. His writings have been particularly significant for those critical human geographers seeking to define power, mainly the way it is played out in and through space and the importance of disciplinary techniques (both discursive and nondiscursive) of the body in the production and deployment of power has been com prehensively elaborated. Unlike much of Foucault’s work, which is almost completely deficient in empirical ma terial to support his theorizations, these writers use de tailed case studies, policy documents, censuses, and so on to support their hypotheses. More recently, human geographers and others have begun to explore ways in which personal details are stored, checked, transmitted, and used as a means of in fluencing and managing individuals and populations. Many of our everyday activities are, as in the Panopticon, regulated as much by the ‘threat’ of observation as by ‘actual’ observation, for example, surveillance cameras, police check points, threat of a tax audit, not carrying a licence (failure to be readily identifiable), being caught without car insurance, and so on. Geographers and social theorists have also drawn on Foucault’s genealogical method of inquiry in order to elucidate ways in which discourse, power, and knowledge have come together in different spaces (including, e.g., schools, industrial settings, offices, neighborhoods, com munity centers, hospitals) to mould human subjectivity and morality. His work has also appealed to academics interested in the historical geographies of marginalized groups (such as Irish Travellers, Native Americans), how these groups have been historically constructed through authoritative discourses and scientific practices. The History of Sexuality fundamentally challenged tra ditional frameworks for understanding sexuality and has opened up the field to critical analysis, assessment, prob lematization, and development and has been enormously significant in shaping recent thought about the relation ship between sexuality and society. Feminists and queer theorists have drawn extensively on Foucault’s genealogies to extend notions of sexuality, to uncover silences and to further challenge orthodoxy, to destabilize and de naturalize traditional histories, categories, and theories. In particular, writers have complimented and extended the theoretical organization and methodological per spective of genealogy in order to examine how discursive practices and processes turn notions of sexuality and

sexual categories (heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and so on) into objects of study and analysis. Over the last two decades geographers have also drawn on and modified Foucault’s method to dispute heteronormative assump tions, to examine issues of sexual citizenship, explore how externally enforced regulations come to be internalized, and to expose how meanings and choices surrounding sexuality are fluid, ever changing, unstable, diverse, and complex and structured through a myriad of discourses, spaces, and social relations. See also: Body, The; Queer Theory/Queer Geographies; Sexuality; Surveillance.

Further Reading Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble. New York: Routledge Press. Dean, M. (1994). Critical and effective histories: Foucault’s method and historical sociology. London: Routledge. Dodge, M. and Kitchin, R. (2005). Code and the transduction of space. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95(1), 162 180. Elden, S. (2001). Mapping the present. London: Continuum. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: An introduction. Hardmonstown: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Allen Lane. Halperin, D. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a gay iconography. New York: Oxford University Press. Hannah, M. (1993). Space and social control in the administration of the Oglala Lakota (‘‘Sioux’’), 1871 1879. Journal of Historical Geography 19(4), 412 432. Jackson, N. (1998). Labour as Dressage. In McKinlay, A. & Starkey, K. (eds.) Foucault, management and organization theory. London: Sage. Kitchin, R. and Lysaght, K. (2003). Hetrosexism and the geographies of everyday life in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Environment and Planning A 35, 489 510. McNay, L. (1994). Foucault: A critical introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Miller, P. (1987). Domination and power. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Prada, C. G. (1995). Starting with Foucualt: An introduction to genealogy. Oxford: Westview Press. Rabinow, P. (ed.) (1984). The Foucault reader. New York: Pantheon. Valentine, G. (1993). (Hetero)sexing space: Lesbian perceptions and experiences of everyday spaces. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11(4), 395 413.

Relevant Websites http://www.foucault studies.com Foucault Studies. http://www.foucaultsociety.org/resources The Foucault Society Resources.

Generalization W. A. Mackaness and O. Z. Chaudhry, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Cartographic Generalization A range of techniques applied to ensure optimal portrayal of geographic phenomena according to task (theme and scale). Cartometric Analysis A set of spatial analysis tools used to make explicit and measure metric, topological, and shape characteristics within and among a set of geographic phenomena. Map Generalization A process of effectively portraying changing levels of detail among geographic phenomena in order to reveal their various properties. Model Generalization Selection, simplification, and aggregation of features stored in a database for improved processing, dataset integration, and prior to cartographic generalization. MRDB A database used to store multiple representations of geographic phenomena (created via the model generalization process).

Scale, Pattern, and Geographic Process It is not possible to describe a geographic process without reference to ideas of scale. The scale of observation is critical to the discernment of pattern and the identifi cation of various types of relationships implicit among the representation of a set of geographic phenomena. Viewing and analyzing geographic space at various levels of detail is common practice in the geosciences. The activity helps to discern the operational scales of geo graphic phenomena, the extent and permanence of pat terns, which in turn sheds light on the underlying processes and their interactions. The scale of observation scopes the problem – the map acting as a filter and, in a digital context, an interface by which we can further explore attributes of the data. Cross scale analysis en ables us to connect together processes operating across a continuum from the fine scale (large scale mapping) to the coarse scale (small scale mapping), and is a start point from which we can theorize about causal processes, and from this, make generalizations about the world, and

Visualization and quantification of pattern

Identification of the determinants of pattern

go on to test and develop predictive models (Figure 1)– the evolution of our models and theories often revolving around the visual form. The creation of paper map series (typically at scales of 1:10 000, 1:50 000, 1:250 000, 1:500 000) is testament to a requirement that we are able to view the world in an abstracted, thematic form, at various levels of detail, in order to discern fundamentally different (yet connected) properties among a specific set of geographic phenomena. For example, general circulation models help us under stand climate change at the global scale. They are (almost by definition) inadequate in helping us to explain subtle regional differences that might point to localized anom alies, yet which collectively contribute to a global effect. Being able to represent geographic phenomena at a range of scales lies at the heart of the cartographic discipline (Figure 2). Traditionally, the cartographic task was the preserve of the human cartographer. The human acted to interpret the requirements of the user, and produce a paper based map of high quality – void of ambiguity, often tailored to the expectations of the user. Information technology (IT) has disrupted this relationship, offering, in the first in stance, opportunities to support this human process (via computer aided cartography), but now going further – seeking to emulate the process of design, thus funda mentally changing the role of the cartographer. Beyond this, IT has created a paradigm shift in how we explore geographic data, leading to developments in the field of scientific visualization, in which the digital map acts as a window onto the underlying database, by which we can manage, visualize, and analyze the data. Not surprisingly, early attempts at automation treated map series products as being quite distinct from one another – reflecting the discrete production process for each of the scales within national mapping agencies (NMAs). This resulted in different databases, repre senting (in many cases) the same phenomena but at different scales. But a line of thinking soon began to emerge which challenged the wisdom of this redundancy. The question became: could we not store the phenomena once (at a very high level of detail), and then apply a

Theorizing on the mechanisms that generate and maintain those patterns

Predictive modeling

Figure 1 From scrutiny of pattern to predictive statements.

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Figure 2 Need of generalization. (a) Source map at 1:25 000, (b) nongeneralized map at 1:50 000, and (c) generalized map at 1:50 000. (Ordnance Survey & Crown Copyright. All rights reserved).

range of algorithms that controlled their selection and representation according to the desired scale and theme? There were significant benefits to this line of thinking. Maintaining a single database was more cost effective than maintaining multiple databases; a high level of consistency could be maintained between different datasets; duplication of storage could be avoided, thus obviating the need to make multiple updates each time something was changed or added into the geographic landscape; most importantly, it offered the opportunity to integrate data from disparate sources, captured at dif ferent scales (or levels of detail). These benefits were premised on the existence of a set of algorithms that would, with minimum intervention from the user, control selection and representation of

geographic phenomena according to a specified scale and theme. The science of ‘map generalization’ is all about designing such algorithms, algorithms that manipulate and symbolize the geometric primitives stored in the database that represent various real world phenomena. Map gen eralization is also concerned with (1) modeling the process of design (how generalized does the map need to become), (2) devising evaluation methodologies by which it can assess the quality of the design solution, and (3) devel opment of interfaces that support users who may well be cartographically illiterate, or who struggle to specify their requirements. We begin by describing the techniques used to manipulate objects within the database. We then describe some of the frameworks designed to support their application in the overall design of the map. The

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discussion that follows this argues that high levels of automation can only be achieved if the automated en vironment includes methods of evaluation. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the changing context of map generalization within developing applications (such as exploratory data analysis and location based services).

Tools and Techniques for Map Generalization The goal of map generalization is to give emphasis to salient objects and their properties while omitting less important qualities with respect to the scale and the purpose of a map. We therefore need a system that supports manipulation of map objects and their rela tionships, and more generally supports the representation of phenomena at different scales. For example, at the finest scale, we might wish to represent each individual building, street light, and pavement that we find within a city. But at a coarse scale, all of this might be subsumed by a single ‘dot’ (with say, the word ‘London’ next to it), representing the idea of ‘city’ in which all those buildings are contained. Therefore, the requirements for a map generalization system are: (1) a database containing some abstraction of the real world, (2) a set of algorithms for aggregating objects in that database (model general ization), (3) a library of symbols with which to render the

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objects according to various themes, and (4) a set of al gorithms focusing on improving the legibility of those symbolized objects (cartographic generalization). The database containing that first abstraction is typically called a digital landscape model (DLM – Figure 3). The DLM might be created by digitizing paper maps or from photogrammetric techniques applied to remotely sensed imagery. Typically, a notional scale is associated with the DLM database though it is perhaps more apposite to talk of the level of detail. Data from the database can be symbolized and visualized directly via cartographic techniques. Alternatively, a database of lower semantic and geometric resolution can first be derived (via model generalization) – creating different digital cartographic models (DLMs – Figure 3) before cartographic gener alization techniques are applied to produce different maps (DCMs). Altering the theme and level of detail enables differ ent phenomena and different properties to be portrayed. Sometimes the emphasis is on precision of location, or of shape (important in the map interpretation process). In other circumstances, we may wish to emphasize connectivity at the expense of other properties and qualities. Maps of transportation networks (such as the London Underground) are nice examples of the need to emphasize connectivity over geographical location. Ir respective of theme, in all cases a map (digital or paper) reflects a compromise in design – a compromise between

Object generalization

Secondary models

Primary model Digital landscape model (DLM) high resolution

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Digital landscape models (DLMs) lower resolution

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Digital cartographic models (DCMs) visualized models

Figure 3 The first abstraction of reality creates the primary digital landscape model (DLM), from which a digital cartographic model (DCM) can be produced either directly from the DLM or via the process of model generalization and the creation of secondary models (DLMs).

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wanting to convey information unambiguously, but not having enough room (given the minimum size of sym bology) to show all information. In this sense, the process of design is about making sense of things – the cartog rapher perhaps working from a mental thumbnail sketch by which their solution reflects the requirements of the user in terms of their need, which in turn govern and constrain the representation of each feature in the map. Various methodologies have been proposed for trying to capture this design process within an automated en vironment. Via close observation and interrogation of the human cartographer at work, researchers have dis tilled out a set of techniques used to manipulate and create more generalized yet recognizable forms of geo graphic phenomena. Considerable research effort has gone into creating algorithms that mimic these human techniques. These techniques are not applied in isolation, but rather in concert, and in varying degree, across the map, depending on the density of information, the type of phenomenon being mapped, and of course, the theme and scale. Therefore, in addition to algorithms that mimic these techniques, we need some framework in which we can orchestrate this whole design process, and we need some evaluation methodologies that enable us to assess the quality of the solution produced within such a framework. We begin with a review of generalization techniques under the headings of model and cartographic generalization. Model Generalization Typically we can divide the techniques under two headings – model and cartographic generalization. The objective of model generalization techniques is to re classify and reduce down the detail, and give emphasis to entities associated with the broader landscape – thus enabling us to convey the extent of the forests rather than see the trees, or to see the island chain along the plate margin, rather than the individual island. The model generalization process is not concerned with issues of legibility and visualization; is more useful to view it as a filtering process; a set of techniques concerned with (1) selection of phenomena according to theme, and (2) the classification and aggregation of phenomena. Typically, model generalization precedes cartographic general ization; alternatively, model generalization may be re quired in response to a nonvisual query, or as a prerequisite to data analysis. For example, the question ‘what modes of travel exist between the cities of Edin burgh and Glasgow?’ requires us first to aggregate toge ther phenomena at the fine scale (in this case dense regions of buildings) in order to define the extent and general location of these two entities. Only then can we identify, for example, the major roads that connect these two urban centers.

Composite or higher order objects are formed via the processes of thematic and spatial abstraction. In thematic abstraction, the number of distinct attributes of objects in the database is reduced. In spatial abstraction, the number of objects are reduced by means of aggregation or elim ination. Thematic abstraction often triggers spatial ab straction. For instance, objects having similar attribute structure can be categorized into classes under the process of classification. Each object then becomes an instance of a particular class and that class defines an object’s prop erties in terms of its attribute structure. If different classes share some attributes, then a superclass or parent class can be created whose attributes are the common attributes of its child classes. This creates a hierarchy where complex classes are present at the detailed low end of a hierarchy and increasingly abstracted classes are present as we go up the hierarchy. This type of hierarchy is called a taxonomy or classification hierarchy (Figure 4a). The creation of these hierarchies is an important way of modeling the changing levels of detail and provides a basis for creating the generalized map (Figure 4b). Another complimentary hierarchy useful in the cre ation of composite objects is a partonomy. Whereas a taxonomy refers to an ‘is–a’ relationship, a partonomy refers to ‘part–of ’ relationships between parent and child classes – reflecting more of a functional and conceptual division of geographic space. Over large changes in scale, it is necessary to aggregate objects belonging to different classes in order to create composite objects. A proto typical view of a city might be defined as a dense col lection of municipal and industrial buildings, and multimodal transportation infrastructures. Once repre sented in partonomic form, it can be used as a basis for combining objects together – in this case, moving from the detail of the house, land parcel, and pavement, to a simple city block (Figure 5and Figure 2). In addition to these techniques of aggregation, there are two other techniques that fall under ‘model gener alization’ – selection and simplification. As the name suggests, selection is the (straightforward) process of se lecting a subset of all classes of objects falling within a specified region. The selection process is governed by task, which in turn tends to define the scale and the theme. The long tradition of topographic and thematic mapping often acts as a basis for specifying content, and thus which classes of objects are selected. The other technique is called ‘simplification’ – and is defined as the process of reducing the number of geometric points used to store the physical location or extent of a geographic object. One can envisage many points being used to re cord the detail of the outline of a gothic cathedral, or the sinuous path of a low lying river. The challenge of sim plification is to reduce the number of points used to store the representation of such features, but in a way that still conveys their essential shape and location. Successful

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simplification reduces storage requirements and pro cessing time. Successful algorithms have been those that have identified and retained critical changes in direction (such as the corners of a building, or the main changes in the course of a river) while removing those points that are not critical to conveying the essential qualities of the object (e.g., the extent and angular nature of a building, or the connecting properties of a river to the sea). Once the model generalization process has taken place, the challenge is then to render those objects into some map space (either for paper production, or as part of a digital interactive environment – a desktop or mobile environment). Cartographic Generalization Cartographic generalization is a set of techniques con cerned with increasing the efficiency with which the map

is interpreted – thus the techniques aim to resolve am biguity, and to retain those qualities of a representation that best fit with the user’s expectations. Symbols used to represent spatial objects from the source database must be visible to the naked eye; but as the scale reduces, the amount of space available decreases thus creating com petition for space. To retain the clarity and to represent the information effectively, a range of cartographic gen eralisation techniques are applied such as symbolization, smoothing, simplification, grouping, enhancement, dis placement, and text placement (Figure 6). When we come to apply these techniques (often in combination), they must be applied such that, irrespective of the scale of portrayal, the essential qualities of the fea ture are still conveyed (that rivers retain their sinuous and connected form, and buildings retain their anthropogenic qualities (such as their angular form)). Different combin ations, amounts of application, and different orderings of

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these techniques can produce different, yet aesthetically acceptable, solutions. The focus is not on making changes to information contained in the database, but upon avoiding ambiguity in interpretation of the image. The process is one of compromise reflecting the long held view among cartographers that making maps involves telling small lies in order to convey the truth! Figure 7a meta phorically represents the contents of the database. The symbolization and enhancement process has led to overlap (Figure 7b) such that displacement is required (Figure 7c), which has improved the clarity of the map, but at some cost to the locational accuracy of these features.

choosing a solution among that choice requires two things: (1) an initial analysis phase in which the conflicts are identified (analysis – Figure 8), and (2) a form of evalu ation such that we can assess the quality of the solution (evaluation – Figure 8). Failure to find an adequate so lution might either result in further analysis of the conflict or flagging unresolved conflicts and drawing these to the attention of the user. The analysis phase is akin to the eyes of the cartog rapher and involves making assessment of the degree of severity of the conflict (extent and complexity and composition). A broad and extensive set of cartometric techniques have been developed to measure the various qualities inherent among the map features. This is be cause we wish to ensure minimum disruption in those qualities during the cartographic generalization process. For example, an unacceptable solution to Figure 7b would be one that placed the church to the right of the road, or one that significantly distorted the shape of the road. Maintaining adjacency relationships requires the use of Delaunay and Voronoi diagrams (Figure 9) which are ways of exhaustively tessellating the space between geographic features, and making explicit shape and distribution parameters.

Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation of Cartographic Solutions For any given cartographic conflict (such as the one pre sented in Figure 7b), one can envisage a number of viable solutions (of which Figure 7c is just one). The choice of solutions will depend, among other things, on: the number of features, their position relative to one another, and their importance relative to the intended theme. Trying to create viable solutions (synthesis – Figure 8), and then Operator (a) Smoothing Reduce angularity of the map object.

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(b) Collapse Reduce dimensionality of map object (area to point, linear polygon to line). (c) Displacement Small movement of map features in order to minimise overlap.

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(d) Enhancement Emphasize characteristics of map feature and meet minimum legibility requirements. (e) Typification Replacement of a group of map features with a prototypical subset. (f) Text Placement Non-overlapping unambiguous placement of text. (g) Symbolisation Change of symbology according to theme (pictorial, iconic), or reduce space required for symbol.

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Figure 6 Definition of generalization operator, initial data, and result after application of the technique.

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(c) Figure 7 Difference between cartographic and model generalization. (a) Result of model generalization, (b) results of cartographic generalization (symbolization, enhancement, and simplification) has led to overlap, and (c) displacement is needed to remove ambiguity.

Analysis

Cartometric analysis to determine complexity and characteristics of phenomenon being represented.

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Create, compare, and select a range of generalization solutions for each class of feature.

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Evaluate the overall solution compared against user needs and map task.

Figure 8 Essential components of a map generalization system: analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

It might also be necessary to ensure connectivity among features (such as road networks) during the pro cess of generalization. Graph theory is often used to model this process (both in model generalization when selecting subsets of roads and during cartographic gen eralization) (Figure 10).

Figure 9 The use of Delaunay (gray) and Voronoi (black) diagrams enables relative proximity and adjacency properties to be measured.

Many other shapes and pattern metrics have been proposed – often applied in the analysis phase, and again in the evaluation phase. If we assume that synthesis in volves creating a number of candidate solutions, then the

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Figure 10 Graph theory can be applied to networks to ensure conservation of connectivity relationships and to control the ‘pruning’ of networks. (Ordnance Survey & Crown Copyright. All rights reserved).

best solution might be one that has resolved the conflict (improved its legibility), while producing the least amount of change among the various cartometric meas ures (in terms of topology, area, shape, and distance).

Modeling the Generalization Process Having a set of techniques for manipulating objects in the database and in the portrayal stage is not, by itself, suf ficient when it comes to designing an autonomous map generalization system. The selection and application of techniques, the creation of candidate solutions, and their evaluation requires some framework in which this can all take place. Because of the interdependent nature of geographic phenomena, it is rare that changes can be made without having to consider the broader context. For example, the solution in Figure 7c is only appropriate because there is sufficient space for the objects to be displaced into. If buildings have to be aggregated in one part of the map (perhaps because of the density of fea tures), then for reasons of consistency, this needs to be applied to other occurrences. Procedural and heuristic knowledge needs to be incorporated within these frameworks so that the solutions most likely to be suc cessful can be applied first. Among the various ‘frame works’ explored, two are worthy of mention: rule based approaches, and constraint based approaches. Rule-Based Approach Since the cartographic design process appeared to in volve decision making and use of ‘rules of thumb’, it was assumed that knowledge based approaches (expert sys tems) could be used to model the process – using a rule based approach. These systems used either a predeter mined rule execution sequence or an inference engine to control the execution sequence in applying various techniques. They consisted of three main parts: a know ledge base, an inference engine, and a user interface (Figure 11). The knowledge base contained a set of rules, facts, or procedures. The inference engine controlled the generalization process by making use of the rules and procedures in the knowledge base. The user interface contained menus for selecting the datasets and intended

Knowledge base

Inference engine

Contains rules on procedures

Controls rules selection

User interface Menus, queries, displays, prompts

Figure 11 The essential components of a rule-based system.

theme and scale, and a mechanism for adding or updating rules in the knowledge base. An example rule might be: If important ðbuildingÞ AND size ðbuilding;o50 m 2 Þ THEN enhancement ðbuildingÞ:

This simple example of a rule captures the idea of cartographically enhancing buildings if they are small yet important to the intended theme. There are examples of partial successes with this approach (the OSGEN system from Ordnance Survey and CHANGE from the Uni versity of Hannover), but several weaknesses were iden tified: it was hard to formulate rules for all the exceptions and circumstances in which a particular conflict might occur, they tended to operate over quite small changes in scale, and for limited classes of features. It was hard for the human to know what the consequences might be for any change or addition made to the rules. It had been assumed that rules could readily be formulated from map specification documents, but solutions were often dem onstrated by illustration, and cartography has never de vised the syntax or semiotics (a system of signs) that could be used to facilitate the rule formulation process. When cartographers were asked to explain their actions as they worked, they often found it hard to articulate their reasoning and were found to be inconsistent in their application of a technique. Constraint-Based Systems More recently, generalization research has focused on a holistic view of the process acknowledging the knock on effects of generalization and the interdependent nature of

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Figure 12 MRDB storing multiple representations of different geographic phenomena. (Ordnance Survey & Crown Copyright. All rights reserved).

the solution. Currently, there is much interest (and promise) in using a constraint based approach – where the aim is to find a state whereby the maximum number of constraints can be satisfied. In this context, there has been much research effort devoted to agent based method ologies – in which each object in the database is modeled as an agent – an object oriented concept in which the object has goals, behaviors, and a capacity to communicate with other agents. These are referred to as ‘multi agent systems’. The goals reflect those of the generalization process – namely to efficiently render the object without ambiguity. The agent makes decisions about its repre sentation based on its own goals while considering the goals and constraints of its neighbors. Ideas have included a hierarchy of agents in which higher order agents are concerned with broader contexts and distribution of agent classes, while agents at the individual object level are

concerned with the specific representation of individual objects. The AGENT project is one project which has been developed into a commercial system that now sup ports a number of national mapping agencies, notably the National Mapping Agency of France (IGN). As a corollary to this discussion, by partially in corporating the decision making process within rule based and agent based systems, the balance of decision making has shifted away from the human to the machine. This has presented some real challenges in the design of interfaces that are intuitive to use, allowing the user to specify their mapping requirements in a simple and ef ficient manner within very complex systems. Researchers have challenged the idea of totally autonomous solutions, arguing that interaction is critical to ensuring that the user remains part of the design process. The idea of semiautonomous generalization techniques, involving the

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user in critical evaluation tasks reflects a more col laborative approach to design. Coupled with machine learning techniques, this scenario might enable capture of design heuristics – thus gradually improving the so phistication of proffered solutions.

generalization methodologies that abstract geographic space in order to reveal the patterns and inter dependencies inherent among geographic features. See also: Geovisualization; GIS and Cartography; Maps; Mapping, Distributed; Spatial Databases.

Multirepresentation Databases Further Reading For databases potentially containing millions of objects, the processing overheads for even the simplest of gen eralization tasks is huge. Delivery of digital maps over the Internet, generalized in real time is not currently achievable. The obvious solution is to generalize maps in batch mode in anticipation of demand, or at least store in the database multiple generalized representations of each object, or groups of objects. This has given rise to the idea of multirepresentational databases – databases that ex plicitly store objects in different generalized states, such that generalization is more of a selection and com positional process – bringing together different classes according to scale and theme (Figure 12). The data model must connect together these different representations such that when changes are made in the primary DLM, these changes can be automatically re flected among the more generalized versions of the ob ject. This same hierarchical structure can then be traversed according to the intended level of detail as the user zooms in and out.

Conclusion When we look at maps at different levels of detail or scale, it is not that we see ‘less’ information but that we see ‘different’ information. The aim of generalization is to support this process – to give emphasis to attributes and relationships at the broader scale. Attempts at automation have revealed just how challenging and creative the art and science of cartography is. Developments in visual ization methodologies have not obviated the need for

Brassel, K. E. and Weibel, R. (1988). A review and conceptual framework of automated map generalization. International Journal of Geographical Information Systems 2, 229 244. Joao, E. M. (1998). Causes and Consequences of Map Generalisation. London: Taylor and Francis. Lamy, S., Ruas. A., Demazeau, Y., Jackson, M., Mackaness, W.A. and Weibel, R. (1999). The application of agents in automated map generalisation. In Keller, C. P. (eds.) Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Cartographic Conference, pp 1225 1234 Canada: Ottawa Mackaness, W. A., Ruas, A. and Sarjakoski, L. T. (2007). Generalisation of Geographic Information: Cartographic Modelling and Applications. Amsterdam: Elsevier. McMaster, R. B. and Shea, K. S. (1992). Generalization in Digital Cartography: Resource Publication in Geography. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. Molenaar, M. (1998). An Introduction to the Theory of Spatial Object Modelling for GIS. London: Taylor and Francis. Muller, J. C., Lagrange, J. P. and Weibel, R. (eds.) (1995). Generalization: State of the art and issues. In Masser, I. & Salge´, F. (eds.) GIS and Generalization: Methodology and Practice (Gisdata, No. 1), pp 3 18. London: Taylor & Francis. Ruas, A. (1999). Mode`le de Geńe´ralisation de Donneés Geógraphiques a` Base de Constraints et D’autonomie. The`se de doctorat. L’universite de Marne La Valleé, Paris. http://recherche.ign.fr/labos/ cogit/pdf/THESES/BARD/These Bard 2004.pdf (accessed in April 2008). Sheppard, E. and McMaster, R. B. (eds.) (2004). Scale and Geographic Inquiry: Nature Society and Method. Oxford: Blackwell. Weibel, R. and Dutton, G. (1999). Generalising spatial data and dealing with multiple representations. In Longley, P. A., Goodchild, M. F., Maguire, D. J. & Rhind, D. W. (eds.) Geographical Information Systems, pp 125 156. New York: Wiley.

Relevant Website http://ica.ign.fr/ ICA Commission on Generalisation and Multiple Representation.

Genetics E. Hall, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Bioprospecting The search for and exploitation of valuable compounds from the genetic resources of, for example, the plant life of tropical forests, for use in the development of medical and cosmetic products. The ownership of and rights to prospect and use such material is commonly contested between commercial companies and national governments. Geneticization The increasing tendency to view most illness conditions, behaviors, and physiological differences as determined (wholly or in part) by genes (adapted from definition by Abby Lippman, 1992). Genetic Map Genetic maps represent the relative and absolute positions of genetic sequences on the 23 pairs of chromosomes that sit within the nucleus of almost every cell in the body. Detailed genetic maps are critical in the identification of genes that contribute to disease susceptibility. Hybrid A term used both to critique the long-standing nature–society binary and to describe the new forms of mixing of social and natural elements in, for example, genetically modified plants and animals.

Introduction Stimulated by a series of biotechnological developments, human geographers have begun a tentative research en gagement with genetic science. We are now in the so called ‘biotech century’, a period of transformation of the understanding of plant, animal, and human bodies, and the possibilities to reconfigure these bodies through biological manipulation. From genetically modified plant crops to the identification of genetic ‘causes’ for chronic illnesses, and from the global trade in genetic resources to the detailed tracing of early human migrations, the changing nature of seemingly immutable biological entities is now a major focus of public and academic attention. Although this may seem the stuff of natural and medical science, geography’s interest should perhaps come as no surprise. The myriad of developments – encompassing bodies, environments, science, politics, corporations, and ethical concerns – has at its heart the interface of nature and society. All of the developments we are witnessing as the biotech century unfolds involve the transformation, or at least the reframing, of the nat ural–social relation, either through material change (e.g., the genetic modification of a plant’s biological makeup, to

produce more flavorsome tomatoes or disease resistant soybeans) or metaphorical change (e.g., the recasting of the causation of disease, such as the identification of the BRCA 1 and 2 ‘genes for’ breast cancer). This cross penetration of the social into the natural and the natural into the social challenges embedded binary understand ings. As such, the key debates generated by genetic sci ence are centered on the disciplinary core of geography – understanding the interface of the natural and social worlds. Echoing David Stoddart’s words of two decades ago, geography is arguably well placed to ‘claim the high ground’ of the theoretical framing and analytical in vestigation necessary to understand and critique the revolution in the relationship between natural entities and processes and social structures and actions, that genetics presents. Sarah Whatmore and Noel Castree, in separate edi torials in 1999, kick started geographical interest in genetics. Whatmore insisted that geography’s integrative positioning spanning the natural and the social sciences makes it perfectly suited to understanding the recon figurations of the natural–social relation produced by genetic science. At the same time, however, the challenge presented by genetics has highlighted the theoretical and methodological divergence of human and physical geographies, where science has been largely rejected within human geography and, more broadly, how the powerful sense of integrated ‘lived worlds’ that were once studied and celebrated within the tradition of geography, comfortably combining human and physical sciences, has been lost. Castree shares a similar frustration with the inability of a geography separated on natural and social science lines to tackle the challenges posed by genetics. Encouragingly, in response, not only has geography begun to rediscover its ‘synthetical’ approach to the world, albeit in small measure, but it has also begun to apply both existing and innovative theoretical tools to the new questions raised by genetics. Castree initiated a neo Marxist framing of genetics as a new manifestation of the long standing production and commodification of nature. Arguably, all that has changed is the scale of the focus and penetration of capital into nature. In short, there is little difference between the exploitation of the resources of forests, rivers, and land, and that of the genetic material of plants, animals, and human bodies. In a globalized economy, capital ac cumulation through nature draws together resources from a myriad of places, bodily and organic sources, to sustain this accumulation. An example is ‘bioprospecting’,

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the search for genetic material in, particularly, the plant life of tropical forest regions of developing countries (e.g., Costa Rica) that can be potentially utilized in the de velopment of medical and commercial products. Eco nomic benefits accrue to the source country for the materials under bioprospecting agreements, but the de veloped West gains far more in its exploitation of this biological material and potential. What is perhaps dif ferent about such exploitations of nature is that in this new genetic regime of accumulation, nature is not damaged or destroyed as the DNA is extracted. Rather, once returned to the laboratories of the West, the natural resource is ‘unpacked’ to reveal its genetic constituents and then, through combination with other natural (e.g., another plant) and social (e.g., a pharmaceutical or cos metic compound) entities, it is remade into an object that is a form of natural–social mix or ‘hybrid’. There is a powerful sense that genetic science, in its identification and manipulation of the genetic material of plants, animals, and human bodies, is redefining the re lationship between nature and society and, as such, de mands a new conceptualization. A binary of fixed, immutable opposites, limited to interaction, rooted in Enlightenment scientific rationality, has defined the way that human geographers from all traditions have regarded nature and society. While realists see nature as material and social constructionists understand nature as a prod uct of society, both see nature and society as separate spaces and entities. The cultural turn in geography squeezed any lingering sense of ‘life’ out of the con ceptual frame, though more recently there has been a welcome resurgence of interest in materiality. The realist versus constructionist positionings on nature of course reflect the nature–society binary itself, and the under pinning sense of ‘pure’ forms of the natural and the social, a sense that persists despite many years of environmental transformation by social action. Society cannot escape nature, and nature has quite clearly not escaped society. Genetics, with its deliberate mixing of the natural and the social – from genetically modified crops to medical gene therapy – demands a different conceptualization, where binaries can be discarded and a sense of hybridity embraced. Social theorists Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour have provided inspiration for this, with their stress on the mixing of the human and the nonhuman and, in particular, a desire to include nonhumans, from plants and animals, to technology and machines, in social worlds on an equal footing. The focus of interest then shifts from interactions between the separate entities of nature and society to the networks and relations between a whole set of people, places, objects, and organisms within which hybrid entities are produced and main tained. Genetically modified plant crops and gene therapies are two such natural–social hybrids, the prod ucts of strongly geographical networks of scientists,

government, pharmaceutical corporations, medical clin icians, technologies and machines, bodies, and the microbiological chemicals of DNA themselves.

Networks of Genes A ‘relational’ sense of nature–society has permitted geographers to engage effectively in the challenging and intense debates on the new genetics. Most importantly, a geography of relations places the hybrid object – the gene, the genetically modified plant, and the gene ther apy – in the context of the networks that produced it, forcing an engagement with the full range of natural and social factors. Just as importantly, the materiality of the chemical mix of DNA in the human or nonhuman body that is named the ‘gene’ is emphasized. Each of the elements in the network is an ‘actor’ or ‘actant’ and all are caught in a productive tension, able to act, but also subject to reaction (a mix of social decisions and natural nonintentional actions), and as they relate to one another, so a collective understanding is produced. So, in theory, no one actor – human or non human – can dominate the network, with any outcome being the product of relations between all of the actants in the network. Two examples of this approach are provided by Whatmore and Edward Hall. Whatmore describes how plant genetic resources are within and are the product of a complex network or ‘assemblage’ of developed and developing world governments, multinational corpor ations, peasant farmers and technologies, patent laws, and international agreements on the exploitation and trade in such resources. ‘Actor network theory’ encourages a reading of this as neither an ordered and governed pro cess of trade nor as a simple power imbalance of dom ination and exploitation, but as a ‘coming together’ of factors with unpredictable outcomes. Through adopting such an approach, we can see that genetic technologies raise some important questions. First, the global trade in plant genetic resources has tried to make sense of the genetic material by wishing to delimit its biological purity, that is, state with clarity its discrete genetic ‘root’, but has found this an impossible task given the long history of human cultivation that plants have undergone, and the complex ecological contexts within which they are located and are to a large extent defined. Second, delimiting the geographical origin of the plant genes has become a source of tension, between the notion of genes as a common entity, to which all humanity has common access, and the notion that developing countries (where most plant genetic resources of interest to corporations are located) have ownership over these indigenous spe cies and their biological material. Third, are the genes the materiality of the chemical mix of DNA or are they the intellectual and technological rigor that extracts and

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utilizes them? This is important, for it decides where the gene is located (and owned), in the laboratories of the West or in the fields and forests of the South. Through all of this, the impossibility of separating the natural from the social is clear; plant genetic resources, indeed all genetic material, are necessarily at the same time a social artifact and a natural entity. Innovations in healthcare, and in particular new cures and treatments for chronic and fatal illnesses such as cancers, heart disease, and Parkinson’s disease, have been at the forefront of the promises of the new genetics, heralded by the ‘completion’ of the Human Genome Project (HGP) – the mapping and sequencing of all of the human body’s genes – in 2003. Geographers (and others) have seen this as a potentially significant shift in the medical and social discourse of health and disease causation and therapy. Dominant understandings of the causation of health and illness, that is, individual be haviors conditioned by external social and spatial con texts, have been challenged by the claim of internal causation located within an individual’s genes. The emergent notion of individual behaviors and environ ments as either irrelevant or providing simply the trigger for the development of a disease condition, has become known as the ‘geneticization’ of disease. The importance of geographical contexts to the explanation of health is increasingly marginalized. Through the adoption of Actor Network Theory, Hall has challenged this seem ingly smooth transition to geneticization (of heart dis ease, in this instance). By conceptualizing geneticization as a managed product of a highly spatialized network, including, crucially, not only scientists and the genes on which they conduct research, but also funding, technol ogy, and even experimental rats (and the unpredictability of their genetic material), a fuller picture of the ‘messi ness’ of science emerges, exposing the impossibility of separating social (environment) and natural (genes) fac tors, and the remaining powerful influence of certain actors (geneticists), contexts (government and charity science policies), and geographies (biotechnological data and medical research) in explaining the causation of and the development of treatments for heart disease.

Genetic Cultures Other geographers have examined the ways in which genetics highlights how the biological makeup of the body has resonances amplified far beyond its chemical constituency, reaching into debates around what it means to be human, of a particular ethnic or sexual identity, and the broader tension between biology (nature) and human agency (society) in determining futures. The HGP re vived and intensified a long standing, if up until then scientifically rudimentary, genetic imagining of the body,

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in particular in its process of the ‘mapping’ of the gen ome. The HGP saw the production of a complete genetic map of the human genome – the identification of the positions of genetic sequences on the 23 chromosomes that sit within the nucleus of almost every cell in the human body. The genetic map is the central analytical tool of the new genetic knowledge, operating both as an information pool in the gathering of data, and as a framework for the subsequent interpretation of genetic information and the linking to physiological and psy chological conditions. It is no terminological accident that geneticists used the language of cartography to de scribe the gathering of knowledge of the body’s DNA, nor that the media so readily adopted this metaphor. Maps retain a popular metaphorical power, suggesting the complete and accurate representation of an unknown landscape, in this case the genome. Further, the map presupposes that there is a landscape there to be known (and that it is possible, through technology, to fully know that landscape), and that once mapped, the landscape becomes a defined object, possible to occupy, own, and exploit. The purpose of the genetic map is to imagine the gene, to transform its chemical materiality into a set of individual objects set within an overall spatial structure. The map makes sense of the gene, indeed it ‘makes’ the gene – breaking the body down into atomized pieces, opening up the body and the genes (like a colonized land) to domination and ownership (such as the commodifi cation of genetic information by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies). So, while the map now per haps stands on the fringes of human geography as an analytical tool, genetics reminds us both that it retains metaphorical power and that as geographers we should reawaken our long held knowledge of the map. With the map, as with the natural–social interface, genetics speaks to the disciplinary core of geography. The complete knowledge of the body promised by the so called ‘book of life’ of the human genome map, and the subsequent linking between particular genes and bodily states, has penetrated the geographical study of identity. The HGP and other genome projects, most notably in Iceland, have used gene patternings within indigenous, and therefore supposedly pure, populations as bench marks for the assessment of ethnic difference and mi gratory histories. This draws on the notion of the gene as somehow our innate humanity, reaching back into our evolutionary past and unaffected by socio environmental change over time. So, discussions of racial and genea logical identities, and the origin and spread of peoples and families, have been heightened by genetic technol ogies and claims of absolute purity and complete knowledge. Such supposed purity of identity of ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality can be a dangerous set of claims to make, as discrimination (utilizing the same genetic technologies) can flourish. However, there is, more

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positively, the potential for genetics to reveal the com plex histories – in Stuart Hall’s memorable phrasing, the ‘routes’ rather than the ‘roots’ – of people now defined and confined by a national state border, shifting toward a possible hybrid notion of identity. In the case of Iceland’s genome project, in which large numbers of people have donated genetic material to be triangulated with medical and genealogical records to better understand gene–environment–health relation ships, and so further the search for ‘genes for’ chronic illnesses, there is understood to be a very particular genetic resource containing a bounded, stable, and homogenous population (termed an ‘island laboratory’). Importantly, not only was the genetic material of thou sands of individuals depersonalized and transformed into the resource of a ‘national’ genome with generalizable characteristics, but also the genes were very much the target of the research, not the individuals that host them. The human body, and the broader contexts within which bodies exist, is replaced by the gene code (and the as sociated medical record data). And, further, this genetic information can then be enrolled and commodified into the genetic technologies of the organizations managing the projects (and become bioinformatic information to transact globally). However, it may not be as straight forward as it seems to pull apart the gene from the body and its contexts; through the consent forms, medical re cords, and public opinion, individuals retain a grip on the ways in which the genetic material is used, and reassert the importance of environments in understanding health and disease, and human development. The HGP and other national genomic collection programs and the dominant symbol of genetics – the double helix of DNA – emphasize a common humanity: we all, irrespective of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or lo cation, share a very large percentage of our genetic material with other humans and organisms. At the same time, the spinning helix also invokes the commodification of the body’s biology, the distancing of people from their biology, and the ability to alter ‘life’, which seems to undermine any sense of common humanity. Charting a way through this debate, geographers emphasize the often marginalized social contexts, natural environments, and natural–social networks within which the body and identity is produced, reproduced, and contested.

The Ethics and Regulation of Genetics The ethical issues raised by genetics in one sense echo those of other areas of contemporary science – such as nuclear energy – in raised risk and uncertainty; in an other sense, they herald something quite different, as the natural–social boundary, usually so tightly marshaled, is unsettled and disrupted as genetics continues to push the

boundaries of what is ‘natural’. As such, much thinking on the ethics of genetics has been provoked within geog raphy. Genetics plays on our greatest hopes – of cures for chronic illness and disease resistant plant crops to feed the poor of the world – and our greatest fears – of pro ducing entities, such as genetically modified crops and transgenic animals (e.g., pigs and sheep developed to produce human proteins in their milk, and ‘oncoMouse’ altered to develop cancerous tumors), that are not ‘nat ural’, potentially dangerous to health, and for many deeply disturbing. Geographers have tackled these issues in ways that avoid making a judgment between what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’ – as such judgments tend to be formu lated around maintaining distance between the natural and the social – instead, emphasizing the new com plexities of natural–social relations, and tracing the many connections, networks, and interests involved, spread across a range of spaces. So, the ethical challenge becomes something rather different: traditional ethical discourse is framed in terms of the dualism of nature and society, with ethical values and decisions lying solely within society (and nature as untainted by such dilemmas). The capacity for ethical judgment is pos sessed solely by the rational human individual within passive social and environmental contexts. One ethical response to this narrow position is the extension of rights to nature, to animals, and to plants. But in the world of hybrid entities, where the natural and the social are entangled in new and ever more fantastical formu lations, a different approach is perhaps necessary and possible. The notion, then, of ‘ethical communities’ of people, bodies, plants, institutions, and others may allow us to recognize that ethical discourse is something produced by the actions and reactions of a whole series of actors. So, the ethics of genetics, rather than being a set of predetermined codes of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, instead emerge within this network of relations. The difficulty that society is finding at present when faced with technological developments in plant and animal hybrids, and ever more innovative medical and pharmaceutical treatments (such as animals genetically modified to allow animal to human organ transplanta tion), that seemingly revel in the possibilities of in jecting the social into the natural and vice versa, and in deciding whether such developments are ethically ac ceptable or not, could be bolstered by a reconceptuali zation of ethics. If we recognize that a transgenic animal is neither (clearly) purely natural nor purely social, but is the product of multiple connected processes, then our geographically informed ethical eyes can be trained on the spaces and agents where these entities are being produced. While the products of genetic science are novel, the structures, organizations, and interests within which they

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are produced are arguably not (albeit in new combin ations). We do not have to decide whether we are ‘for’ or ‘against’ genetics; our energy is better spent unearthing how, where, and why it is happening, who determines the rules, and who (humans and nonhumans) benefits. For example, the bioprospecting for plant or human genetic resources in Costa Rica or Iceland need not be rejected on principle as neocolonial exploitation of natural re sources (although it can be), rather it can be located and then questions asked about why such activity is occurring in that particular place, what are local understandings and responses, and who benefits and how. The assessment then becomes less of ethics and more of critical practi cality. This is part of a growing spatializing of genetics within geography. Through ‘placing the gene’ within the ‘uneven and unequal’ contexts where genetic science is being produced, applied and regulated, the complex, dynamic, and contested landscape of genetics is mapped, and geography’s unique contribution identified. In the case of medical genetics, these contexts include labora tories funded by corporate and charitable science, clinical services unequally provided within national healthcare, and the social and spatial inequalities of health, and government policy and legal frameworks. For genetically modified crops and seeds, these networks are transna tional and transcultural, with genetic products being mapped onto existing unequal relations of knowledge, technology, trade, and politics. The study of genetics is dominated by natural and medical science. Geographers, however, are beginning to forge a particular and incisive approach. By mapping out the networks of the production and application of genetic science, revealing the many natural–social actors, inter ests, and spaces, geography is reasserting the importance of (uneven and unequal) contexts and environments.

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Further, genetics is an opportunity for geography to re connect to its disciplinary roots: the concern with the materiality of ‘life’ at the interface of the natural and social worlds. See also: Nature; Nature-Culture.

Further Reading Bridge, B., McManus, P. and Marsden, P. (2003). The next big thing? Biotechnology and its discontents. Geoforum 34, 165 174. Castree, N. (1999). Synthesis and engagement: Critical geography and the biotechnology century. Environment and Planning A 31(5), 763 766. Castree, N. (2003). Bioprospecting: From theory to practice (and back again). Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28(1), 35 55. Castree, N. and Braun, B. (eds.) (2001). Social Nature: Theory, Practice and Politics. Oxford: Blackwell. Davies, G. (2006). The sacred and profane: Biotechnology, rationality and public debate. Environment and Planning A 38, 423 443. Greenhough, B. (2006). Towards a geography of bodily biotechnologies. Environment and Planning A 38, 416 422. Greenhough, B. (2006). Decontexualised? Disassociated? Detached? Mapping the networks of bioinformatics exchange. Environment and Planning A 38, 445 463. Hall, E. (2003). Reading maps of the genes: Interpreting the spatiality of genetic knowledge. Health and Place 9, 151 161. Hall, E. (2005). The ‘geneticisation’ of heart disease: A network analysis of the production of new genetic knowledge. Social Science and Medicine 60, 2673 2683. Lippman, A. (1992). Led (astray) by genetic maps: The cartography of the human genome and health care. Social Science and Medicine 35(12), 1469 1476. Nash, C. (2002). Genealogical identities. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20, 27 52. Nash, C. (2005). Geographies of relatedness. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30(4), 449 462. Whatmore, S. (1999). Geography’s place in the life science era? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, 259 260. Whatmore, S. (2002). Hybrid Geographies. London: Sage.

Gentrification D. J. Hammel, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Devalorization In Marxist urban theory, it is the destruction of a parcel of land’s ability to produce increased return on capital invested in it. Displacement The forced movement of a lowerincome individual out of a neighborhood usually due to increasing rents or property taxes brought about by gentrification. Land Rent It is a form of economic rent accrued through the control (or ownership) of land in productive use. Postindustrial City As it relates to gentrification, it is the city created by the move away from a strong reliance on manufacturing as an economic base, particularly throughout the 1970s, and an increasing emphasis on the provision of high-level business and financial services as the basis for economic growth. Revanchism It is a nineteenth-century French political movement that attempted to take revenge on the working classes for a series of perceived national humiliations. As applied to gentrification, it describes the series of neoliberal policies aimed at poor and minority urbanites to ensure that central cities were more palatable for middle-class habitation and consumption.

Definitions Gentrification refers to a process of neighborhood transformation in which working class and poor residents are displaced by an influx of middle class residents. This change results in improvements in the area’s private housing stock and public infrastructure with a con comitant increase in house values and contract rents. Gentrification, the processes that create it, its effects, and its political ramifications have been the focus of a large amount of social science research and substantial political rhetoric. The importance of gentrification rests not only upon the dramatic effects it has upon both the residents of a neighborhood and the neighborhood’s landscape, but also upon the linkages that have been created between gentrification and theories of urbanization. Origins Sociologist Ruth Glass originally used the term in 1964 to describe a process of class based neighborhood change in a handful of London neighborhoods like Islington. The

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process clearly predates the name and what might be termed as modern gentrification began in the mid 1950s as bohemian enclaves in sections of several global cities. The earliest identified gentrification in the United States was the discovery of Georgetown in Washington, DC, by bureaucrats brought to the city to assist in the adminis tration of New Deal programs of the 1930s – although the process appeared contemporaneously in some Boston neighborhoods as well. In Europe, the first significant evidence of gentrification was in 1860s Paris. ‘Embour geoisment’, as it was termed, was one result of the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods inherent in Haussmann’s infamous modernization scheme. Despite the precursors, the coining of the word gentrification does represent an important watershed because it marks the beginning of a period of cyclical but sustained gen trification activity in cities around the world.

Shifts in Meaning The term ‘gentrification’ has been subject to shifts in meaning over the four decades since it was first created, and debate about the meaning of the term has been a part of the process since the beginning. The gentrification that Glass observed in London involved the basic upgrading of older homes and mews dispersed through several inner city neighborhoods. As the process expanded in London and was identified in other advanced capitalist cities, it began to involve the redevelopment of retail properties as well as residential ones. In addition, some areas experienced demolition and new construction. Little attention has been paid to retail redevelopment, but most scholars seem to acknowledge that it is part of the gentrification process, although clearly secondary to the activity in the housing market. A more robust and longer lasting debate developed around the legitimacy of what is now termed new build gentrification. Some ob servers confine the use of the term gentrification to the process of rehabilitating old housing stock, or what is sometimes termed traditional gentrification. This usage is somewhat more common in work emanating from the design fields, and despite the substantial limitations that it places on both the extent and impact of gentrification, there are still those who adhere to this traditional view. Very few areas, however, have been gentrified purely through the redevelopment of old housing stock, espe cially in the North American context. Even Society Hill in Philadelphia, the locus of some of the earliest and most theoretically significant work on gentrification, involved

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both the redevelopment of historic structures, and clearance and construction of large condominium towers. The political context of gentrification has also created substantial debate over the use and meaning of the term. While there was little early reaction to Glass’ usage, by the mid 1970s the term had significant competition. Reinvestment, revitalization, renewal, and renaissance were all preferred over gentrification. The authors of one of the early scholarly collections on the topic chose to use the phrase ‘neighborhood renovation’ in the title, and the special section of the Journal of the American Planning Association appearing in 1979 used the title ‘Symposium on neighborhood revitalization’. There has been no sys tematic investigation of the evident discomfort that American scholars had with the term, but the class re lationships explicit in gentrification may have played a role. In addition, early North American research often viewed gentrification as a generally positive process, and alternate terms, particularly renaissance, may reflect that bias. Throughout the 1980s, research on gentrification took a much more critical approach and organized re sistance to gentrification became much more common. The term was increasingly used by academics in Europe and North America, but had acquired a strong enough negative connotation that policymakers, developers, and gentrifiers themselves actively avoided it. Perhaps the most acute example of this avoidance in the Urban White Paper completed in 2001 as a guide to the future of the cities of the United Kingdom. The term renaissance appears in the subtitle of the implementation document, and regeneration is used commonly to describe the goals of the policy. Some critics have pointed out that the document is one of the most comprehensive policy statements on gentrification ever written, but the term gentrification never appears in the hundreds of pages of text. For many, the term gentrification is one to be avoided for fear of a political backlash. For others, its explicit class connotations make it the preferred label for the process. Urban scholars have also expressed some difficulty with the term on a conceptual level. Since the early 1980s, there has been concern that gentrification has been a catch all term used to describe an increasingly chaotic concept. In an attempt to introduce more specificity, various modifying phrases have been added. New build and traditional gentrification have been joined by rural gentrification and super gentrification as ways to describe newly theorized aspects of gentrification. Rural gentrifi cation was first identified in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s and most of the research on the topic has been conducted there. The term is used to describe the class transformation of large portions of small rural vil lages. New telecommunications technologies have made it possible for a small portion of the urban middle class to leave the city and establish rural residences. The

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transformation in some villages is similar to that in gentrifying urban neighborhoods and the concept of rural gentrification has gained recognition as another form of the gentrification process. At the same time the process in urban areas has continued to develop, and after a history of over four decades in some cities gentrification in some areas has intensified to the extent that a previous gen eration of gentrifiers has been displaced from their homes by a set of very wealthy gentrifiers who may have mul tiple residences and reside in the neighborhood on a part time basis. This super gentrification appears to be confined to major global centers, and is yet another facet of the larger process of gentrification.

History of Gentrification Gentrification Waves Like most urban processes, gentrification is temporally uneven. In the European and North American context it has been closely linked with economic cycles, first as a counter cyclical process, and later as a cyclical one. The first significant wave of gentrification appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Jason Hackworth and Neil Smith observe that gentrification during this period was led by state redevelopment efforts and was confined to major US and Western European cities. A second wave of gentri fication began to gain momentum in the late 1970s. At this point, it became evident that gentrification was no longer confined to global cities, but was present in moderate amounts in cities well down the hierarchy. Although the state still was actively involved in pro moting the process, the role of private actors, who had begun to see the market potential of gentrification, was more prominent in creating gentrification. This time period, particularly in the mid 1980s also saw coales cence of organized resistance to gentrification, albeit mostly at the local levels. In the United States, this period also saw one of the largest office building booms in the country’s history due in part to tax policies of the Reagan administration. Much of the new construction was fo cused on the core of major American cities and the combination of public/private partnerships to create large gentrification projects and substantial office tower construction made a highly noticeable impact on the landscape of the American downtown. The third wave began in the mid 1990s as the economies of the indus trialized world began a long period of sustained economic growth that lasted throughout the decade and into 2001. Another mild recession slowed gentrification activity, but unusually low mortgage interest rates, especially in the United States, allowed urban housing markets to navigate the recession with little difficulty. The result has been nearly a decade and a half of substantial growth and expansion of gentrification. This wave of gentrification is

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distinguished from prior bursts of activity not only by its duration, but also by the expansion of the process to cities outside the industrialized world. Some research has also suggested that this new gentrification has been fi nanced more by large, global sources of capital than in previous periods. Geographic Extent Over the four decades that gentrification has become a significant feature of the urban fabric, its extent and in tensity have changed dramatically. By the late 1970s gentrification seems to have been identifiable in most major cities in Western Europe, North America, and Australia. Throughout the 1980s published reports of gentrifi cation in Johannesburg, Kyoto, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aries, and Tel Aviv appeared. Shortly after the fall of com munist regimes in Eastern Europe, the gentrification process began in earnest in cities such as Prague and Budapest. It was even identifiable in Warsaw whose historic core was almost completely destroyed in World War II. By the late 1990s, gentrification was evident even in Moscow. Given the strong movement toward a mar ket based economy in East and South Asia it is un surprising that gentrification and displacement became major issues in Chinese and Indian cities, especially, Shanghai and more recently in Mumbai. While the spread of gentrification continued, its intensity in North American and European cities increased. By 2001, large sections of London and New York were heavily gentri fied. The processes had proceeded to the point that long standing areas of poverty were gentrifying: Harlem and the Lower East Side in New York, and sections of Brixton and the East End in London. Manhattan had become such a center of activity that gentrification spilled over into substantial sections of Brooklyn and even Hoboken, New Jersey. In Chicago, gentrification reached deep into the south side, and northwest of the Loop has surrounded Cabrini Green, one of the largest public housing projects in the country. In several more spatially limited central cities like Boston and San Francisco, gentrification, combined with an overheated housing market, had almost eliminated any affordable housing in the central city. Toronto, Vancouver, and Sydney also faced similar issues. At the same time, gentrification was moving down the urban hierarchy both in Europe and North America. By 2000, urban programs explicitly designed to foster gen trification had created small but viable areas of re development in the United Kingdom’s old industrial centers. The remote Spanish city of Bilbao was selected as the site for the European branch of the Guggenheim museum, the now famous structure helped start a wave of gentrification that penetrated well away from the

city’s redeveloped waterfront. In the United States, gen trification has slowly begun to transform small areas of cities near the bottom of the urban hierarchy with row house redevelopments and warehouse conversions in places like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or the creation of lofts in small downtowns like Bloomington, Illinois. Some critics have cautioned that gentrification has been defined so broadly that if you look for it you can find it almost anywhere, and there are conceptual difficulties with conflating redeveloped houses in a city of 50 000 people with the massive flows of capital that have rebuilt large portions of a number of global cities. Nonetheless, there is an identifiable trend toward both a spatial expansion and intensification of the gentrification over the last 30 years of the 1900s, and the trend appears to be con tinuing into the new century.

Causes of Gentrification Early Explanations The emergence of gentrification throughout the 1960s and 1970s caught the attention of urban scholars for several reasons. It was evident on the urban landscape, it offered some solution to the problems of urban decline, and it seemed to contradict nearly 50 years of urban theory that focused upon the out movement and subur banization of the middle class. This challenge to the theoretical canon required serious consideration of the causes of gentrification. While the early research on gentrification covered a range of issues from displace ment to other social and policy considerations, it was the attempts to theorize gentrification that dominated the scholarly research throughout the 1980s. The earliest explanations for gentrification developed out of a view that it was a temporary phenomenon rooted in demographic factors present in both North America and Europe. Brian Berry suggested the major recession of the early 1970s followed by large numbers of baby boomers entering the housing market created a signifi cant shortage of housing, rapidly driving up housing prices beyond the means of many members of the large cohort of first time homebuyers. A few of these indi viduals turned to lower cost housing in declining areas of central cities. These gentrifiers, Berry suggested, would soon leave their central city location and move to more typical suburban locales when their incomes rose, hous ing became more affordable, and they began to have children. This demographic explanation was echoed by many others and established a general view of gentrifi cation as a highly ephemeral event. As it became clearer that gentrified areas were expanding throughout the 1980s instead of contracting, Berry suggested that gen trification was more an issue of contagious abandonment of inner city housing brought about by overbuilding in

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suburban housing markets. This substantial shift from a demand side to a supply side explanation has been largely ignored because of Berry’s famous contention that gentrified areas were ‘‘islands of renewal in seas of decay.’’ While early explanations of gentrification emphasized demographic factors, many also noticed the correlation between gentrification and emerging high order service centers. Starting in the mid 1970s numerous scholars linked gentrification with an increasing concentration of white collar jobs in the central business district. By the late 1970s, some were trying to empirically evaluate this link. At the same time, a number of other suggestions were made about the root causes of gentrification: high fuel prices, increasing numbers of women in the work force, etc. While all these factors probably played a role in bringing about gentrification, they were frequently offered in an ad hoc fashion. Critics of this early phase of explanation accurately pointed to the lack of coherent theories to contextualize the process. However, it is somewhat inaccurate to refer to the explanations as ad hoc. Both of the Berry’s explanations of gentrification, although mutually exclusive, were consistent with and linked to prevailing neoclassical theories of urbanization (although he claims to have challenged these same the ories). It is accurate, however, that most of the early re search on the causes of gentrification failed to make explicit links to established urban theory. This situation changed dramatically in 1979 and 1980. Capital and Culture With the publication of a short paper dedicated to moving toward a theory of gentrification, Neil Smith introduced what has become known as the rent gap hy pothesis. In doing so, he identified gentrification as the leading edge of a process of urban restructuring driven by the demands of advanced capitalism. He suggested links between the rent gap and Marxist theories of urban ization being honed by Henri Lefebvre and David Har vey, and cemented those links in his later work on uneven development. The rent gap hypothesis emphasized the supply side causes of gentrification and focused on movements of capital in the gentrification process. The subtitle of Smith’s paper was ‘A back to the city move ment by capital and not people’. The rent gap theory focused on a cycle of devalorization, or destruction of value, that all urban land is subject to. The five stage cycle suggests that while some land maintains its value, other land proceeds through phases of devalorization, perhaps eventually to abandonment. As devalorization occurs, the actual land rent (termed capitalized land rent) declines as less and less value can be extracted from the land given its current use. At the same time, in a met ropolitan area with continued investment in the built environment, or valorization, the potential land rent of

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the devalorized parcel remains high because of their high levels of accessibility. This difference in capitalized and potential land rent is the rent gap. In land rent terms, gentrification represents the closing of the gap. The rent gap hypothesis stood in stark contrast to the demographic explanations of gentrification because it emphasized the supply of gentrifiable land and housing and not the de mand for gentrification growing out of the rise of a particular cohort of urbanites. The postindustrial city hypothesis formed another new strand in gentrification theory, emerging at the same time as the rent gap. David Ley was the first to fully elaborate the impact of this hypothesis on gentrification in a seminal paper in 1980. Ley emphasized the effect of a new liberal ideology in changing the inner city landscape in Vancouver, British Columbia. As the city’s economy was transformed by the increase in high level service functions, a growing group of elite white collar pro fessionals began to assert power in local politics, adopting a liberal ideology that Ley suggests was characterized by a concern with humane governance and emphasized issues involved with the urban esthetic. As this political transition played itself out, it became clear that the new liberal elite were not terribly concerned with issues of social justice, but instead, placed issues of urban livability above all other concerns. The urban orientation of this new class was in part a result of their employment in the urban core and in part a function of the liberal ideology. Ley outlines many of the emphases of Vancouver’s liberal movement in a case study of False Creek, an old indus trial area that was the subject of city led redevelopment. Ley never used the term gentrification in the 1980 paper, but it was clear that he was outlining a different view of the process of gentrification. He explicitly links gentri fication to larger political and economic forces that help create a new class of potential gentrifiers. He also suggest that liberal ideology was so focused upon livability and esthetics that some of its results, including the False Creek, project were uneconomical. In this sense, the liberal ideology explanation of gentrification would seem to be in direct opposition to the rent gap hypothesis, and in some respects, it is. The debate surrounding these explanations of gen trification continued through the 1980s, and included a lively exchange between Smith and Ley in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Other gentrification theorists began to portray these explanations of gentrifi cation as being based either in capital or culture. In this sense, the theories surrounding gentrification became a microcosm of larger debates and theorization in geog raphy and other social sciences. Indeed, much of the attention that gentrification received was not due to its empirical extent, or even its effects on working class and poor neighborhoods. Gentrification was understood as a symbolic process representative of sweeping changes in

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industrialized cities. Theorizing gentrification was a key component in rejecting positivist theories of urbanization and supplanting them with alternative theories. However, the capital and culture debates were not actually about capital and culture. The rent gap hypothesis was often simplified to a deterministic diagram representing the gap between potential and capitalized land rent, but ig noring the politics of neighborhood change and class constitution that drove land rent changes. Conversely, while the liberal ideology explanation certainly con tained a cultural component, it also relied heavily upon concepts common in political economy. Both Smith and Ley seemed to move in this direction in later work, and most scholars who wrote about gentrification theory seemed to suggest the need for some combination of both explanations, but often with the clear intent of privileging one of them. Revanchism and Neoliberalism By the early 1990s, the so called capital and culture debates had run their course, and gentrification itself was slowed by a recession in Europe and North America. Given the culmination of these two events, it is un surprising that several scholars began to speculate about the end of gentrification, and processes of degen trification. Once again they raised questions about its usefulness as a concept. The rapid reappearance of gentrification in many global centers, however, silenced many of those questions (even when they raised im portant and difficult issues). As academic interest renewed in gentrification, the focus changed. Jan Van Weesep suggested that after the experiences in gentrified areas during the 1980s more attention needed to be paid to issues of displacement and the inequalities that gen trification was inscribing in the landscape. The research that followed focused initially upon documenting and eventually upon understanding and theorizing processes of gentrification as they unfolded after the recession of the early 1990s. Gentrification in the 1990s can be differentiated from early processes in several ways. Oddly, there appeared to be less political resistance to the process in gentrified areas, especially in contrast to the sharp and sometimes violent conflicts of the 1980s. In the United States, part of this difference may be explained by shifts in a range of housing policies. Throughout the 1980s the residential lending industry was deregulated in ways that allowed an increase in both the products that mortgage lenders could offer and the type and characteristics of the lenders themselves. A secondary mortgage market had existed in the United States for decades, and had expanded mas sively in the 1970s, but in the 1980s private secondary market added to the growth. Historic discrimination in lending had been addressed in a series of legislation

throughout the 1970s, which the Clinton administration began to enforce with some vigor. These developments, combined with market pressures, began to open up inner city neighborhoods to mainstream mortgage capital for the first time. The intended result was that low and moderate income individuals would have increased ac cess to mortgages, and this did occur, but these shifts also made gentrifying areas the target of increased mortgage lending. Home buying and renovations in gentrifying areas had traditionally been funded through processes of sweat equity, personal savings, and informal loan net works. While mortgages were made in gentrifying areas, they were difficult to obtain, and were often at un favorable rates. Access to mainstream mortgage capital, initially in the 1980s and in massively increasing amounts throughout the 1990s helped finance gentrification at a pace that had not been experienced previously. Resist ance to gentrification at the local level was handicapped by an increasingly direct link between the process and global capital markets. The extent of gentrification in many major US cities was significant enough that David Ley’s suggestion, made in the early 1980s, that gentrification may one day turn North American cities inside out creating a morphology much more similar to other cities around the globe, seemed plausible. The amount of gentrification in places like Manhattan, Chicago, Boston, Washington, DC, and San Francisco made a significant mark on local politics. Neil Smith borrowed the term revanchism to outline a theory of middle class revenge upon the poor in an at tempt to take back the city and make it more palatable for middle class consumption habits. The vigorous po licing championed in New York, with its occasional overt violence inflicted upon marginalized groups, effectively pushed the poor and dispossessed out of Manhattan. It also served as a model for other US cities. Similar tactics were adopted in European cities, although initially they were somewhat less aggressive. Revanchism was quickly linked to a political and economic movement in advanced capitalism, termed neoliberalism. A number of scholars have argued that gentrification is a clear example of neoliberal policies and its expansion during the 1990s was brought about by those policies. Philosophically neoliberalism is a return to a deeply held belief in the efficacy of the free market, albeit with substantial assistance from the public sector that is typically used to guarantee a high return on private investment. Gentrification throughout the 1990s was often aided by local neoliberal regimes that saw it as a free market solution to urban problems. There are numerous examples in the United States, but the United Kingdom may offer the single most sweeping example of neoliberal gentrification policy in the Blair adminis tration’s plan for regenerating the country’s central cities.

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The Process of Gentrification Stage Theories There has been significant investigation into the process of gentrification, and a few useful generalizations have been made. Early work suggested a first group of gen trifiers who were risk oblivious and thus were willing to live in neighborhoods that probably lacked many of the typical amenities they would expect, and from a real estate perspective posed significant investment risks. These early gentrifiers often had specific reasons, fre quently economic constraints, that moved them toward gentrification. College students have been identified in this group, but the arts community is often seen as the most prominent participants in the early stages of the gentrification process. Artists’ need for studio space, their low incomes, and their counter cultural outlook led them to neighborhoods that were, in real estate terms, off the map. Some research has suggested that gay men and lesbians have also been key actors early in the gentrifi cation process. During the earliest waves of gentrification, the social barriers to living openly as homosexuals in many parts of the city made economically marginal areas attractive as safe havens. In addition, single working mothers, another group with limited housing choices, may have chosen gentrified areas because of their prox imity to the workplace, which helped them maintain the difficult balance between domestic and professional re sponsibilities. Discussion and theorization about the role of these groups introduced an important gender com ponent into gentrification and while it has never been the primary concern of most research on the topic, theories explicating processes of gendering space have been pre sent in work on gentrification for several decades. These early gentrifiers have often been the subject of debate about their role in the gentrification process. If these groups manage to start the process of gentrification, do they bear some responsibility for the resulting dis placement from later, more intense gentrification? The subject has received much discussion on web forum and electronic mail lists, and the issue has received serious consideration by some members of the subject com munities that are often characterized by progressive pol itics. However, from a policy standpoint, it may be myopic to lay blame on socially marginalized groups for a process that other research has clearly indicated is largely driven by mainstream economic and cultural forces. Gentrification in the second stage is characterized by risk prone or risk aware in movers. These individuals are attracted to gentrifying areas because of the social diversity and the counter culture trendiness that result from the first stage of activity. The gentrifiers may be professionals with somewhat limited financial resources, but are well aware of the investment risks of purchasing in areas in early stages of the gentrification process. On the other hand, they are

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just as aware of the potential financial benefits, although most work focusing on stages of gentrification typically emphasizes the cultural aspects of gentrification in its early stages. It is also in this risk aware stage that investors and developers begin to pay attention to the area. The final stage of gentrification is often referred to as the risk adverse stage. At this point a neighborhood is heavily gentrified and will likely have many of the typical amenities upper middle class urbanites expect in their neighborhoods. In movers, at this point, will pay sub stantial prices for homes and expect that investment to be safe. Gentrified neighborhoods at this point have taken on a particular economic profile and may be solidly middle class, or in some cases an elite urban enclave that is comparable to some of the traditional outposts of urban wealth. While stage theories of gentrification are useful in understanding the potential forms that gentrification may take, it is difficult to effectively apply them to individual neighborhoods due to the diverse forms that gentrifi cation may take and the incredible range of urban contexts that occurs within. There has been some in vestigation into various types of gentrified areas, but it has typically been constrained to neighborhoods within a single city, or at most selected neighborhoods in cities from one country. The diversity of international contexts poses a significant challenge to anyone attempting to create some form of classification of gentrified neigh borhoods, but the task might provide an entreé into more fully understanding the multitude of processes that cre ate and maintain gentrified areas. Profile of Gentrifiers Questions about the identity of gentrifiers and their mo tivations have been addressed in a wide array of research projects. The initial view of gentrifiers as a ‘back to the city’ group was shown to be inaccurate by early empirical studies. By and large, gentrifiers lived in households that were either new, or that had moved from other areas of the city. A more sophisticated picture began to emerge in the 1980s that tied gentrifiers to both liberal ideology and a culture of consumption. More recently, some have argued that gentrifiers should be understood as part of a trans formed middle class who seek to identify themselves through the process of gentrification. Theorists in this vein have invoked Bourdieu’s concept of habitus in an attempt to link the structural aspects of gentrification to individual beliefs and dispositions.

Consequences of Gentrification Displacement The potential of gentrification to displace lower income residents from a neighborhood seemed obvious very

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early after the identification of the process. Some of the earliest research focused on displacement, and while the findings were based on relatively small scale studies, the general consensus was that gentrification in a tradi tional neighborhood setting would result in the dis placement of many of the original residents of the neighborhood. Most of the displacement was the direct result of economic issues, but the stress and strain of class differences and neighborhood change were also identified as factors. More recently, some controversy has arisen over the issue of displacement, as part of a larger movement that seeks to suggest that gentrification is a largely positive phenomenon and the only realistic way of revitalizing many inner city areas. Several studies conducted by Lance Freeman have indicated that gentrification does not directly contribute to displacement of low income individuals. There is a high degree of residential mobility in poorer households and the background rates of mobility are high enough and the typical process of gentrification slow enough that it is impossible to attri bute the out movement of low income individuals dir ectly to gentrification. On the other hand, there are a number of case studies that clearly identify inci dences of displacement directly caused by gentrification. In addition, there can be little doubt that gentrification can dramatically reduce the housing options for low income people, forcing them to direct their search elsewhere. Displacement is an on going concern with gentrifi cation and is likely to be the source of a great deal of debate. The debate, however, has tended to focus on the link between gentrification and displacement. In aca demic research, at least, there is little argument about the severity of the process and the difficulties displacement creates for low income people. Policy Consequences The consequences of gentrification reach beyond the neighborhoods in which the process is operating, because it has become the centerpiece of a range of urban policy initiatives. In much of the industrialized world, gentrifi cation has been seen as a possible solution to a range of urban problems. There is little doubt that the massive gentrification of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn con tributed to the strong fiscal position that New York City enjoyed throughout the 1990s and was in strong contrast to the debt ridded metropolis of the 1970s. In the US, the purported fiscal benefits have provided a justification for many cities to subsidize gentrification. While the process has long been subsidized and even initiated by the state in myriad ways, it was not until the 1990s that gentrifi cation became fully linked with large scale redevelop ment policies and theories.

In the United States, ideas surrounding the import ance of a so called creative class in initiating and ex panding economic development enmeshed gentrification and development policies. In the creative class hypoth esis, it is the educated, urbane, and highly skilled work force that drives the postindustrial economy. This creative class is often also a gentrifying class and this link has driven a set of neoliberal policies that have attempted to attract the creative class through subsidizing devel opments and projects that would improve the lifestyle of the urban middle class and attract members of the cre ative class. It has also driven a series of revanchist policies aimed at removing the poor from the areas that are likely to be most attractive to the creative class. The hypothesis does emphasize the importance of diversity and tolerance in local governance, but this emphasis is rarely translated to policy. One of the most direct links between gentrification and public policy is the Urban White paper issued by the UK government in 2002. Formally titled, ‘Our towns and cities – The future: Delivering an urban renaissance’, the paper was based on a government commissioned study of urban problems, ‘Towards an urban renaissance’. Both the report and the ensuing policy recommendations place heavy emphasis on the need for the regeneration of the urban core, particularly in the country’s regional metropolises. The document places emphasis on public/ private partnerships in creating gentrification and makes scant mention of a range of social issues that plague the urban cores of the country’s most troubled cities. In short, the document poses gentrification and commercial re development as a solution to a vast range of urban issues. As Loretta Lees has observed, however, the term is not used and renaissance, regeneration, and sustainability are substituted, thus avoiding the deeply imbedded class constitution of the gentrification process. The discourse makes the intent clear. The new urban core will be a place for the British middle classes. Given the influence of the central government in the United Kingdom, the implementation of these policies, as was intended, has triggered gentrification often as a major facet of central city or waterfront redevelopment. Perhaps, one of the more unusual effects of gentrifi cation has been its influence on public housing policy in the United States. In the early 1990s, after a report on the troubling conditions in many of the country’s public housing projects, the HOPE VI program was launched to improve the conditions in the nation’s worst public housing. HOPE VI was a multidimensional program and its origins were complex, but there is a distinct link with several major aspects of the program and the intense gentrification of many American inner cities. There had been a growing concern about the effects of concentrated poverty in American cities and public housing was seen as one of the greatest contributors to the issue of

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concentration. The results of several decades of gentri fication had led to situations in some US cities where public housing projects and gentrified neighborhoods were sitting side by side. The HOPE VI program had adopted a policy of encouraging income mixing when possible, and the presence of gentrification in some lo cales made it possible. Chicago provides one of the most stunning examples, where several of the country’s largest projects were slated for demolition and replacement with a mix of as much as 50% market rate housing, and only vague plans for relocating a majority of public housing residents. Gentrification then has created a new and troubling option for policymakers who seek to create a new form of urbanization that excludes all but the privileged. See also: Gentrification, Rural; Habitus; Housing; Land Rent Theory; Ley, D.; Neoliberalism, Urban; Regeneration to Renaissance; Smith, N.; Uneven Development; Urban Policy; Waterfront Development.

Further Reading Atkinson, A. and Bridge, G. (2005). The New Urban Colonialism. London: Routledge. Butler, T. and Lees, L. (2006). Super gentrification in Barnsbury, London: Globalisation and gentrifying global elites at the neighbourhood level. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31, 467 487.

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Duany, A. (2001). Three cheers for gentrification. The American Enterprise 12, 36 39. Freeman, L. (2006). There Goes the ‘Hood’: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Hackworth, J. and Smith, N. (2001). The changing state of gentrification. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 92, 464 477. Lees, L., Slater, T. and Wyly, E. (2007). Gentrification. New York: Routledge. Ley, D. (1980). Liberal ideology and the post industrial city. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70, 238 258. Ley, D. (1996). The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rose, D. (1989). A feminist perspective on employment restructuring and gentrification: The case of Montreal. In Wolch, J. & Dear, M. (eds.) The Power of Geography, pp 18 138. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman. Smith, N. (1979). Toward a theory of gentrification: A back to the city movement by capital not people. Journal of the American Planning Association 45, 538 548. Smith, N. and Williams, P. (eds.) (1986). Gentrification of the City. Boston, MA: Allen and Unwin. Smith, N. (1996). The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge. Wyly, E. and Hammel, D. (1999). Islands of decay in seas of renewal: Urban policy and the resurgence of gentrification. Housing Policy Debate 10, 711 771. Zukin, S. (1989). Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (2nd edn.). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Relevant Website http://members.lycos.co.uk/gentrifications/ Gentrification Web maintained by Tom Slater, Lycos.

Gentrification, Rural M. Phillips, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Exurbia A phrase widely used in North America to refer to settlements which although located in the countryside are inhabited by residents whose lives are principally linked to urban settlements. Hegemony A term widely associated with the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and used to refer to the exercise of power or influence without the use of force or sanction. It is often used to suggest that certain social groups can exercise power through cultural means, such as getting people to accept the exercise of power as legitimate or unavoidable or getting people to adopt and internalize the views of the dominant group. The concept of counterhegemony is also often used to refer to situations where groups reject the culture of dominant groups and/or express different cultural values and practices. Petite Bourgeoisie French terms widely used to refer to the people who own a business in which they work and which employs only a small number of employees, many of whom might well be family members. Businesses are classically seen to encompass shopkeepers and craft trades, but the term also encompasses family farms and a range of self-employed workers. It is sometimes also used to refer to a middle class that adopts conservative values, consumption habits, and tastes. Postproductivist Countryside A term that is used to signal some break or difference from a countryside dominated by expansive capitalist production centered within agriculture. It is seen to emerge from a shift in agriculture away from a focus on expanding output and/ or the release of land/properties from agricultural use. There has been considerable debate as to the value of the term in characterizing rural areas in contemporary advanced capitalist societies given the continuities in agricultural production and because of uncertainty as to the precise contours of any emergent postproductivist countryside. Rent Gap A term used to refer to situations where the actual payment, or rent, for a piece of land or property is lower than could be received under some alternative usage. It is suggested that at the point of capital investment, actual and potential rents are close to each other, because investors will seek to maximize their returns, but that thereafter, there is a tendency for actual rents to fall and potential rents to rise, creating rent gaps, which may be of such extent that redevelopment of the area becomes profitable. It is in these situations

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that capital investment is seen to flow in, establishing gentrification. Reproductive Labor A phrase that is used to refer to the everyday work people do that enables them to be able to participate in the paid economy. It is commonly seen to encompass domestic work, through which people reproduce the conditions of their own existence (by, for instance, creating food to sustain themselves) and also provide childcare, which can be seen to be reproducing future generations of workers. Service Class A term often used to refer to people in managerial and professional occupations, and also sometimes used interchangeably with the term new middle class. A range of debates have surrounded the meaning and value of term, with a series of definitional criteria having been proposed, including receipt of salary rather than wages, performance of intellectual and administrative work, autonomy from supervision, and the presence of trust. It has also been suggested that important divisions may exist within the service class, and indeed that there may be no overall coherence to the class.

Introduction Gentrification has long been the subject of research and debate within urban geography, with it often being de scribed as an inherently urban process. It has, however, also been identified in rural areas, and has had almost as long a history in rural studies as in urban. The term is often traced back to Judith Glass, who in a study of London suggested that a process of gentrification was oc curring, involving both the refurbishment of properties in an area, and also changes in its class composition through both in movement and displacement. Although there has subsequently been considerable debate about the meaning of gentrification, and the relative emphasis that should be given to in migration, refurbishment, and social displace ment, Glass’ definition is still incorporated within many recent definitions of gentrification, even though many have sought to add additional features, often of the basis that the nature of gentrification has itself changed. Although Glass used the term gentrification in 1964, it was really only in the 1970s and early 1980s that it be came more widely used to refer to change occurring across a range of urban, and indeed rural, spaces. Gen trification in the countryside has not, however, been subject to the same level of attention as that paid to


gentrification in urban centers, with relatively few rural researchers using the term and even then often providing little by way of accompanying commentary or justifi cation. This is despite growing popular reference to rural gentrification, particularly in North America, and evi dence that the use of the term in rural studies is be coming more akin to that within urban arenas, where a series of differing theorizations of gentrification have emerged. By the early 1990s, it was possible to identify at least five distinct, albeit overlapping, approaches to gentrification studies, each of which has some applic ability to rural studies.

Gentrification as Class Colonization and Displacement Glass’ initial commentary clearly highlighted notions of middle class in migration and working class displacement, and these dual changes have also been readily identified in rural as well as urban studies. From the late 1960s, a series of studies identified middle class in migration into rural areas of Britain and documented a series of associated displacements. Often the term gentrification was not used, with studies often phrased using terms such as incomer/ local and urbanization/counterurbanization, whereby counter urban migration was seen to produce urban in comers who displace locals and their rural way of life, via mechanisms such as outbidding rural locals in housing markets and dominating local political and social organ izations. Similar comments could be made with respect to rural studies in many other countries. In North America, for instance, the foci of many rural studies have been on population and economic growth, encapsulated by notions such as rural development and rural renaissance, and on the impact of urban to rural migration, particularly in so called exurbia settlements, with very few studies making connections to concepts such as gentrification or class colonization/displacement. Even studies that refrained from use of the term gentrification and focused on the spatialized identities of incomer–local/rural–urban sometimes did contain rec ognition that these might involve in migration of middle class people, occurring at the expense of working class people. Such connections became much more explicit with the emergence of critical/political–economy per spectives in rural geography and associated rural studies. Work by people such as Paul Cloke and Jo Little began to use to term rural gentrification, viewing it in terms of middle class in migration occurring at the expense of other, lower class groups, as well as considering the de gree to which settlement planning practices might foster gentrification in certain rural locations. The equation of incomer with middle class and local as working class was clearly open to criticism. First,

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many of those considered local are often seen to be far from working class, as with, for instance, farmers who are in Britain widely perceived as wealthy landowners and/ or middle class small scale employers. Likewise, there is clear evidence that not all incomers are members of an affluent middle class. Second, although there is con siderable contestation over the meaning of class, with a wide range of seemingly incommensurable concepts being advanced, contemporary class structures are widely seen to be more complex than implied by the dichot omous middle class/working class division. In the late 1980s, studies began to speculate that there might be a series of middle classes, or middle class fractions, moving into rural areas, and hence rather than talk about an incoming middle class, it might be better to speak in terms of incoming middle classes. Related to this, given that middle class in migration may have been occurring for many years, it may be that rather than seeing rural social change in terms of a middle class replacing a working class, as the term gentrification might seem to imply, in many instances it might be more appropriate to speak in terms of one middle class, or middle class fraction, replacing another. The suggestion that rural areas might be being colon ized by a series of middle classes has been subject to some empirical investigation. Keith Hoggart, for example, ex plored the growth of three middle class groups in England between 1971 and 1991, suggesting that quite distinct patterns of growth were apparent, with a service class of professionals and managers growing greatest in the Southeast, in both rural and non rural areas, while the number of clerical workers in England remained relatively static, and the size of a petite bourgeoisie declined overall, although they were a significant presence in some remote rural areas. These findings were broadly confirmed in a later analysis using the 2001 census by Martin Phillips, although here attention was also focused on differences between professionals and managers as well as between these groups and a petite bourgeoisie. Taken together, these studies suggest that there is a complex geography to pat terns of middle class colonization, an impression con firmed by local scale studies, such as Darren Smith and Deborah Phillips’ study of the hill top and valley locations around Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, England. They argued that the former locations were undergoing gentrification by high income legal, business, and finance professionals, while people moving into town and surrounding valley locations tended to work in teaching and other, what might be deemed lower professional, occupations. Connections can be drawn between studies of rural gentrification and debates within class analysis, economic geography, and studies of the ‘geography of gentrification’ within urban studies. Smith and Phillips, on the other hand, focus attention on the attraction that particular locations hold for incoming gentrifiers, proposing that the term rural

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gentrification be replaced by the term rural greentrification, to reflect the significance that ‘green space’ plays in stimulating in migration. Sylvain Paquette and Ge´rald Domon develop quite similar arguments in their studies of population flows into southern Quebec, suggesting that rural areas with open views and remoteness attract wealthy householders seeking an esthetic relationship with rurality, while rural areas lacking scenic attraction become sites for low income in migration and residential property deterioration. As Eliza Darling has commented, the emphasis given to environmental influences on rural in migration shows clear parallels with so called consumption side theories of urban gentrification in that both see consumer preferences as the key determinant of gentrification processes, and indeed, in some cases posit these as constitutive of differentiation between rural and urban gentrification. It is also a focus that connects rural gentrification to a long established, and much more widely expressed, research interest in migra tional motivations. However, while many studies of resi dential migration to rural areas have highlighted the significance of the perceived naturalness of the countryside, as many, if not more, have also highlighted other con stituents in the desire for country living, such as its per ceived sociability and distance from social ills such as crime, poverty, homelessness, and conflict. Studies of rural gentrification employing a consumption perspective can clearly draw on studies of migrational motivation and the processes underpinning counterurbanization, even though, as noted earlier, many of these studies have been reticent about adopting concepts of class colonization and dis placement often seen as central to notions of gentrification. Besides linking to studies of migration, rural gentri fication also connects quite directly to research on social marginalization and exclusion. Rural researchers and commentators have long highlighted how incursion of affluent residents who commute to work can adversely impact rural retailing, transport, welfare services and housing availability; it is also suggested that these in coming residents can direct the course of development in rural areas by exerting political, intellectual, and cultural hegemony over other classes and social groups in the countryside through a combination of direct and indirect influence on the rural housing market and planning systems. While popularly often described in terms of NIMBYism (NIMBY, not in my backyard), a more nu anced argument is provided in the concept of hegemonic blocs outlined by Paul Cloke and Mark Goodwin in 1992 and subsequently incorporated into a stage model of gentrification (see Table 1).

Gentrification as Capital Investment While gentrification has been readily linked to issues of population movement, this emphasis has been questioned,

notably by Neil Smith who argued that urban gentrifi cation should not be viewed as ‘a back to the city move ment of people’. He suggested that this view was mistaken because not only were many inner city gentrifiers actually moving from other urban areas, but also, and more sig nificantly in his view, because gentrification was a process of capital rather than population movement. Smith de veloped what has widely been characterized as a pro duction side theory of gentrification, in which gentrification is seen as a manifestation of the uneven circulation of capital, and specifically the product of pro cesses of devalorization and revalorization in which so called rent gaps emerged where current use of an area yields financial returns significantly lower than those available under some alternative land usage. The existence of such gaps means that there are opportunities for higher level profits for those people or institutions that invest capital – in the broad sense of products and labor power as well as money – in this new use. Gentrification, for Neil Smith, is a process of property investment, and gentrifiers are in effect property developers who reap the rewards of converting properties from some lower value activity toward one associated with middle class residences. Although this concept has been widely explored and debated in the urban context, until recently little use of it was made within rural contexts. This is despite there being discernible rural parallels, such as studies high lighting rapid gains made from buying and selling houses in the countryside, and rural residents undertaking sub stantial building work on their property to heighten its exchange value. One particularly prominent instance of rural refurbishment in Britain is the barn conversion, and while this is by no means the most empirically extensive instance of rural refurbishment it does clearly illustrate processes of devaluation and revalorization, in that con version of these properties in many cases occurred after they fell out of agricultural use, although they are now such sought after properties that so called neo barns have been built, which simulate a converted barn but are themselves new builds. The barn conversion, and rural gentrification more generally, connects to the concept of the postproductivist countryside which, in at least some interpretations, highlights de valorization of land and buildings with respect to agricultural production and their revalorization with respect to other, more con sumption orientated, capital networks, including those associated with residential development. Processes of devaluation are not restricted to just agricultural land and properties but can span a range of economic sectors. Likewise, revaluation is not restricted to the flow of capital into residential development but can encompass retail, leisure, and other facilities. This has clear parallels with Neil Smith’s concept of ‘gentrification generalized’ – whereby gentrification is seen to have evolved in scale and diversity such that it often now

Table 1

Deva or zed propert es

Refurb shment of rust c propert es

Creat on of ensemb e of fac t es to create a rura scene’ Demarcat on of h stor ca bu d ngs, vernacu ar house sty es, conservat on zones Pressure for gentr fied new bu d

Dec ne of agr cu tura workforce

Rebu ds and restorat ons

Product on of gentr ficat on products – .e., rep ca products and bu d ngs Gentr fied festy e magaz nes; v age pub cat ons

C rcu at on of deas and personne

Creat on of oca rea estate market; nvestment n consumpt on serv ces Promot on of area as des rab e res dent a and perhaps tour st and reta dest nat on; fict ous cap ta (cred t) encourages further expans on Profess ona zed agenc es of rura gentr ficat on emerge

Centra zat on of cap ta ownersh p, product ve cap ta nvestment n agr cu ture nvestment n res dent a propert es

Finance

From Phillips M (2004) Other geographies of gentrification Progress in Human Geography 28 5–30

Physical infrastructure

Labor/products

Large corporate and spec a st cap ta

Nat ona and mu t nat ona firms

Symbo zat on of cap ta

D ffus on and corporat zat on of cap ta

nd v dua zed but more empowered

nd v dua zed

Mu t p e

Type of agency gentrification

ntens ficat on of cap ta

D rect cap ta nvestment

Deva or zat on of cap ta

Phase in the circuit of capital

A stage mode of rura gentr ficat on ncorporat ng flows of cap ta , agenc es of gentr ficat on, and cu tura or entat ons

Types of capital and associated practices of gentrification

Emergence of new gentr fied hegemon c b oc

ncreas ng use of commod fied cu tura textures

Deva or zat on of ongstand ng hegemon c b ocs Gentr fiers w th h gh degree of countercu tura or entat on Low ncome res dents and potent a res dents

Cultural orientation

Gentrification, Rural 371

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involves the formation of cross sectoral developments in volving retailing, leisure, and entertainment as well as housing – and with Sharon Zukin’s concept of gentrifi cation as a ‘sociospatial complex’ formed out of a series of flows of labor, commodities, and finance, a concept which has been explicitly linked into rural gentrification (see Table 1). Eliza Darling also adopts a production side focus in her study of wilderness gentrification, suggesting that notions of devaluation and revaluation are relevant to areas such as the Adirondack State Park, USA, which has seen forestry, mining, and agriculture become supplanted by tourism and public service related activities. Darling suggests that the wilderness character of this area itself relates to broad scale devalorization of the region as a consequence of land ownership structures and state conservation regu lations acting to discourage large scale capital investment. The consequence of this was an underutilization of po tential ground rent and a preservation of landscape and habitats which subsequently become highly valued by tourists, whose desire to visit the area eventually stimu lated capital investment in properties, which in turn has fostered the displacement of earlier residents. Work in North America, Australasia, Northern and Southern Europe, and South Africa has indeed suggested that tourist activity may be a key driver of gentrification in rural areas, highlighting a further stream of capital investment to add to those of retailing, recreation and residence which have come to be recognized in both rural and urban gentrifi cation studies. Capital centered accounts of gentrification have not gone uncontested, with at least two lines of debate of relevance to rural studies emerging. First, attention has been paid to the extent to which it implies that economic motives underpin gentrification activities, an issue which adds a further dimension to studies of migrational mo tivation that have long been a concern within rural studies. Second, it has fostered consideration of the agents involved in gentrification, as in Martin Phillips’ stage model of gentrification (Table 1) and his earlier discussion of gentrification in the Gower Peninsula, which highlights both the use of professional agencies, such as architects, builders, building societies and estate agents, in the gentrification process and also the presence of so called marginal gentrifiers who rely largely on their own labor, or sweat equity, to gentrify their properties. This last group has also been invoked by Paul Chaney and Ken Sherwood in a study of changes following the sale of former council houses in Northamptonshire.

Agents of Gentrification and Social Difference In urban studies, consideration of agents of gentrification emerged not only from production side theorizations but

also within so called consumption side perspectives. Examination of locational decision making by incoming householders, for instance, revealed a range of motiv ational influences, which not only questioned the profit motivation arguably implied in the gentrifier as developer concept, but also suggested that residential decision making might be influenced by issues such as access to retail, leisure, and entertainment facilities. This in turn was suggestive that urban gentrifiers were relatively young and perhaps living alone or in childless households and raised the issue of whether there was a need to dis aggregate the notion of gentrifier beyond the simple designation as middle class, or indeed from a particular middle class, and recognize that a variety of forms of social difference might be of significance in the formation of gentrification. It was argued, for instance, that gentri fication might relate to demographic as opposed to class change, with changes in marriage and child rearing pat terns both leading to the creation of more single person households and childless couples. There are clear rural correlates to these arguments. Counterurbanization studies, for instance, not only rec ognized a class dimension to rural in migration, but also, and often more directly, identified other social differ ences as significant. Age relations, for example, were often seen as important, with counterurbanization being associated not only with gentrification but also with geriatrification, a term used to refer to situations where there is an increasing proportion of elderly in an area’s population. Studies in the US also frequently highlighted the racial character of rural migration streams, an issue which is being increasingly recognized in British and European contexts, while notions of national identity have long been prominent in studies of migration to rural Wales, Scotland, and France. The rise of postmodernism within rural studies promoted recognition of neglected difference and otherness, concerns that were explicitly drawn into the study of rural gentrification in Darren Smith and Louise Holt’s study of lesbian gentrifiers. The rise of postmodern perspectives also invited re flection of the general meaning and value of the term gentrification. Recognition of social differences such as age, race, nationality and sexuality raised questions as to the degree to which gentrification should, by definition, be seen to involve processes of class recomposition. Re sponses have included abandonment of the term or di lution of its class connotations, to suggestions that attention needs to be paid to how other social differences are interwoven with socio economic differences in the constitution of gentrification. Questions have also been asked about the extent to which gentrification is a mod ernistic grand concept or theory, lumping together a range of events, practices, and relations that should be viewed as quite distinct. While these latter arguments may lead some people to reject the concept of


gentrification, there have also been attempts to adopt more postmodern/interpretive approaches to the study of gentrification.

Gentrification, Gender and Reproductive Labor Recognition of difference is of significance to, and has been very much fostered by, considerations of gender, with gentrification studies being clearly influenced by feminist as well as postmodern perspectives. Within studies of urban gentrification, three distinct lines of ar guments relating to gender can be discerned. First, gentrification has been seen to be, at least in part, an outcome of rising female participation in paid employment which has led to increasing numbers of both high income, single women households and dual income households who can afford to engage in gentrification activities. Second, the ‘back to the city movement’ of people commonly associated with urban gentrification has been viewed as a response to increased pressure placed on the performance of reproductive labor by the rise of female paid employment, as a consequence of which householders have sought to live in locations which minimize journey to work costs and facilitate the substitution of market produced commodities for household labor. Third, it has been argued that women, and some other gentrifying groups, may be drawn to areas where there is a perceived lessening or a dilution of patriarchal attitudes and relations. Each of these arguments has an explicit urban dis position, with research pointing to urban areas as having higher rates of female paid employment; greater acces sibility, service, and retail provision levels; and lessening patriarchy. The three aspects of gender, however, still have rural relevance. Performance of reproductive labor may, for instance, be impacted by rural gentrification given that studies have suggested that rural in migration is often stimulated by the onset of child rearing, with many households moving when they had, or were in tending to have, children. While a move to countryside may be perceived as good for children, it is often ac companied by female disengagement and/or dislocation from the paid labor market, and a spatialized and gen dered separation of productive and reproductive labor. While women may formally stop paid work for only a short time after childbirth, many return on a part time basis and/or take a new job that can be more easily in tegrated into childcare. These jobs can be difficult to find in rural areas, and as a consequence, women who intend to return to paid employment may not do so, or else do it by forsaking their previous careers. The demands of re productive labor may hence create the strong and highly gendered class asymmetry that has been observed within

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rural households, it being suggested that a feminized service proletariat might be emerging in the countryside alongside the migration of affluent male service and other middle classes. Transport and service provision in rural areas can be considerably lower than that found in urban areas, which may well act to heighten disengagement and dislocation. On the other hand, rural areas are often perceived to have high levels of personal and community service provision that might help ameliorate these tendencies, and indeed may also form part of the attractiveness of rural localities. However, community and personal sup port services are often both conceived and practiced as feminized activities, features that stem from, and re inforce, patriarchal social relations and identities. Rural gentrification may hence be in part sustained by, and itself help sustain, a patriarchal rural gender regime or order, although the studies of Hebden Bridge by Darren Smith, Deborah Phillips and Louise Holt have high lighted how rural locations can be sites for gentrification because they are perceived as localities where non conventional household and partnering relations are widely practiced. Such findings, along with the identifi cation of the significance of childcare in the locational decision making of some urban gentrifiers, and detailed examination of the class composition of households across inner city, suburban and rural locations, raise questions as to the significance of urban/rural differences as opposed to differences within urban and rural space.

Gentrification and Culture Preceding discussion has largely been framed in terms of rural studies being able to draw upon ideas circulating within studies of urban gentrification. There is, however, one area of contemporary discussion of gentrification, its relationships to culture, where it can be argued that rural studies have been somewhat more advanced, at least in temporal terms, than their urban counterparts. From the late 1980s, for instance, considerable atten tion has been paid to eliciting how cultural attachments to the countryside fuel rural in migration. While much of this discussion was not framed with regard to gentrifi cation, Paul Cloke and Nigel Thrift’s discussion of middle class fractions did involve consideration as to whether these might connect to different attachments to the countryside, issues that have been followed up in work considering how different rural identities and life styles might both reflect and actively constitute particular class relations. Early emphasis was given to the role that consumption plays in the establishment of social position, with ideas of cultural capital and distinction, advanced by Bourdieu, being employed. Subsequently, and as with some urban gentrification studies, use has been made of

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Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, as in Smith and Phillips, discussion of hill top and village gentrification. However, critical comments have also been made about this con cept in rural studies, it being argued that when linked to concepts such as cultural capital, culture tends to become reduced to the pursuit of personal advantage. Studies by Paul Cloke, Nigel Thrift, Martin Phillips, John Holmes and Kate Hartig have all suggested that less reductive concepts of culture need to be employed. Attention has been paid to the practices through which the countryside comes to be represented as a place of middle class desire and habitation, and how culturally constructed notions of competence and morality are used in everyday life to devalorize the practices of gentrification.

Concluding Comments While rural gentrification has attracted much less at tention than its urban counterpart, the two concepts can be seen to exhibit clear parallels, as well as some points of difference. The extent of the parallels between the terms raises at least three important questions. The first con cerns whether differentiation of gentrification into urban and rural is warranted. Eric Clark is one of the few people explicitly arguing that it is not, although there has been growing recognition that gentrification is appearing in places other than the inner city. This extension is seen by some to stretch the concept of gentrification close to, if not beyond, its meaningful limit. On the other hand, conceptions of gentrification within urban studies have been wide ranging and can each be quite readily applied to changes occurring in rural space. The degree of con ceptual overlap itself raises a second question, namely, whether studies of rural gentrification can simply draw on concepts circulating in urban studies, or whether there are issues that are specific to, or at least are of greater significance within, rural rather than urban spaces. One issue that has been identified as being of particular, although not unique, rural significance is the role of nature or green space in gentrification. On the other hand, it has also been argued that gentrification has become generalized, although this is often framed as top down, urban out dispersal, a viewpoint which can be questioned for overlooking that studies of rural gentrifi cation have almost as long a history as do those of urban gentrification. This is not to say that there may not be processes of serial reproduction of gentrification across space, but rather that attention also needs to be paid to whether gentrification may emerge from spatially dis crete processes of change. Finally, questions have emerged about the degree to which differences in gen trification can be mapped onto broad spatial categories such as urban or rural, or whether more complex geog raphies of gentrification are required, which recognize

differences within and between categorizations of rural and urban space. See also: Ageing and Mobility; Ageism and Age; Anti-Urbanism; Belonging; Census Geography; Cloke, P.; Counterurbanization; Culture; Demography; Dwelling; Economic Development, Rural; Ethnicity; Feminism/ Feminist Geography; Gated Communities/Privatopias; Gender and Rurality; Gender in the City; Gentrification; Greenfield Development; Habitus; Home; Homelessness; Homelessness, Rural; Housing; Housing, Rural; Identity and Otherness, Rural; Land Rent Theory; Leisure; Marxism/Marxist Geography I; Marxism/Marxist Geography II; Migration; Multicultural City; Patriarchy; Population Geography; Post-Productivist and Multifunctional Agriculture; Postmodernism/Postmodern Geography; Poverty, Rural; Race; Regeneration to Renaissance; Rural Communities; Rural Geography; Rural Populations; Second Homes; Services, Rural; Smith, N.; Social Class; Social Geography; Suburbanization; Tourism, Rural; Tourism; Transport and Social Exclusion; Transport, Rural; Urban Habitats/ Nature; Whiteness.

Further Reading Agg, J. and Phillips, M. (1998). Neglected gender dimensions of rural social restructuring. In Boyle, M. & Halfacree, K. (eds.) Migration into Rural Areas: Theories and Issues, pp 252 279. London: Wiley. Chaney, P. and Sherwood, K. (2000). The resale of right to buy dwellings: A case study of migration and social change in rural England. Journal of Rural Studies 16, 79 94. Clark, E. (2005). The order and simplicity of gentrification A political challenge. In Atkinson, R. & Bridge, G. (eds.) Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism, pp 256 264. London: Routledge. Cloke, P. (1979). Key Settlements in Rural Areas. London: Methuen. Cloke, P. and Goodwin, M. (1992). Conceptualizing countryside change: From post Fordism to rural structured coherence. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 17, 321 336. Cloke, P., Phillips, M. and Thrift, N. (1995). The new middle classes and the social constructs of rural living. In Butler, T. & Savage, M. (eds.) Social Change and the Middle Classes, pp 220 238. London: UCL Press. Cloke, P. and Thrift, N. (1987). Intra class conflict in rural areas. Journal of Rural Studies 3, 321 333. Cloke, P. and Thrift, N. (1990). Class change and conflict in rural areas. In Marsden, T., Lowe, P. & Whatmore, S. (eds.) Rural Restructuring, pp 165 181. London: David Fulton. Darling, E. (2005). The city in the country: Wilderness gentrification and the rent gap. Environment and Planning A 37, 1015 1032. Ghose, R. (2004). Big sky or big sprawl? Rural gentrification and the changing cultural landscape of Missoula, Montana. Urban Geography 25, 528 549. Glass, R. (1964). London: Aspects of Change. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Hoggart, K. (1997). The middle classes in rural England, 1971 1991. Journal of Rural Studies 13, 253 273. Holmes, J. and Hartig, K. (2007). Metropolitan colonisation and the reinvention of place: Class polarisation along the Cessnock Pokolbin fault line. Geographical Research 45, 54 70. Little, J. (1987b). Rural gentrification and the influence of local level planning. In Cloke, P. (ed.) Rural Planning: Policy into Action? pp 185 199. London: Harper and Row.


Paquette, S. and Domon, G. (2001). Trends in rural landscape development and sociodemographic recomposition in southern Quebec (Canada). Landscape and Urban Planning 55, 215 238. Paquette, S. and Domon, G. (2003). Changing ruralities, changing landscapes: exploring social recomposition using a multi scale approach. Journal of Rural Studies 19, 425 444. Parsons, D. (1980). Rural Gentrification: The Influence of Rural Settlement Planning Policies. Department of Geography Research Paper No. 3, Brighton: University of Sussex. Phillips, M. (1993). Rural gentrification and the processes of class colonisation. Journal of Rural Studies 9, 123 140. Phillips, M. (2002b). The production, symbolisation and socialisation of gentrification: A case study of two Berkshire villages. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27, 282 308. Phillips, M. (2004). Other geographies of gentrification. Progress in Human Geography 28, 5 30. Phillips, M. (2007). Changing class complexions in and on the British countryside. Journal of Rural Studies 23, 283 304. Phillips, M. (ed.) (in press) The Gentrified Countryside. Aldershot: Ashgate. Phillips, M., Page, S., Saratsi, E., Tansey, K. and Moore, K. (2008). Diversity, scale, and green landscapes in the gentrification process: Traversing ecological and social science perspectives. Applied Geography 27, 54 76. Smith, D. (2002a). Extending the temporal and spatial limits of gentrification: A research agenda for population geographers. International Journal of Population Geography 8, 385 394.

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Smith, D. (2002b). Rural gatekeepers and ‘greentrified’ Pennine rurality: Opening and closing the access gates? Journal of Social and Cultural Geography 3, 447 463. Smith, D. and Holt, L. (2005). Lesbian migrants in the gentrified valley and other geographies of gentrification. Journal of Rural Studies 21, 313 322. Smith, D. and Phillips, D. (2001). Socio cultural representations of greentrified Pennine rurality. Journal of Rural Studies 17, 457 469. Smith, N. (1979). Toward a theory of gentrification: A back to the city movement by capital not people. Journal of the American Planners Association 35, 538 548. Smith, N. (2002). New globalism, new urbanism: Gentrification as global urban strategy. Antipode 34, 428 450. Visser, G. (2004). Second homes and local development: Issues arising from Cape Town’s De Waterkant. Geojournal 60, 259 271. Walker, P. and Fortmann, L. (2003). Whose landscape? A political ecology of the ‘exurban’ Sierra. Cultural Geographies 10, 469 491. Whitson, D. (2001). Nature as playground: Recreation and gentrification in the Mountain West. In Epp, R. & Whitson, D. (eds.) Writing off the Rural West: Globalization, Governments, and the Transformation of Rural Economies, pp 145 164. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Zukin, S. (1990). Socio spatial prototypes of a new organization of consumption: The role of real cultural capital. Sociology 24, 37 56.

Geocomputation M. Birkin, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Abduction A process of scientific reasoning in which hypotheses are generated to best explain the available data. Cyberinfrastructure Latest generation computational technologies which support the storage, manipulation, sharing, analysis, and visualization of data. E-Science The development and testing of scientific theories using computational methods: broadly the European equivalent of cyberinfrastructure. Grand Challenge A fundamental problem in science or engineering which is amenable to solution by computational methods. Grid Computing An approach to computation which involves the combination of multiple processors into a grid or network. Microsimulation A research methodology which aims to model the behavior of individuals over time.

Introduction The first use of the term ‘geocomputation’ in the lexicon of human geography can be traced to the first of a series of international conferences on that topic in Leeds in 1996. Despite its relative novelty, the term geocomputation has already been defined in at least three different ways by its advocates: 1. A crusading definition has been put forward by Openshaw, who seeks to establish nothing short of a new set of approaches – a ‘computational paradigm’ – for doing human geography. In this definition, geo computation takes geographic information science (GIS) and moves it beyond the traditional emphasis on gathering and representation of data toward a focus on analysis, modeling, and finding solutions to real world problems. Geocomputation seeks to combine spatial data, computational technologies, and high perform ance computing (HPC) hardware. In this view, the subclauses of the term are deliberately capitalized in order to emphasize the combination of spatial data and analysis methods with novel computational approaches. 2. An epistemological definition is preferred by Helen Couclelis, focusing in essence on the prior existence of a scientific discipline – computation – and applications within a geographical environment. In this view,

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geocomputation becomes a universe or ‘grab bag’ of geographical analysis methods applied to spatial problems. The problem of articulating a research agenda for geocomputation can be pursued in relation to the tools and frameworks of computation as a parent discipline. 3. Paul Longley prefers an ostensive definition, in which the subject matter of geocomputation is defined ac cording to the conduct of its researchers and prac titioners. This view places a much stronger emphasis on the continued development of GISs and techni ques, in contrast to Openshaw’s emphasis on appli cations and real world problem solving. We return to this discussion later, pending a more detailed outline of the subject matter of geocomputation. Six important features of the approach will be discussed in further detail below: inductive emphasis, spatial orientation, technical novelty, computational intensity, policy focus, and multidisciplinarity.

Inductive Emphasis The availability of increasingly rich spatial datasets provides an important part of the rationale for geo computation. Indeed there is a clear association between approaches such as the cluster hunter (i.e., geographical analysis machine, or GAM) and the geographical ex planations machine (GEM) and the computational dis cipline of data mining, in which a barrage of statistical techniques are applied to large datasets in the search for patterns. According to the philosophy of this approach, only after patterns have been detected does it become helpful to articulate and refine potential hypotheses which might explain these observations. Such depths of inductivism have not met with universal approval within the geocomputation community. Paul Longley quotes with an apparent mixture of admiration and horror the Openshaw dictum that ‘‘prior knowledge or ignorance was rendered equally irrelevant’’ in the search for pat terns in spatial data. Mark Gahegan has perhaps done most to try and reconcile such rampant inductivism with established approaches to the scientific method, arguing for a process of map based abduction in which the pro cess of data exploration, pattern extraction, and theory generation are combined together. Penn State’s GeoVista software platform therefore provides an environment for the exploration of spatial datasets through large scale visualization together with spatial analysis and statistics.

Geocomputation

The importance of inductive methods has led ad herents of geocomputation into an interest in metadata, or data about data. The argument here is that as data sources continue to expand and multiply, then it is not simply the analysis of data which becomes the problem, but the identification of which datasets exist in relation to specific phenomena in the first place. It is axiomatic that much of geocomputation is concerned with the reuse and combination of secondary datasets. The essence of the metadata problem is therefore to provide descriptions of the form and content of spatial data which allow potential users to find them (through conventional search engines – the equivalents of Google or AltaVista), and ideally to query, link, or model their constituent fields. This is clearly a nontrivial task in a world in which spatial representations vary, and entity definitions can be fluid even across small geographical distances – for example, as neighboring cities or local authorities may define land use categories in completely different ways. One sense in which the ‘data deluge’ is currently more acute than previously is in the capture and interpretation of real time data. For example, environmental sensors can now detect variations in air quality across multiple points within an urban area on a continuous basis and these can provide a basis for spatial analysis applications focused on causal mechanisms, environmental justice, or monitoring and forecasting. A particularly interesting class of problems arises where there is also a capacity for real time feedback. For example, Kai Nagel and col leagues have recently proposed a real time model of the diurnal journey to and from work across the whole of Switzerland. Queues at individual junctions can be simulated and monitored, in relation to road conditions and control mechanisms such as traffic lights. There is then no reason why the timing of traffic lights (for in stance) cannot be adjusted to maximize the smooth flow of traffic throughout the network. Similar applications have been envisaged in relation to problems such as crowd control (at festivals or sports events), retail opti mization, or even culture and recreation within cities.

Spatial Orientation Clearly the focus on spatial problems is emphasized in the notion of geocomputation. For example, Helen Couclelis argues that geocomputation needs to find a coherent perspective on geographical space – to justify the term ‘geo’. For most practitioners the question goes beyond an application of computational techniques to geographical problems, and toward the establishment of computational methods which recognize and exploit the unique properties of spatial data. While Couclelis has argued that geographers have failed to get beyond a dearth of theory, it is at least possible to point to a

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number of practical examples of techniques which com bine the geographical and the computational in powerful and exciting ways. Openshaw’s original ‘GAM’ remains the standout application in this regard. In this work, the author and associates set out to find a method to determine clusters in spatial data, without regard to any a priori expectations as to the location or cause of such clusters. The technique works by the repeated application of standard statistical tests across space and at a multitude of geographical scales. For any dataset, it is then possible to answer questions including – where is the greatest concentration of occurrences?, how significant is this concentration?, and what is the spatial extent of each cluster? In a famous application to a dataset of childhood clusters, GAM identified not only a well known preexisting disease cluster around the Sellafield nuclear storage facility in Cumbria, North West England, but also a previously unrecognized and more significant cluster in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. In later work, attempts were made to produce a GEM in which a target data set is modeled statistically against a number of spatially independent datasets in order to find the most appropriate set of linkages. Unfortunately this work remains relatively underdeveloped following Openshaw’s enforced early retirement from academic life. Both GAM and GEM are freely available as Internet applications. An example is shown in Figure 1. A dataset of retail customers has been input to GAM. The data consists simply of a list of x and y coordinates of customers on the ordnance survey grid. The output of GAM displays a number of clusters and serves as an indication for further exploration or devel opment of theories in relation to the retail network, its competitors, and customers. Another successful example of an explicitly spatial approach to the problem of geocomputation is Stewart Fotheringham’s geographically weighted regression (GWR). GWR recognizes that statistical techniques, specifically regression analysis, change when they are applied to spatial data. The model coefficients are therefore modeled as continuously varying in space. GWR is provided as a desktop application which is dis tributed by compact disc, and has users in many different countries. There are published applications in relation to house prices, healthcare, educational attainment, and many others. A third technique which introduces an explicitly geo graphical emphasis to a classical problem, in this case with its roots in economics, is spatial microsimulation. Micro simulation is widely used in modeling the impact of fi nancial strategies (e.g., tax and benefit regimes) on a population represented as a list of individuals or house holds with unique characteristics. Spatial microsimulation has recognized that population characteristics are un evenly distributed across cities and regions, and that this

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Geocomputation

Missing Value [0.0] (5381)

[12.80, 169.29] (234)

[169.29, 325.79] (64)

[325.79, 482.29] (14)

[482.29, 638.79] (5)

[638.79, 795.29] (2)

Figure 1 Clustering of spatial data with the geographical analysis machine.

has crucial implications not only for financial policy, but for the delivery of services such as education, retailing, and healthcare. A further sense in which geocomputation has adopted an explicitly spatial emphasis is in the visualization of the spatial data. Applications range from the extension of classical spatial visualization methods through the transfer of visualization methods from the physical and mathematical sciences (like recurrence plots and relative distribution methods), to the creation of entire software studios for the visual representation and interpretation of spatial and statistical data (e.g., GeoVista at Penn State, and GeoDa at Illinois).

Technical Novelty We have noted above that there are standout applications in which geocomputation has sought the redevelopment of classical techniques within a geographical environ ment. However, it is equally true that geocomputation has given an impetus to the introduction of many com putational techniques from scientific disciplines into geography. In the late 1990s, cellular automata (CAs)

became popular as a means of representing spatial dis tributions and processes. A CA is an abstract entity which can be represented in a variety of states. The states of neighboring automata are interdependent so that change in one can generate further changes in its neighbors. CAs are particularly suited to land use problems, in which the CA represents a parcel of land and the state is the use to which that land is put (e.g., agricultural use, housing, recreation, and so on). Problems of urban growth are particularly tractable by this method. If movement is added to CA models, then we begin to enter the even more popular area of agent based simu lation. In this context, an agent is an entity whose be havior is governed by certain well defined rules. Advocates of agent based modeling approaches argue that complex geographical phenomena can be replicated using agents with relatively simple behavioral rules. A popular example is Schelling’s model of residential seg regation, in which the behavior of agents with one characteristic – membership of an ethnic group – are located on a grid, and move around that grid in ac cordance with a desire to be close to neighbors of a similar ethnic type. This model can be shown to generate distinct ethnic clusters, even when the propensity to

Geocomputation

locate in proximity to similar ethnic groups is relatively weak. Agent based simulations have also become popular as land use models, but have also been explored in a variety of economic, sociological, and geographical con texts, such as the behavior of agents in a retail market, and the movement of individuals within public spaces. A wide variety of techniques from artificial intelli gence have also been popularized by members of the geocomputation community. Examples include the use of neural networks to forecast river levels and flood risk, deployment of genetic algorithms for the optimization of retail market areas, derivation of alternative spatial interaction models using genetic programming, network optimization from artificial life, and fuzzy logic classifi cation of residential neighborhoods.

Computational Intensity The availability of massively powerful computational resources is one of Openshaw’s three pillars of geo computation. In early experiments with the GAM, a single national level simulation of disease clusters was estimated to need 9 days of processor time. Bearing in mind that typical applications will typically require multiple runs, of say fifty or a hundred datasets, then some sort of parallel processing capability becomes ne cessary. Parallel processing occurs when computational tasks are shared out across many processing units within a single computer or machine group. Massively parallel computers are simply those with very large number of processors, often several hundred. The good news for geographers is that spatial problems can often be de composed quite easily for parallel execution as a similar task is frequently repeated across multiple locations. A similar application of massive parallelism to a network optimization problem in the 1990s reported increased speeds from 3 months to a few seconds through a com bination of code parallelization and the use of an enor mous ‘data vault’ for virtual storage. The British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) ClimateNet project has recently enlisted 50 000 home personal computers (PCs) on a computational grid for long term environ mental predictions. Access to massive computational resources has re cently become an intense battleground between discip lines. This is not surprising given the size of the resources now being made available. For example, in the UK alone the e Science program distributed d340 million to re searchers in the years 2001–04, a sum comparable to the total social science research budget. e Science is a gen eric term covering the application of state of the art computational resources to big science problems, some times referred to as ‘grand challenges’. A broader case for ‘human systems modeling’ as a grand challenge for

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e Science has been sketched – inevitably by Stan Openshaw! Geon and Moses are two significant research projects which explore the deployment of massive computational resources within a geocomputational environment. Geon is a multidisciplinary collaboration involving geographers, earth scientists, and computer scientists. A network of users contribute data as well as sharing tools for global database search, seismological modeling, and topographical reconstruction from remotely sensed data. Construction of elevation models with billions of data points are facilitated through the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid network. Moses is a project within the UK National Centre for e Social Science (NCeSS) which develops data rich simulations for the strategic analysis of social policies. Using the technology of the White Rose Grid, a centre of excellence on the National e Science Grid, Moses rep resents a synthetic national population of individuals and households. The changing behavior if this population is modeled under a variety of scenarios to provide decision support capabilities for healthcare, transport, housing, and other planning applications. While both Moses and Geon share a capability to piggyback on computational grids, the e Science logic for these projects extends beyond a capability for parallel processing. In both cases, access to virtualized data re sources is a second key feature, and a third is the pro vision of a collaborative infrastructure for resource sharing. Data integration and collaborative infra structures are both important features of many e Science projects (in the US, the term ‘cyberinfrastructure’ tends to be preferred). However the number of applications remains small, because of difficulties in accessing re sources and the skills required to deploy such systems. The more commonplace use of massive geocomputa tional resources depends on the availability of a shared infrastructure of hardware and software. While such shared infrastructures are currently the subject of re search, whether they will ever be made universally available remains an open question.

Policy Focus Geocomputation seeks to take GIS to a new level, not least in solving real world problems. Policy relevance may be regarded as the ultimate test of real world ap plicability. For example, the Moses project introduced above is explicit in its desire to address policy issues regarding resource allocation, service delivery, efficiency, and equity of access across a variety of domains, in cluding transportation, health, and housing. While Geon is perhaps more research oriented, related GeoScience projects at San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)

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have a more obvious policy dimension. For example, TeraShake seeks to simulate the impact of the next big earthquake across southern California. Episims is a particularly good example of policy relevant geocomputational research. Episims is an epi demic simulation model, which is constructed with ref erence to the social network relationships within a population of individual demographic agents. In other words, the model seeks to recognize that transmission of diseases takes place from individual to individual, and that these individual contact probabilities are mediated through social structures such as workplaces, school playgrounds, cinemas, and so forth. From a policy per spective this means, for example, that the spread of a disease might be restricted by school closures. Episims is itself a development of the earlier Transims model, in which agent based simulations of a transport network are constructed. In early research, the developers considered a hypothetical terrorist attack leading to release of the smallpox virus into the city of Portland and were able to demonstrate, for example, that mass vaccination would be one of the most dangerous response strategies (because of the likelihood of increased contact rates among already infective individuals). This research is now being heavily funded by governments in the US and elsewhere in preparing plans to counter potential outbreaks such as H5N1 (Asian bird flu). Of course the spread of diseases has been a favorite concern of geographers since the quantitative revolution. Nevertheless, geocomputational approaches demonstrate theoretical novelty in their treatment of individual interactions and the mediation of those individuals through social networks, as well as utilizing advanced visualization capabilities for the simulations, and har nessing the power of HPC for realistic models at a re gional, national, or even international scale.

Multidisciplinarity In early writings, geocomputation is sometimes described as the search for a new paradigm in human geography. However, it is clear that the approach has developed to become inclusive of both human and physical geography. Physical geography applications appear to span most, if not all, of the features of geocomputation which are described above. Algorithms have been deployed in ductively to search for patterns relating to phenomena such as climate change, land cover, and the distribution of ice masses, techniques such as neural networks (to model hydrological discharge), and wavelets (in the simulation of avalanche behavior) have been deployed with en thusiasm, while applications such as Geon show the importance of HPC within the GeoScience domain. Applications such as flood forecasting or recognizing

patterns in hydrocarbon formation have clear policy relevance for both commercial and public organizations. Some of the most popular applications of agent based simulation technologies in particular have focused on land use modeling, and can therefore be considered to cross the divide between human and physical divide. Geocomputation in human geography can also be considered to be multidisicplinary in its substantive emphasis. Many of the examples above, such as Episims, Moses, and disease clustering applications of GAM have a strong health sciences focus. Among agent based simulations, the focus on artificial societies and social networks provides a link to the discipline of sociology, and often a means to explore theories which are more qualitative in nature. There is also much interest in this area from economists seeking to explore concepts like imperfect information and subrational decision making, with clear links to classical behavioral geography. A third sense in which geocomputation promotes a multidisciplinary approach is in sharing techniques with disciplines such as artificial intelligence, computing, and mathematics. Indeed Helen Couclelis in particular has argued that the essence of geocomputation is to explore the metaphors of computer science within a spatial context. Examples like GWR and GAM serve to em phasize that geographers have not simply sought to re hash new third party techniques close to home, but to add a more distinctive methodological spin. Perhaps a true measure of success in this context would be the extent to which the methods of spatial science can themselves become embedded within other disciplines, particularly those of the hard sciences. A nice example of this would be something like the ‘mouse brain atlas’, a project in which the various parts of the mouse brain, their functions, and interrelationships were represented using GIS techniques. Nevertheless, it is still striking in the extent to which projects like AstroGrid, which seek to integrate astrophysical data, to map such data, and then automatically detect astronomical phenomena, deploys techniques entirely without reference to GIS, let alone cluster hunting or other methods, for detection of spatial patterns. While geocomputation may have achieved something in lifting the credibility of quantitative geog raphy among the mathematical, computational, physical, and biological sciences, there is clearly some way to go in this regard.

Conclusion In reflecting on the development of geocomputation within a relatively early volume, Bill Macmillan draws a historical analogy with the development of astronomy in the Renaissance period. He argues that new techniques in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave scientists

Geocomputation

the ability to make all kinds of new empirical discoveries about the heavens and from this to lift their science to new levels. For Middle Age telescopes read GIS, and for astronomy read geocomputation! The argument is that GISs provide us with the capability to represent and explore spatial environments in hugely powerful ways; what we need is to articulate geocomputational approaches which help us to make more sense of all this. The metaphor is an interesting one, but perhaps needs to be embellished by the observation that the process of scientific discovery is cyclical rather than linear. The invention of new telescopes is surely stimulated to some extent by a desire to explore the skies, and the need to answer deeper questions arising from initial observations will provide a stimulus to further development of the basic technology. Similarly with geocomputation, it is not simply a case of taking GIS and using these techniques to answer new and hopefully interesting questions. Rather geocomputation should be seen as the evolution of a set of scientific methods (including, but not limited to, GIS) through attempts to apply those methods to hard prob lems. This view perhaps helps to explain why in practice the subject matter of geocomputation meetings extends right through from relatively theoretical papers about GIS and spatial methods to highly applied studies of a specific problem domain, and why it is right that this should be the case. The discipline of geocomputation is still young. It might be argued that despite a body of interesting ap plications, the grand challenges in human geography which geocomputation can bring into view are yet to be fully articulated let alone addressed. Yet the field has made substantial progress in its early years and provided common ground for a new generation of spatial scientists with a passion for a geography which is at once empirical, relevant, and scientifically rigorous. If such enthusiasm can be maintained in the coming decade, then surely its achievements will begin to multiply exponentially. See also: Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems; Cellular Automata; Computational Human Geography; Geographically Weighted Regression; Simulation; Spatial Clustering, Detection and Analysis of; Spatial Data

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Mining, Cluster and Pattern Recognition; Spatial Data Mining, Geovisualization.

Further Reading Barrett, C. L., Eubank, S. G. and Smith, J. P. (2005). If smallpox strikes Portland y . Scientific American 292(3), 54 61. Couclelis, H. (1998). Geocomputation and space. Environment and Planning B 25th Anniversary Issue, 41 47. Ferguson, N. M., Cummings, D. A. T., Cauchemez, S. et al. (2005). Strategies for containing an emerging influenze pandemic in Southeast Asia. Nature 437, 209 214. Foster, I. (2003). The grid: Computing without bounds. Scientific American 288(4), 78 85. Longley, P., Brooks, S., McDonnell, R. and Macmillan, B. (eds.) (1998). Geocomputation: A Primer. Chichester: John Wiley. Martin, D. (2005). Socioeconomic geocomputation and e social science. Transactions in GIS 9, 1 3. Openshaw, S. (1995). Developing automated and smart spatial pattern exploration tools for geographical information systems applications. The Statistician 44, 3 16. Openshaw, S. and Abrahart, B. (eds.) (2000). Geocomputation. New York: Taylor & Francis. Openshaw, S., Charlton, M., Craft, A. W. and Birth, J. M. (1988). Investigation of leukaemia clusters by the use of a geographical analysis machine. Lancet I, 272 273. Openshaw, S. and Openshaw, C. (1997). Artificial Intelligence in Geography. Chichester: John Wiley. Xie, Y. and Brown, D. G. (eds.) (2005). Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Geocomputation, Geocomputation CD ROM. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan.

Relevant Websites http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk Centre for Computational Geography at the University of Leeds. http://www.geongrid.org Geon project website. http://www.geocomputation.org Home site for the Geocomputation Conference series, including downloads of papers from recent events. http://www.ncess.ac.uk National Centre for e Social Science: Moses project. http://ncg.nuim.ie National Centre for Geocomputation, Maynooth. http://www.mbl.org Overview of the mouse brain library, including a description of the mouse brain atlas. http://www.geovista.psu.edu Pennsylvania State University Geographic Visualization Science, Technology, and Applications Center. http://www2.astrogrid.org Portal to the AstroGrid Virtual Observatory. http://www.nesc.ac.uk Portal to the UK National e Science Centre.

Geodemographics M. Birkin and G. P. Clarke, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Cluster Analysis A statistical approach to grouping data. When applied to small area census data, this becomes a means of identifying areas which are similar to one another. Ecological Fallacy The idea that applying a descriptive label to an area or group of individuals and households implies homogeneity where there is actually diversity. Factor Analysis A way of determining the main axes of differentiation within a dataset: for example, in what way can one group of areas be distinguished from another. Instrumental Rationality The idea that by targeting policies on certain groups of customers or service users, those groups will automatically become the most significant. Lifestyles Data Information about people including behaviors and interests in addition to classic descriptors such as age and social class. Profile A structured comparison between a dataset and a parent population, identifying over-representation in certain groups and under-representation elsewhere. Segment A group of people or a set of geographical areas of a similar type. Social Area Analysis An approach to the study of urban areas which was popular in the US in the middle part of the twentieth century. It tried to determine the extent to which certain social groups, such as young people, ethnic minorities, or affluent families, would tend to group together within cities.

Introduction Geodemographics is a classification of the entire popu lation of an area (e.g., the UK) according to the type of area in which they live. Such classifications are usually based on a broad range of indicator variables that cover housing tenure, socioeconomic information, and demo graphic characteristics (classic census variables). The geodemographic industry as a whole is a very lucrative one. For example, Claritas Europe – one of at least a dozen major players in the global market – had annual turnover of $100 million in 2003. The vast ma jority of businesses in retailing, financial services, fore court retailing and utilities, as well as service providers, local and central governments now make extensive use of

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the technology, making geodemographics represent the largest end user of census data and applied spatial analysis. Geography has become an extremely market able subject in recent decades! This article looks at the history of geodemographic systems, the make up of contemporary systems, and then focuses briefly on the data and methods needed to build and apply such a system. Finally, we consider some drawbacks and criticisms associated with these methods.

Early Developments of Geodemographics The history of geodemographics is frequently traced back to the Charles Booth poverty maps of Victorian London. However, the intellectual roots of the approach lie most clearly in the work of the Chicago School of urban sociologists, led by Park and Burgess in the 1920s. The human ecology of the urban sociologists developed naturally into the formal classification of areas within cities by means of social area analysis. In statistical terms, this work amounts to a factor analysis of multidimen sional data structures built around census variables, and was stimulated by the availability of small area data for census tracts in the order of 4000 people in size from 1910 onward. Commercial applications of the technology date back to at least 1961, and Jonathan Robbin’s foun dation of General Analytics Corporation (GAC), later renamed as Claritas. The first geodemographic system proper, Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets (PRIZM) did not appear until the mid 1970s, however. At first the development of similar techniques in the UK was hampered by a lack of the equivalent small area data. From the 1950s onward, however, and perhaps at an accelerated rate in association with the quantitative revolution in geography, a number of classifications of UK cities began to appear. Eventually a full national classification known as A Classification of Residential Neighbourhoods (ACORN) was produced by Richard Webber at Centre for Environmental Studies (CES). Initially this work was targeted at local authorities, with an interest in the distribution of people, housing, and social deprivation within their areas. The application of the ACORN system in the private sector resulted from experimental work conducted in the early 1970s for the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB). Webber’s ward based classification was used and cross tabulated with information collected about product purchases and media use, to produce what became known as the Target Group Index (TGI). The study revealed a surprising

Geodemographics

ability to discriminate more effectively (e.g., between readers of the Guardian and the Telegraph) than ‘tradi tional’ indicators, such as social class, age, or education. In 1979 the consumer analysis company, CACI (ori ginally California Analysis Centers Inc.) recruited Richard Webber, who developed his system for them into a new Enumeration District (ED) level 36 cluster classification of neighborhood types, and it was at this point that it was renamed ACORN and linked into CACI’s InSite retail catchment characteristic description system. Webber later left CACI in 1985 to join CCN Marketing, where he developed the MOSAIC geodemographic system. In recent years, academics have continued to be interested in technical enhancements to the methodology of geodemographics, offering new approaches based on fuzzy clustering, self organization, and genetic algo rithms. First Superprofiles, and lately Output Area Classification (OAC), the official Office for National Statistics (ONS) classification of output areas (OAs) in the UK, have been derived as the products of university research. Academics have also had an interest in case study applications of geodemographics, such as crime and policing, education, and healthcare. In the commercial world, however, the major impact has been from the as similation of new data sources, especially massive life style databases which have allowed systems to be enriched and refreshed on a much more frequent basis. This has made geodemographics progressively more lu crative, with the result that most providers are now embedded within global market research businesses (e.g., Claritas within Nielsen (US) and Acxiom (Europe), CCN as part of Experian, and most recently the acqui sition of CACI by ESRI). Geodemographic systems now exist not only across North America and Europe but for many international markets such as Japan and the

Table 1

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Philippines (Cameo International), China, New Zealand, and Australia (MOSAIC Global).

Examples of Geodemographics Major commercial systems in the UK include MOSAIC, ACORN, and Cameo. The major system in the North American market is PRIZM. Typically, these systems adopt a hierarchical classification structure, in which a broad set of area types can be disaggregated into a more refined set of profiles. In many systems, a third level of disaggregation is also possible. For example, ACORN neatly identifies six broad categories from ‘thriving’ to ‘striving’ (see Table 1), which can then be broken down into a further 17 second level headings (‘groups’) and 54 third level headings (‘types’). Each area type is accom panied by a ‘pen profile’, which constitutes an intuitive portrait of a geographic neighborhood which summarizes its main characteristics. The pen profiles vary in char acter from the factually accurate but perhaps bland (e.g., Cameo) to the more evocative, but arguably fanciful (e.g., MOSAIC). The area names themselves are a clue to this dichotomy: Cameo’s level 2 areas are labeled simply 1A– 10C, whereas MOSAIC lists areas like ‘pebbledash sub topia’ and ‘bohemian melting pot’! Both MOSAIC and Cameo are also available in international versions. This means that it is not only possible to apply market profiling techniques to global markets, but also to make between country comparisons of cities or regions. Many providers have also experi mented with sector specific versions of their classifi cations, like Grocery MOSAIC and Financial Acorn, in which the basic classifications are fine tuned for a particular purpose, using specialized data about retailing

Area classifications within ACORN

ACORN category

ACORN groups

ACORN types

% UK households

B. Expanding

4. Affluent executives, family areas

4.10 Affluent working families with mortgages 4.11 Affluent working couples with mortgages, new homes 4.12 Transient workforces, living at their place of work 5.13 Home-owning family areas 5.14 Home-owning family areas, older children 5.15 Families with mortgages, younger children

1.8

5. Well-off workers, family areas

ACORN A classification of Residential Neighbourhoods. * Thriving: 19.8% of UK households (3 groups and 9 types) * Expanding: 11.6% of UK households (2 groups and 6 types) * Rising: 7.8% of UK households (3 groups and 10 types) * Settling: 24% of UK households (2 groups and 7 types) * Aspiring: 13.7% of UK households (2 groups and 6 types) * Striving: 22.6% of UK households (5 groups and 16 types)

1.3 0.3 2.5 2.6 1.9

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or financial markets. However, the breadth and general applicability of geodemographics is one of its main ap peals, and the sector versions have tended to be less popular. The technique of geodemographics has been deployed in many contexts spanning both commercial and public sector domains. A large number of commercial case studies are maintained on corporate web pages. The main application areas include market research, customer tar geting, trade area analysis, and resource allocation. Geo demographics is appealing for market research as a sampling method, in order to determine a set of locations where interviews or other primary research can take place to provide balanced coverage of the population. Customer targeting is a staple commercial application. A typical approach would be for a company to undertake a local trial for an expensive direct marketing campaign, and then to analyze customer responses according to demographic groups. The national campaign would then be targeted at the types of areas in which customer responses were most favorable in the trial. Trade area analysis can be used by retail organizations to profile local markets. For example, this technique was used in appraisals of the Meadowhall Regional Shopping Centre to estimate trading volumes and customer preferences in advance of the development. This technique can also be used by retailers for processes such as sales benchmarking (am I doing well here?) and format optimization (have I got the right products here?). Resource allocation decisions can be supported for com mercial and service organizations so that spending is matched to need. For example, in relation to crime pre vention, neighborhood policing might be a priority in areas of a particular geodemographic type. Funding for healthcare is regularly prioritized to areas of greatest need using geodemographics or alternative indicators of deprivation. In the rest of this section we offer two examples of geodemographics in action, first, in a commercial en vironment, second, in a public service planning context. Our first example concerns a travel business. One of the beauties of geodemographics is that the only essential requirement is a list of customer addresses. These ad dresses are matched individually to census geographies using a point in polygon operation or lookup table, and this allows geodemographic codes to be assigned to customers based on their place of residence. Now the customer database can be ‘profiled’, that is, compared to the expected or national average distribution. For ex ample, when the travel agent considers customers who book ‘flight only’ holidays (no accommodation, car hire, or other products) then 4% of customers are located in Cameo Group 2D (described as urban living professional singles and couples), whereas only 2% of the national population are in this category. These customers are twice as likely to buy ‘flight only’ than the total market.

This relationship would usually be expressed as an index around 100; in this example, the precise value is 213. The top ranking geodemographic groups for flight only, along with cruises and family holidays are shown in Table 2. An observer considering Table 2 might conclude that all this analysis reveals is what one might know or expect anyway. At one level this is true, but many would argue that a great strength of geodemographics is that it does tend to present an intuitively reasonable representation of the world. For example, individual users (like the market research manager of our travel agent) can carry out tasks such as querying their own postcode to find the kind of neighborhood that they live in, and this profile nearly always makes sense. However, we are also able to quantify quite accurately the levels of variation in cus tomer uptake, and then to take specific action to target new products or promotions. For example, in looking at next year’s cruise packages the travel agent might elect to target brochures to all customers of type 5G both existing and potential – sending flyers by direct mail or door drops, newspaper or television advertising in regions with a high concentration of 5G customers, stocking extra brochures, or prominent display of posters at branches with a high 5G customer base. In this way, the travel agent would expect to become more effective in targeting

Table 2 business

Penetration indices by Cameo segment for a travel

Type

Description

2.1 2D

Flight only Urban living professional singles and couples Mature owner occupiers in rural and coastal neighborhoods Opulent couples and singles in executive city and suburban areas White-collar home owners in outer suburbs and coastal areas

4D 1A 4C 2.2 5G 8C 2B 2A 2.3 4E 8C 3D 2B

Cruise Older couples and singles in suburban family semis Older households with school-age children in towns and suburbs Affluent mature families and couples in large exclusive detached homes Opulent older and retired households in spacious rural properties Family holidays Couples and families in modern rural and suburban developments Older households with school-age children in towns and suburbs Wealthy mixed households living in rural communities Affluent mature families and couples in large exclusive detached homes

Index 213 207 205 190

243 239 231 230

210 189 175 172

Geodemographics

and recruiting new customers (as well as retaining the ones they have already) and thus generating real financial benefits from the application of geodemographics. Our second brief example is taken from work under taken with the UK Home Office. This arose from the need to benchmark police force performance and the possibility of using such analysis to help better allocate existing re sources. This type of work stems from the recent gov ernment emphasis on performance indicators in public services and the increasing interest in geodemographics for public sector applications. Often schools, hospitals, police authorities, etc., are listed in a league table based on such key performance indicators. Working with the Home Office, researchers at Leeds built a model of ‘crime ex pectation’ based on a geodemographic classification which uses a raft of socioeconomic variables. This creates a number of clusters of police force areas which are similar in socioeconomic terms. Then, police authorities working in similar types (‘families’) of community environment could be directly compared. Figure 1 shows variations in burglary rates within family 4, large city areas with many socioeconomic problems. These new rankings and families proved useful policy alternatives to the traditional crime lists which always had leafy England at the top (lowest crime rates) and the forces working in the most deprived estates at the bottom. Using the ‘distance from expected value’, Knowsley, for example, emerged as an area where, despite some of the highest poverty rates in the UK, crime rates were lower than expected (they were still high of course). Subsequent media attention focused on the good things the police force was doing to reduce drug related crime in particular. The new method of classification proved popular with police forces. For example the commander of Knowsley Police, Supt. Stuart Kernohan, was quoted as saying:

This is a thought provoking analysis of crime statistics and highlights the importance of the force’s move to neighbourhood policing across Merseyside.

Data

30.00

32.14

32.55

40.42

50.31 27.74

35.47

37.61

40.00

33 04

39.09

50.00

40.51

60.00

53.79

59.01

The most important source of data for all geodemo graphic systems is the Census of Population, which is conducted at 10 year intervals in the UK, US, and many other countries. The census provides data which is wide ranging in its social and demographic contents, it covers the whole population, and is available for very small geographical areas. The major kinds of data which are captured within the census and are useful within a geodemographic classifi cation include demographics (age, sex, marital status, ethnicity), housing (tenure, number of rooms, central heating), socioeconomic status (economic activity, occu pation), household composition (number of children, dependents, lifestage), and health (limiting long term illness, overall health and fitness). For commercial purposes in particular, however, a number of important things are missing from census data. The topic of income has been debated for a long time in the UK, and indeed the trial census from 2001 included such a question, but ultimately personal and household income was not collected as part of the 2001 Census. Furthermore, it has often been argued that spending depends more on behaviors and attitudes rather than demographics and class. Thus hobbies and interests could be just as important as age and job type. In order to capture these dimensions, ‘lifestyles’ data are particularly important. Lifestyles data are collected by a variety of means, including newspaper questionnaires, product

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Figure 1 Family 4 from the Home Office classification: a comparison of domestic burglaries rates, 2000 (per 1000 persons).

386

Geodemographics

guarantee forms, and door to door leaflets. The ques tionnaires typically ask people about their hobbies and interests, household income, and product ownership (e.g., type of vehicle owned or driven) in addition to basic demographic and household data. These data are there fore a good match for the most important missing elements from census data. Although not as extensive as the census, companies like CMT and NDL have col lected tens of millions of responses to lifestyles ques tionnaires. It could also be argued that lifestyles data are superior to census data to the extent that the information tends to be continually refreshed and so is more up to date, and it is usually available for individual respond ents, and so classifications may be produced for indi vidual households, or at very fine spatial scales (such as unit postcodes or zip plus four in the US). In addition to lifestyles data, many geodemographics companies will also incorporate third party data such as property prices, shareholder data, or County Court Judgements into their profiling process. For example, EuroDirect produces seven different versions of Cameo using a variety of data sources of this type, so that while Cameo UK is purely census based, Cameo Property is based on a profile of house prices by area. The idea is that the different classifications can be combined flexibly for different purposes. On the other hand, Experian uses the names and addresses of company directors as a direct input to the classification process for MOSAIC, so here the emphasis is on using a wide variety of data to get the best possible core product. Finally, pure spatial data are used in some classifi cations. For example, Experian has developed measures of accessibility to retail and other services, which are used in addition to population density measures in area profiling. There is no reason why measures of green space, or even variables like pollution and air quality, might not become increasingly used as such information becomes universally available. In summary, then, census outputs are augmented within geodemographic systems by three other types of data – lifestyles, spatial data, and third party registers. In addition to ‘thickening’ the source data, potential advantages of these sources are that they may be bang up to date and allow geodemographic profiles to be disaggregated to very fine spatial scales. However, none of these secondary data sources can match the census for overall quality and density of coverage, and so classifi cations which respect census timescales and geographies will always inspire the most confidence.

required. In other words, we need to take a whole raft of data elements (described above) and to collapse them into a single code which represents a type of neighbor hood. The most suitable technique for this problem is cluster analysis – in essence, we take a set of areas and divide them into groups of areas which are of a similar type. In a two or three dimensional space, these might be visualized as clusters within a traditional sense – see Figure 2, for example. In a higher dimensional space, the concept is similar but the visualization is a bit more difficult! There are three basic flavors of cluster analysis, known as agglomerative, hierarchical, and relocation. To fix ideas, we will assume that the problem is to divide 200 000 census OAs into 10 clusters, although the specific numbers have no impact on the logic. Using an agglomerative method, we would start with 200 000 OAs and define a measure of similarity between areas based on the data available. For example, if area A has 10% unemployment, area B has 9% unemployment, and area C has 3% un employment, then area A is more similar to area B than area C on this criterion. With appropriate assumptions, these similarities can be summed or averaged across all the data inputs. Next we join together the two most similar areas. In effect, this gives us 199 999 clusters. The char acteristics of the new cluster are compounded from its constituent areas. The process is simply repeated until we arrive at the desired set of 10 clusters. Using hierarchical methods, we would start with 200 000 OAs allocated to a single cluster. Then we would split the cluster into two pieces, in such a way that the two pieces are as different as possible. Again, in two di mensions we can visualize this process as simply drawing a boundary between two groups of areas on a graph (Figure 2). The process is exactly analogous in higher dimensions. Next, we try and cut each of our two superclusters into two pieces, and accept the solution which gives maximum differentiation. Then we keep going until ten clusters are reached. A relocation method would take ten OAs at random to form cluster centers, and then allocate each OA to its nearest cluster. Once this has been done, the initial area is

Variable Y

Methods In order to build a geodemographic classification, it is clear that some kind of method for data reduction is

Variable X

Figure 2 Three clusters in two dimensions (schematic).

Geodemographics

no longer at the geometric center of each cluster, so the cluster centroid must be recalculated. Then the OAs are reallocated, and we proceed until the cluster centroids stop moving. In practice, both agglomerative and hierarchical methods are hugely expensive computationally and cannot be implemented for problems of a reasonable size (al though there is a hierarchical process known as Ward’s algorithm which is available in Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and can be operationalized for clusters composed from several hundred cases). For ex ample, with 200 000 OAs, generation of the first pairing in the agglomerative algorithm requires evaluation of simi larity, maybe across several hundred variables. Then this process needs to be repeated 199 999 times. This is too much work even for a supercomputer! In practice, there fore, relocation based methods are used. The most popular of these is k means clustering within SPSS. Here ‘k’ is simply a reference to the number of clusters, and ‘means’ is a reference to the arithmetic mean, because the cluster centroids are calculated using the arithmetic mean of each variable in each cluster. K means is not a perfect technique. In particular, so lutions are not unique and will vary according to the starting conditions (i.e., which random cluster centroids are initially chosen). Furthermore, cluster analysis itself is limited by the need to select a number of clusters at the outset, and it is difficult to propose satisfactory and ob jective measures to compare a solution with (say) 8 clusters to a solution with 10 clusters. Other practical problems include which data to include, and the possi bility of weighting certain variables to increase their importance (e.g., suppose we have ten demographic variables and two health variables: should we increase the weighting of the health variables because there aren’t very many?). Nevertheless k means cluster analysis has been shown to provide robust classification systems with distinctive area types at a number of levels of resolution (number of clusters). Refined versions of the k means technique have been proposed, including the use of genetic algorithms, or even self organizing maps. Argu ably these methods may lead to slightly ‘better’ classifi cations, but logically they are relocation based and very similar to k means clustering. A slightly more fundamental refinement of k means clustering is the idea of fuzzy clustering. This idea starts from the observation that the distinctions between clusters are not necessarily clear cut. Thus OAs which are near to cluster centroids may be relative distinct, but those which are close to boundaries might easily be reclassified, for example, if slightly different data were chosen, or due to sampling errors in the data itself. Fuzzy mathematics is essentially a discipline which recognizes that boundaries are inexact, and fuzzy clustering therefore proceeds by recognizing explicitly that cluster membership is

387

probabilistic rather than deterministic. However, while it is conceptually interesting and methodologically valid, fuzzy clustering is problematic simply because it compli cates a technique, that is, geodemographics, of which the most appealing feature is its simplicity. Once a set of small areas has been grouped into clusters, the procedures associated with the preparation of a geodemographic system are fairly straightforward. The key step is to inspect and interpret the distribution of data means across the clusters. Usually these means are presented in the form of indices, so that 100 represents the average across the whole population. Suppose, for example, a cluster is indexed at 120 for infant population (aged 0–4). Thus, areas in this cluster have 20% more infants than the population as a whole. Following this logic, this cluster also has 20% less unemployment than the population as a whole, and so on. By repeating this process across the full set of variables in the classification, we then arrive at a view of what typical areas in this cluster look like, and the narrative form of this analysis forms the basis for the pen profiles discussed earlier. All that remains as part of the descriptive process is to produce pithy names for the clusters! Some form of ‘ground truthing’ is important in the validation of the clustering process. Ground truth is a concept with its origins in remote sensing which involves comparing the results of a modeling or estimation process with an actual observation on the ground. So what we would do is to select some areas from the classification and actually see what they look like. In particular, do neighborhoods of the same type share similar characteristics in real life, and are they different to neighborhoods of other types? Ultimately, many sys tems would then try to represent typical neighborhoods using photographs and embed these into product de scriptions or pen profiles. Once all this has been done, then it is to be hoped that the geodemographic system can be used to profile populations in a distinctive and helpful way. A typical process here is simply to compare the distribution of a ‘target market’ against the national population. Let us suppose that the target in question is students entering higher education. Postcodes for all students are taken from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, and pro filed to show that 26% of all students come from affluent professional backgrounds. In the national profile, 13% of school leavers have similar backgrounds. Entry to higher education is represented at 200 within this database. The effectiveness of the profiling can be assessed informally by comparing these penetration indices across groups. An effective application will have a number of values both much greater than and well below 100. This effectiveness can be formally measured using a measure such as the gini coefficient, more commonly known simply as ‘lift’ within the market analysis industry.

388

Geodemographics

Figure 3 shows an example of the recent UK ONS ‘Output Area Classification’ for the city of Leeds in the UK.

Issues In a searing critique of geodemographics, Jon Goss has objected to the ‘instrumental rationality’ of this method ology. In our interpretation, this means that geodemo graphics becomes a self fulfilling prophecy: if products are exclusively targeted at customers (in neighborhoods) type x, then customers of type x will start to demonstrate a strong propensity to buy these products, and so on. Therefore, one objection to geodemographics is that it creates or exacerbates existing divisions within markets, and potentially within society more broadly. According to Goss such marketing sciences exercise ‘surveillance and

1: Blue collar communities 2: City living 3: Countryside 4: Prospering suburbs 5: Constrained by circumstances 6: Typical traits 7: Multicultural

Figure 3 ONS Output Area Classification for Leeds, UK.

control’ over the field of consumption and take no account of those who are ‘excluded from the pleasure even of playing with consumer identity’. Goss has a number of other ethical objections to geodemographics, revolving around notions of ‘data veillance’ and ‘consumer espionage’ – the lengths to which organizations will go in piecing together customer profiles from disparate sources and the extent to which individual privacy is potentially infringed. On the other hand, one could also argue that there are extensive legal frameworks governing the use of personal data, and furthermore that one of the attractions of geodemo graphics is that it presents profiles of areas or groups and not of individuals. Alongside these ethical objections there also sit important methodological reservations about geodemo graphics. The most significant of these are the ecological fallacy (the implication that all residents of a

Geodemographics

neighborhood share the same characteristics), up to dateness, and data accuracy. At the end of the day, one potential rebuttal to the methodological problems at least is that geodemo graphics appears to ‘work’ in a robust and meaningful way. Even this benefit has been turned around as a weakness by some, arguing that however meaningful empirically, geodemographics lacks a robust theoretical foundation. In constructing models of educational at tainment, Richard Harris and Ron Johnston have argued that at best area profiles should be used as only one potential explanatory variable, and perhaps better left in the role of exploratory analysis. However, it is undoubtedly true that geodemographics is one of the most important applied techniques in the world outside academia. For the current authors, en gagement with such techniques is therefore important in our teaching, and what is important in our teaching is important in our research. Important research questions about geodemographics should continue to be asked, for example, in relation to scale effects (how do patterns vary at different spatial scales, what does this mean about neighborhood geographies, and what are the practical implications?), in relation to dynamics (how do neigh borhoods change over time, are there general models, and how do these differ from place to place?), and in relation to spatial inequalities and environmental justice (do re source allocation mechanisms, e.g., in schooling or healthcare, reflect variations in neighborhood types, and is it right that they should do so?). The study of geodemo graphics will continue to be of importance to academics, students, and policymakers. See also: Census Geography; Ecological Fallacy; Education; Factor Analysis and Principal-Components Analysis; Health Inequalities; Urban Morphology.

Further Reading Ashby, D. and Longley, P. (2005). Geocomputation, geodemographics and resource allocation for local policing. Transactions in GIS 9(1), 53 72. Feng, Z. and Flowerdew, R. (1998). Fuzzy geodemographics: A contribution from fuzzy clustering methods. In Carver, S. (ed.) Innovations in GIS 5, pp 119 127. Taylor & Francis: London.

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Goss, J. (1995). We know who you are and we know where you live: The instrumental rationality of geodemographics systems. Economic Geography 71, 171 198. Harper, G., Williamson, I., Clarke, G. P. and See, L. (2002). Family Origins: Developing Groups of Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships and Police Basic Command Units for Comparative Purposes. London: Home Office. Harris, R., Sleight, P. and Webber, R. (2005). Geodemographics, GIS and Neighbourhood Targeting. Chichester: Wiley. Longley, P. (2005). Geographical information systems: A renaissance of geodemographics for public service delivery. Progress in Human Geography 29(1), 57 63. Openshaw, S., Blake, M. and Wymer, C. (1995). Using neurocomputing methods to classify Britain’s residential areas. In Fisher, P. (ed.) Innovations in GIS 2, pp 97 111. Taylor & Francis: London. Sleight, P. (1997). Targeting Customers. How to Use Geodemographics and Lifestyle Data in Your Business (2nd edn.). Henley on Thames: NTC Publications Limited. Tonks, D. and Clarkson, S. (1997). A geodemographic analysis of degree performance. Higher Education Review 30(1), 5 19. Tranmer, M. and Steel, D. G. (1998). Using census data to investigate the causes of the ecological fallacy. Environment and Planning A 30, 817 831. Vickers, D. W. and Rees, P. H. (2006). Introducing the national classification of census output areas. Population Trends 125, 15 29. Voas, D. and Williamson, P. (2001). The diversity of diversity: A critique of geodemographic classification. Area 33(1), 63 76.

Relevant Websites http://www.statistics.gov.uk Access Point for the Office for National Statistics Output Area Classification, UK Statistics Authority. http://booth.lse.ac.uk Charles Booth Online Archive, Charles Booth Poverty Maps. http://www.eurodirect.co.uk Description of the Cameo Family of International Classifications, EuroDirect. http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk Description of the ‘Geodemographics and Geo Genealogy’ Project at University College London. http://www.claritas.com Home Page of Claritas Describing Geodemographic Products and Applications. http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/ Home page for David Ashby, Describing Research into Geodemographics and Policing, UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. http://www.experian.co.uk Home Page of the MOSAIC System and Experian Business Solutions, Experian. http://www.caci.co.uk Overview of ACORN. http://geodemographics.org.uk The ‘Geodemographics Knowledge Base’, a Portal to the Geodemographics Industry Maintained by the Market Research Society.

Geodesy J. Hessler, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary ECEF Coordinates One of the forms of geocentric coordinates where the axes of the coordinate system are attached to the rotating solid Earth. Ellipsoid Purely geometrical idealized reference shape of the Earth that has two or three axes of differing size. Equipotential Surfaces Surfaces of equal gravitational potential of which the geoid is a special case. Geodetic Datum Any numerical or geometrical quantity or set of such quantities that serves as a reference or base for other quantities and distances on the Earth’s surface. Geoid Figure of the Earth abstracted from its topographic features and specified by a model of the equipotential gravitational surface. This to a first approximation is defined by the idealized mean sea level. Global Positioning System (GPS) A constellation of at least 24 medium Earth orbit satellites that transmit precise microwave signals enabling a GPS receiver to determine its location, direction, and time. Inertial Coordinates One of the forms of geocentric coordinates in which the axes of the coordinate system are associated with the fixed stars. Point Positioning The accurate determination of the coordinates of a point on land, at sea, or in space with respect to a coordinate system.

to an equipotential surface whose calculation determines the shape of the geoid. In geodesy, a point on the surface of the Earth having a height that is ‘above sea level’ forms an irregular, physically defined surface. Height is gen erally not thought of as a coordinate but rather a physical quantity. There are three types of heights normally as sociated with geodetic computation: normal heights, geopotential heights, and orthometric heights. Both orthometric and normal heights are defined in meters above sea level, whereas geopotential heights are meas ures of potential energy (Figure 1) and therefore not metric or distance related. Geodetic heights that define the geoid are referenced to the deformation potential of the Earth’s gravity and are not constants but vary with time. The variation is caused by forces acting on the earth and things such as the time varying loading of the at mosphere. The global geoid shape and the gravity po tential of the Earth are now well defined and accurately expressed using the coefficients of spherical harmonic expansions and other types of approximations that utilize the data from Earth orbiting satellites. To calculate the shape of the geoid, the gravity field of the Earth must be calculated along with both its internal and external gravity potential. A particle on the surface of the Earth is acted on by two forces, the gravitational force represented by rg graduðx; y; zÞ

and the inertial force represented by ri grado2 x 2 þ y 2

Geoid, Ellipsoid, and Gravity Field The geoid is essentially the figure of the Earth abstracted from its topographic features. It is an idealized closed equilibrium surface that is formed by the surface of sea water. This is the mean sea level surface in the absence of currents, air pressure variations, and other perturbing phenomena. The geoid, unlike the Earth’s reference el lipsoid, is irregular and too complicated to serve as the computational surface on which to solve geometrical problems like point positioning. The geometrical sepa ration between the geoid and the reference ellipsoid is called the geoidal undulation and is defined positively above and negatively below the reference ellipsoid. To account for this difference the notion of geodetic height is used and is calculated in terms of the Earth’s gravi tational potential. These heights are specified according

390

in a geocentric coordinate system which rotates with angular speed o of the Earth. The actual computation of the geoid is based on the solution of the field equation of gravitation which describes gravity by divðgraduðx; y; zÞÞ ¼

4pgrðx; y; zÞ

The source of gravitation in the above equation is the mass density field r(x, y, z) which is multiplied by the coupling constant g of the inertial and gravitational for ces. There are many solutions to this field equation that effectively define the gravitational potential. The reference ellipsoid is usually chosen to be the same volume as the geoid and is described by its semi major axis defined by the equatorial radius and the flat tening that makes it appear oblate. The quantity f ¼ (a b)/a, where b is the semi minor axis (polar

Geodesy

391

Earth’s Gravity Field Anomalies (milligals) −50 −40 −30 −20 −10

0

10

20

30

40

50

Figure 1 Gravity field anomalies from GRACE. Courtesy NASA.

radius), is a purely geometrical relationship. The mech anical ellipticity of the Earth which is the dynamical flattening caused by its rotation has been determined to a high degree of precision by observation of satellite orbit perturbations. Its relationship with the geometric flat tening is indirect and depends on the internal density distribution of mass in the Earth. The 1980 Geodetic Reference System (GRS80) posited a 6 378 137 m semi major axis and a 1:298.257 flattening. This system was adopted at the XVII General Assembly of the Inter national Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) and formed the basis for geodetic positioning by the Global Positioning System.

Coordinate Systems Finding the accurate locations of points on the surface of the Earth is an important aspect of geodesy and these points are most conveniently described by three co ordinates, X, Y, and Z, in space. Since the advent of satellite positioning, such coordinate systems are typi cally geocentric where the Z axis of the coordinate sys tem is aligned with the Earth’s axis of rotation. In geodesy two types of data are necessary, a horizontal and a vertical. The horizontal datum forms the basis for the computations of surveys that consider the curvature of the Earth, while the vertical datum is the baseline that elevation determinations refer to. Before satellite geo desy, the coordinate systems associated with geodetic datum attempted to be geocentric, but their origins differ from the geocenter by hundreds of meters, due to re gional deviations in the direction of the plumb line. These regional geodetic data, such as ED50 (European Datum 1950) or NAD83 (North American Datum 1983), have ellipsoids associated with them that are regional

‘best fits’ to the geoids within their areas of validity, minimizing the deflections of the vertical over these areas. It is only because Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites orbit about the geocenter that this point be comes naturally the origin of a coordinate system defined by satellite geodetic means, as the satellite positions in space are themselves computed in such a system. Satellite data are defined in a slightly different way, based on the positions of tracking stations, the geopotential model used to define the Earth’s gravitational field and physical parameters that do not appear in traditional data. These include things such as the velocity of light, the rotation of the Earth, and clock corrections. Geocentric coordinate systems used in geodesy can be divided naturally into two classes. First, there are inertial reference systems, where the coordinate axes are oriented relative to the fixed stars. Second there are co rotating, also called ECEF (‘Earth Centered, Earth Fixed’), coordinates, where the axes are attached to the solid body of the Earth.

Satellite Geodesy and Point Positioning Point positioning is an important application of geodetic data and is the accurate determination of the coordinates of a point on land, at sea, or in space with respect to a coordinate system. Point positions are found by compu tation from measurements linking known positions with unknown terrestrial positions. This may involve trans formations between or among astronomical and terrestrial coordinate systems. The known points used for point positioning can be triangulation points of a higher order network, GPS satellites, or some other form of satellite geodesy. The use of satellites in geodesy has a long his tory and is now standard for most geodetic measurements.

392

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Historically, there have been a wide variety of techniques employed in satellite geodesy and several of the most important are discussed briefly in the following.

monitoring of natural hazards, for example, earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides.

Geodetic Use of Global Positioning Satellite Systems

Satellite Laser Altimetry

A GPS receiver calculates its position by measuring the distance between itself and three or more GPS satellites. Measuring the time delay between transmission and re ception of each GPS microwave signal gives the distance to each satellite, since the signal travels at a known speed. These signals also carry information about the satellites’ location and general system health (known as almanac and ephemeris). By determining the position of, and distance to, at least three orbiting satellites, a receiver can compute his position using trilateration. Receivers typi cally do not have perfectly accurate clocks and because the positioning in the GPS is based on very precise time measurements between satellites, a receiver normally tracks one or more additional satellites to correct for possible clock error. Laser Ranging to Satellites In satellite laser ranging (SLR), a global network of ob servation stations measures the round trip time of flight of ultra short pulses of light to satellites equipped with retro reflectors. This provides instantaneous range measurements of millimeter level precision which can be accumulated to provide accurate measurement of orbits and a host of important scientific data. It is the most accurate technique currently available to determine the geocentric position of an Earth satellite, allowing for the precise calibration of radar altimeters and separation of long term instrumentation drift from secular changes in ocean topography. Its ability to measure the variations over time in the Earth’s gravity field and to monitor motion of the station network with respect to the geo center, together with the capability to monitor vertical motion in an absolute system, makes it unique for modeling and evaluating long term climate change by providing a reference system for post glacial rebound, sea level, and ice volume change. Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometric synthetic aperture radar, also abbreviated as InSAR or IfSAR, is a radar technique used in geodesy and remote sensing. This geodetic method uses two or more synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images to generate maps of surface deformation or digital elevation, using differences in the phase of the waves returning to the satellite. The technique can potentially measure centi meter scale changes in deformation over time spans of days to years. It has applications for geophysical

Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), part of NASA’s Earth Observing System, is a satellite mission for measuring ice sheet mass balance, cloud and aerosol heights, as well as land topography and vegetation characteristics. The satellite uses a laser system to measure distance, a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, and a star tracker attitude determination sys tem. The laser transmits short pulses of infrared light and visible green light photons reflected back to the space craft from the surface of the Earth and from the atmos phere, including the inside of clouds, that are being collected in order to precisely determine distances.

Satellite-to-Satellite Tracking The goal of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experi ment (GRACE) space mission is to obtain accurate global and high resolution determination of both the static and the time variable components of the Earth’s gravity field (Figure 1). GRACE enables precise measurement of the Earth’s shifting water masses by detecting their effects on the gravity field. To determine accurate benchmarks or reference positions, geodetic data from any source is used to build a hierarchy of networks to allow point positioning within a country. Highest in the hierarchy are traditional trian gulation networks used in surveying. These are made into networks of polygons, into which local mapping surveying measurements, usually with measuring tape, corner prism, lasers, and the familiar red and white poles, are tied. Most measurements today are performed with GPS. The higher order networks are measured with static GPS using differential measurements to determine vectors between terrestrial points. These vectors are then adjusted in the traditional network fashion to determine local distance and height variations. A global polyhedron of permanently operating GPS stations under the aus pices of the IERS is used to define a single global, geo centric reference frame which serves as the ‘zero order’ global reference to which national measurements are now attached. One purpose of point positioning is the pro vision of known points for mapping measurements, also known as horizontal and vertical control. In every country, thousands of such known points exist in the terrain and are documented by the national mapping agencies. See also: Global Positioning/GPS; Photogrammetry/ Aerial Photography.

Geodesy

Further Reading Grafarend, E. W. (1994). In Varicek, P. (ed.) What Is a Geoid? Geoid and Its Geophysical Interpretations, pp 3 32. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Grafarend, E. W., Krumm, F. W. and Schwartz, V. (eds.) (2003). Geodesy: The Challenge of the Third Millenium. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Hoffmann Wellendorf, B. (2006). Physical Geodesy. New York: Springer Verlag. Rapp, R. H. and Sanso, R. (eds.) (1991). Determination of the Geoid, Present and Future. New York: Springer Verlag.

Smith, J. (1996). Introduction to Geodesy. NewYork: Wiley. Torge, W. (2001). Geodesy. Berlin: W. de Gruyter. Vanicek, P. and Christou, N. (eds.) (1994). Geoid and Its Geophysical Interpretations. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Relevant Websites www.agu.org Geodesy Section of the American Geophysical Union. www.iugg.org International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics.

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Geographical Journals L. D. Berg, University of British Columbia, Kelowna, BC, Canada & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Academic Capitalism It refers the conjuncture of processes under neoliberalism that is forcing both academic institutions and academic faculty members to behave in more capitalist-like ways. Neoliberalism has seen the reduction in state block-funding of universities, and a concomitant emphasis being placed on both targeted state funding and external nonstate funding. Funding is being streamed to higher-performing institutions. At the same time, such ’performance’ is being measured in more finance-like terms, drawing on financial audit systems as the metaphor for measuring educational and research performance. The change in funding regimes, along with the rise of audit cultures in the academy, have both acted to pressure academics (and the institutions they inhabit) to behave in more entrepreneurial ways than in the past. The embedding of such processes into everyday academic life is a key aspect of the rise of academic capitalism. Citational Consciousness Arising within both neoliberal understandings of the academic Self as a unified individual and academic capitalist valuations of individual labor, citational consciousness involves the overemphasis of the value and importance of academic citations (i.e., when one academic cites the publication(s) of another academic in his/her own published work). Citational consciousness also involves the conflation of citations with quality, such that more highly cited works are seen to be of higher quality than less-cited works. Similarly, more highly cited works are seen to be of greater importance than less-cited works. All of this draws on the science model of knowledge production, which is closely connected to enlightenment reasoning and the notion of single direction for scientific ’progress’. At the same time, it ignores the geographic contexts of knowledge production, the problematic nature of English-language hegemony in the sciences and social sciences, as well as less-obvious issues such as the differing intercitational rates of arts, humanities, and social sciences. Citational consciousness has become more embedded in academic life through processes like the UK Research Assessment Exercises and the New Zealand Performance-Based Research Funding assessments. It is likely to be even more entrenched in the lives of UK academics with moves to the new ’metrics-’based (read citations) Research Excellence Framework. Notwithstanding these official uses of citation counts, they have been an important

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unofficial art of many academics at North American research universities for sometime now.

Introduction While geography has a long history as an intellectual pursuit, its formal institutionalization as an academic discipline with its own separate identity in Western universities is a phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even then, according to Johnston, ‘‘full institutionalization [of Geography] did not occur until well into the twentieth century.’’ A wide range of interrelated processes were part of the extended institutionalization of Geography: the establishment of Geography departments in universities; the introduction of Geography degree programs; the allocation of pro fessorial (lecturing) posts in Geography to teach and undertake research in the discipline; the establishment of learned societies to promote Geography; and, the es tablishment of publication outlets to publish research in Geography (note the use of upper and lower case letters to signify the difference between Geography as a dis cipline and geography as practice). While all of these phenomena were important to the development of Geography, of interest here is the es tablishment of scholarly publication outlets in the dis cipline, although this facet of what James Sidaway calls the ‘production of Geography’ cannot be easily separated from others. Over the years, geographers have come to have a wide range of outlets available to them for pub lication of their scholarly work. These include edited books, monographs, reports, and scholarly journals whose contents have been subject to peer review. Scholarly journals have come to dominate publishing in Anglo phone Geography. Academia has long operated within a central conceit of dispassionate and impartial ‘objectivity’; one that is re flected in a key metaphor that is often used by supporters and detractors alike to locate and describe the university – ‘the ivory tower’. Peer reviewed geographical journals are one of the primary means by which academics, geog raphers among them, have attempted to maintain the ideals of impartiality and objectivity. This article seeks to describe geographical journals, their role in the pro duction of geographical knowledges, and their place in the messy social relations of the ‘real world’ that their contributors seek to describe in their research. In this regard, the article can be seen as part of the movement to


develop a political and cultural economy of geographical journals (ACME Editorial Collective, 2007; Barnett and Low, 1996; Moss, Berg and Desbiens, 2002). It is im portant to note two points: (1) this is an interpretation that draws from critical geography for its inspiration (and thus it is open to contestation from other perspectives); and (2) the focus is on Anglo American geographical journals.

Geographical Journals: A Brief Description

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identity. There is, however, considerable disagreement among geographers over just how anonymous blind re view is, especially in the light of the relatively small numbers of academic geographers extant in the Geo graphical subdisciplines today. Some journals in Human Geography, including Antipode and ACME (two radical geography journals), thus operate open by choice re views in which authors and reviewers can choose to be identified in the review process. The Rise of Commercial Journal Publication

For many people, as Rob Kitchin and Duncan Fuller, (2003: 313) observe, publication in geographical journals is best encapsulated by the metaphor of the ‘black box’: ‘‘it has inputs (e.g., submitting a paper or abstract) and outputs (referees comments, acceptance, rejection), but a lack of clarity exists concerning what happens between one and the other’’ (Kitchin and Fuller, 2005). Given the general lack of knowledge about geographical journals, it is useful to briefly review the development of the peer reviewed journal in Geography and the processes to which manuscripts are submitted prior to publication. The Learned Societies The first scholarly research journals in Anglophone Geography were launched by learned societies such as the Royal Geographical Society or the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Section E, Geography). Over time, some of these learned societies came to be known by other names and other new societies were formed to represent academic Geography. In the Anglo American context, these ‘newer’ societies include the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers in the UK (publishers of Transactions, In stitute of British Geographers), the Association of American Geographers in the USA (publishers of Annals, Association of American Geographers), the Institute of Australian Geographers in Australia (publishers of Geographical Re search), the New Zealand Geographical Society in Aotearoa/New Zealand (publishers of The New Zealand Geographer), and the Canadian Association of Geog raphers in Canada (publishers of The Canadian Geog rapher). Their journals had relatively similar characteristics, the most significant feature being that they were ‘peer reviewed’. The term peer review refers to a number of related processes: review of proposals for research funding, evaluation of ongoing or completed research projects, evaluation of teaching, and the review of manuscripts for publication in academic journals. In this case, then, peer review refers to scholarly review by one’s peers of manuscripts submitted for consideration for publication in a scholarly journal. In most cases, such review involves what is termed a ‘blind’ review, in that neither the author nor the reviewers know the other’s

As a result of both demographic changes (the post war baby boom) and moves by the state to democratize uni versity systems, university education expanded signifi cantly in places like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA during the 1950s and 1960s. With these demographic and educational policy changes came sig nificant growth in both the size and number of academic Geography departments, and subsequently, increased pressure on the limited journal publication venues offered by the learned societies. Commercial publishers moved in to fill this vacuum, and by the 1990s a signifi cant majority of journals were being published by com mercial publishers, many of which saw an opportunity to extract significant profits from the academic publishing market (on profits in scholarly publication). During the 1990s, changes in research policies and, in particular, the rise of new audit systems to manage ‘re search quality’ put even greater pressure on geographical journals. The Australian Department of Education, Sci ence, and Training, for example, implemented policies that more or less forced Australian geographers to pub lish in refereed ‘international’ journals. There were (and continue to be) significant career consequences for those who did not do so. The story is the same for New Zealand which has implemented its own performance based research funding exercise, modeled extensively on the UK research assessment exercises (RAEs). Similar stories can be found in many other academic settings, as neoliberalization of the academy continues apace, and academic audit and assessment leads geographers to publish more and more in geographical journals as op posed to other forms of publication available to them. This is all part and parcel of what has been termed ‘academic capitalism’, in which market like behavior and the principles of performance and control become cru cial. Anssi Paasi argues that the rise of academic capit alism also results in the homogenization of publication practices in Geography, and there is strong evidence to support his contentions. Moreover, academic capitalism transforms, repositions, and regulates the activities of researchers. Ultimately, ‘‘this process increases the power of management and diminishes the autonomy of pro fessional academics’’ (Paasi, 2005: 773).

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The Dominance of Journals in Scholarly Communication Within academic capitalism, scholarly journals have be come crucial to the institutional survival of academic disciplines. While authors may choose to publish in monographs, edited collections, or reports, journal art icles are the current stock in trade of geographical publishing in Anglo American Geography. The so called ‘international’ journals are also coming to dominate the publishing terrain open to geographers from outside the Anglo American metropole, as state funding agencies in other countries encourage their researchers to become ‘international’ (read: ‘published in English’) as well. These processes are all part of the homogenization of opportunities for Geography publishing that Paasi speaks of. Paradoxically, it is within this larger process of homogenization that increased specialization has also occurred in the publishing activities of geographers. Thus, it is important to note the distinction between general Geography journals (some of which are society journals and which publish both human and physical geography), general human Geography journals, and specialist subdisciplinary journals. With a few exceptions (e.g., Annals of the AAG and Transactions of the IBG), general Geography journals have become less influential in the discipline. Much the same can be said for general human Geography journals (again with exceptions, such as Pro gress in Human Geography). The last one and a half dec ades have seen a proliferation of specialist journals in Geography, and for the most part these have tended to become more and more influential in (and outside) the discipline. While many serve specialist communities of geographers, a number of them (e.g., Society and Space and Gender, Place and Culture) have also created inter disciplinary spaces for nongeographers to contribute to spatial understandings of the world. While the international terrain of journal publication is uneven at best, it is clear that in some Geography publishing cultures, journals have become almost the sole publishing outlets that ‘count’ as credible research ‘out puts’ in the calculative rationality of research assessment (of both the formal and informal varieties). For example, less than 10% of submissions to the UK 2001 RAE were books, monographs, or other forms of research publi cation; 91.1% of all submissions were scholarly journal articles. While the RAE might present a skewed under standing of research ‘outputs’, primarily because journal articles are easier to assess and they might be deemed by authors and university departments to be more likely to be ranked higher than other forms of publication, it is still safe to assume that scholarly journals are the most im portant single form of publication in UK Geography. At the same time, given an understanding of the similarities and differences in geographically differentiated cultures

of publication, it is logical to infer that journal articles are also the primary form of publishing for academic geog raphers working in places that comprise the rest of Anglo American Geography: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA. Other places not normally thought of as Anglo American – and Singapore comes immediately to mind – also rely on scholarly Geography journals to publish the majority of their work (and pri marily ‘international’, English language journals at that). It is important to keep in mind that many other cultures of geographical publishing differ from that found in Anglo American universities, although, as suggested in the discussion in the previous section, in recent years with the almost worldwide rise of new and more coercive forms of ‘accountability’ in academia, the ‘international’ journal is fast becoming the sine qua non for publication of work by all academic geographers. The ‘Black Box’ of Journal Publication In order to further develop an understanding of the political and cultural economies of Geographical jour nals, it is useful to outline some of the more mundane and banal processes of journal publication. ‘Publish or perish’ may be a hackneyed cliche´ in academia, but that doesn’t make the forces behind such statements any less ‘coercive’. Most academic geographers have three key components to their university workload: teaching, re search, and service. In the administrative discourse of most universities, all three components of academic workloads are valued equally. In practice, however, most geographers know that things related to research – or more specifically, obtaining external funding for research, carrying out that research, and publishing one’s findings – matter most. Accordingly, academic geographers are only too aware that they must prioritize these activities over other aspects of their work if they are to ‘get ahead’ in a university position. Of course, this is an overly schematic representation of these processes, and the balance be tween research and teaching varies greatly both within and between universities. Notwithstanding these differ ences and complexities, it is very clear that publication of research ‘in the right venues’ is a fundamental part of being an academic geographer, and peer reviewed scholarly journals are invariably the venue of choice for geographers. The manuscript submission and review process

So how does the ‘black box’ of journal publishing that Kitchin and Fuller (2003) refer to, function? To better understand this, it is useful to follow a ‘typical manu script’ through a standard journal submission process. When an author submits a manuscript to a journal for consideration for publication, they must usually attest to a number of things. First, it must be original scholarly


work completed by the author and her/his co authors. Second, it must not have been published elsewhere previously, nor can it be under consideration for publi cation with another journal (or other medium) at the same time. If these initial conditions are met, then the journal editor will quickly review the manuscript to ensure that it meets minimum standards of publication and that it fits with the editorial policies of the journal. If the manuscript meets these minimum requirements, the editor will send a confirmation of receipt to the author and assign the manuscript to reviewers, usually two or three, but possibly as many as six, for peer review. The editor often draws on the expertise of her editorial board members, both to provide the names of potential referees, and to act as possible referees themselves. Some journals (such as ACME) have explicit policies that manuscripts be reviewed by at least one editorial board member in addition to other external referees. Peer review takes time, especially in light of the ever expanding workloads referees face, and the fact that they do peer review as a service that gets little recognition in the university system of merit and promotion – in spite of its absolutely pivotal role in academic knowledge pro duction. Most journals specify a review period of 6 weeks, although most editors are forced to allow 8–10 weeks before they search for an alternate reviewer. Authors should expect to wait at least 4 months for an editorial decision, although some journals take up to a year to provide such decisions. While such waits are problematic, it should be understood that managing manuscripts, reviews, and re viewers is one of the most time consuming (and trou blesome) aspects that an editor and her editorial staff face. Just to put things in perspective, an accepted manuscript can generate as much as 30 separate pieces of correspondence from submission to publication. Given that most editors manage at least 100 manuscripts in any given year, they and their staff are managing somewhere between 2500 and 3000 letters and e mails relating to manuscript management. Put another way, if each piece of correspondence takes just 5 min to write or read, an editor can spend between 200 and 250 h yr just dealing with manuscript management correspondence. This workload does not include reading manuscripts, referee reports, and writing decision letters, the latter of which can take between three to four hours to complete. Once the reviews are in, the editor must then review the referee reports, review the manuscript (again), and then write a decision letter outlining the reasons for their decision and linking it explicitly to the referee reports. Editorial decisions are based on more than a simple tallying of the referee decisions for or against publication, but instead attempt to balance a host of issues. While there are many places that an author may succeed or fail, it is much less common in human geography to have

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straightforward reasons to reject a manuscript for publi cation. The issues in human geography are rarely about technical correctness (although this still happens in some approaches to the discipline), but instead focus on questions relating to the quality of argument, sophisti cation of theoretical approach, internal consistency, and the nature of the contribution to the literature the manuscript might make. A good editor will be working to protect the reputation of both the journal she edits, as well as that of the authors submitting their work. Journal articles become a very public and permanent record of both the journal and the scholars who publish in it, so it is in everyone’s interest to have the editor make careful acceptance decisions. In the majority of cases, manuscripts are rejected with encouragement to revise and resubmit for further review. In the author’s 10 years experience as either an editor or editorial board member on six journals, there has prob ably been only one instance of a manuscript being ac cepted for publication without revision. So, let us follow the more typical manuscript that gets rejected with en couragement to revise and resubmit. This manuscript goes back to the author, who then needs to decide whe ther or not to revise and resubmit to the original journal, or whether to revise and submit the manuscript else where. If the editor’s letter is at all encouraging, it is good strategy to do the revisions as requested (within reason) and to resubmit to the original journal. If, however, an author decides to submit his/her manuscript to a second journal, they must inform the editor of the first journal of their decision to do so. Failure to do so, results in a manuscript technically being under review at two journals simultaneously, since the editor at the first journal will keep the manuscript file active for approximately one year after sending out a decision letter to an author. Most editors will ask authors to provide some indication of how they wish to respond to the editorial decision. Once a manuscript has been revised and resubmitted, it is then up to the editor to decide if the revised manuscript must go out to the original referees for a second review. Often, editors have specified in their original decision letter to the author whether or not the manuscript will go back out to reviewers for a second round of revisions. Usually, this decision is aided by referees who specify whether or not the revisions required are of the magnitude that the manuscript needs to be reviewed again. Editors can choose to heed such advice or not, and sometimes their decisions may be based on their own expertise on an issue, or on their need for manuscripts. Most journals have an abundance of submissions, and often a backlog of copy, but publication schedules, juggling of special issues, and other technical matters around page counts, issue size, etc., can mean that the editor must take issues other than solely manuscript ‘quality’ into account when making acceptance or rejection decisions. If the manuscript goes back out to

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referees for review, it often goes to just one or two of the original reviewers. This can add a further 6–8 weeks to the process. At various times, the editor’s other duties (since most editors do their editorial tasks in addition to teaching, research, and university service, often with only a minimal teaching reduction) can slow the process further. Once a manuscript has been accepted for publication (whether after the first or second set of reviews), it must then be prepared for submission for production. It seems rare for authors to submit their manuscripts in the required format, so this adds one further step to the process – revision to fit the journal’s style guidelines. After the manuscript has been prepared according to submission guidelines, the editor must then make a de cision about when it will be published. This decision is based on the existing backlog, the juggling of special issues, the yearly page limits specified by the publisher (publishers usually have in place substantial financial penalties for going over yearly page allotments, so this is a significant issue for an editor), and other matters that one might not think are relevant to scholarly editorial practice. For example, given current ‘citation conscious ness’ among journal editors, one issue that concerns many editors is ensuring their best manuscripts get published in early issues, thus giving more time for them to be cited, counted in citation counts, and thus raising their ‘impact factor’ in journal ranking systems (for a discussion of these issues). Once the editor has decided on the manuscripts (and other publication materials such as book reviews) that will make up an issue, it is standard practice to submit the manuscripts and materials that make up an issue to the publisher in digital format. Some publishers have FTP sites to which editors may upload their manuscripts, while others allow submission via CD ROM or DVD. It is now becoming quite commonplace for many publishers to use web based submission (and review) systems, such as ‘Manuscript Central’. Most commercial publishers require about 6 months lead time to produce an issue. In addition, many journals have significant backlogs of ac cepted manuscripts, and the resulting lag between ac ceptance and publication can be as long as 18–24 months. The hegemony of the geography journal as a form of publishing geographical knowledge and the resulting inability of journals to publish in a timely manner is now a central contradiction in the processes of academic knowledge production.

Power Geometries of Geographical Journal Publication Of course, the above discussion about the review and editorial decision making process makes the process seem like a series of primarily ‘technical’ issues that are

dealt with by rational, impartial, and objective editors, assisted by similarly disinterested editorial board mem bers and journal staff. This, of course, is what the metaphor of the ‘ivory tower’ implies. Certainly, it would be inaccurate to suggest that journal editors (and edi torial board members) have an axe to grind. Most editors are fair and even handed in their support for the work that all authors submit to their journals. At the same time, editors clearly have specific editorial policies to fulfill that favor some kinds of knowledge over others. It is important to remember that regardless of the good intentions of editors, there exist powerful structural relations that interpellate the production of geographical knowledges in Geography journals. To paraphrase Marx, for academic geographers, publishing in Geography journals is all about making geographies, but not under the historical–geographical conditions of their own making. In this regard, it should be clear by now that Geographical journals are enmeshed in the very power geometries of the world that their contributors seek to describe and understand in their journal articles. Geo graphical journals, then, are best understood as ‘situated’ within both the politics and practices of academe. In the remainder of this article, the author briefly canvasses some of these power geometries and their impact on Geographical journals. Academic Capitalism and Citation Consciousness While not all geographers agree on the specific character of academic capitalism, there is growing consensus that there has been an intensification of capitalist like pro cesses arising as part of the neoliberalization of academia. As a result, ‘impact factors’ and ranking of journals in ‘league tables’ are now commonplace processes in the working lives of geographers. This is because such things have become an important component of what Michel Foucault (1988) termed ‘governmentality’, or the gov ernance of individuals from afar. The techniques of governmentality disguise as mere technical processes a set of highly political neoliber alizing practices in this case, journal ranking based on impact factors designed to ensure that the work of academics aligns with the objectives of the institutions in which they work (ACME Editorial Collective, 2007: 132).

Geographers are thus being asked to become re sponsible for the academic capitalist accumulation strategies of universities, and one way of attempting to ensure that they do so is through the disciplining prac tices of impact factors and journal ranking systems. Geographers have long had an informal ranking of the status and quality of Geography journals. However, the


institutionalization of such ranking processes means that Geographical journals are themselves having to align with the calculative desires of impact factors, rankings, and league tables. This is highly problematic for a number of reasons. First, there is presently only one source of data for impact factors and rankings: [t]he effective monopoly supplier of such statistics is the Philadelphia based ISI, formerly known as the Institute for Scientific Information, and now owned by the Thomson Corporation (Nature, 2002: 101).

In a number of cases investigated by editors of the journal Nature, the raw citation data collected by ISI Web of Science were incorrect, and further mistakes were found in impact factor calculations. The editors of Nature (2002: 101) concluded that such problems ‘‘yhighlight an even greater needy to check the ISI’s data. Re searchers, policy makers, and publishers who depend heavily on citation statistics should be urged to treat them with greater caution.’’ The problem is that in the current climate of audit and accountability driven by research assessment of both the formal and informal kind, academic administrators are becoming ever more reliant upon citation statistics, impact factors, and journal rankings, to evaluate the merit of scholarly publication. Thus status, funding, and career advancement for geog raphers are all becoming more closely linked to publi cation in only the top ISI ranked journals. Personal communications with many UK based colleagues make it clear that more than a few Geography departments have internalized this ‘citational consciousness’, and they now require academic staff to publish in journals ranked in the top ten of the ISI ranked Geography journals. For-Profit Publishing and the Narrowing of Choice If citation consciousness linked to ISI rankings has a tendency to reduce the number of journals to which geographers submit their work, then the growing trend toward commercial publication has further reduced the availability of journals in academic research libraries. Human Geography journals are less affected by this process, as most titles cost less than USD$1000.00 per year. This problem is most acutely felt in the physical sciences where some journals can cost tens of thousands of dollars per year for subscriptions. Studies commis sioned by the Association of Research Libraries (a non profit organization of 123 research libraries at comprehensive, research extensive institutions in the US and Canada) almost a decade ago suggest that there was a growing crisis of affordability in serials publications. Mary Case notes that, in the decade between 1988 and

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1998, the average cost increases to research libraries for serials was 9.5% per annum. Inflation during that period was usually less than 5% per annum. As a result, libraries have had no choice but to cancel significant numbers of journal subscriptions and to reduce monographic purchasing, decimating their collections. Many believe the exploitative practices of a few large commercial companies operating in a near mo nopolistic market are the fundamental cause of high prices. An earlier 20 year longitudinal study of scientific journal publishing in the USA found that neither in creases in journal pages and number of issues, nor in flation, could adequately account for price increases made by commercial publishers. In other words, it appears that commercial publishers are making significant increased profits on the backs of a ‘captured market’ – academic research libraries. Commercial publishers are also ex ploiting state funders of the universities that pay the salaries of academics who contribute their manuscripts and their editorial expertise to journals as absolutely necessary components of the (commercial) journal pub lication process. Finally, commercial publishers exploit state research councils that fund the research that forms the basis upon which scholarly publications are built. The issue, of course, is that because of significantly increasing costs, journal collections, including those of Geographical journals, are shrinking in university lib raries. Not only are there fewer venues in which to publish – because of the pressures arising from academic capitalism and citational consciousness – but now there are fewer journals being picked up by academic libraries. This is a positive feedback loop in which fewer journals are available to academics, thus reducing the number of journals with higher citation counts, thereby leading to fewer journals for academics to choose from in order to submit their work. Academic capitalism has another, closely related set of implications for scholarly journal publication, namely the hegemony of Anglo American approaches in the academy, which arises from the domination of Anglo American journals in Geography (and all other disciplines too). The issue of Anglo American hegemony in Geog raphy publication has been well canvassed elsewhere, so my comments here are brief. The key point is that both citation consciousness and the dominance of commercial publishers seeking profit maximization have led to a concentration of English language journals published from either the UK or the USA predominating the scholarly publishing terrain in Geography. One small example should illustrate this point: of 39 Geography journals ranked by ISI, just two – Mitteilungen der Oster reichischen Geographischen Gesellschaft and Geographische Zeitschrift – can be said to be truly non Anglo journals in that they publish in a language other than English and their editorial boards are dominated by scholars working

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outside the Anglo American ‘core’ of Geography. Just as Anssi Paasi suggested, we are indeed seeing the hom ogenization of Geographical journal publishing outlets.

Open Access? Recognizing these problems, there have been some movements to contest commercial control of journals through the so called ‘open access’ movement. Open access journals can be defined as peer reviewed scholarly journals that are available free to readers (and insti tutions), usually on the Internet, and at the time of initial publication. The Directory of Open Access Journals is the best available source for locating open access jour nals, and its database currently holds 26 entries for ‘geography’. Of these, 18 journals publish at least some editorial materials in English (and these journals are listed in the list of open access journals below). Un fortunately, the potential of an independent, open access system of scholarly publication (via the internet) has not been realized to date. As Mike Sosteric concluded: In the context of the crises in the scholarly communi cation system, proselytizing a future for independent publication was a laudable project. However, the vision of independent communication has not been realized pri marily because scholars have been reluctant to take up the call to independent publication. Despite the powerful potential of information technologies to wrest control of the scholarly communication system from the big com mercial publishing houses, relatively few individual scholars have initiated journal projects. It is perhaps this failure on the part of the academic community to move quickly to independent publication that has encouraged commercial houses to grow bolder in their demands. (Mike Sosteric, 1998)

Knowing the power of citation consciousness and the lack of rewards within the academy for scholarly journal editing, it is completely understandable that academics would be reticent to engage the open access movement more fully. However, it is this lack of commitment to developing a system of open access scholarly communi cation, as well as the desire on the part of academics for quick and easy access to journal articles via the internet, that has given commercial publishers even more ‘mon opolistic powers in scholarly publication. Commercial publishers have developed pricing structures for their journals that involve requirements to purchase ‘both’ print and online versions of their journals, and at prices that the International Coalition of Library Consortia ‘‘fears will eventually add as much as 40% or more to the cost of scholarly material in journals (Sosteric, 1998).’’

Conclusion This article has outlined, albeit briefly, a political and cultural economy of Geographical journals. Such journals became a prominent feature of the publishing landscape in Geography in the mid twentieth century, and by the end of the century had come to dominate academic publishing in Geography. At the same time that the journal article became the sine qua non of publication for geographers, commercial publishing houses came to dominate the journal publishing market. These processes were embedded within wider processes in the academy that saw the rise of academic capitalism and the creation of a form of citation consciousness. In turn, this has handed a great deal of control of the scholarly publishing system in Geography to commercial publishers who now operate both the actual publication of journals, and the measurement of those journals’ ‘value’ through impact factor calculations and journal rankings. Most geog raphers are strongly discouraged from publishing in anything but highly ranked journals, as measured by ISI Web of Science Journal Impact Factors. As a result, and in spite of the proliferation of journals being published in the latter half of the twentieth century, the terrain of Geographical journals is becoming less varied and more strictly policed by structural constraints imposed by the capitalist like practices arising within academic Geography. See also: Citation Geography; Research Funding Bodies.

Further Reading ACME Editorial Collective (2007). The politics of indexing and ranking journals. ACME: An International E Journal for Critical Geographies 6(2), 131 134. Barnett, C. and Low, M. (1996). Speculating on theory: Towards a political economy of academic publishing. Area 28, 13 24. Berg, L. D. (2001). Masculinism, emplacement and positionality in peer review. Professional Geographer 53(4), 511 521. Berg, L. D. (2004). Scaling knowledge: Towards a critical geography of critical geography. GeoForum 35(5), 553 558. Berg, L. D. (2006). Hierarchical space: Geographers and neoliberalism. Progress in Human Geography 30(6), 764 769 and 778 782. Berg, L. D. and Kearns, R. A. (1998). America unlimited. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16, 128 132. Case, M. (1998). Views of the current marketplace for scholarly journals. ARL: A Bimonthly Report, no. 200. No pagination. http:// www.arl.org (accessed 15 July 2008). Castree, N., Aspinall, R., Berg, L. D. et al. (2006). Research assessment and the production of geographical knowledge. Progress in Human Geography 30(6), 747 782. Castree, N. and Sparke, M. (guest eds.) (2000). Special Issue: Professional Geography and the Corporatisation of the University. Antipode 32(3), 322 339. Ferguson, R. (2003). Publication practices in physical and human geography: A comment on Nigel Thrift’s ‘The future of geography’. Geoforum 34, 9 11. Foster, J., Muellerleile, C., Olds, K. and Peck, J. (2007). Circulating economic geographies: Citation patterns and citation behaviour in economic geography, 1982 2006. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 32, 295 312.


Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In Martin, L. H., Gutman, H. & Hutton, H. P. (eds.) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Gutie´rrez, J. and Lo´pez Nieva, P. (2001). Are international journals of human geography really international? Progress in Human Geography 25, 53 69. Johnston, R. J. (2003a). Geography: A different sort of discipline. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 28, 133 141. Johnston, R. J. (2003b). The institutionalization of geography as an academic discipline. In Johnston, R. J. & Williams, M. (eds.) A Century of British Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kitchin, R. (2006). Research assessment in Ireland. Progress in Human Geography 30(6), 749 751 and 778 782. Kitchin, R. and Fuller, D. (2003). Making the ‘black box’ transparent: Publishing and presenting geographic knowledge. Area 35(3), 313 315. Kitchin, R. and Fuller, D. (2005). The Academic’s Guide to Publishing. London: Sage Publications. Lee, D. and Evans, A. (1984). American geographers’ rankings of American geography journals. Professional Geographer 36(3), 292 300. Lee, D. and Evans, A. (1985). Geographers’ rankings of foreign geography and non geography journals. Professional Geographer 37(4), 396 402. Mitchell, K. (1999). Scholarship means dollarship, or, money in the bank is the best tenure. Environment and Planning A 31, 381 388. Moss, P., Berg, L. D. and Desbiens, C. (2002). The political economy of publishing in Geography. ACME: An International E Journal for Critical Geographies 1, 1 7. Nature (2002). Errors in citation statistics. Nature 415(6868), 101. Paasi, A. (2005). Globalisation, academic capitalism, and the uneven geographies of international journal publishing spaces. Environment and Planning A 37, 769 789. Sheppard, E. (2006). Geographies of research assessment: The neoliberalization of geography? Progress in Human Geography 30(6), 761 764 and 778 782. Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L. (1997). Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sosteric, M. (1998). At the speed of thought: Pursuing non commercial alternatives to scholarly communication. ARL: A Bimonthly Report, no. 200. http://www.arl.org (accessed 15 July 2008). Stoddart, D. (1983). Progress in geography: The record of the I.B.G. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers NS 8, 1 13. Tenopir, C. and King, D. W. (1997). Trends in scientific scholarly journal publishing in the United States. Journal of Scholarly Publishing 28(3), 135 170.

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Withers, C. W. J., Finnegan, D. and Higgit, R. (2006). Geography’s other histories? Geography and science in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831 c.1933. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, NS 31, 433 451.

Relevant Websites www.acme journal.org ACME: An International E Journal for Critical Geographies. http://www.zrc sazu.si ACTA Geographica Slovenica. http://www.anuario.igeo.ufrj.br Anua´rio do Instituto de Geocieˆncias. http://www.sunysb.edu Coordinates: Online Journal of the Map and Geography Round Table of the American Library Association. Series A. http://www.cybergeo.eu CyberGeo: European Journal of Geography. www.doaj.org Directory of Open Access Journals. http://www.ff.uni lj.si Dela. http://www.geo focus.org GeoFocus: International Review of Geographical Information Science and Technology. www.geo publishing.org Geo Publishing: A Publishing Resource for Geographers. http://www.geotropico.org GeoTro´pico. http://igeographer.lib.indstate.edu Industrial Geographer. http://redalyc.uaemex.mx Investigaciones Geogra´ficas. http://www.journalofmaps.com Journal of Maps. http://metropoles.revues.org Me´tropoles. http://nome.unak.is Nordicum Mediterraneum. http://revistaurbanismo.uchile.cl Revista de Urbanismo. http://www.soc geogr.net Social Geography. http://www personal.umich.edu Solstice: An Electronic Journal of Geography and Mathematics. http://redalyc.uaemex.mx Tabula Rasa.

Geographical Masking G. Rushton, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Data Enclaves Supervised work areas where use and access to individual personal records is closely monitored to ensure that the privacy and confidentiality of personal records is ensured. Geographic Masking Any trasnformation of spatial data disigned to protect the privacy of individuals by concealing their identity from anyone with access to geocoded information about them. k-Anonymity Identification of a given number of individuals, k, among whom a given individual’s personal information is merged. Mask Metadata Specific information about the mask that has been used to guarantee personal privacy in the release of information about an individual. Reverse Address-Matching The coordinates of a symbol on a map are linked to a street address file to determine the likely street address of the map symbol. Spatially Adaptive Mask Identification of an area, based on local information about it, that is of sufficient size to merge to given individual’s personal data and preserve the confidentiality of their information. Spruill Coefficient The proportion of records that are located closer to their parent record than to any other record.

Introduction There is a great deal of interest in human geography in examining human behavior in space and time, and for this purpose many activities of individuals are now routinely geocoded. However, there is a risk that indi viduals will become identified from location information about them and so methods have been developed to protect their privacy. One of the methods is known as ‘geographical masking’, and is the subject of this article. The term ‘geographical masking’ refers to any trans formation of spatial data designed to protect the privacy of individuals by concealing their identity from anyone with access to geocoded information about them. Ex amples where such masks are used include the health information of individuals for disease maps, the locations of crimes for crime maps, or the store visited in a study of household spatial behavior for making models of spatial retail behavior. Masking methods are thus methods for concealing locations, or other data associated

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with locations to protect personal privacy and assure confidentiality. When spatial data have been masked, typical ques tions asked are how effective is the mask at protecting the true locations from discovery by others and how the purposes for which the data are released may be met as well after being masked as before. Geographic masking is thus one of a class of methods for limiting the disclosure of personal information. Interest in geographical masking has increased recently with the widespread availability of fine grained spatial data that can be used to link geo graphic coordinates to demographic, social, and eco nomic variables in a geographic information system. Matching the addresses of people in a database to a digital street map to find their location or, knowing their place on a map, recovering their addresses are examples of how spatial information is acquired or used.

Threats to Privacy and Anonymity: Disclosure Risk The need for geographical masking arises from the ob servation that in many cases the location of an individual is a unique identifier. The ethical conduct of research in the social sciences demands that individuals are not harmed by either the conduct of the research, its dis semination, or its use. Professional academic societies have codes of conduct that spell out responsibilities to protect the confidentiality of research subjects or any individual explicitly covered by the research. Most countries have laws that specify standards of privacy and confidentiality to which holders of personal data or distributors of such data must conform. In addition, institutions that engage in research using information provided by individuals follow standards and procedures for ensuring that research is done according to ethical principles. The United States, for example, has institutional review boards (IRBs) that review proposed research and ensure that it follows es tablished procedures to protect the privacy and safety of individuals. Confidentiality considerations relate to how information about individuals is handled by others who have access to it.

Does the Location of an Individual Identify the Individual? The degree to which knowledge of the location of indi viduals potentially identifies them depends on the degree


of specificity of the location provided, other information characteristics of the individuals that could be linked to the respective individuals, and the number of other people with whom an individual could potentially be confused. In the world of digital information, knowing the latitude and longitude of a person in decimal degrees accurate to six decimal places, identifies a person in ab solute terms to within approximately 2 m. Whether such absolute location coordinates are known with this ac curacy depends on the method by which the coordinates were established. Possible sources are global positioning system (GPS) measurements which vary in accuracy by the technology used and the quality of the instruments used; geocodes that are read off properly registered orthophoto maps; and address matching technologies which associate the postal address of an individual with digital road files containing either individual addresses, given ranges of addresses, or land parcel files. In most cases, any of these sources of location information are sufficiently accurate either to uniquely identify an indi vidual or to associate a small group of individuals with the data source.

Spatial Aggregation as a Geographic Mask Throughout the world, the disclosure of personal infor mation in census data is most commonly accomplished by aggregating data into groups or classes and releasing the data for regions. In such cases, spatial aggregation is the method that accomplishes the purpose of the geographic mask. In such cases, individual data are geocoded to known geographic entities. With US Census data, this might be a census tract number; in the United Kingdom it might be a Census Ward. Although this approach can be effective for the purpose of protecting individual infor mation, it often reduces the usefulness of the information for many important purposes. Studies of relationships between environmental exposures and health, for example, often rely on estimates of exposure to harmful con taminants made at particular locations and estimates of the locations of people close to these locations. If information on exposures are averages for areas and information on health outcomes are also averages for areas, it may be impossible to determine whether the exposures at par ticular locations led to the poor health outcomes at those locations because the size of the geographic mask conceals a relationship that really exists. In other cases, a researcher might want to know whether there is a relationship be tween poverty and health but using spatially aggregated census data, such correlations suffer from the ecological fallacy in which relationships observed between census values for areas are different from relationships measured between individuals in these areas.

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Cartographic Display It is not uncommon for data to be shown as dots on a map where each dot refers to an event. It is possible techni cally to identify the address associated with the dot by a process known as ‘reverse address matching’ in which the coordinates of the symbol on the map are matched against the coordinates of the street center line data set. With the likely address identified, links can be made to other data sources that identify a person linked to the address. A number of studies have shown, using empirical examples, that a very large percentage of the addresses illustrated in such maps can be exactly recovered by this process. To obviate this disclosure risk, a geographic mask can be used that relocates any information to prespecified locations. Any information from a given street segment may be shown at the midpoint of the street segment, no matter where, in fact, it is located. If insufficient numbers of other people live on the street segment, the rule might be modified and the information may be shown at the closest street intersection. One negative aspect of applying a geographical mask is that it raises the risk of false identifications. That is, when individual data are mapped, any attempt to protect an individual by attaching his or her information to a location which in fact is not their location runs the risk that some other person who lives at the location identi fied in the masked data may be identified by others as the person whose data are shown. Especially when the ac tivities portrayed in the data are activities that a person does not wish to be associated with such as crimes, rapes, infectious diseases, and many other activities, a person falsely identified as the individual associated with the event will likely object and have a fair argument that they have been harmed by the false disclosure. To overcome such resistance to portraying the locations of individual events, it is not uncommon to place disclaimers on maps advising users that the locations shown are not the real locations of the events. One publicly available web map showing the locations of registered sex offenders had a note attached ‘‘PLEASE NOTE: The symbols identifying the street location DO NOT represent the exact location of where the offender lives. The symbols have been en larged and offset to keep an exact location from being determined.’’

Principles of Masking Scale, Translation, and Rotation (Affine Transformations) Masks This commonly used mask moves each location a par ticular distance and direction from its true location. This mask is easy to implement and can be effective in con cealing the true locations of each person shown. Should

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even one person become correctly located, however, the locations of all other persons immediately become compromised – which is an acknowledged weakness of this mask. When the scale of the map is changed, the information shown can only with difficulty be re connected to other geographic information. When using a scalar transformation, if the map with information on individuals that needs to be protected shows any add itional information beyond the point locations, it can often be rescaled using the ancillary information and then the mask is no longer effective. In short, these transformations can be effective in limited circumstances but they are inherently weak. The Random Perturbation Mask The random perturbation mask displaces each location by a randomly determined amount within a specified range and by a direction selected by a uniform random angle between 01 and 3601. An alternative specification of this mask which has the desirable property of placing the displaced location with equal likelihood within the area of the mask is to select the displaced location from a uniform random distribution within a given distance range east–west and then north–south of the real lo cation. The displaced location is any location selected at random from the set of points computed by this process. Sometimes constraints are added to ensure that all dis placed locations are feasible locations for the event in question, or to ensure that the locations are within a given shape chosen for the mask. If, for example, the displaced event is a residential location, the constraint may ensure that the displaced location is located where residences are found. The random perturbation mask is a commonly used mask and, providing parameter values for the mask are selected with care, this mask is robust and risks of disclosure of personal identities are low when it is used. A Spatially Adaptive Mask There are many factors that affect disclosure risk and it is often not immediately clear how these factors, working in combination, contribute to disclosure risk. VanWey et al. show how a research study that used a sample of US schools, each of which had been guaranteed protection from identification, could determine the size of the geographic mask each should use to perturb the location of the true school so that the approximate pattern of sample schools could be shown on a map. In making such a map available to the public, the study has the additional task of conveying to the public that the schools in the sample were not being identified – or more accurately misidentified – on the map. A possibility in this case was to use the principle of k anonymity to protect the iden tity of the schools in the sample. This principle selects

the number of other schools that may be selected to represent each school. If k ¼ 20, for example, then the number of miles distant from the sample school that is needed to find 20 actual schools becomes the size of the geographic mask for the school in question. Since this size would be different for each school in the nation, the result is the definition of a ‘spatially adaptive geo graphic mask’. The ability to implement such a mask does depend on the availability of a data file of all schools eligible to be included in the sample, their geographic coordinates, and an analysis system capable of making the measurements in question. The spatially adaptive mask is becoming more widely used as potential users recognize that it has all the strengths of the random perturbation mask with additional protections in some specific situations. Attribute Perturbation Mask For some kinds of research, knowing the attribute of a location is sufficient for it to be identified using external data sources. An example might be knowledge gained from a detailed map that estimates contaminant ex posures by people living at any location. A data set that supplied health data and contaminant exposure measures for individuals might be sufficiently precise that the lo cations of the residences could be ‘discovered’ by searching the map for the exposure level associated with the health data. An attribute perturbation mask adds a random value of the attribute – in this case contaminant exposure value – to each case to mask the ability to recover the location through a systematic search of the exposure contaminant map. The range within which the attribute is perturbed can be computed based on the density of people at particular locations on the map. In this case, the mask would be called a ‘spatially adaptive, attribute perturbation mask’.

Pros and Cons of Concealing Details of the Mask An issue that affects the effectiveness of a mask in ac complishing its confidentiality objective is the infor mation divulged to users of a data set about the mask that was used to provide privacy protection. In general, the more details of the mask are divulged, the less effective is the mask at accomplishing its confidentiality objective. Information about a mask is known as ‘mask metadata’. Knowing details of the mask is very useful to the user of the data who can use this information to determine whether the conclusions they have reached after ana lyzing a given data set is likely to be valid, given the characteristics of the mask used. The ability to infer such conclusions is often reached after sensitivity analyses on simulated data that show how results of quantitative tests


are sensitive to particular values of the mask. When a geographic mask has been used, there are different views about releasing details of the mask. Anyone using spatial information that has been masked would like to know all the characteristics of the mask in order to decide whether the masked data can be used for their purpose. However, knowing the characteristics of the mask helps anyone who would like to find the identities of people in the database because it helps identify those individuals who might be the persons being protected by the mask. Thus, withholding the characteristics of the mask helps protect any given individual.

Effectiveness of Geographical Masks The effectiveness of a mask can be measured in two ways. The first is the degree to which the mask protects the privacy of an individual. The second is the degree to which the results of spatial analyses on the masked data are the same or, at least, are consistent with results of analyses on the unmasked data. A common way of measuring the first is by the Spruill coefficient which measures the proportion of records that are located closer to their ‘parent’ record than to any other record. The larger the proportion, the greater the risk of dis closure for the person at the arbitrary location chosen. Related conceptually to the Spruill measure is the ‘k anonymity’ principle which specifies that a mask should supply at least k other individuals with whom a given individual would be identified by a given mask. The privacy of the given individual is assured by the fact that the characteristics of all the k other individuals could be attributed to the given individual. The effectiveness of such a mask depends on the fact that no other charac teristics of the individual are known. If other character istics of the individual are known, the risk of disclosure increases since all members of the k anonymous set who do not have the known characteristic would then be excluded from the set which could decline drastically in number. Armstrong et al. describe the information pre serving qualities of various geographic masks.

Alternatives to Geographic Masking Because of the risk of disclosure of individual data through data linkages, some organizations that archive or produce data attempt to reduce the risk of disclosure by restricting access to data to individuals whose research objectives have been approved and who agree to work in a monitored environment where their access to data is supervised and any data they take from the protected environment is examined to ensure that future disclosure is impossible. These facilities are called ‘enclaves’.

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Data sharing agreements are a second alternative to geographic masking. Such contractual agreements are made between willing partners where researchers promise not to engage in data linkages that might lead to the identification of records. The data user generally agrees to restricted terms of data use, including accepting controls by the data provider over the release of geo graphical details of the data. An example of a data use agreement (DUA) can be seen at website of Centre for Medicare and Medicaid Services. A third alternative is to process the geocoded data to produce a ‘de identified data set’ prior to release to re searchers or to the public. In the USA, the HIPAA law provides explicit rules for producing a de identified data set. Holders of data that follow these rules are said to be invoking the ‘safe harbor’ clause of the HIPAA privacy law and are safe from prosecution. Current rules in the USA stipulate that in a de identified data set, the fol lowing identifiers of any individual are removed: All geographic subdivisions smaller than a State, in cluding street address, city, county, precinct, zip code, and their equivalent geocodes, except for the initial three digits of a zip code if, according to the current publicly available data from the Burea of the Census; (1) the geographic unit formed by combining all zipcodes with the same three initial digits contains more than 20 000 people; and (2) the initial three digits of a zip code for all such geographic units containing 20 000 or fewer people is changed to 000. (http://www.hipaaps.com/legislation/ 45CFR 164.514.html)

A fourth alternative is for the holder of individual level information associated with exact or near exact information on their locations make available, usually on a website, a secure server which is capable of providing selected spatial analyses of their data. The server is or ganized not to allow any original data to be returned to the enquirer; instead, it returns results of analyses which do not include any individually identifiable information either directly or by inference by connecting the results to any other information in the possession of the en quirer. In such cases, as Boulos et al. note, only the soft ware agent ‘sees’ the locational detail in the data and it is the software, associated with control over the server that functions as a geographic mask. This approach to geo graphic masking is likely to prevail in many socially sensitive areas of human geography in the future.

Conclusions Given the vast amounts of information in spatial data bases held by many organizations, interest in the ethical uses of such information and in preventing the disclosure of personally identifiable information, interest in the

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responsible release of data will undoubtedly grow. We have seen that there are many different ways to mask geographical detail to fulfill these ethical purposes. No single mask is more effective than all others. Masks limit detail, add noise, and search for the myriad ways, and attempt to thwart other data that might be linked to those released in order to identify individuals. Work in this area of human geography will continue. Research on the ef ficacy of masking methods is in its infancy. See also: Ethical Issues in Research.

Further Reading Armstrong, M. P. and Ruggles, A. J. (2005). Geographic information technologies and personal privacy. Cartographica 40(4), 63 73. Armstrong, M. P., Rushton, G. and Zimmerman, D. L. (1999). Geographically masking health data to preserve confidentiality. Statistics in Medicine 18, 497 525. Boulos, K. M. N., Cai, Q., Padget, J. A. and Rushton, G. (2006). Using software agents to preserve individual health data confidentiality in micro scale geographical analyses. Journal of Biomedical Informatics 39, 160 170. Brownstein, J. S., Cassa, C. A. and Mandl, K. D. (2006). No place to hide reverse identification of patients from published maps. New England Journal of Medicine 355(16), 1741 1742. Kwan, M. P., Casas, I. and Schmitz, B. C. (2004). Protection of geoprivacy and accuracy of spatial information: How effective are geographical masks? Cartographica 39, 15 28.

Leitner, M. and Curtis, A. (2004). Cartographic guidelines for geographically masking the locations of confidential point data. Cartographic Perspectives 49, 8 25. Monmonier, M. (2002). Spying with Maps: Surveillance Technologies and the Future of Privacy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. National Research Council (2007). In Gutmann, M. P. & Stern, P. C. (eds.) Putting People on the Map: Protecting Confidentiality with Linked Social Spatial Data. Panel on Confidentiality Issues Arising from the Integration of Remotely Sensed and Self Identifying Data. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Ratcliffe, J. H. (2002). Damned if you don’t, damned if you do: Crime mapping and its implications in the real world. Policing and Society 12(3), 211 225. VanWey, L. K., Rindfuss, R. R., Gutmann, M. P., Entwisle, B. and Balk, D. L. (2005). Confidentiality and spatially explicit data: Concerns and challenges. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of United States 102(43), 15337 15342. Waldo, J., Lin, H. S. and Millett, L. I. (eds.) (2007). Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age. Washington, DC: National Research Council, The National Academies Press. Zimmerman, D. L., Armstrong, M. P. and Rushton, G. (2007). Alternative techniques for masking geographic detail to protect privacy. In Rushton, G., Armstrong, M. P., Gittler, J. et al. (eds.) The Use of Geographic Codes in Cancer Prevention and Control, Research and Practice, pp 127 137. New York: CRC Press. ch. 7.

Relevant Websites http://www.cms.hhs.gov Centre for Medicare and Medicaid Services. http://www.hipaaps.com HIPPAs Law.

Geographically Weighted Regression A. Paéz, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada D. C. Wheeler, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Bayesian Statistics A branch of statistics that incorporates prior information about phenomena with current data in a statistical model to perform inferences on model parameters. Bonferroni Adjustment A technique that decreases the statistical significance value of individual tests in a situation where multiple significance tests are carried out simultaneously. Collinearity The presence of correlation between explanatory variables in a statistical model that may interfere with statistical inference. Cross-Validation A model parameter estimation technique that systematically removes observations from a dataset to minimize prediction error. Distance Decay A way of describing the diminished interaction or correlation of locations as distance between them increases. Expansion Method A method for estimating spatially varying parameters defined as deterministic functions of the coordinates of observations. Hierarchical Bayesian Model A statistical model that uses unknown random parameters that are in turn specified with other parameters. Kernel Function A mathematical function that accepts an input of distance between observations and returns a value that represents a measure of association. Kriging A method for spatial interpolation that models the covariance of observations at certain distances over space. Spatial Autocorrelation A dependent relationship between the values of a variable due to the geographical arrangement of units on a map. Spatial Heterogeneity The variation in a condition or relationship from one place to another. Spatial Interpolation A method for prediction of an unknown value of a spatially continuous variable at a location that uses the values of neighboring locations. Spatial Nonstationarity A condition where the relationship between variables is not constant across a study area. Stationarity The presence of a constant mean and a covariance function that depends only on distance between locations in a spatial process.

Background Geographically weighted regression (GWR) is a local form of spatial analysis introduced into the geographical literature drawing from statistical approaches for curve fitting and smoothing applications. The method works based on the simple yet powerful idea of estimating local models using subsets of observations centered on a focal point. By placing GWR in the context of analytical geography, this modeling approach has appealed to the geographical imagination by implementing, within a lo cally linear regression framework, the distance decay effect popularized by Tobler with the first law of geography. GWR fits into the tradition of analytical geography. Following important developments in human geography in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the so called quanti tative revolution, this technique is part of established practice in geography of using quantitative techniques and models as tools to assist discovery. Recognizing the fact that models are abstractions and simplifications of reality, statistical models were adopted in early times for their ability to describe or explain observed effects in terms of a reduced set of relationships with explanatory factors thought to be relevant for a specific process. In particular, the following model became a workhorse of geographical analysis: yi ¼ b0 þ b1 x1i þ b2 x2i þ ? þ bk xki þ ei X ¼ b0 þ bk xki þ ei

½1

K

This model is a simplified and stylized representation of reality, developed to describe or explain the systematic variation of a phenomenon, while allowing for un certainty. The model relates a number (k) of relevant explanatory (or independent) variables x to a response (or dependent variable) y for unit of observation i (i ¼ 1, 2, y, n). The relationships between response and ex planatory variables are given by coefficients bk which represent the mean response. The model is called a re gression, since it ‘regresses’ the variables toward the mean. In addition to this mean structure, uncertainty enters through a set of terms ei, variously called residuals, errors, or disturbances. These terms, estimable from the data once a model has been specified, measure the dif ference between the systematic (mean) description of the process, and the observed outcome.

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Geographically Weighted Regression

The usual assumptions regarding the residuals e in regression analysis are randomness (i.e., all systematic variation is assumed to be accounted for in the model), an expected value of zero, independence, and constant variance. Soon geographers realized that some of these assumptions, in particular independence, were often untenable when the location of the observations was introduced. Technical developments initially focused on inferential analysis of spatial patterns (e.g., Moran’s I and Geary’s c statistics of spatial autocorrelation), and later tools to model spatial pattern (spatial autoregression, and regression with spatially autocorrelated errors). The techniques matured, and by the mid 1990s, thanks in part to new software, spatial analysis had found application in many areas of geography, and had begun to transcend the discipline to become routinely used elsewhere, notably in civil engineering, real estate economics, and regional and urban studies. But some analysts realized that, despite their ability to capture map patterns, the techniques in use (autocorrelation statistics, regression analysis, spatial regression) were still insufficiently geographic. Auto correlation statistics were able to detect map patterns, but did not produce mappable results. In other words, they did not identify locations where spatial effects were relevant or strong. The regression model in eqn [1] il lustrates this situation by assuming that relationships (the coefficients bk) are stationary or constant across space. Subsequently, spatial statistical analysis and modeling came to be seen as an exercise in the discovery or val idation of global trends or averages – that is, in the study of stationary relationships assumed to represent equally well, anywhere within the system, the phenomenon being examined. It has been suggested, however, that the search for general trends and rules overlooks contexts, and especially geographical variations. There has since emerged an interest in forms of spatial analysis that focus on what Michael Goodchild has termed the second law of geography, or the principle of spatial heterogeneity. These methods yield more accurate and sophisticated representations of the world.

Geographically Weighted Regression Among the various exploratory and explanatory methods for local spatial analysis, GWR has attracted considerable attention. This method was proposed in 1996 by Bruns don, Fotheringham, and Charlton to study spatial para metric nonstationarity – the variable nature of relationships in geographical space. GWR is related to the nonparametric technique known as locally weighted regression, developed in statistics for smoothing and curve fitting applications based on the simple yet powerful idea of estimating statistics using subsamples of data around specific points. The innovation in the case of

GWR, consisted of the selection of subsamples of data based on distance in geographical space, and the notion that, unlike a majority of applications in statistics whose main concern is with curve fitting (in a predictive sense), nonstationary relationships could be investigated as well, in an exploratory or explanatory sense. GWR is defined as a model that is locally linear in the mean: yi ¼ b0i þ

X

bki xki þ ei

½2

K

The elements of the model are as defined above, except that now the coefficients bki are not stationary but cor respond to location i, termed the focal point, which is the point selected for local model estimation. In general, the number of local models m is not fixed and an arbitrary number of them (mZ1) can in principle be estimated for a region. In many applications, the focal point for each local estimation is made to coincide with the location of an observation i, although this need not be the case. In this sense, coefficients can be estimated for any location within the study area, regardless of whether data have been col lected at that point – say, a generic focal point o. Given covariate data, the response can be estimated at unsampled locations as well, a feature of the model that makes it attractive for spatial interpolation purposes that closely resemble the origins of GWR. The primary feature of GWR of interest in the geographical literature concerns the coefficients in eqn [2], which are specific to location i. By obtaining location specific coefficients, GWR provides a tool to investigate the issue of geographical non stationarity. An example of GWR output is shown in Figure 1. A model of proportion of bachelor degree holders (dependent variable) is estimated using different socioeconomic and demographic measures as covariates, including proportion of the population that is rural, proportion of population below the poverty line, etc., using the counties in Georgia, US as units of analysis. The results of the regression suggest a negative rela tionship between proportion of rural population in a county, and the proportion of degree holders in the state of Georgia. However, this relationship appears to be considerably stronger (i.e., more negative) in the south east parts of the state. Similar output can be obtained for all coefficients of the model. Estimation of the Model Parameters The GWR model is relatively simple, and involves weighting observations depending on their relative lo cation with respect to a focal point. The weights wij re lating focal point i to each observation j in the system are given by an expression, called a kernel function, that implements the concept of distance decay (or the first law of geography): other things being equal, events closer in


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B3_GWR (PctRural) −0.100 0 to −0.051 0 −0.051 0 to −0.043 2 −0.043 2 to −0.037 4 −0.037 4 to −0.032 0 −0.032 0 to −0.000 0 0 20 40 60 Kilometers

Figure 1 Example of a spatially varying coefficient estimated using the GWR approach.

space are more related than other events. Essentially, the kernel function places a window over the observations, thus selecting a subsample of points. The window can subsequently be displaced for local reestimation of the model. A number of different kernel functions have been proposed and used in practice. In perhaps the simplest case, a binary weighting scheme could be used as follows: ( wij ¼

1; 0;

if d ij rd otherwise

½3

where dij is the distance between observations i and j, and d is a cutoff distance that defines the size of the window. Despite its simplicity, this kernel function has not been widely used. Instead, most applications of GWR have favored continuous functions that produce monotonically decreasing weights, such as the negative exponential:

wij ¼ exp

d 2ij 2g 2

! ½4

410


or the bi square kernel: wij ¼

1

d 2ij

!2 ½5

g2

In these formulations, instead of a binary scheme, the weight attached to each observation j with respect to i varies as a function of the intervening distance dio be tween the two locations mediated by g, a parameter that controls the rate of change of the function, that is, the size of the window. Modified kernel functions have been proposed that adapt to the density of observations within a region by using ranks instead of distance: Rij wij ¼ exp g

½6

with Rij as the rank of j when observations are sorted by increasing distance from focal point i. Alternatively, it is also possible to define the kernel function in terms of nearest neighbors to location i:

wij ¼

8h > < 1 > :

d ij =d

2 i 2

0;

;

if j is one of the N th nearest neighbours of i ½7 otherwise

where d is the distance to the Nth nearest neighbor. Once a kernel function has been chosen, the GWR local regression coefficients are estimated using the fol lowing expression (in matrix form): 1 bi ¼ X T Wi X XT Wi Y

½8

where Wi is a diagonal matrix of size (n n), specific to location i, with the ith element in the diagonal (wij) given by the value of the kernel function for observation pair i and j. A point to note is that the estimators in eqn [8] are a function of known data (the x and y observations), as well as the weight matrix, which depends on known distance between observations, but also an unknown parameter that defines the size of the window. In general, it is ac cepted that, in terms of estimation, selection of a func tional form for the kernel is less critical than selecting a window size. Therefore, there is a need for criteria to guide the determination of critical distance d (in the case of eqn [3]), the value of g (in eqns [4]–[6]), or the number of nearest neighbors (in the case of eqn [7]) in specific applications. Cross-Validation Two general methods (direct assignment of window size or validation of window size) have been proposed for determining an appropriate window size for estimation.

In direct assignment of window size, the analyst decides the percentage of all observations in the sample to include in each local regression, or alternatively a cutoff distance may be adopted based on practical or theoretical reasons (e.g., flight range of mosquitoes). More commonly, the size of the window is validated through procedures that involve a measure of goodness of fit of the local regressions to the data. The following cross validation procedure remains the most widely used calibration technique: min CVSðDÞ ¼ D

X ½ yi

yî ðDÞ2

½9

i

CVS is a cross validation score, in essence a sum of squared errors between the observed value of y at i, and the predicted value of y at i after removing observation i for estimation ( yˆ i ). The latter value is a function of window size D, which depends on either cutoff distance d , par ameter g, or number of nearest neighbors. Simply put, cross validation attempts to find the size of the window that gives the best correspondence (minimizes the differ ence) between predicted and observed values of y. The leave one out protocol (removing observation i in cross validation) is followed to impede the local estimators from wrapping around a single data point, that is, estimating one data point perfectly. Once the window size has been val idated local coefficients can be estimated using eqn [8]. More recently, modifications of the Akaike infor mation criterion (AIC) have been proposed as a window size validation tool. Despite the potential advantages of adopting an information theoretical approach for valid ation, this alternative remains underutilized. It is im portant to note that neither the use of CVSs nor AIC have been systematically investigated in the geographical literature from the perspective of their properties and behavior. As a consequence, it remains unclear whether, and if so, under what conditions, one of these validation procedures should be preferred. Extensions In addition to the linear regression framework, the idea of applying geographical weights has been extended to a variety of other techniques, to produce geographically weighted descriptive statistics, discriminant analysis, logistic regression, Poisson regression, and geographi cally weighted probit models. With regards to model specification and estimation, mixed GWR models have been proposed that combine spatially stationary and nonstationary coefficients, while more recent research has introduced local linear expansion of the coefficients.

Issues A number of issues regarding the development and use of GWR merit mention. The first concerns the topic of


inference regarding the local regression coefficients. One approach to developing a testing framework has been to adopt the nonparametric formulation of the method, and the allied concepts, developed mainly in the statistics literature, of effective number of observations and effective number of coefficients. These concepts are analogies of the global regression counterparts, and provide the basis for obtaining confidence intervals and other statistics. A second approach to develop tests has been to see the method as an ensemble of local regression models. This gives rise to a different issue whenever the number of local models to be estimated exceeds one (m41), since m hypotheses need to be tested simul taneously. The problem is that, as the number of tests increases, there is an increasing probability that some will turn up significant, even if only by chance. There is thus a need to give protection to the group of statements through group error rates as opposed to individual error rates – in other words, the individual level of significance needs to be adjusted for multiple comparisons. Several procedures have been proposed to provide the kind of protection needed when conducting simultaneous infer ence. A simple procedure is based on the Bonferroni probability inequality, a simple procedure that divides the overall significance level a (group error tolerance) by the number of tests m to obtain an adjusted significance level a/m (individual hypothesis error tolerance). Al though this fast and rough procedure does not require distributional assumptions and is simple to use, the re sulting tests lack power and are overconservative when the tests are highly correlated (i.e., not independent), which is certainly the case in GWR due to the use of overlapping subsets of data. Other methods exist that improve the power of the tests by introducing multiple step rejective schemes that adjust the size of the penalty to the level of significance in a sequential way. A second issue with GWR concerns the high levels of spatial variability encountered by practitioners, a situ ation that arouses concerns that results may be mis leading if not interpreted with caution. One source of regression coefficient variability in GWR comes from collinearity, or correlation in the model explanatory variables. Collinearity has been found in empirical work to be an issue in GWR models at the local level even in cases when it is not an issue in the traditional, or global, linear regression model with the same data. In addition to high variability of estimated regression coefficients, there can be strong covariation in the GWR coefficients for different parameters (covariate effects or the intercept), at least partly due to collinearity. The inflated regression coefficient variability associated with local collinearity can lead to coefficient sign reversals and overestimates of effect magnitudes, both of which could lead to incorrect interpretations of regression relationships. Collinearity diagnostic tools have been developed for the GWR

411

framework that can detect when and where there are high levels of regression coefficient correlations due to col linearity. Estimated regression coefficients from cali bration locations that are diagnosed as problematic should be interpreted with caution and additional an alysis may be required in these areas to understand the nature of the relationships under study. A more practical issue with GWR is with computa tional runtime of implementations of the technique. The estimation of GWR model parameters via cross valid ation can be computationally intensive for relatively modest datasets of thousands of model calibration lo cations and several covariates. However, the nature of the GWR estimation algorithm lends itself well to parallel computing solutions, where different computers can perform calculations for model predictions at different locations and the answers can be combined to evaluate the objective function for a given window size. Con veniently, there are multiple implementations of the GWR method. While not free, GWR 3.0 is available from Fotheringham and his coinvestigators. A free, open source implementation of GWR written by Roger Bivand is available as an R package. In addition, the basic elements of the GWR technique are relatively easily programmed in other programming languages and software, such as Matlab, as in James P. LeSage’s spatial econometrics toolbox.

Debates While GWR has offered the potential of understanding relationships between variables over space, there have been several concerns voiced about the methodology on both theoretical and practical bases. One concern says that GWR is not a unified, formal statistical model that provides a clear cut approach for inference on relation ships. GWR is instead a collection of local spatial re gressions where the dependence between regression coefficients at different data locations is not specified in the model, which results in a fixed effects model with no pooling in estimates. Some statisticians prefer the unified framework of hierarchical Bayesian models. In addition, the reuse of data to estimate regression coefficients at different locations creates a multiple comparisons situ ation that invalidates the usual confidence intervals for the regression coefficients. The debates surrounding de velopment and use of GWR have been complicated by the fact that models with GWR style varying coefficients can be derived parting from a weighted regression framework, as a nonparametric model, or as a model with nonconstant variance. While all these alternatives pro duce exactly the same expressions for the estimators, they differ conceptually and technically in how and to what extent inference can be conducted. This feature of

412


the regression coefficients, known as equifinality, has made it difficult for some researchers to agree on the properties of the model. In relation to the above point, one issue of concern surrounding GWR for some researchers is the matter of degrees of freedom, which is directly related to model complexity. Although the concept of effective number of degrees of freedom is an accepted one in statistical analysis (e.g., for nearest neighbor and regularization methods, among others), and the concept has been adopted in some presentations of GWR, some researchers remain uncomfortable with the issue of degrees of free dom of the residuals in GWR, and the potential results from sharing data through spatial weighting to estimate regression coefficients at different locations. Yet another debate about GWR is in the nature of the application of the technique itself. It has been suggested, for example, that GWR is well suited for estimation and prediction of the response variable but is perhaps less useful for the explanation of, or formal statistical infer ence on, potentially spatially varying regression effects. Given the roots of GWR in local linear regression, which was developed to estimate a response variable locally, this debate is not entirely surprising. When interpolation of a response variable over space is of interest, estimation issues such as collinearity are no longer a major concern.

Alternatives GWR has highlighted the existence of potentially com plex, nonstationary, relational patterns in geographical modeling. On the other hand, the approach is not unique in its ability to model spatially varying relationships, as there are some earlier and also later developments that accomplish the same objective, although in different ways, both technically and conceptually. An early example of a local form of spatial analysis is the expansion method, in which the coefficients of a model are allowed to vary as functions of analyst defined expansion variables, typically using the coordinates of the units of analysis. The expansion variables are introduced using polynomial formulations (linear, quadratic, etc.), such that the expanded coefficients incorporate con textual variation across locations to produce a set of local, mappable results useful to detect spatial drift. The ex pansion method is a simple and intuitive way of building models, but is otherwise limited in that expansions are deterministic and, depending on the form of the expan sion, might arguably miss more complex spatial vari ations. While GWR has been called a natural evolution of the expansion method, the two techniques are in fact very different in how they approach the problem of spatial coefficient nonstationarity, with GWR essentially

being a moving windows approach and the expansion method a form of analysis of covariance. A second development in local spatial analysis that predates the popularization of GWR in geography is the use of hierarchical models. This is an analysis technique similar to the expansion method that allows coefficients to vary by location, while introducing random variation of the coefficients. The method is attractive because models can be simultaneously defined at several levels that explicitly incorporate geographical and other (e.g., social) contexts into the analysis. In multilevel models, a type of hierarchical model, regions (or classes) at each level must be defined, so that individual observations can be ‘nested’ according to some type of categorization (e.g., geographical zones, age ranges, type of job, etc.). In addition to the usual concerns with modifiable areal units, a consequence of the multilevel model approach is that representation of geographical and attribute space becomes discontinuous or ‘fragmented’: coefficients are local in the sense that they vary between regions or classes, but are global (i.e., constant) within a given region or class. Related to the hierarchical model is the hierarchical Bayesian model, in which information about relationships can be incorporated into the model through prior dis tributions of the parameters. If uninformative (or vague) priors are used for the model parameters and the re gression coefficients are specified as independent in the model, the estimated regression coefficients derived from samples from the joint parameter posterior distribution will be, in theory, the same as in the non Bayesian hierarchical model. There are hierarchical Bayesian models with random effects for both the intercept and slopes for covariates, where the random effects may be independent a priori and borrow strength across obser vations globally or defined to have spatial structure and borrow strength locally. The primary alternative within this class of models is the Bayesian spatially varying coefficient model, which defines spatial structure in the regression coefficients through a prior conditional spe cification of the coefficients that uses neighboring ob servations only or through a prior joint specification of the coefficients that models the coefficients as a spatial process (SVCP). In terms of the way the dependence in coefficients is modeled, the conditional specification of the Bayesian model is similar to a GWR model with a nearest neighbor kernel with a small bandwidth of ad jacent neighbors and the joint specification of the Bayesian model is similar to a GWR model with a dis tance decay, or geostatistical, kernel function. In contrast to the fitting of spatially local regression models in GWR, the Bayesian hierarchical model is a formal, unified, statistical hierarchical model where the coefficients are modeled as a multivariate spatial process and the cor relation between regression coefficients is explicitly


modeled. Simulation based comparisons of the accuracy of estimated regression coefficients from both GWR and the Bayesian SVCP model suggest that the Bayesian model may be preferable to GWR for inference on the effects under study, in terms of the proportion of the estimated coefficient confidence intervals that contain the true values. One drawback of the Bayesian model is increased computation time and more difficult implementation for inference. However, more general purpose software for Bayesian inference is becoming available through open source packages such as R and WinBUGS.

Concluding Remarks The main professed benefit of GWR in geography and other disciplines that have adopted this technique is the ability of the method to investigate spatially varying processes through coefficient variability based on the geographical concept of distance decay. GWR provides an intuitive and technically accessible approach to this end. Computationally, estimation of the coefficients can be intensive, but the problem is highly solvable using parallel computing solutions that are becoming more widely available as mainstream technology. Historically, GWR is based on the transposition of attribute space used in the method of locally weighted regression in statistics for curve fitting, to geographical space in a locally weighted regression used for modeling potentially spatially varying relationships. While the number of applications of GWR continues to grow, there have been relatively few attempts to assess the extent to which the transposition has been successful in providing a tool capable of retrieving spatial processes in a technically accessible, computationally economic, and ultimately accurate fashion. The evidence available in dicates that GWR is a good tool for estimating and predicting a spatially varying dependent variable, within a technical framework that is less demanding than, for example, variographic analysis and the use of kriging equations. Based on this it may be concluded that GWR is a useful tool for spatial interpolation, the analog of curve fitting in statistics. With regards to the estimation of potentially spatially varying effects, the evidence indicates that GWR is capable of detecting, and to some extent retrieving underlying coefficient surfaces. GWR provides estima tion of spatially varying coefficients, but not a widely agreed upon inferential framework. As such, it seems prudent at this point to approach the use of GWR for inferential purposes with some caution. While the evi dence available indicates that the approach is useful for detecting nonstationary coefficient patterns, the degree of accuracy may not be extremely high, and therefore its

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use for drawing conclusions regarding substantive spatial processes should whenever possible be supported with other forms of analysis, such as the expansion method, and/or multilevel or hierarchical Bayesian models. This view of the method would align it more closely with other tools used for exploratory data analysis. Further support provided by other techniques would help to in crease the level of confidence with respect to any con clusions drawn about the character, nature, and possible origins of spatially varying relationships between variables. See also: First Law of Geography; Kriging and Variogram Models; Modifiable Areal Unit Problem; Quantitative Methodologies; Quantitative Revolution; Regression, Linear and Nonlinear; Spatial Autocorrelation; Spatial Expansion Method; Spatial Filtering/Kernel Density Estimation; Spatial Interpolation; Spatially Autoregressive Models; Statistics, Spatial.

Further Reading Atkinson, P. M., German, S. E., Sear, D. A. and Clark, M. J. (2003). Exploring the relations between riverbank erosion and geomorphological controls using geographically weighted logistic regression. Geographical Analysis 35(1), 58 82. Brunsdon, C., Fotheringham, A. S. and Charlton, M. E. (1996). Geographically weighted regression: A method for exploring spatial nonstationarity. Geographical Analysis 28(4), 281 298. Cleveland, W. S. and Devlin, S. J. (1988). Locally weighted regression an approach to regression analysis by local fitting. Journal of the American Statistical Association 83(403), 596 610. Fotheringham, A. S. and Brunsdon, C. (1999). Local forms of spatial analysis. Geographical Analysis 31(4), 340 358. Fotheringham, A. S., Brunsdon, C. and Charlton, M. (2002). Geographically Weighted Regression: The Analysis of Spatially Varying Relationships. Chichester: Wiley. Goodchild, M. F. (2004). The validity and usefulness of laws in geographic information science and geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94(2), 300 303. LeSage, J. P. (2004). A family of geographically weighted regression models. In Anselin, L., Florax, R. J. G. M. & Rey, S. J. (eds.) Advances in Spatial Econometrics, pp 241 264. Berlin: Springer. Leung, Y., Mei, C. L. and Zhang, W. X. (2000). Testing for spatial autocorrelation among the residuals of the geographically weighted regression. Environment and Planning A 32(5), 871 890. McMillen, D. P. (1996). One hundred fifty years of land values in Chicago: A nonparametric approach. Journal of Urban Economics 40(1), 100 124. Mei, C. L., He, S. Y. and Fang, K. T. (2004). A note on the mixed geographically weighted regression model. Journal of Regional Science 44(1), 143 157. Paéz, A. (2006). Exploring contextual variations in land use and transport analysis using a probit model with geographical weights. Journal of Transport Geography 14(3), 167 176. Paéz, A., Long, F. and Farber, S. (2008). Moving window approaches for hedonic price estimation: An empirical comparison of four techniques. Urban Studies 45(8), 1565 1581. Paéz, A., Uchida, T. and Miyamoto, K. (2002). A general framework for estimation and inference of geographically weighted regression models: 1. Location specific kernel bandwidths and a test for locational heterogeneity. Environment and Planning A 34(4), 733 754.

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Wheeler, D. and Tiefelsdorf, M. (2005). Multicollinearity and correlation among local regression coefficients in geographically weighted regression. Journal of Geographical Systems 7(2), 161 187. Wheeler, D. C. and Calder, C. A. (2007). An assessment of coefficient accuracy in linear regression models with spatially varying coefficients. Journal of Geographical Systems 9(2), 145 166.

Relevant Websites http://www.mrc bsu.cam.ac.uk/bugs/winbugs/contents.shtml WinBUGS website.

Geography, History of A. Maddrell, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

What Is the History of Geography and Why Do It? The history of geography is more than a list of dates of the foundation of geographical societies, or even a reci tation of key texts and ideas. The two main elements of a history of geography are to do with the institutional frameworks of the discipline (e.g., geographical societies, university departments, state legislation on education) and the geographical ideas and practices developed within (and beyond) those institutions. Histories of the discipline which were dominated by institutional frameworks have been criticized for being too inward looking, giving insufficient attention to the development of geographical ideas; and those dominated by geo graphical ideas and their associated philosophies and methodologies have sometimes failed to recognize the role played by those institutions in shaping ideas and practices. The emphasis here will be on the development of ideas and practices in the history of geography, but with reference to those institutional frameworks where relevant, as well as recognizing that the subject has been influenced by ideas and practices from beyond what might be recognized as disciplinary boundaries – and that forms of geographical knowledge and practice exist be yond what might be formally defined as geography. Studying the history of geography illustrates ways in which geographical knowledges have been accrued, val idated, challenged; how they have been shaped by na tional or regional scholarly traditions and manipulated to fit the ideological needs of other agents such as the state or commerce. While there are those who suggest the only way to truly understand the present discipline is to look to socioeconomic, political, and cultural forces at work today, others believe understanding past processes help today’s geographers to understand not only how the subject was shaped and used historically, but also sheds light on present forms of geographical knowledge and practice, with all their strengths and weaknesses.

How Do We Write a History of Geography? Histories of geography appeared early in the life of academic geography as part of the search for disciplinary identity and status when the subject was professionalized within the international university sector in the nine teenth and early twentieth century. New accounts of the

history of geographical thought and practice appear at regular intervals, often focusing on a particular country’s tradition. Historians of geographical inquiry employ the insights of historiography to analyze and evaluate dif ferent histories of geography, and the approach taken to the history of geography reflects the way(s) in which geography as a subject is seen, interpreted, and repre sented. One of the key analytical tools is to consider the extent to which a particular history might be considered as internalist or externalist. Internalist accounts are those which look within the discipline, to its personnel, its theories and methods in order to explain geographical thought at a particular time and place, rather than pla cing it in a wider context. These histories of geography have often focused on leading individuals and their fol lowers (typically represented in gendered terms as founding fathers), schools of thought, and institutions. These celebratory accounts often result in a hagiographic rendering of the subject and people, resulting in what has been called the ‘textbook chronicles’ of the subject. They have also been categorized as ‘whiggish’ history, creating accounts which give the impression of an ongoing natural progression in geographical knowledge. Nineteenth and early twentieth century accounts of the history of discipline, often emphasized geography’s lineage to the work of European classical scholars and/or focused on the history of exploration; others celebrated anniversaries of foundations (notably of geographical societies). However, these accounts have been criticized for being too internalist and more ‘critical’ approaches to historiography were called for in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly for histories of what happened within geog raphy to be placed in the context of wider external fac tors. This externalist approach, as the name implies, stresses the explanatory role of external factors framing the practice of geographical inquiry at a given time and place. These external factors include: ideas from beyond academia, including natural science, religion, politics, and circulating ideologies; they also include what can be classified as socioeconomic and cultural factors, in both their materialist expression such as through war or cap italist processes, and the impact of related discourses such as prevailing views on class, race, gender, for ex ample, on geographical inquiry. In recent years this externalist contextual approach has dominated work on the history of geography and in turn has resulted in what are described as revisionist histories, which use novel data and/or perspectives to shed new light on the nature

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and practice of geography, revising previous received histories. This includes more ‘inclusionary’ approaches, which consciously set out to incorporate a wider scope for the definition of geography (such as vernacular or children’s geographies) or individuals or groups previ ously neglected or omitted from geography’s histories (such as colonial subjects, women, or disabled people). Clearly there are many potential alternative perspectives on the history of geography, and in turn this gives sense of the rich ground which constitutes the history of geography. Skinner’s important 1969 paper ‘Meaning and understanding’ in the history of ideas has been particu larly influential within interdisciplinary historiography, including that of geography. Within geography, attention was particularly drawn to the relationship between text and context, discipline and wider context: including disciplinary, institutional, political, and economic cycles. In recognizing the influence of wider contexts in the way in which a body of knowledge is shaped, we can see how a discipline – in this case geography – reflects current concerns and agendas at a given time and place. This is known as the social construction of knowledge, which allows for knowledge being ideologically shaped and open to varied interpretation. While few scholars would see a subject as a pure social construct, most recognize that disciplines do not develop in isolation and it is im portant to acknowledge and examine these wider influ ences. Related to this was a recognition of the influence of the interests of a given historian in constructing a par ticular history, whether by choice of subject matter, theoretical and analytical framework, or methodological scope. Many scholars, especially those working from a feminist and/or post structuralist perspective believe this recognition of the author’s own positionality in relation to their subject is more honest than claims to neutral objectivity. This awareness has given rise to what is re ferred to as ‘situated knowledge’ and can be applied to all forms of geographical inquiry including historiography. Inevitably this means there will be different views of what constitutes geography per se and how it developed and changed, and these will vary over time and space and between different practitioners: that is, the history of the subject is contested (this is a theme which will be re turned to below). An important way in which historians of the discipline differ is in identifying the impetus for change within geographical inquiry. Those working from an internalist model tend to see changes emanating from forces within the discipline or wider academia, tracing the exchange of ideas and methods through publications, field work, con ferences, and other intellectual networks. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions brought an alternative explanation for change within academia. Looking at aca demics from a sociological perspective, he saw a

competitive drive for status driving change within scien tific communities. This competition caused significant shifts between different frameworks or paradigms which successively defined the appropriate subject matter and methodologies for enquiry. The dramatic nature of these shifts in practice caused them to be described as revo lutions and the idea of revolutionary relative to evo lutionary change dominated historical surveys of geographical inquiry in the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast, externalist accounts looked to the wider socioeconomic and cultural milieu to explain changes within the discip line, for example, the impact of war, social planning or existentialism on geographical knowledge and the status of the discipline. One strand within these externalist ap proaches was a recognition of the social construction of knowledge (see below) which challenged the view of ob jective knowledge or the possibility of a single history of the discipline.

Contextual and Discursive Approaches to the History of Geography The contextual approach has increasingly been normal ized within the history of geography, replacing whiggish and exclusionary accounts of the development of the subject; the role of ideas and practices external to aca demic geography in shaping geographical thought being identified as the antidote to previous shortcomings. David Livingstone’s work The Geographical Tradition has been pivotal in raising questions about social context, metaphysical assumptions, professional aspirations, and ideological allegiances, asking questions such as: what role did geography play in past society? Was geography used by particular groups for political, religious, or economic purposes? Who benefited and who lost out by the introduction of new theory? Why were particular theories generated, welcomed, or outlawed? Anne God lewska similarly argues that conceptual history rests on asking basic questions about individuals’ lives and work, such as: what were their key ideas? Which were the de cisive influences shaping not only their ideas but the method and presentational form of their work? What was, and what has been, the impact of their ideas and methods? The merits of the contextual approach to the history of geography have been expounded widely on numerous grounds. First, as the name implies it allows historical events, movements, and changes to be placed within wider socioeconomic, political, and cultural contexts – for geographical knowledge at any given time to be recognized as ‘situated knowledge’ even if it is compli cated. Second, it avoids a sense of linear progression and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ individual geographers. Third, taking a contextual approach allows for the continuity of some


ideas while new systems of thought emerge in parallel; it also avoids an artificial dichotomy between internal and external factors of scientific change as does the discursive approach, which identifies sets of ideas forming and jostling for influence over the way a given society thinks and acts (including academic communities). However, even proponents recognize that there are limitations to the contextual approach which can be presented as a cure all for historiographical work. Contextual historians can be overly influenced by current agenda and fall into the trap of presentism – judging preceding scholars and society by present criteria. Using a contextual approach also raises the question of ‘which context?’ For example, it has been argued both that there is much to be learned about geography by looking beyond the academy, and that too little is known about geography’s place within the academy. Thus, there have been recent calls to study ‘minor’ as well as ‘major’ figures, small scale as well as larger schema, to consider ordinary or vernacular his tories, and to look for hidden, obscured, or omitted his tories. Also internalist institutional accounts of geography departments and societies could become obscured in the face of externalist history, at best relatively neglected and at worst dismissed as introspective records of little interest to anyone beyond those associated with the institution. However, recent work on departmental archives has shed significant light on localized geographical practices and how these relate to geography in national and international terms. These internalist accounts can also be rich data sources on individuals and practices omitted from more wide ranging accounts and should not be dismissed sight unseen. The frequent characterization of histories as either ‘internal, cognitive history’ or ‘external, contextual his tory’, has also been challenged and an acknowledgment of the creation of geographical knowledge through dis course allows an alternative to this conventional dichot omy, thereby avoiding a caricature of knowledge as ‘pure’ or ‘corrupt’, when in reality all knowledge has been subject to external and internal influences. The discursive approach allows abridge between different explanatory approaches. If knowledge is discursively constructed then an understanding of institutions and practices is vital to the historical project. Discourses work in social contexts with material consequences: this is both the site and content of ‘new’ self critical discursive historiography of geography. The production and reception of geographical and other texts is crucial to understanding the development of a discipline. Debates within contextual history and literary theory concerning the relationship between texts and contexts, knowledge and power, authorial intention and alternative readings can make surveys of geo graphical literature complex but nonetheless rewarding.

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The French philosopher Michel Foucault’s discussion of power and knowledge has been central to much of the debate on the significance of texts, particularly his central argument about the reciprocal nature of these two: power produces knowledge and knowledge presupposes and constitutes the relations of power in a transformative process. Largely influenced by this Foucauldian view, it is widely accepted that texts are not mere reflectors of the material world but are relations of power in themselves. Foucault argues the question (and therefore the strategy) is to consider what it means for a given statement or body of knowledge to appear when and where it did, and we can ask this question about geography as a whole or a given geographical text: what is its location in the cultural complexity of the specific moment of its historical pro duction? However, just as it is important to think about how a text or subject is produced, we also need to think about its reception – how is it received by different audiences in different places and times? Reading differ ent reviews of books can reveal a lot about the different ways in which geographical knowledges and practices varied – as well as the relative merits of which are in cluded or excluded in disciplinary histories. In the 1990s the postmodern suspicion of transcen dental themes and an awareness of knowledge as a situ ated social practice raised questions regarding the mechanistic interpretation of the relationship between text and context, including geographical texts and related contexts. Geographical knowledge is seen not merely as the data and theory that is contained under the heading of ‘geography’, but also as a discursive formation. This approach is shared by those who affiliate themselves to, or make use of, the post structuralist work of Derrida and Foucault as a powerful analytical tool because of their recognition that cultural concepts lack transparent and shared meanings. The recognition of the instability and contestation of meanings facilitate and demand an examination of the politics behind the conflictual pro cesses that establish those meanings. The creation of the ‘Other’ is of particular importance when studying con structions of those beyond the dominant group, as shown in the case of race and gender, as well as other axes of difference such as disability or sexuality. It is therefore crucial to understanding the representation of people and places in geography generally and in geographical texts in particular. Textual means for creating the ‘Other’ in clude the type of narrative voice adopted, the type of structure the author builds, and the kind of images and motifs circulated in the text. Edward Said’s Orientalism played a crucial role in understanding how the ‘Other’ is constructed. Recent critiques of the history of geography have pointed to the marginalization or omission of some groups within the historiography and current practices of geography – including those using an externalist con textual approach. What is omitted from histories can be

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just as revealing as what is included. For example, many histories of geography give the impression that pre 1970s geography was a male preserve. This could indeed be the impression given by the historical canon of geography, however, as Jan Monk and Mona Domosh show, a more complex underlying picture emerges with more detailed (archaeological in Foucault’s terms) analysis of publi cations, obituaries, institutional, and departmental re cords. This leads us to a consideration of sources used in constructing histories of the discipline and how these relate to representing difference within the discipline.

Historical Sources Historical sources are generally divided into two cat egories: primary and secondary. Primary sources include archives, such as personal and professional papers, letters, institutional records, manuscripts, original published texts, and oral histories. Secondary sources include existing histories, related literature, reviews, obituaries, etc. This immediately raises issues about the number and quality of sources available to any historian of the subject, accessibility of those sources and how those sources re late to one another. Archives, for example, can be ex perienced as sites of partiality, control, and regulation of knowledge, they may have limited records on a given group such as postcolonial subjects; but for other groups or individuals they can also be potential sites of access and liberation of knowledge. Changes in technologies and cultural attitudes to access to information have combined to increase the accessibility of many archives. Many archive catalogs are available online and a growing number of entire archive collections can be accessed and downloaded from the Internet; other collections, in cluding national archives, increasingly offer customized remote ordering systems for electronic copies of docu ments (for a fee). Increased public access to private archive collections has also been a condition of state funding for updating archive collections (as seen at the Royal Geographical Society – with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS–IBG)). Traditionally, the history of geography has relied upon textual sources, but reflecting developments in con temporary history, oral accounts, including auto biographical interviews, are increasingly being sought and integrated into disciplinary histories. This approach was notably undertaken in the 10 year Dialogue Project in Sweden, headed by geographers Anne Buttimer and Torsten Ha¨gerstrand during the 1970s and 1980s. This multidisciplinary project, explored autobiographical interviews as a means of promoting understanding and integration of knowledge, interpreting personal accounts in terms of the three headings of meaning, metaphor, and milieu. Oral histories or autobiographical accounts may be

considered to lack objectivity, but their very subjectivity can be a rich source of information. They allow an indi vidual to communicate in a more informal way – an al ternative voice – compared to written work and provide personal and institutional contexts (such as personal ideologies, intellectual inspirations, and career rivalries) which may not be apparent in print form, making for a richer and more nuanced set of sources to be combined with textual material. Oral accounts can be of particular value in relation to geographers working before publi cations were considered as the main academic purpose and for whom few textual records exist of their work and lives. While limited to what might be described as recent his tory, the value of this approach can be seen in initiatives in various countries to collect autobiographical interviews and oral histories relating to geographers, their geo graphical practice, and careers (e.g., the American Asso ciation of Geographers’ interview archive). The combination of a greater variety of sources, perspectives on, and questions about geography in the past, has resulted in more varied approaches to the his tory of the discipline. A core element is the recognition of its multiple strands rather than an accepted account or canon: there are histories rather than a single history of geography. Key figures and texts continue to be recog nized, but there is a wider appreciation that much can also be gleaned from less well remembered sources and biographies; universities and geographical societies are important windows to geography’s past practice, but so too are schools, teacher training colleges, local field study groups, ramblers’ associations, and everyday sources such as personal diaries. Turning to these more varied his torical sources in conjunction with appropriate historio graphical methods sheds light on a more varied body of those we might describe as geographers and a richer variety in the construction and practice of geographical knowledge. This does not make for simple histories (it is for good reason that David Livingstone described his theoretical and methodological approach to the history of geography as ‘situated messiness’), it makes for more complex but arguably more interesting histories of geography.

Trends and Contestation in Geographical Thought and Practice While maps and representations of place can be found in prehistoric cave and rock paintings and vernacular geographies have always been a part of everyday lives, written accounts of geographical knowledge can be found ranging from the classical writings of Herodotus, Strabo, Ptolemy, and Varenius; to the Norse sagas of Eric the Red and Leif; and the writings of Arab scholars such as al Maqdisi, Ibn Batuta, and Ibn Khaldun, with instruments


such as the compass and concepts such as decimalization circulating from China and the Hindu world. European documentation of what was known as the ‘New World’ had been growing since the sixteenth century, largely as a result of seafaring trade and colonization on the part of the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and British. With a rich variety of sources, it is not surprising that geography had been part of European university curricula for hundreds of years, notably within the disciplines of classics and history, however, geography only emerged as a modern independent discipline in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, spreading from the geographical so cieties founded across Europe and North America into universities and teacher training institutions and schools. Although often represented as of secondary importance, geographical societies not only provided funding for expeditions and a public forum for geographical reports and debate, many also lobbied and provided strong support for the establishment of geography in uni versities, especially in France and Britain.

Filling in and Laying Claim to the Blanks on the Map Increased demand for geographical knowledge in the nineteenth century was crucial to the discipline’s estab lishment and popularity. Geographical societies were founded across Europe throughout the nineteenth cen tury: starting with Paris (1821) and Berlin (1828), London (1830), St Petersburg (1845), numbers growing to 16 by 1865, 94 societies worldwide by 1885; 80 of these were in Europe (over half in France and Germany) but those beyond Europe represented the global spread, for ex ample, the American Geographical and Statistical Soci ety (1851), the Geographical Society of Quebec (1877), the Tokyo Geographical Society (1879), the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (1887), and the International Geographical Congress which met for the first time in London in 1895. While the number of so cieties continued to grow between 1890 and 1920 (in cluding the Association of American Geographers (1904)), the pace of this expansion was slower and the number of societies declined after 1930 (several societies closing during the 1914–18 and 1939–45 wars). In the UK the foundation of the RGS could be seen in the context of the general trend of the foundation of learned literary, scientific, and philosophical societies in the early nine teenth century, but by the 1880s there was a clear sense of the national need to catch up in relation to the geo graphical knowledge of competing European imperial powers, especially with the Berlin Conference taking place in 1884 when European powers negotiated terri torial claims and spheres of influence in Africa. Con sequently, the Royal Scottish (1884), Manchester (1884),

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Tyneside (1887), Liverpool (1891), Southampton (1897), and Hull (1910) geographical societies were founded around Britain in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. This reflected more than a simple thirst for knowledge about the world and scientifically motivated exploration, it also reflected popular zeal for the empire and related political and economic interests. Thus it was not just about the ‘heroic’ search for geographical knowledge and the filling in the blank areas on maps, but in many cases was about laying political and economic claim to those areas as well: the disciplinary drive for intrinsic geographical knowledge and the external im petus of national geopolitical and commercial interests. These varied interests were often seen as comple mentary and often presented as such by geography’s relatively young interest groups lobbying governments and universities for recognition. These overlapping interests could also be compressed in the geographical inquiry of one individual, such as British explorer David Livingstone, who was a representative of the British government as a commercial envoy, a Christian missionary society, and two geographical societies, as he journeyed in central Africa. In common with the RGS, the nonmetropolitan societies all attested to their ability to serve the practical needs of numerous different interest groups in their founding documents. However, two other geographical societies were founded in Britain which were oriented to teaching and researching geography: the Geographical Association (1893), principally concerned with teaching geography in schools, and, some 40 years later, the Institute of British Geographers was founded in 1933 as a consciously aca demic forum for British geography. The relationship between the emerging discipline of geography and empire has been widely researched and documented, especially in the 1990s. These studies un picked the ideological, geopolitical, and materialist mo tives which underpinned many of the popular and ‘scientific’ drives for geographical knowledge beyond Europe. Interests at play included the globalizing struc tures of capitalist trade, state territorial expansion and colonization, population management and emigration, racialized control, and cultural assimilation. Indeed, the interests of empire continued to influence the content of European geography into the 1950s and arguably persist in many nations’ framing of geography in state school curricula. In turn, geographers from Europe and North America also influenced the diffusion of geography within the colonial network in the first half of the twentieth century, with a significant number teaching abroad and publishing related regional studies. However, it should be noted that this synergy between geographical knowledge and empire applies not only to Europe, but also to periods of expansionism in the Arab world in the Middle Ages, the USA in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Russia/USSR in the twentieth century.

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It should also be noted that some geographers ac tively resisted being complicit with the imperial dis course in their work and alternative discourses emerged within nineteenth century geography. Although not widespread, anarchism had some influence on nine teenth century European geography and has some threads of continuity through to contemporary radical geographical practices. Anarchism eschews authority and takes various forms, and within geography is particularly associated with what has been described as the ‘gentle anarchism’ of Peter Kropotkin and Eliseé Reclus. Kro potkin, born to an aristocratic family in Russia, found both his political views transformed and his interest in geography ignited while posted with the Cossacks in Siberia after which he returned to St Petersburg to work in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Imperial Geographical Society. Other nineteenth century Russian geographers had also expressed concern for the plight of the peasants such as Arsenyev and Semenov (Kropotkin worked for the latter at the Ministry) but Kropotkin’s anarchist beliefs, writings on the abolition of the state, and support of political movements such as the Nar odniks caused him to be imprisoned for 3 years in St Petersburg,. After his escape and exile, he resided principally in London, but was thrown out of Switzer land and imprisoned in France. While his geographical work was largely in the sphere of physical geography, especially glaciation, two of his philosophical articles continue to have an impact on the discipline. ‘Mutual aid. A factor in evolution’, serialized in 1902, stressed cooperation rather than the competition propounded by social Darwinists, and his article on ‘What geography ought to be’ in which he stresses the importance of travel and education, are still cited today and probably represent his main linking of geographical and anarchist concerns. It is interesting to note that the RGS was among those petitioning for his release when imprisoned in France, and that both the Russian Imperial and the British Royal geographical societies approached Kropotkin to become a post holder, which undercuts their traditional uniformly conservative image (although Kropotkin declined these invitations on political grounds). Kropotkin went to Switzerland in the 1870s, where he met and was greatly influenced by French an archist Eliseé Reclus, whose political views were shaped by his travels in Ireland and America and participation in the Paris Commune of 1871, after which he was im prisoned and exiled. Before the Commune he had simi larly combined political radicalism (in the First International and Bakunin’s ‘Brotherhood’) and a key role in the Paris Geographical Society. Like Kropotkin, Reclus produced anarchist and geographical publications, his most famous geographical work being his 19 volume Nouvelle Geographie Universelle published between 1876 and 1894, in which he combined observations from his travels

with secondary material, although his later 1905–08 volume L’Homme et la Terre articulated more of his beliefs about society, including a combination of the unique qualities of each area or region with a holistic approach to understanding the equilibrium of people and en vironment in a given region, as well as an emphasis on industrial and urban spaces. Not surprisingly he also made a critique of imperialism. Kropotkin returned to the new revolutionary Russia during his final few years and Reclus spent his last years in Brussels where he continued to write and was influential in the founding of the New University and the Geographical Institute there. Socialists, Marxists, and the Situationists have all drawn attention to the work of these early radical geographers, especially Kropotkin. While geographical societies represent the insti tutionalization of the subject across Europe, it was the opportunity to gain accredited qualifications at university level which professionalized the discipline. The work of Carl Ritter (author of the 19 volume 1822–59 Erdkunde) who held the first chair in geography at the University of Berlin from 1820 and Alexander von Humboldt (author of the 5 volume 1845–62 Cosmos) have been identified as both the end of the period of universal or renaissance geographies and the rebirth of modern geography. Al ternatively, the founding of geography as a discipline in nineteenth century Europe can be attributed to an al ternative external social explanation which may account for the rapid establishment of geography in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. Modern geography emerged as a university discipline as much in response to external goals of European society as the result of the growth of specialist geographical knowledge: namely, the demand for education of teachers after the popularization of elementary education; the demands of exploration and colonization and for public knowledge of the latter; and the role given to geography in fostering nationalism. It was the utility of the subject in an age of domestic unification, of war with France and wider geopolitical interests of empire, which inspired the Prussian/German government to found chairs in geog raphy in the 1870s. The Prussian’s victory in the Franco Prussian War 1870–71 was attributed to superior geo graphical knowledge and understanding on the part of the Prussian militia. This stimulated geographical study in France and other European countries, with British geography being much influenced by the publications in Germany and France. Thus, in terms of a contextual or discursive approach to the history of geography, the European subject was shaped very much by the interests of state and commerce – as much as by scientific inquiry and cartographic endeavor. Similarly, in Japan geo graphical knowledge was strategically useful in the Sino Japanese and Russo Japanese wars of the 1890s and 1900s, and in North America the subject was associated with


state interest in expansion and consolidation of territories and national identity. Geography developed unevenly between countries, which has been attributed in some cases to the slower development of state funded popular education; for ex ample, Britain was slow to establish free popular edu cation (1870) compared with France, Prussia/Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden (1842). By 1875 there were university chairs in Geography in Germany (7), France (7), and Switzerland (3) followed by St Petersburg in 1885 and Lund in 1897. After a short lived appointment at University College London in the 1830s, Britain saw its first permanent university appointment in geography in 1887 and first degrees offered from 1917. In Britain some universities resisted the establishment of geography as an academic discipline, disliking its association with empire and/or considered it lacking intellectual rigor; in France geography met opposition from other sciences and from those on the political left who held inter nationalist ideas. In Russia expansionism fueled the de mand for geographical knowledge and maps from the rule of Peter the Great in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century; this led to the founding of a geog raphy department in the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1758, but it was almost 120 years before the first uni versity professorship in geography was created. In common with many other scientists in the early to mid nineteenth century, geographical authors often wrote about the world from a God centered or tele ological point of view, as can be seen in the influential writings of Ritter in Germany and Mary Somerville in the UK. While the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Speciesy is characterized as the lynchpin of the science versus religion debate in the nineteenth century, and there were philosophical purists on both sides of the debate, many of the issues had been circulating for years and many involved occupied the muddy mire of the middle ground. What can be said about geography is that its voice was increasingly secularized in the second half of the nineteenth century. At the same time geography was increasingly separated from physiography and geol ogy as part of the specialization within natural sciences. It was this specialization coupled with the emergence of the social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century that prompted calls for a separate identity for geography in universities where the subject was not yet established. Britain was a case in point and geography’s supporters had not only to define its purpose and intellectual cre dentials but also prove its utility, thereby justifying its status within the university sector. This view was strongly represented in Britain by Halford Mackinder in his 1887 address to the RGS ‘On the scope and methods of geography’, in which, reflecting earlier pronouncements, he argued that the new geography would serve the interests of the statesman, merchant, historian, scientist,

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and teacher. Perhaps in an attempt to emphasize the professional status of the discipline Mackinder did not want to refer to the traveler, novelist, journalist, or painter – and with the exception of ‘the teacher’ his list of interested parties represented a near exclusively mascu line domain at the time of his writing. He also mentioned the regional approach to geography in his address, which would be central to defining the subject and practice of geography internationally in the first half of the twentieth century. University geographers were of necessity drawn from other disciplines, many attracted by the opportunity for professional advancement in a new discipline, for ex ample, Vidal de la Blache who moved from classics to geography in France and Eva Taylor who switched from chemistry and became the first woman to be appointed as professor of geography in the UK in 1930. Initially, geography was strongly grounded in a holistic approach which founded the understanding of people’s relationship to place very much on the physical characteristics of that place: topography, geomorphology, climate, etc. This which led on to the regional approach to geography being the first methodological blueprint in Anglo American and European geography. At the turn of the nineteenth century ‘political geography’ was rejected as a heading for all nonphysical geography, ‘anthro pogeography’ was adopted for a while and then replaced by ‘human geography’ in the 1900s. People–environment relationships and the region were the key foci of early twentieth century geography, both of which drew on and linked physical and human geographies.

Unpicking the Philosophy of Geography in the History of Geography Philosophy at its most basic is the study of what we know and how we know it. Ontologies are theories of what exists, what is real in the world, sometimes referred to as metatheories; epistemologies are concerned with the theory of knowledge, what we know and how we can know it: what constitutes valid knowledge – which has obvious implications for the methodologies adopted. If we look at intellectual developments within the history of geography we can see where geographers have agreed on the ontologies and epistemologies applied to geo graphical enquiry and where these differed and were contested and how changes came about within geo graphical thought and practice, as well as identifying continuities and discontinuities in that geographical theory and practice. Two approaches to geography will be discussed in some detail in the light of different ways of interpreting the history of geography, including the shift from one dominant discourse to another; this will be followed by a brief analysis of the alternative

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approaches to geographical inquiry which have de veloped since 1970.

The Region The region as a concept and methodology of geographical enquiry was derived principally from Ritter’s work and served to unify the identity of the subject internationally – but it was known by different names and conceptualized in different ways both between and within countries. In Britain geographers studied ‘regions’, in France ‘pays’, in Germany ‘landschaft’, and in Russia ‘zones’, each having the common focus on studying particular places. In Germany the regional approach was characterized by Hettner’s Natural and Land schaft and was methodologically based on the Landerkunde schema: geology, relief, climate, natural resources, and settlement. The cultural landscape or human imprint on a region and local study (Heimatkunde) was popular in schools. Friedrich Ratzel, seen as the founder of modern human geography, was strongly influenced by Darwinian and associated ideas, seeing a direct relationship between cultural forms and natural conditions. While this may have been based on a deterministic approach to geography, Ratzel was innovative in subjecting cultural phenomena to sys tematic study and his 1881 and 1891 two volume Anthro pogeographie demonstrate his belief in environmental influence, but also how he modified his views in the time between volumes one and two. Alfred Hettner, who re mained a champion of the regional chorological approach, similarly rejected simplistic determinism. In his 1897 Political Geography Ratzel represented states as organic entities which thrive or decline: Karl Haushofer built on Ratzel’s ideas to rationalize German need for space (Lebensraum) and this was infamously used to justify the domination of weaker neighbors, especially when coupled with the 1930s German concept of Volk (folk) which linked blood and soil in terms of race. The Nazi state thereby extracted from geography and related disciplines a form of theoretical justification for aggressive expansionism. However, it has been pointed out that these and similar ideas also underpinned much of the earlier rationalization of wider European colonial expansion. In post war years regional geography continued to evolve in Germany including Carl Troll’s landscape ecology approach which studied the relationship between biological com munities and environment in a specific delineated landscape. The breadth of Hettner’s chorological geography was criti cized as too all encompassing methodologically, causing Otto Schluter to introduce the more focused approach of landscape morphology, but Hettner’s approach was con tinued, notably championed by Richard Hartshorne who was to have international influence, especially in the USA. Swedish geography was influenced by German thinking from the outset and Hembydsforskning (home area studies) were popular in Sweden’s Folkhogskolor

(people’s or folk colleges). Helge Nelson promoted re gional studies at Lund from the foundation of the geography department in 1916 onwards, stressing links between home area and nation at this time of consoli dation of national identity. However, by the 1920s there was tension between those geographers favoring a focus on people’s relationship to the environment and those who favored the chorological approach – analysis of spatial distributions. Ultimately it was the latter which dominated twentieth century geography in Sweden, not least because of the emphasis on applied geography and close links between geography and government planning. Rudolf Kjellen, a pupil of Ratzel’s, developed geopolitics on the basis of ‘survival of the fittest’. This association with determinism, expansion, and Nazi aggression (as noted above) caused political geography and particularly geopolitics to come into disrepute, but the Cold War caused a revival of interest in the subject (especially in America) and its more recent reorientation to critical political geographies, engaging with issues of environ ment, gender, and contemporary security issues have made for a thriving subdiscipline. A strand of post war Swedish geography also developed a strong thematic and ideological orientation to social equality and develop ment issues, reflecting the domestic social concern which grew out of the 1917–18 famine and building on the work of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal who had been politically radicalized by a visit to the USA in the late 1920s (an experience to be replicated by David Harvey in the early 1970s). In France early twentieth century le regionalisme was based on detailed local studies of pays, resulting in small scale regional monographs and promoted by Jean Bruhnes and Vidal de la Blache. These studies were often based on substantial doctoral theses and Roger Dion’s Le Val de Loire is considered one of the great French regional monographs. Vidal argued for the essential unity of a region, the inseparability of nature and culture which was interwoven in a complex localized expression as the re gion’s genre de vie. While grounded in the physical land scape, Vidal, influenced by Ratzel’s later work, and took a view of the physical environment providing the oppor tunity for a range of human responses, which people could choose between, what is known as possibilism (although Vidal never used the term himself), and that these particular sets of responses to particular environ ments gave rise to unique regions or pays. He favored a chorological approach as can be seen in his 1903 Tableau de la Geographie de la France. Given the regional political structure in France, there were opportunities for these regional monographs to be utilized by administrators and planners within France, but they were criticized for being too based on agriculture and assumed historical con tinuity of practice, which did not always apply, especially in rapidly industrialized areas. Vidal’s 1917 L’Oest, which


studied the industrialized East of France, acknowledged the role of wider economic influences on pays and credited as his most innovative work, was published in the year of his death. Vidal’s model was notably de veloped by his student Lucien Gallois who demarcated the regions of France; his son in law, Emmanueal de Martonne, who completed Vidal’s book Human Geography which was published posthumously; and Jean Brunhes, who is credited with simplifying and popularizing Vidal’s work. Vidal influenced many geographers internationally, for example, Hilda Ormsby and Marion Newbigin in the UK and Jovan Cvijic at Belgrade, who linked a region’s genre de vie with land productivity and economic activities. In the UK Patrick Geddes, deeply influenced by Frederic Le Play, argued that all education had to be based on regional survey. Although not a geographer per se, he deeply influenced a whole generation of the emerging university and school teachers of geography (as well as other disciplines) through his promotion of re gional field work through the UK Le Play Society (fo cusing on place–work–folk relationship) and the summer schools he organized initially in his Outlook Tower in Edinburgh. A. J. Herbertson, who had been an assistant to Geddes at Dundee before being appointed as Lecturer in Regional Geography at Oxford in 1899, published on natural regions 1905 and 1913. Herbertson, who had studied in Germany and whose doctoral work had been on global rainfall, used a larger scale of regions, being based largely on physical factors and particularly climate, with cultural and political aspects a secondary factor – although he did revise his views and by the time of his premature death in 1915 he was writing of the genius loci or ‘spirit of place’, derived from people’s relationship with place. Herbertson’s approach has been described as ‘regionalization’ rather than regional geography as such and was widely disseminated to teachers and through texts in Britain, as well as in Europe, but was criticized as a form of geographical determinism by H. J. Fleure. Fleure, influenced by Geddes, sought to understand regions as much as the interaction between people and people, as people and environment. He also characterized global regions, but ones defined by human well being: regions of hunger, debilitation, increment, effort, dif ficulty, wandering, and industrialized regions – with the latter being able to replace any of the former. Both Fleure (trained in anthropology) and Newbigin (trained in biology) tried to establish empirical generalizations from regional studies, despite the limitations of available data. Another regional approach influenced by Geddes was that of Charles Fawcett whose idea of functional regions led him to argue for a federal political system for England. The extent to which the regional discourse or episteme, in Foucault’s terms dominated British geography can be

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seen not only in the number of regional monographs written by academics, but also the fact they were a re quirement in many of the new geography university courses into the 1950s. The methods of regional survey were also to underpin the Land Utilization Survey dir ected by Dudley Stamp, involving over 20 000 school children, as well as most academic geographers and other volunteers nationwide, whose mapping of land use in local areas culminated in a national map which was of strategic importance to agricultural production during the 1939–45 war. The regional approach in the USA is associated with environmental determinism, notably in the work of Ellsworth Huntingdon and Ellen Churchill Semple. In 1915 Huntingdon used climate to explain the distri bution of civilization across the globe, and closely as sociated this with race. In her 1911 Influences of Geographic Environment Semple, influenced by Ratzel, stressed the role of field observation and causal relations and wrote that people and their way of life in a given area were influenced by the earth’s surface in their locality. Semple stressed environment rather than race and emphasized the influence rather than determining character of en vironment, but her work was often read as environ mentally deterministic. Although it has been argued that the strength of Semple’s argument was influenced by the wider context of the disciplinary need to establish a justified niche for geography within academia in the USA (just as geographers had strategically promoted geography in Europe earlier), it was this combination of observation based methodology and environmental in fluence/determinant which can be traced as a dominant discourse in early twentieth century American geog raphy, as well as having international influence within what was still a relatively small international community of professional geographers. In Australia, Griffith Taylor argued against government policy to populate the out back on the grounds of scientific information about the environment, and felt he was vindicated in the long term after being treated as a political pariah in Australia. Environmental determinism has been identified at best as geography’s contribution to social Darwinism and at worst providing justification for imperialist/expansionist racism; it has been further criticized not only for its ideological but also for its methodological shortcomings as well, particularly by materialists favoring technolo gical innovation as a solution to environmental con straints. The geographical work of Isaiah Bowman and Carl Sauer was contrary to the environmental influence/ determinist trend in American geography, the latter’s chorological regional studies were conceptually framed by possibilism, recognizing the interdependence of people and natural environment, which combine to produce cultural landscapes – an approach which was a precursor to more explicit humanist and cultural

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geography to follow. In the USSR the economic defin ition of regions dominated, originating with Nikolai Baranskiy, a leading Bolshevik and friend of Lenin who promoted the subject in schools. Although expressed differently by the varying national and theoretical schools, the region provided newly pro fessionalized geographers in the early twentieth century with a raison d’eˆtre which unified physical and political/ human studies and provided a framework for local and international studies at a time when geography had to define its disciplinary content and its place in academia. There were clearly weaknesses in the various regional epistemes, not least, in their scope as encyclopedic studies could be overwhelming with detail making analysis dif ficult; many (but not all) were descriptive rather than analytical; and the focus was on the unique limited com parative studies and theories. Ironically it was the sense of unique characteristics, the idiographic element of regional studies, and their often humanistic/cultural basis which was revived later in late twentieth century cultural and postmodern approaches to geography, if not the region as geographical unit. Despite this, regional geography has suffered from historical homogenization and caricature, and its significance underestimated in the history of the discipline. Of course, regional studies have never com pletely disappeared, some geographers are known as ‘re gional specialists’ through their work on a particular part of the globe, for example, Latin America or Eastern Europe, but regional studies have often been subsumed in historical or economic studies such as regional develop ment since the 1960s, and it is only in recent years that a more critical regional approach has begun to emerge, perhaps not surprisingly within economic geographies. Examination of the move to spatial science and quantitative techniques sheds some light on both the internal disciplinary and external contextual factors in fluencing the dramatic shift from regional studies in the 1960s and 1970s.

Spatial Science and the Quantitative Revolution The work of Walter Christaller is a central element in the theoretical and methodological shifts of the 1960s, al though its significance was only appreciated long after its original publication (which can be interpreted either as an example of the nonlinear development of geographical thought or as a historical antecedent of later work – or both). Christaller’s 1933 doctoral thesis Central Places in Southern Germany and his Central Place Theory created a geometric economic hierarchical spatial model, was based on his training in economics and was a departure within geography which opened up new horizons. Christaller’s work was undertaken within a growing field

of locational analysis in geography, stemming from the regional science trend within Germany in particular. His location theory was novel in including nonmaterial goods such as services, but he did not achieve the hoped for international recognition for central place theory at the IGC Congress in Amsterdam in 1938. Keen to see his ideas applied, he sought to influence planning in Ger many, especially of new settlement networks. Christaller, who had returned from serving in World War I espousing pacifism and socialism, worked with National Socialist Regional Planning in occupied Eastern Europe 1940–44. This resulted in wariness about his work in Germany in post war years, and his ideas were more readily accepted and developed in Sweden (by Edgar Kant and Torsten Ha¨gerstrand), the USA (notably by Harris and Ullman), Canada and Switzerland in the 1960s and 1970s. Most undergraduates will be familiar with Central Place Theory, but Christaller’s other legacies to the discipline are the understanding of the links between theoretical and applied work and between theoretical analysis and empirical field research – his model was seen as repre senting a training in a scientific approach to geography. Christaller’s work gained a wider international audience when translated from German into English in 1966 (followed by Italian) and has been applied in regional planning across the globe, from the polders of the Netherlands to Japan. Geographical work and skills had been employed by all parties in World War II, geographers were employed in the armed services and in the production of intelli gence materials (notably the allied forces Intelligence Handbooks which covered actual and potential theaters of war), meteorology, cartography, map reading skills, and interpretation of aerial photographs, as well as spe cialist applications for predicting localized tide and beach conditions for landing forces. Male and female geog raphers were employed for their geographical skills and the allied forces drew on volunteers from the USA and British Commonwealth. Although World War II itself did not produce immediate change in the practice and theory of geography, American geographers were criticized for their focus on limited regions, and a more synthetic spatial science emerged to dominate geography inter nationally, and the role of the natural environment was pushed into the background. It has been suggested that just as the regional approach offered an alternative to environmental determinism, so spatial science and the quantitative revolution offered an ideologically neutral and scientifically objective approach to knowledge in post war years. Despite various attempts to reformulate the regional method in geography, such as Dudley Stamp’s application of small scale studies to address larger questions and problems and R. E. Dickinson’s work on functional regions in the 1930s and 1940s, the ap proach was still widely criticized. The detailed regional


approach promoted by Hettner was described by Ha¨gerstrand as ‘mission impossible’ in the face of grow ing complexities of lived geographies and Ha¨gerstrand’s work on innovation diffusion broke away from the re gional mode by focusing on process rather than place. While there was rejection of the lack of theory and ex planation in the regional approach, its merits were not completely overlooked and regional science and sta tistical recognition of regions featured in new approaches to geographical knowledge in what was described as spatial science. This was closely allied to what is known as the ‘quantitative revolution’ in geography and wider social sciences and allied closely to positivism, with its emphasis on a unitary scientific method based on in duction and verification. It replaced comprehensive studies of unique areas with a desire for observable laws which could be established and tested through the ap plication of the scientific method and has been charac terized as a battle between descriptive idiographic and generalizing or nomothetic systematic approaches. Although, Schafer had argued as early as 1953 that the subject was still too grounded in exceptionalism and that geographers should be more interested in similarities and causal explanation rather than descriptions of difference. The origins of the quantitative revolution is attributed to the USA/geography departments of Iowa, Evanston, Seattle, and Madison, and was disseminated in the UK through the Study Group in Quantitative Methods in the Institute of British Geographers. The IGU meeting at Lund in 1960 was pivotal in recognizing Christaller’s earlier contribution and offering an international forum for related work. In Sweden, Lund University, where Ha¨gerstrand worked, was the center for spatial science and quantitative techniques, with developments in the field published in the internationally influential Lund Studies in Geography series, including William Bunge’s 1960 Theoretical Geography where he described spatial patterns in terms of ‘morphological laws’. In the USA William Garrison (University of Seattle, Washington) played a pivotal role in promoting quantitative techni ques, through courses in location theory, urban and economic geography, and the graduate seminar in mathematical statistics offered from 1955 onwards, which trained many of those to lead the quantitative movement in American geography in the 1960s, e.g., Brian Berry, William Bunge, and Richard Morrill. Key figures in the new movement in Britain also visited Seattle and other similarly oriented departments and Ha¨gerstrand’s work gained a much wider audience after visiting the USA. In the UK S. Gregory’s Statistical Methods and the Geographer and John Cole and Cuchlaine King’s 1968 Quantitative Geography were influential undergraduate texts, but theoretically the way was led by Richard Chorley and Peter Haggett’s publications, especially their

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1967 Models in Geography, which was considered to be something of a methodological watershed. David Har vey’s 1969 Explanation in Geography was very influential as the most developed exploration of the philosophy of positivism in geography. These books went into reprint, appeared in paperback and were translated into numer ous languages; they also sparked heated debates within the discipline concerning the nature and purpose of geography. As has already been hinted at, this meth odological shift did not spring fully formed from within geography but reflected other changes and pressures within and beyond the discipline. Just as the foundation of geography was set within wider contextual and discursive frameworks, so changes within the discipline are similarly framed. The influence of the war and the attraction of ‘ideologically neutral’ epistemologies have already been noted, as well as the desire to construct geography as a science (social and/or physical), but there were also other international and national trends which played their part in geography’s disposition to change in the 1950s and 1960s. Techno logical change was a significant factor, not least in the increased access to computers able to deal with large data sets, inferential statistics and predictive models. All nat ural and social sciences were undergoing a quantitative phase in the 1960s. The increasing trend to systematic specialization within subdisciplines in geography from the 1950s onwards, encouraged and necessitated geog raphers to work with colleagues in cognate disciplines, seen in the fruitful interdisciplinary work with eco nomics, following Christaller’s lead and the development of ‘social physics’ in the USA, but this simultaneously represented the spectre of rupture to geographers schooled in a unified view of geography. The quantitative revolution can be seen as part of post war technological approaches to management and planning in countries developing welfare policies and/or undertaking reconstruction after war damage. There was also a wider sense that universities were expected to produce problem solvers to meet the needs of increas ingly complex society. Contextual factors also explain the late acceptance of the quantitative revolution in Ger many: wariness of Christaller’s work noted above, cou pled with a relatively unitary approach to geography in which international rather than home based studies were considered the pinnacle of knowledge and achievement: the ‘new’ ideas were introduced to German speakers by Steiner’s 1965 study of Swiss cantons which used factor analysis. It has been argued that the use of the positivist hypothetico deductive method and inferential statistics brought physical and human geographers together methodologically and epistemologically, as well as gain ing increased respectability and funding through associ ation with the methods of the natural sciences and maths – but it has also been suggested that in many cases

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positivist epistemologies followed quantitative methods in geography rather than vice versa. However, while the so called quantitative revolution spread in receptive departments, it was far from un contested and met resistance in some established jour nals, as well as particular departments and was criticized for its language and methodologies which seemed in decipherable to the uninitiated. Journals such as Progress in Geography and Geographical Analysis were founded to provide outlets for the innovative work, but critiques continued with warnings of disciplinary civil war and fragmentation, the limitations of quantitative techniques in some fields of research, the neglect of the environment as a reality, and the Occidental nature of work centered on existing large data sets. Peter Taylor argued from the sociological perspective on disciplinary change that the role of mathematics in spatial science was not merely to facilitate quantification and verification, but also to fa cilitate the establishment of a new generation of geog raphers who defined themselves against what went before and established a new research agenda and methodology, accompanied by its own specialist language which ex cluded traditionalists. By the early 1970s even proponents such as David Harvey and Bill Bunge were recognizing the limitations of spatial science and quantitative techniques in the face of social inequality. Geometry had become the language of geography, but it was a language and practice that relied on representing and creating fixed patterns which did not necessarily reflect the dynamic socioeconomic geography contained therein, or, more basically, did not incorporate the people whose lives were modeled. Problems also emerged with the application of some statistical methods to spatial phenomena with multiple influences (notably spatial autocorrelation). While spatial science built on regional science, it attempted to apply methods from the natural sciences which it was thought would achieve sci entific rigor; the focus was shifted from regions to ques tions of spatial order and to real applied issues: quantitative techniques were central to achieving these aims. These epistemological and methodological changes created a community, which exchanged ideas, methods, and personnel, but claims that it was revolutionary need to be set in a wider context. By the late 1980s, the positivist, if not always the quantitative, turn in geography had come under serious criticism. It was challenged by those economic, social, and urban geographers following a political economy approach; one of the most influential critics was David Harvey, who found the previous attractions of quantifi cation inadequate to the task of understanding and the orizing the historical geography of capitalism and the associated inequalities of uneven development and pov erty locally and globally. However the challenge to quantitative techniques did not only arise from

materialist critiques, another principal strand was ex pressed in behavioral and humanistic geography. More recently postmodern approaches have articulated a dis trust of a single privileged path to knowledge and today geographers are taught to choose the methods appro priate to their subject of enquiry. Despite these critiques, the value of quantitative techniques persists within the discipline, although not in the logical positivist sense as the only way to ascertain truth. In the USA there seems to be more of a dichotomy between spatial–analytical and social–cultural geography, whereas in the UK quantita tive methods, hypothesis testing and verification are now usually seen as one means of measuring and analyzing human phenomena and are often combined with field study and small scale intensive studies using qualitative techniques such as interviews and participant obser vation. Similarly, qualitative studies can incorporate quantitative data but interpret findings within a qualita tive framework.

The Last Thirty Years The idea of a quantitative revolution (influenced by Thomas Kuhn’s work) was popularized within the history of geography at a time when dramatic social changes were occurring in terms of race, class, and colonial emancipation. However, as has been suggested above, while representing a significant shift in geography’s epistemology and methodologies, the spatial science of the 1960s and 1970s had antecedents in earlier work, failed to extinguish existing approaches, and spawned competing epistemes. The character of successive alter native approaches to geographical enquiry are revealing in terms of their impact on the discipline epistemo logically and methodologically. Two very philosophically different responses to the limitations of spatial science and positivist epistemologies were those of Marxist/so cialist and humanist geographies (both representing broad coalitions). Marxist/socialist and other radical geographies are ideologically related to earlier nine teenth century anarchist and socialist geographies; they are grounded in a materialist view of the world which centers on the power relations of capital, notably seen in the work of David Harvey, Neil Smith, Doreen Massey, and Richard Peet for example. While quantitative tech niques may be useful to demonstrate these power re lations they are explanatorily inadequate in the face of economic power distributions. At once highly theoretical and seeking application to social problems, this school of geographers has been very influential within social, urban and economic geography in particular, normalizing the consideration of socioeconomic class and power in geo graphical studies. In contrast, humanist geographies drew inspiration from the Vidalian school as well as


phenomenology or existentialism which made human experience central to geographical questions and meth ods, as articulated by Anne Buttimer and applied by David Lowenthal and Yi Fu Tuan for example. In turn these approaches were found at least partially wanting by others working from different theoretical perspectives: post structuralists who stressed the multiplicity and in stability of the meaning of texts; postmodernists who emphasized difference and the inadequacy of grand metatheory and notions of objectivity; postcolonialists who exposed ways in which Western epistemologies can be embedded in racialized colonial power relations; feminists who identified both the gender bias and absence of gender in geographical epistemologies and method ologies; lesbian, gay, and Queer theorists who stress sexuality as a crucial factor in understanding spatial phenomena. These epistemological approaches have produced related methodologies (including an important range of qualitative techniques) and are associated with particular subdisciplines, but many have been creatively combined as can be seen in cultural geography which has widened the ontological base of what can be considered as geographical enquiry and the related epistemological questions and methods, both of which draw theoretically on numerous of these recent (as well as past) theoretical approaches within human geography, creating hybrid geographies. Just as spatial science and quantitative techniques were found to be of limited application and explanatory value, so other approaches offering universal analytical frameworks or metatheories have been found to have their limitations and human geographers increasingly draw from more than one epistemology, for example, many development studies have combined postcolonial, socialist, and feminist theories. However, not all geog raphers are happy with this creative mix approach to geographical enquiry which has been characterized as alphabet soup, and some hold a fixed ontological position for philosophical, ideological, political, and/or strategic reasons. Similarly, this subject and philosophical diversity has had an impact on the scope and character of the history of geography, as can be seen in the cases of gender, imperial, and postcolonial geographies. While we should be wary of histories that stress the continuity and unity of the discipline, for example, Hartshorne’s 1939 The Nature of Geography, which in famously addressed deviations from the mainstream de velopment of geography, we need to be sensitive to the evolution and diffusion of ideas in the face of the rep resentation of attractive ‘heroic revolutions’; we also need to be sensitive to the multiplicity, synchronicity and often circular loops in the development of knowledge and as sociated methods and theories. After Foucault, changes in Western thought have been seen more in terms of shifts and discontinuities, discursive rivalries, and combinations

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rather than the binary divide between change by evo lution or revolution. Arguably both development and environmental agenda have gone some way to bringing physical and human geographers into conversation with one another after the post war divide between physical and human geographies. Technological changes have brought GIS to geography and GPS to the public; email and the Internet make for near instant communication which eases collaborative work and both temporary and permanent global interest networks such as specialist research networks and the Critical Geography Forum. External political forces impact on sources of funding and the means of evaluating geographical output. Like academia as a whole, human geography is a much more diverse field than it was in the 1950s. However, while some see that as a threat to the unified definition and practice of geography (which can be important for a se cure place within the broader academy), it can also be seen as a strength that human geography has become much more sensitized to and expressive of a wide range of social, cultural, economic, and political relations. In turn, approaches to the history of the discipline have to be sufficiently sensitive to that range, to difference within history, in order not only to represent that variety but gain historical insights from different sources and dif ferent epistemologies, resulting in more inclusive, per spectives on the history of geography. See also: Geohistory; Possibilism; Regional Geography I.

Further Reading Bell, M., Butlin, R. A. and Heffernan, M. J. (eds.) (1995). Geography and Imperialism, 1820 1940. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Blunt, A. and McEwan, C. (eds.) (2002). Postcolonial Geographies. London: Continuum. Bunge, W. (1962). Theoretical Geography. Lund: Gleerup. Buttimer, A. (ed.) (1983). The Practice of Geography. New York: Longman. Dickinson, R. E. (ed.) (1976). The Regional Concept. The Anglo American Leaders. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Domosh, M. (1991). Towards a feminist historiography of geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16, 95 104. Driver, F. (2001). Geography Militant. Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell. Freeman, T. W. (1961). A Hundred Years of Geography. London: Gerald Duckworth. Godlewska, A. (1999). Geography Unbound. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Godlewska, A. and Smith, N. (eds.) (1994). Geography and Empire. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hartshorne, R. (1939). The Nature of Geography. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. Harvey, D. (1969). Explanation in Geography. London: Edward Arnold. Harvey, D. (1973). Social Justice in the City. London: Edward Arnold. Johnston, R. and Williams, M. (eds.) (2003). A Century of British Geography. Oxford: The British Academy/Oxford University Press. Keighren, I. M. (2006). Bringing geography to the book: Charting the reception of influences of geographic environment. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31, 525 540.

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Kimble, G. H. T. (1951). The inadequacy of the regional concept. In Stamp, L. D. & Wooldridge, S. W. (eds.) London Essays in Geography. Rodwell Jones Memorial Volume, pp 151 174. London: Longmans, Green. Kwan, M. P. (2004). Beyond difference: From canonical geography to hybrid geographies. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94, 756 763. Livingstone, D. N. (1992). The Geographical Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell. Lorimer, H. (2003). Talking small stories: Spaces of knowledge and the practice of geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28, 197 217. Maddrell, A. (2009). Complex Locations. The Production and Reception of Women’s Geographical Work and the Geographical Canon 1850 1970. Oxford: RGS IBG/ Blackwell.

Martin, G. J. (2005). All Possible Worlds (4th edn.). New York: Oxford University Press. Monk, J. (2004). Women, gender and the histories of American geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94, 1 22. Peet, R. (1985). The social origins of environmental determinism. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75, 309 333. Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography. Cambridge: Polity. Stoddart, D. R. (ed.) (1981). Geography, Ideology and Social Concern. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Withers, C. W. J. (2002). Constructing the geographical archive. Area 34, 303 311. Withers, C. J. and Mayhew, R. J. (2002). Re thinking ‘disciplinary’ history: Geography in British universities, c. 1580 1887. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 27, 1 19.

Geohistory P. Claval, Universite´ de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Fernand Braudel (1902–85) Historian; Braudel taught in Algeria and worked on the history of the Western Mediterranean during the Renaissance. His doctoral dissertation, La Me´diterraneé et le monde me´diterraneén a` l’e´poque de Philippe II (1949), made him famous. He held important positions in the French academic system as a professor at the Colle`ge de France and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and as chairman of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. He was a historian of the slow evolution of economic and social structures. His influence was important in Italy, Spain, Latin America, Poland, and, after the translation of his major books into English, in Britain and the United States. Longue dureé ‘‘Traditional history, with the attention it devotes to short time, got us used, since a long time, to its brief time, its rapid, dramatic, short breathed narrative [y] There is also, besides this narrative, a recitative of conjuncture, which involves the past by large slices: ten, twenty or fifty years. ‘‘Much beyond this second recitative is situated a history with a wider breath, of secular length this time: long duration history. (Braudel, 1958, 1969) ‘‘Good or bad, [the term structure] dominates the problems of long duration. By structure, the observers of social realities understand an organization, a coherence of relatively stable relations between realities and social masses. For us, historians, a structure is certainly an assembling, an architecture, but is much more a reality that time does not wear away and which persists for very long periods.’’ (ibid.) The Annales School The Annales School of history was a way to conceive history developed from 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch through a new journal: Annales. Socie´te´s, ećonomies, civilisations. Instead of focusing on the events of political life, it analyzed the demographic, social, and economic transformations of the world as well as the symbols which weighed upon them. The Annales School dominated French history until the 1980s and had a strong international innfluence. It provided a new interest in economic realities, geographic constraints, social organizations, and representations. The French School of Geography Developed in France at the end of the nineteenth century, geography blended the lessons of German geographers (mainly Humboldt, Ritter, and Ratzel) with the French tradition of historical approach and regional analysis. Shaped by

Paul Vidal de la Blache, this conception dominated French geography for two generations. Its impact was strong abroad, particularly in Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Britain. For the first time, geography focused on regional analysis – or, in a simplified and often caricatural way, regional description.

Introduction The term ‘geohistory’ was coined by Fernand Braudel in the conclusion of the first part of his doctoral dissertation on La Me´diterraneé et le monde me´diterraneén a` l’e´poque de Philippe II: Geohistory? [y] when speaking of geohistory, we wish to designate [y] something more historical and at the same time broader [than geopolitics], which would not be only the application to the present and future situ ation of States, of a schematized spatial history [y]. In fact, a double approach. To put human problems as they may be observed, spread over space and as far as possible, mapped, a human intelligent geography: yes, certainly, but to put them not only for the present and in the present, but in the past [y]; to build a really retrospective human geography: [y] to pay more at tention to time and [y] to mind more about space, what it supports, what it generates, what it impedes in a word, to [y] take sufficiently into account its formidable permanency. (Braudel, 1949)

Such was the program illustrated by the first part of the book: a wonderful analysis of the Mediterranean, its environments, the sea and its borders; an evocation, also, of their transformation: A history slow to run and to change, often made of un ceasing move backs, of starting anew cycles. I wished neither to neglect this history, almost out of time, in re lation with inanimate things, nor content myself, con cerning it, of these traditional geographical introductions to history [y] with their mineral landscapes, ploughed fields, and flowers which are rapidly presented, and from which there is nevermore question, as if the flowers did not bloom again each spring [y]. (Braudel, 1949)

Such are the main characteristics of Braudel’s geo history: its foundation in Vidalian human geography (‘‘a human intelligent geography’’), its curiosity for the links

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between social life and ‘inanimate things’, and its relation with long duration, the other major concept Braudel invented at that time. The idea of geohistory, as developed by Braudel, was rooted in the history of French geography and history since the beginning of the twentieth century. His con ceptions greatly influenced historians and geographers.

Environments and History as Conceived by Geographers and Historians from the Early Twentieth Century The History Practiced by Vidalian Geographers Vidalian geography was shaped by Vidal de la Blache and his students, who were responsible for the development of a new ‘genre’: the regional monograph. From the be ginning of the twentieth century, doctoral dissertations in geography were devoted to the study of a particular re gion. These dissertations stressed geography’s physical features, the nature of its environments and the present distribution of its population, settlements, and activities. An emphasis was put on the historical dimension of re gional structures: the various milieux were conceived as active factors in local development. In Jules Sion’s Les Paysans de la Normandie orientale, for instance, the econ omy of the fertile Pays de Caux plateau was initially based on subsistance farming. Since its social structure was deeply unequal, poor peasants also became weavers from the seventeenth century onwards: merchants pro vided them with cotton and commercialized their pro duction. Pays de Caux produced enough food for this proto industrial population. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the significance of the environment changed: the well watered rivers dissecting the plateau were harnessed in order to move the new weaving machines imported from England, hence the development of new industrial vil lages in the valleys. Later, these factories relied increas ingly on coal imported from England through Rouen, which allowed for the further growth of the textile in dustry in the lower valleys converging towards this port. In most regional dissertations, geography was not a neutral framework; it participated in the history of the studied areas. Vidal de la Blache stressed more systematically the role played by the environment in the articles he pub lished on the genesis of ‘‘the great human agglomer ations’’ in the Annales de Geógraphie : the success of the moderately fertile Mediterranean was linked to the close juxtaposition of plains, hills, plateaus, mountains, and deeply indented coasts, since they created comple mentarities, explained the early development of trade, and the construction of polities stretching over these various milieux and controlling them.

Pierre Denis used a similar historical approach to explain the specificities of a national state: Argentina. The country was made of the Andes cordillera, their piedmonts, low plains, and plateaux including the tem perate Pampa. During the Inca period, it was organized along the route that linked the Bolivian highlands to central Chile through the Mendoza oasis and Cumbra Pass. The significance of this road was reinforced during the colonial period by the silver mines of Potosi: the piedmonts oases provided the latter with food, thanks to long caravans of pack mules moving up and down the mountain slopes. A side road was opened during the sixteenth century to the Paraguay River and further down to the Plata River, Buenos Aires, and Europe. A complete recentering of the country on Buenos Aires occurred in the nineteenth century with the conquest of the Pampa and the development, in that part of the country, of commercial of agriculture based on export ation. A few years later, Emile Fe´lix Gautier proposed a fantastic geohistory of North Africa. About the same time, Albert Demangeon explored the British Empire with a similar ambition: to study its evolution through the way British colonizers invented new methods to organize and control space. To use the analysis of regional differentiation, the nature of different environments, and the techniques of spatial organization as key factors in the building of territorial units was thus a tradition in French geography. The Geography Practiced by Historians Historians and geographers received the same training in France until the 1940s. Both groups shared a similar interest in regional realities. Influenced by Vidal de la Blache, Henri Berr, a leading historian of the time, launched a series of monographs in 1903 on Les re´gions de la France. The aim of these monographs was to analyze the historical individualities that people had built in each of these areas. Lucien Febvre – a close friend of Jules Sion in the Fondation Thiers – was preparing a doctoral dissertation on Philippe II et la Franche Comte´. He accepted to compose the volume on Franche Comte´: Les re´gions de la France. IV La Franche Comte´ was published in 1905. Febvre first stressed the differences between various components of this province: Such are, in their deep diversity, the constituting parts of the comtoise province. What do they share? Very few things, apparently: neither their origin nor their geo logical formation [y]. And in their natural and agri cultural flora, the distribution of their populations, the conditions nature offered to their settlements, how many contrasts [y]: it was an endless variety of materials, plans, agglomeration, and aspects (Febvre, 1905: 19).

This variety appeared, however, as an advantage for building a strong territorial unit: ‘‘It is a great surprise to

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see all these contrasts, all these dissimilarities melted together in the political and moral unit of a province, associated for centuries for the same destinies.’’ Why? Because of the complementary nature of all these elements. [Franche Comte´] remained the privileged country which was self sufficient and absorbed all its production. For the meat of his cattle, the montagnon received the wheat of the low country; for the wine of the vineyards, he offered his cheese: old secular practices of trade, observed over time by travellers; they kept on uniting indissolubly the Bur gundy of pastures to that of open fields (Febvre, 1905: 66).

The Annales school of history, as founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch at the end of the 1920s, relied on the idea that history had much to gain in cooperating with other social sciences, economics, sociology, an thropology, or geography. For them, the latter offered rich perspectives on the long term evolution of countries and the slow rythm of their transformations.

Braudel’s Geohistory Philippe II and the Mediterranean Braudel was well aware of the possibilities geography offered for explaining the construction of territorial units. When preparing his doctoral dissertation, he developed a rich personal experience of the Mediterranean: he lived in Algeria and spent a few months every year exploring Spain, Italy, the former Yugoslavia, and their archives. He was perfectly aware of the diversity of Mediterranean environments and relied on the categories proposed by Vidal de la Blache to analyze how they were used by human groups, and what they offered to them, at the end of the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance. Moun tains, plateaus (and hills), and plains (either inland basins, piedmonts alluvial fans, or sea level marshy lowlands) were the basic elements of the Mediterranean reality. These regions were linked by the sea, which explained the similarity of their climates. It was a factor of human unity when navigation was safe, and a cause of isolation when insecurity prevailed – hence the ups and downs experienced by the islands. The rivieras played a major role in the development of trade. The construction of a unity out of this mosaic of humanized environments was achieved through the development of commercial routes and the initiation of city formation. For Braudel, the environment was not given once and for all. It changed because of trade and economic relations, or the building of roads and ports, and thanks to the ini tiative of urban centers and political rulers. The unity of the Mediterranean countries was real, but its human half was a product of human initiative as much as the ex pression of environmental conditions. Hence the

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refutation of environmental determinism which concluded the first part of Philippe II et la Me´diterraneé and was more clearly formulated in the second edition of the book. Exploring Geohistory Through the Relations Between Material Civilization, Economy, and Capitalism As conceived by Braudel, geohistory explored the role of environmental features in history, with the idea that they evolved, even slowly, through time, and were perman ently and actively reinterpreted by social groups through commerce and the building of political organizations: hence the role of sea and land routes and the growing influence of cities; hence also the growing significance of those who lived in these cities, that is, from the second half of the Middle Ages on, of their bourgeoisies. In this way, geohistory was central in the Braudel’s study of Western capitalism. From Vidal de la Blache and Lucien Febvre, geog raphers and historians were conscious of the role of technical innovations in the changing relationhips be tween social groups and their environment: it was the basis of possibilism. In this perspective, Braudel explored first the technical dimension of man–milieu relationships: it was the theme of Civilisation mate´rielle and capitalism. The book delved not only into the tools and methods of farmers or cattle raisers, but also into the exploration and exploitation of mines, and the machines built for metal lurgy or textile industries. The chapters on the techni ques used for building houses or roads, and on cities as geographical devices, were really new. With the devel opment of urban bourgeoisies and capitalism, the relations between human groups and their environment were in creasingly mediated through markets. The second volume of the trilogy on Civilisation mate´rielle, ećonomie et capitalisme, Les Jeux de l’ećhange, ana lyzed the way some Western European big cities, and especially harbors (like Genoa and Antwerp, and later on Amsterdam and London), enlarged trade realms and dominated them through the monopolies they de veloped – with the complicity of the new sovereign states. Geohistory ceased to be focused on the evolution of particular areas, like the Mediterranean. The last volume of the trilogy, Le Temps du monde, covered this aspect of geohistory: Western countries managed to build for the first time a World Economy, with its core area in Western Europe, and its impact all over remote and related outer spaces. The Last Phase: l’Identite´ de la France In this way, Braudelian geohistory had turned its major focus towards economy, trade, money, and power. It offered an original interpretation of the changing world scene – later exploited by Immanuel Wallerstein and

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geographers like Peter Taylor. But such an approach forgot one aspect of the evolution of geographical real ities through time: the remarkable permanence of some of their features. Braudel faced this problem in his last and uncompleted book, L’Identite´ de la France. In the first volume, he analyzed the physical, or ‘geographic’, en vironment and concluded that it was unable to explain the stability of French social and spatial structures over time. Was the reason for their permanence to be re searched in economy and social organization? No: the only significant factor in this field was the weight of peasantry in French society, which contributed to the slow rythm of change characteristic of French history during the last century. The reason for the historical solidity of France was certainly to be sought in the cultural field. Braudel died before completing the last part of L’Identite´ de la France. As a result, his vision of geohistory remained incomplete. Geohistory: An Overall Vision of History Braudelian geohistory was not an easily defined part of history. His ambition may be really assessed in his text book, Grammaire des civilisations: geohistory was for him a way to combine synthetic historical and geographical approaches to build an overall picture, both spatial and temporal, of human civilizations and destiny. Braudel first made known this conception of geohis tory in 1949, but to measure its breadth, people had to explore all his works: it was not a limited research pro gram which was easy to apply. That explained why ‘geohistory’ did not attract much comment and was not transformed into a new historical genre. Just as in the early twentieth century, it was a way of combining history and geography as practiced by both historians and geographers. Braudel’s geohistory changed along his career, since for him space was increasingly made of networks, infra structures, and mental schemes: natural constraints, still very significant in 1949, were losing their weight.

Historians’ Geohistory Regional Geohistory French historians often chose to study the history of regional entities in their doctoral dissertations. Lucien Febvre’s Philippe II et la Me´diterraneé was the first example of this orientation. He was mainly imitated from the 1940s onward. Rene´ Duby proposed his new and very fecund conception of feudal times through his analysis of Maˆconnais. Emmanuel Le Roi Ladurie followed the transformations of Languedoc peasantry from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Goubert showed how the social hierarchy functioned in the seventeenth century

rural areas of Beauvaisis. After 1970, there was a decline in this type of doctoral dissertations. At a Larger Scale The most interesting examples of geohistory were de veloped at another scale: instead of dealing with the Mediterranean, like Braudel, Rene´ Grousset, a well known essayist of the inter war period had produced a thought provoking book on L’Empire des steppes, in which he explored the impact of long range nomadism on sedentary civilizations from the fifth to the sixteenth century. Maurice Lombard was a specialist on Islam. In L’Islam dans sa premie`re grandeur, he proposed a geographical in terpretation of a well known fact: ‘‘out of the successive phases experienced by Islam, [y], the first was that of its widest extension, the apogee of its power and civilisatory expansion’’ (Lombard, 1971). His interpretation was a simple one: ‘‘The Islamic moment in world history was explained by the construction of a wide economic net work, putting in touch until then distinct realms’’ (Lombard, 1971). Denys Lombard summarized his knowledge of Java in a wonderful book: Le Carrefour javanais. Essai d’histoire globale. The reality in Indonesia was a complex one. In order to decipher it, the best way was to start with the influence of the West since it was so strong from the sixteenth century onwards. Slightly deeper lay a layer of urban and trading communities, whose mental con ceptions and mental maps were shaped by Islam and the Chinese influence. The third and deepest layer was built at the time when the agrarian kingdoms of Central and Eastern Java were shaped by Indian culture, with its concentric cosmographies. In this way, Denys Lombard interpreted the history of Java in terms of spaces and networks, agrarian inland areas, and trading seashores, and renewed significance of crossroads. The work of Pierre Chaunu, a historian of the Spanish colonization of Latin America and Atlantic economy in the modern times, paralleled in many ways that of Fernand Braudel. Geohistory as the Study of Networks The orientation of the Annales school of history changed deeply in the late 1970s and 1980s. Economy lost its prominence. There was a growing interest in everyday life and mental representations. History also became more spatial. The space it explored had nothing to do with the natural environments which appeared so im portant in the analyses of early twentieth century his torians. Space was constantly reshaped and restructured by human agency. It did not appear as a surface, or a set of discrete surfaces: it was increasingly made of nodes and networks.

Geohistory

Bernard Lepetit, who was very influential in this evolution, was a specialist on urban history: he practiced geohistory of an abstract and systematic brand: in a way, he had just moved a step further than Braudel – but his geohistory sounded completely different, without any sense of concreteness. Environments had almost com pletely disappeared from his studies, and with them, the sense of atmosphere. Is it for that reason that geohistory is less popular among historians than a generation ago?

Geographers’ Geohistory A More Dynamic Historical Geography At the time when doctoral dissertations in geography dealt with regional entities, French geographers were also historians. With the development of more systematic orientations, the form of geohistory involved in the preparation of regional theses regressed. During the 1960s, some of the followers of Pierre George advocated a complete separation between the two disciplines. His torical geography became a specialized field, praciticed only by a few geographers, some from the older gener ation, like Roger Dion, and some from the younger, like Xavier de Planhol. Geographers were, however, fascinated by Braudel: hence the renewed interest in the historical dimension of spatial organizations, either at the regional, national, or international scale. Geohistory and Chorems For Roger Brunet, regional analysis had always been the core area of geography. It was mainly among his followers that geohistory developed as a geographical enterprise. For Roger Brunet, linguistic procedures have to be ap plied to geography: just as a sentence may be divided into a set of elementary phonetic units, ‘phonems’, or a set of elementary significant units, ‘sems’, regional organization results from the combination of elementary forms of organizations, or ‘chorems’. In such a perspective, geohistory analyzes chorems and the way their combination evolves, or remains stable, through time. It means that strategic and political factors play an essential part – it was already clear in the first book based on this paradigm, Reynaud’s Une Geóhistoire. La Chine des Printemps et des Automnes. Christian Grataloup is today the main exponent of this new form of geohistory. In his book Lieux d’histoire. Essai de geóhistoire syste´matique, he shows how territorial constructions can be reduced to a few types: the mono concentric model, the polycentric one, and the pro tected angle one. To simplify maps in order to demonstrate the main relations they express is an ex cellent idea. As soon as these simplified elements are used

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to build complex pictures, the advantage of simplicity is lost. The emphasis on topological features is conducive to a weakening of the social and economic dimensions so important in Braudelian geohistory, as well as its cultural significance.

Conclusion Geohistory was closely linked to the Vidalian conception of geographical analysis, with his emphasis on the chan ging significance of environment depending on techni ques. It was present from the beginning of the twentieth century, both among geographers and historians. A divorce occurred between French history and geography at the mid century. Most geographers in creasingly considered themselves specialists of the pre sent time. Thanks to Fernand Braudel, the Vidalian paradigm was not lost to historians: his ambition was to write neither pure history nor pure geography, but to combine them in a dynamic apprehension of spatial or ganization. Braudel started with the Mediterranean and later tried to provide a similar approach for the world economy which began to be built from the time of the Discoveries. At the same time, he tried to capture the reasons that explained the remarkable permanence of some geographical features. Geohistory was not conceived by Braudel as a sub discipline. Some historians and geographers proposed, as Braudel did, synthetic views of places and times. From the 1980s, a more restrictive conception of geohistory de veloped: historians focused increasingly on the role of networks in structuring time; among geographers, the followers of Roger Brunet tried to develop a systematic topology of elementary forms of spatial organizations or chorems. These new developments are interesting, but do not present the fascinating quality of Braudel’s geohistory. Braudelian ideas had a strong influence outside France: Braudel drew a part of his inspiration from German historians; he has very close personal links with Italian, Polish, and Portuguese historians. His ideas about capitalism were diffused in the anglophone world by Immanuel Wallerstein. The Braudelian theme of geohistory was endorsed by some British geographers, such as Alan Baker, and more deeply, by Irish ones (Estyn Evans, for instance). A general discussion of Braudel’s influence is presented by Marino. See also: Historical Geography; Historical Geography, Evolution of.

Further Reading Boulanger, P. and Trochet, J. R. (eds.) (2005). Ou` en est la geógraphie historique? Entre ećonomie et culture. Paris: l’Harmattan.

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Braudel, F. (1949). La Me´diterraneé et le monde me´diterraneén a` l’e´poque de Philippe II. Paris: A. Colin, (Eng. trans. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 2, New York: Harper and Row.). Braudel, F. (1958). Histoire et sciences sociales. La ‘longue dureé’. Annales ESC 13, 725 745. Braudel, F. (1967). Civilisation mate´rielle et capitalisme. Paris: Armand Colin. Braudel, F. (1969). Ecrits sur l’histoire. Paris: Flammarion. Braudel, F. (1979). Civilisation mate´rielle, ećonomie et capitalisme, 3 vols.: 1 Civilisation mate´rielle et capitalisme; 2 Les Jeux de l’ećhange; 3 Le Temps du monde. Paris: Armand Colin. Braudel, F. (1986). L’Identite´ de la France, 3 vols.: 1 Espace et histoire; 2 et 3, Les Hommes et les choses. Paris: Arthaud Flammarion. Braudel, F. (1987). Grammaire des civilisations. Paris, Arthaud; 2e`me e´d. de la contribution de Braudel a` : Baille, S., Braudel, F., Philippe, R., 1963, Le Monde actuel. Histoire et civilisation, Paris, Belin. Brunet, R. (1980). La combinaison des mode`les dans l’analyse spatiale. L’Espace Geógraphique 9(4), 253 265. Burguie`re, A. and Revel, J. (eds.) (1989). L’Espace français. Paris: le Seuil. Chaunu, P. (1969). L’Expansion europeénne. Paris: PUF. Chanu, P. (1974). L’Histoire, science sociale. Paris: SEDES. Claval, P. (1984). The historical dimension of French Geography. Journal of Historical Geography 10(3), 229 245. Claval, P. (1989). La Conqueˆte de l’espace ame´ricain. Paris: Flammarion. Claval, P. (2003). Fernand Braudel 1902 1985. In Armstrong, P. H. & Martin, G. J. (eds.) Geographers. Biobibliographical studies, vol. 22, pp 28 42. New York: Continuum. Claval, P. (2004). La Fabrication du Bre´sil. Paris: Belin. Denis, P. (1920). La Re´publique argentine. Paris: A. Colin. Demangeon, A. (1923). L’Empire britannique. Etude de geógraphie coloniale. Paris: A. Colin. Dion, R. (1990). Le Paysage et la vigne. Essais de geógraphie historique. Paris: Payot. Duby, G. (1941). La Socie´te´ au XIe et XIIe sie`cles dans la re´gion maˆconnaise. Maˆcon: Annales d’Ige´. Dunford, M. (1998). Economies in space and time: Economic geographies of modernization. In Graham, B. (ed.) Modern Europe, pp 53 88. London: Arnold. Febvre, L. (1905). Les re´gions de la France. IV La Franche Comte´, Publications de la Revue de Synthe`se historique, 77p. Paris: Cerf. Febvre, L. (1912a). Philippe II et la Franche Comte´. Paris: Honore´ Champion. Febvre, L. (1912b). Histoire de la Franche Comte´. Paris: Boivin.

Febvre, L. (1922). La Terre et l’e´volution de l’humanite´. Introduction geógraphique a` l’histoire. Paris: La Renaissance du Livre. Friedman, S. W. (1996). Marc bloch, sociology and geography. Encountering changing disciplines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gautier, E. F. (1927). Les Sie`cles obscurs du Maghreb. Paris: Payot. Grataloup, C. (1996). Lieux d’histoire. Essai de geóhistoire syste´matique. Paris Montpellier: Reclus. Goubert, P. (1960). Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 a` 1730. Paris: SEVPEN. Graham, B. (ed.) (1998). Modern Europe. London: Arnold. Grousset, R. (1939). L’Empire des steppes. Paris: Payot. Kisser, S. (1981). The geohistorical structuralism of Fernand Braudel. American Historical Review 86, 63 105. Lepetit, B. (1988). Les Villes dans la France moderne (1740 1840). Paris: Albin Michel. Le Roy Ladurie, E. (1966). Les Paysans du Languedoc. Paris: SEVPEN. Lombard, D. (1990). Le Carrefour javanais. Essai d’histoire globale, 3 vol. Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Lombard, M. (1971). L’Islam dans sa premie`re grandeur. Paris: Flammarion. Lombard, M. (1972). Espaces et re´seaux au Haut Moyen Age. Paris: Masson. Marino, J. A. (ed.) (2002). Early modern history and the social sciences: Testing the limits of Braudel’s mediterranean. Kirksville, MO: Mich. Ozouf Marignier, M. V. (1992). Geógraphie et histoire. In Bailly, A., Ferras, R. & et Pumain, D. (eds.) Encyclope´die de Geógraphie, pp 93 107. Paris: Economica. Planhol, Xavier de, (1988), Geógraphie historique de la France, Paris, Fayard. (eng. trans., (1994). An Historical Geography of France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). Revel, J. (ed.) (1999). Fernand Braudel et l’histoire. Paris: Hachette. Reynaud, A. (1992). Une Geóhistoire. La Chine des Printemps et des Automnes. Montpellier: Reclus. Roncayolo, M. (1989). Histoire et geógraphie: les fondements d’une comple´mentarite´. Annales E.S.C. 44(6), 1427 1434. Sion, J. (1908). Les Paysans de la Normandie orientale. Paris: A. Colin. Taylor, P. (1985). Political geography. World economy, nation state and locality. London: Longman. Vidal de la Blache, P. (1918). Les grandes agglome´rations humaines. Re´gions me´diteraneénnes. Annales de geógraphie 27, 174 187. Vidal de la Blache, P. (1922). Principes de geógraphie humaine. Paris: Armand Colin. Wallerstein, I. (1974 1988). The modern world system, 3 vol. 3, New York: Academic Press.

Geomatics M. Duckham, A. Kealy, and J. Wallace, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Cadastre An authoritative, large-scale parcel map representing the existing uses of land. Geoinformation Geographic information; information that is referenced in some way to locations on the Earth. Geosensor Network A wireless sensor network used to monitor geographic environments. Land Administration The institutions and processes involved in organization of land uses and delivery of security of tenure. Location-Aware Computing The integration of positioning information and mobile computing devices to provide information to a user related to that user’s current location. Location Privacy The right of an individual to determine to what extent information about the location of that individual is communicated to others. Ubiquitous Positioning System A positioning system that can provide positioning information everywhere required by a specific application (e.g., globally or across a wide range of indoor and outdoor environments). Uncertainty An endemic feature of spatial data arising from imperfection in that data, including imprecision, inaccuracy, and vagueness. Wireless Sensor Network Networks of miniature sensor-enabled computing devices connected using short-range wireless communication.

Fundamentals The study of geomatics has its roots in the disciplines of land surveying and mapping. As related topics, such as GIS and visualization, have grown and converged, the use of the term ‘geomatics’ has grown correspondingly, reflecting the increased breadth of topics under investi gation. The term geomatics first emerged in the early 1970s as the French term ‘geómatique’. The similarity between the French and English translation made it es pecially popular in Canada, the country first to adopt the term. The term has now gained widespread acceptance and recognition, and is found in the names of university departments and degrees, industrial companies, and international standards. Numerous different definitions of geomatics have been proposed. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary

(OED) defines geomatics as: The mathematics of the earth; spec. the science of the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, esp. in strumental data, relating to the earth’s surface (OED, 2002.)

A common theme to most existing definitions is that geomatics encompasses all scientific studies of ‘geoin formation’ (information that is referenced some way to locations on the Earth). A definition of geomatics that highlights this fundamental theme, synthesizing elements of many of the existing definitions, can be stated as follows: Geomatics is the scientific study of the structure, prop erties, acquisition, analysis, distribution, communication, and use of geoinformation.

What distinguishes geomatics from the individual sciences that comprise it, is that geomatics is also con cerned with the integrated processes through which geographic data is collected, transformed into infor mation, disseminated, and manipulated to meet user re quirements within specific application domains. In short, geomatics is concerned with the interaction and con vergence of traditionally separate disciplines: geomatics is more than the sum of its components. Although geomatics is an area of scientific investi gation, its growth and development is inextricably linked with the growth and development of enabling technolo gies, in particular global positioning systems (GPSs), geographic information systems (GISs), mobile com puting devices (e.g., personal digital assistants, PDAs), and the Internet. These enabling technologies are not only encouraging the growth of a broad range of geo matics applications and services, such as in car navi gation systems and location based services (LBS) but also their rapid uptake by society. Consequently, many people today routinely use geomatics without being aware. Geomatics has evolved to not only encompass a broad spectrum of fundamental concepts, but also to include the scientific exploration of the processes through which geoinformation is captured, used, and transformed in these integrated applications. Many of the fundamental concepts in geomatics are historically based around those of land surveying and mapping. These include coordinate reference frames, geodetic datums and map projections, measurement ad justment, and error analysis. As geomatics has grown to

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encompass not just the acquisition but also the use of geoinformation, so the fundamentals upon which geo matics is based has expanded to include those of spatial cognition, scientific visualization, and human–computer interaction, as well as more traditional cartography and map design. Bridging the gap between spatial data ac quisition and spatial data use, other fundamental con cepts in geomatics are drawn from geographic information science and spatial computation, including spatial data structures, spatial databases, spatial analysis, and web based and distributed mapping. Figure 1 sum marizes the relationship between geomatics, its defin ition, and its fundamental concepts. Many systems in common use in society now inte grate across the spectrum of geoinformation acquisition, analysis, and application. For example, an in car navi gation system must integrate information from a number of positioning systems, such as GPS and inertial pos itioning, to generate real time information about the location of a vehicle. This location information must then be analyzed and combined with geoinformation about the road network to generate routing information, using a spatial database or GIS. Finally, the combined infor mation must be displayed to the vehicle driver in a concise form that supports his or her spatial decision making without distracting attention from the hazardous task of operating a vehicle. Crucially, the different stages of this integrated process may constrain and influence one another. In the in car navigation example, the quantitative coordinate information produced by the positioning system can present problems to the user of that information. For

humans, qualitative representations of geographic space are often more usable than precise quantitative repre sentations (e.g., ‘turn right’ instead of ‘turn on a bearing of 841’). Consequently, the in car navigation system must encode mechanisms for converting between quantitative coordinate systems and salient qualitative geoinforma tion. Indeed, geomatics is not restricted to measurement based representations of space. The scientific examin ation of the structure, properties, and use of purely qualitative geoinformation, such as proximity (e.g., ‘nearness’), are also important topics within geomatics.

Integrative Topics in Geomatics As discussed previously, geomatics concerns the inte grated processes by which geoinformation is collected, transformed, disseminated, and used. A variety of topics emerge directly from this integrated process, including ubiquitous positioning systems, digital cadastral data bases, location aware computing, and wireless geosensor networks. In addition, long standing topics, such as lo cation privacy and uncertainty, have gained new rele vance and urgency as a consequence of this integration. Ubiquitous Positioning Systems A ubiquitous positioning system aims to provide pos itioning information everywhere that is required by a specific application. While many sophisticated pos itioning technologies currently exist, for many appli cations no single solution is independently able to meet

Geomatics: Integrated processes through which geoinformation is transformed and used

Scientific visualization

Human−computer interaction

Cartography and mapping

Communication and use of geoinformation Spatial cognition

Distributed and web-based mapping

Spatial analysis

Spatial databases and GIS

Structure, properties, analysis, and distribution of geoinformation Spatial data structures

Error analysis

Measurement adjustment

Geodetic datums and map projections

Coordinate reference frames

Acquisition of geoinformation

Figure 1 Geomatics as the integrated process of geoinformation transformation and use, and the fundamental topics and concepts that comprise geomatics.

Geomatics

all these requirements. For example, in outdoor pos itioning domains where there is a clear view of the sky, GPS can offer high precision and accuracy positioning at a global scale. The availability of additional satellite in frastructures, such as the European Galileo and Russian Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), is helping to extend the coverage and robustness of GPS based positioning. However, the physical properties of GPS signals means that signal attenuation and multipath errors inevitably limit the reliability and availability of GPS in locations where the sky is partially or completely obscured, as in urban canyons or indoor environments. Other technologies that do not suffer from these limitations do exist. However, each of these possesses its own inherent weaknesses. In populated areas with cel lular phone network coverage, the cell ID of mobile phones and other devices provides positioning infor mation, albeit at low levels of precision (typically to within 200 m at best). Enhanced cell phone networks can provide greater precision, but cannot offer as extensive coverage as conventional cell phone networks. Inertial navigation systems (INS) suffer from accumulations of errors over time, making them unreliable if used in isolation. Although some studies have shown that pos itioning using wireless fidelity (WiFi) and other short range wireless radio frequency networks can match or even outperform the accuracy and precision of GPS in urban environments, these techniques suffer from limited and inhomogeneous coverage. For many applications, the ability to provide a seamless positioning capability be tween outdoor and indoor environments is a problem that can only be solved through the integration of indi vidual technologies.

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vagueness (the existence of boundary cases in infor mation). Vagueness in geoinformation is exemplified by geographic concepts and relations like ‘mountain’, ‘for est’, ‘bay’, and ‘near’. Many of the approaches to repre senting and computing with uncertainty in geomatics are statistical (e.g., using standard deviation to measure im precision in the location of a point). However, non statistical approaches, such as fuzzy sets, rough sets, and other nonclassical logics, are also widely used, particu larly in the representation and analysis of vagueness in geographic information (Figure 2). Another topic closely aligned with uncertainty in geomatics is that of quality control (QC). This is par ticularly important given the pervasiveness of geomatics technologies across society. For example, users of GPS rely on the positions determined by low cost receivers for a number of leisure applications. Naı¨ve users rely on these solutions and often have no method for deter mining their validity. This is even more significant for applications that are safety critical such as aircraft landing systems. QC relies on the ability of the meas urement system to not only maintain the accuracy and precision of the solution but also the integrity, that is, the ability of the system to inform a user of a potential failure before it occurs. Integrity is enhanced through the

Uncertainty Uncertainty in geoinformation is a topic that cuts across the entire spectrum of different domains within geo matics. The measurement sciences, including geodesy, surveying, and photogrammetry, have developed sophis ticated stochastic techniques for reducing uncertainty through the combination of different information sour ces. Storing and managing the uncertainty associated with geographic information has also been extensively studied in GIS. Similarly, cartographers have studied the communication of that uncertainty to users using maps and computer visualization. Uncertainties can be introduced at every stage of the integrated process of data collection, transformation, manipulation, and dissemination. As a result, under standing and allowing for uncertainty in geomatics ap plications is especially important. Three fundamental types of uncertainty are commonly identified in geo matics: inaccuracy (a lack of correctness in information); imprecision (a lack of detail in information); and

b

R a Figure 2 The fundamental types of uncertainty are inaccuracy, imprecision, and vagueness. The statement ‘the city of Exeter is located at point b’ is inaccurate: in actuality the location of Exeter is more correctly represented by point ‘a’. The statement ‘the city of Exeter is located in region R’ (the county of Devon) is accurate, but less precise giving less information about exactly where Exeter is located. The statement ‘the city of Exeter is located in the south of England’ is accurate, but vague since the ‘south of England’ has no precisely defined boundary. All vague information is also imprecise, but imprecise information is not necessarily vague (e.g., Devon has precisely defined boundaries, so ‘Exeter is in Devon’ is imprecise but not vague).

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availability of redundant measurements which can be increased through the robust integration of technologies. Digital Cadastral Databases Land administration systems fundamentally rely on the identification of land parcels to support legal, tradeable property rights. Identification relies on surveying tech niques to determine the boundaries of parcels on the ground, in buildings, underground, or even in marine environments. When the parcels are systematically de scribed in a reliable parcel map, a cadastre is the result. Digitization of the cadastre results in a digital cadastral database (DCDB). The key characteristics of a modern DCDB include: the large scales of its data (typically 1:500–1:1000 in • urban areas with 1:2000–1:10 000 in rural areas) cov

• •

ering very small areas of land, such as street blocks or local government areas; the seamless horizontal or 2 D merger of the areas to reflect actual urban and rural land uses of a country, road networks, and other built features; and a data collection process which relies on rigorous methods to measure and mark the earth used by surveyors who establish the legal boundaries of parcels.

A DCDB is vital for modern land administration and sustainable land use. DCDBs form the major land in formation component in a country’s spatial data infra structure (SDI). The digital capture, storage, and use of cadastral information is therefore reliant on the inte grated technologies and processes within geomatics. DCDBs must be integrated with other mapping and topographic information held in GIS, and with updates to that information, for example, resulting from subdivision or resurvey of parcels. Information about land rights, land values, and land uses held in a DCDB must be accessible in a form that nontechnical users, from land adminis trators to the general public, can comprehend. In the future, the representation and manipulation of parcels in three dimensions (width, depth, and height) will be critical to the development of the next generation of ‘3 D cadastre’, suitable for management of modern cities. Location-Aware Computing The integration of portable, real time positioning sys tems (such as GPS) and low cost, powerful mobile computing technology (such as PDAs) has led to the development of location aware computing. Location aware computing systems use a mobile user’s current position to provide more relevant information services to that user. The primary application for location aware computing is LBS, such as navigation systems and lo cation based games.

Location aware computing systems must overcome many technical challenges, for example, performing the complex calculations necessary for positioning and geoinformation processing using low power, limited capacity mobile computing devices. But, in addition to the technical challenges, location aware computing has exposed many new and fundamental scientific problems in geomatics connected with the integration of pos itioning and mobile computing. For example, understanding and allowing for un certainty in geoinformation is critical in location aware computing. Unlike conventional GIS, where users re motely manipulate information, users of location aware computing systems are typically interacting with the geographic environment about which they are receiving information. Uncertainties of positioning systems (such as inaccurate locations), in the stored data (such as im precise map data), and in the user’s interaction with the system (such as in a vague query for ‘nearby’ points of interest) can result in location based services being delivered to the user that are clearly contradicted by the user’s own interaction with the geographic environment. The interaction itself also demands new ways of presenting information to the user. Conventional map based visual interfaces are often inappropriate in lo cation aware computing environments, where small screens and low power devices place severe limitations on conventional cartographic techniques for representing geographic space. In some circumstances, such visual interfaces may even be hazardous (for example, where map based interfaces distract a driver’s visual attention away from the task of avoiding collisions). Consequently, investigating new ways to communicate salient geoin formation to location based service users is an important focus for geomatics research. Developing new ways of communicating salient geoinformation to human users demands an under standing of the entire process of capture, transformation, and use. Textual, iconic, and verbal communication modes are often more suited to location aware com puting environments than traditional visual or carto graphic communication modes. Qualitative and vague spatial concepts (like ‘north’ and ‘near’) are common in human textual and verbal communication. Location based services interfaces increasingly aim to be more usable by presenting the user with information that is ‘cognitively ergonomic’ in the sense that it is closer to human spatial concepts and so requires less cognitive effort to process. As already noted, such aims often necessitate the definition of processes for transforming the quantitative coordinate information generated by most positioning systems into qualitative geoinfor mation about a user’s relative location in geographic space.

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Location Privacy Location privacy concerns the right of an individual to determine to what extent information about the location of that individual is communicated to others. The inte gration of positioning systems with mobile computing devices enables frequently updated, high precision, and accurate information about the location of an individual to be generated and processed. The development of wireless communication technology and distributed, web based GIS architectures means that personal infor mation about an individual’s location can be disseminated more rapidly and widely than ever before possible. Understanding and protecting an individual’s location privacy is therefore of critical importance in society, as location area computing systems are becoming more and more familiar. The topic of location privacy is very broad and en compasses many aspects that extend beyond the domain of geomatics, such as the legal status of location privacy or the extent to which societal attitudes to location privacy are changing. However, there are still ways in which geomatics is contributing to the science of location privacy. For example, one approach to the problem of protecting an individual’s location privacy is to delib erately degrade the precision and accuracy of location information, termed ‘obfuscation’ or ‘spatial cloaking’. The individual can control how much information about their location they choose to reveal in order to receive some useful information service. Figure 3 gives a simple example of a situation where an individual can receive

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high quality information about the nearest point of interest based on low quality information about her lo cation. The process of degrading real time location in formation and making the best use of low quality information about a user’s location presents some im portant theoretical and technical challenges for geomatics. Wireless Sensor Networks Advances in sensor technology, coupled with the ad vances in positioning technologies, mobile computing, and wireless communication discussed above, have led to the development of miniaturized, sensor enabled com puter systems. A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of these miniature sensor enabled computing devices connected using short range wireless communi cation network. WSNs used to monitor information in geographic space are sometimes referred to as ‘geosensor networks’. Although technological advances have made WSNs possible, these technological advances expose many new and fundamental scientific challenges. Plans for dense WSNs with thousands or millions of nodes will provide geoinformation at much greater spatial and temporal granularity than has ever previously been possible. Making sense of this overwhelming volume of spatial data is motivating the development of new information processing paradigms. For example, the huge volume of readily accessible real time data generated by WSNs means that storing all this data becomes impractical. One approach to this problem is ‘stream processing’, where

Ichiban

Remote locationbased information service provider

A: "Yo! Sushi" Yo! Sushi Sushi Ten Q: "I am in City Center Park. What is the closest sushi restaurant?" City Center Park

Pedestrian

Figure 3 To protect her location privacy, a pedestrian might deliberately degrade the quality of information about her location generated by her location-aware computing device, termed ‘obfuscation’. In the example above, the pedestrian has degraded her personal location information from precise GPS coordinates to the lower-precision information that she is in the ‘City Center Park’. However, such low-quality positional information can still potentially be used to receive high-quality information services, such as finding the closest sushi restaurant from a remote location-based service provider. Modified from Duckham, M. and Kulik, L. (2006). Location privacy and location-aware computing. In Drummond, J., Billen, R., Joao, E. & Forrest, D. (eds.) Dynamic & mobile & GIS: Investigating change in space and time, pp 35 51. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

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information generated is automatically searched for sali ent patterns and summarized. Only the salient patterns are stored and reported to users, while the raw data is simply discarded. Another approach is to perform partial processing and aggregation of information within the WSN. Thus, each node in the network locally processes the information generated by itself and its neighbors, before passing this partially processed information on to other nodes. Such new modes of spatial computation, with partial processing distributed throughout the network, are at odds with the traditional geoinformation processing paradigm in GIS, where information is collated within a single system before being processed. Outlook New technologies mean that society’s access to geoin formation is growing across a broad range of applications. Correspondingly, the need for integrated processes to support these applications means that geomatics is also growing. The definition of geomatics provided at the beginning of this entry relates exclusively to geoinfor mation (information that is referenced in some way to locations on the Earth). However, we conclude by ac knowledging the increasing range of applications that apply the techniques within geomatics to spatial, but non geographic information. For example, the creation of spatially accurate virtual worlds found in many computer games, architectural systems, and archaeological re constructions, utilize many of the integrated techniques found in geomatics. Similarly, accurate 3 D measurement, modeling, and visualization of objects like teeth (used in forensic dentistry to identify criminals in violent crimes) and motor vehicles (used in crash analysis to determine the cause of a road accident) also rely on geomatics based techniques applied to non geographic spatial domains. See also: Geovisualization; Integrated Spatial Data Infrastructure; Photogrammetry/Aerial Photography; Spatial Databases; Surveying.

Further Reading Duckham, M. and Kulik, L. (2006). Location privacy and location aware computing. In Drummond, J., Billen, R., Joao, E. & Forrest, D. (eds.) Dynamic & mobile GIS: Investigating change in space and time, pp 35 51. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Economic Commission for Europe Geneva, Land Administration in the UNECE Region Development Trends and Main Principles. http:// www.unece.org/env/documents/2005/wpla/ECE HBP 140 e.pdf (accessed on 18 July 2007). Retscher, G. and Kealy, A. (2005). Ubiquitous positioning technologies for modern intelligent navigation systems. Journal of Navigation 59(1), 91 103. Schiller, J. and Voisard, A. (eds.) (2004). Location based services. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann. Shi, W., Fisher, P. F. and Goodchild, M. (eds.) (2002). Spatial data quality. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Stefanidis, A. and Nittel, S. (eds.) (2004). GeoSensor networks. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Stoter, J. E. and van Oosterom, P. (2006). 3D Cadastre in an international context: Legal, organizational, and technological aspects. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Wallace, J. and Williamson, I. (2006). Building land markets. Journal of Land Use Policy 23, 123 135. Williamson, I. P., Rajabifard, A. and Feeney, M A. E. F. (eds.) (2003). Developing spatial data infrastructures: From concept to reality. London: Taylor & Francis. Worboys, M. F. (2001). Nearness relations in environmental space. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 15(7), 633 651. Worboys, M. F. and Duckham, M. (2004). GIS: A computing perspective (2nd edn). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Zhao, F. and Guibas, L. (2004). Wireless sensor networks: An information processing approach. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.

Relevant Websites http://www.cig acsg.ca Canadian Institute of Geomatics. http://www.fig.net Cadastre 2014, FIG. http://www.gps.gov Global Positioning, System Serving the World. http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/ GPS, Current GPS Constellation, US Naval Observatory. http://www.esa.int Navigation, ESA.

Geopolitics P. Reuber, University of Mu¨nster, Mu¨nster, Germany & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Critical Geopolitics Rooted in post-structuralism, critical geopolitical inquiry is, at its core, concerned with the operation, interaction, and contestation of geopolitical discourses. Discourse The setting or domain in which words are used and take on specific meanings. Geopolitics The study of the impact of geographical distributions and divisions on the conduct of world politics. Nation-State A state in which the territorial boundaries also enclose a claimed nation which the state represents. National Socialism German political movement initiated in 1920 with the organization of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The movement culminated in the establishment of the Third Reich, the totalitarian German state, led by the dictator Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1945. Post-Structuralism Influenced by Heidegger and Nietzsche, French philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault suggest that all text has ambiguity and because of this the possibility of a final and complete interpretation is impossible. This means first that language and society are shaped by rule-governed systems and second that it is impossible to step outside of discourse and survey the situation objectively.

Introduction Geopolitics – that is nothing ‘real’. Nothing ‘real’ from an essentialistic point of view. Geopolitics is a social con struct, a sort of social practice, a discursive formation depending on what theoretical perspective you take on this phenomenon. No wonder that there is no solid core of knowledge in this respect, geopolitics seems to be fluid, runs through your fingers. As intangible as it might be, a significant impact it still has. This phenomenon is neither harmless nor innocent. It is highly politically relevant. Wars are led in the name of geopolitics. People are driven out and murdered to serve geopolitics. It is a clear proof for how discursive constructions turn into social practice, how represen tations and imaginations grounded in discourse turn into powerful instruments of political actions.

What exactly is geopolitics, though? What is so fas cinating about it? Why does it have such an impact? In order to answer such questions the line of argumentation follows two consecutive sections: In the first section, ‘Geopolitics as a discursive con struction – some theoretical remarks’ the nature of geo politics is considered from a conceptual perspective. The goal is to refine the nexus – created in terminology and practice of geopolitics – between society, space, and power; the nexus which is not essentially preexistent but that forms a fragment of the hegemonic discourses of modernity and has a powerful impact on social practice. These details are considered in subsections ‘The nexus between society and space as a basic element of the geopolitical imagination’ ‘The nation state as the fundamental ‘‘territorial trap’’ of the geopolitical im agination’, and ‘Post structuralism and discourse analy sis as a basis for the deconstruction of geopolitical representations’. Against this background the next section, ‘The tidal waves of discourse: geopolitics and geopolitical repre sentations in different historical periods’, presents ex amples from the history and development of geopolitical discourses to show how and based on what historically situated framings geopolitical representations develop and grow their specific impact. The historical comparison shows how little the geopolitical regionalizations have in common even when they frequently choose to justify their social legitimacy and authority with reference to an ultimate ‘scientific objectivity’. From the beginning of the last century, when the term ‘geopolitics’ itself was first used by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjelleń, the range of explanations widely extends. The subsections ‘Geopolitics as a discourse in the historical context of biological determinism and geodeterminism at the end of the nineteenth century’, ‘Karl Haushofer and geopolitics in national socialism’, ‘Cold War geopolitics’, ‘The pluralization of geopolitical representation after the end of the Cold War’, and ‘The new spatial organization of power in geopolitical representations after 9/11’ provide an overview of the subject.

Geopolitics as a Discursive Construction– Some Theoretical Remarks From a political–geographical perspective, geopolitics can be seen as all those elements of discourse and/or social practice that deal with the construction of large scale regional up to global worldviews. The expression

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geopolitics is semantically plurivalent and according to theoretical perspective comprises: 1. geopolitical discourses as representations of space and power; 2. geo policymaking of the political actors; 3. geo policymaking of scientists, consultants (in inter national relations (IR), political geography, ‘geos trategic analysts’ in scientific think tanks, etc.), and the media; and 4. the scientific deconstruction of geopolitics and geopolitical imaginations from a post structuralist perspective. These four aspects, which overlap and unify in the word geopolitics, show not only the broad range of contents that is represented by this expression, but also points out the different social groups that are engaged in the field of geopolitics – from politics over political advisors and the media to scientific consultants and critical scientists. This heterogeneity also expresses in the various the oretical approaches that form the conceptual basis of geopolitics. These approaches partly vary to such a great extent that they lead to diametrically opposed forms of scientific analysis, practical recommendations, and pol itical positioning. What scientists publish under the label of geopolitics today reaches from latently geodeterminist over positivist and structuralist to post structuralist approaches. This variety of concepts has made geopolitics a topic in various scientific disciplines (mainly in the fields of IR and political geography). Due to this variety geopolitics has quite heterogeneous options of political influence – according to the conceptual orientation. Considering the historical development these options reach from phrasing hawky, demagogic Darwinian policy of living space (Lebensraum) at the beginning and middle of the last century to nowadays’ emancipated criticism of the pol itics of geopolitics. The Nexus between Society and Space as a Basic Motive of the Geopolitical Imagination From a theoretical point of view, geopolitics is the dis cursive coupling of social and spatial categories. The decisive point in linking social and territorially defined elements lies in the resulting ‘purification of space’. By this kind of discursive practice the ‘self ’ and the ‘other’ is framed along spatial categories and provided with bor ders. This results in the construction of culturally/so cially homogeneous territorial groups. Such constru ctions can be found as geopolitical representations in all historical epochs (see below). As much as their contents may vary according to the hegemonic discourses of their time, (e.g., if they exploit expressions like race, class, or cultural diversity when constructing putative

homogeneous spaces), as uniform their decisive mode of distinction is in the construction of homogenous social spaces that separate from the other. In this way, the politics of geopolitics is a structuring element in social negotiation processes and conflicts. Geopolitical imaginations offer the option to society to find something like orientation, straightforwardness, and assumed safety in the contingent diversity of being. They are historically alterable narratives and – apart from stable phases in which they may appear to be virtually objective formations – are subject to constant negotiation and renegotiation. From the geographical perspective space and place are of crucial importance in the con struction of geopolitical representations. The Nation-State as the Fundamental ‘Territorial Trap’ of the Geopolitical Imagination Concerning this matter in the epoch of modernity, the nation state advanced to be the territorial masterframe for countless political strategies of containment and ex clusion. The nation state was the basis of Friedrich Ratzel’s biologistic Staatsorganizismus. He represented the territorial container of the nation state as the putative logical outcome of a corresponding development of human history. Even though Benedict Anderson’s long standing conceptualization of nations as ‘imagined com munities’ has once more characterized them as social constructions, the nation state order has become such a persistently successful framing that it is taken for granted as a kind of ‘realistic’ entity in the discourses on identity over the last two centuries. Even in the times of increasing globalization its effect appears to hold its ground – despite the undeniable and partly grave power loss to the transnational networks of ‘global governance’. John Agnew calls this stiff fixation on the space con tainer of the nation state a ‘territorial trap’. This ex pression characterizes the unreflected taking over of the concept of nation states, or more precisely, a virtual ontologization of the territorial principle as a decisive framing of social, especially political structuring. Ac cording to Agnew, the territorial trap is based on three main assumptions that must be analytically separated but overlap in social practice. The territorial ‘logic’ of mod ernity expresses in the fact that 1. the sovereignty of the modern state requires defined regional authorities; 2. the internal and foreign policy are strictly separated; and 3. the territorial state serves as the spatial container of national societies. Based on these assumptions the geopolitical order ap pears as a patchwork of separated, secluded, and in dependent entities, implicitly marginalizing the fact that

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all individual elements of such a territorial structure are socially constructed and – when looking at the longe dureé of historic eras – are constantly renegotiated. Post-Structuralism and Discourse Analysis as a Basis for the Deconstruction of Geopolitical Representations Though scientific methods of analyzing geopolitical representations are discussed in further detail in other contributions of this handbook (compare keywords such as critical geopolitics, political geography, post colonialism, geographical imaginations, postfeminism, etc.), it may be helpful for understanding the following reconstructions of historic geopolitical narratives to mention at least some core aspects and basic principles out of the wider field of theoretical and methodological reflections concerning this matter. Most of the theoretical framework can be found in post structuralist theories, especially in discourse an alysis and semiotic analysis. The deconstruction of geopolitical representations in particular works against the reemergence of strongly traditional, sometimes practically natural determinist ideas, for which geo politics is the doctrine of the influence of the physical space on the politics of a state. Post structuralist rea soning in political geography show how such a con ceptualization of geopolitics leads to an ideological as well as an epistemological cul de sac. Post structuralist approaches are characterized by a general shift of per spective. They take the geopolitical discourses them selves as the object of their analysis. The issues to address from this point of view are: (1) the construction of discursive and cartographic representations and (2) how these representations intersect with political and social imaginations. Beyond such lines of research more strictly oriented to post structuralist discourse analysis, we can find a broad range of approaches that consider geopolitical narratives and imaginations more as a discursive strategy of intellectuals of statecraft serving toward the legitimization and achievement of their aims (critical geopolitics). Both approaches follow a constructivist perspective and a linguistic (respectively semiotic) turn which re gards geopolitical representations as constructions using geographical semantics, metaphors, symbols, etc. Such a perspective sharpens the awareness of the nor mative character of competing imaginations. The greater the extent to which their relativity and their subtle role become apparent, the less they can fulfill their occa sionally problematic role in the geopolitical debate on power and space – both in political discourse itself and in the polarization and instrumentalization of public opinion.

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The Tidal Waves of Discourse: Geopolitics and Geopolitical Representations in Different Historical Periods The following analysis of selected geopolitical repre sentations follows a more post structuralist approach which directs its interest toward the discursive pro duction of space. Echoing Said’s Orientalism and Gre gory’s Geographical imaginations geopolitical discourses are regarded in Foucault’s sense as linguistic formations of power and space. Against this background, it becomes apparent how much geopolitical imaginations and representations are situated within their social and/or discursive context. This means that geopolitics is subject to change that – from a discourse theoretic perspective – takes place along the slow oscillating of hegemonic discursive for mations. In order to show this, some basic elements of the geopolitical framings of different historical eras are shortly and exemplarily discussed in the following. Even in this shortened form it becomes clear to what extent geopolitical representations – from Ratzel’s bio and geodeterminism to Huntington’s cultural deterministic Clashing Civilizations – are interwoven with the hege monic discourses of their times in order to construct the corresponding historical specific context of society, space, and power. To illustrate these correlations the following phases (periods/eras) will be discussed: 1. discursive establishment of the sciences of political geography and geopolitics in the historical context of biological determinism and geodeterminism at the end of the nineteenth century; 2. political use of the (scientific) geopolitical discourse in context with imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, and national socialism; 3. discursive framing of the foreign policy and IR in the post war phase (Cold War); and 4. development of new geopolitical representations after the end of the Cold War.

Geopolitics as a Discourse in the Historical Context of Biological Determinism and Geodeterminism at the End of the Nineteenth Century Generally, it was argued that geopolitical representations have always been part of the hegemonic discourse of their time. Nevertheless, the kind of geopolitics that developed at the end of the nineteenth century is special in this regard for two reasons: first, this period is characterized by powerful discursive framings of territorial order. This expressed in political everyday life where the concept of the nation state emerged to be one of the most important

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structuring principles of society. The nation state – fol lowing Foucault’s considerations about the development of governmentality – had successively formed to be a crucial element in replacing the feudalistically organized society by a civil society. In the following period of a state centered imperialism and colonialism, a geopolitics of na tion states and their global areas of influence established. Second, this period lies in a phase in which naturalist and biologistic narratives in European societies for the first time in history widely diffused into the discourse of the whole society. At the same time they worked as key concepts in science and thus greatly influenced newly developing disciplines, for example, sociology and – as the science of space – geography. For the development of geopolitical framings it was essential that spatial and biologistic fragments of dis course began to interact. Some examples can demonstrate this. As Schultz states geopolitics is founded on the tra ditional natural geographical concept, which, for ex ample, is reflected in Herder’s construction of nations as largely influenced by climatic geography. ‘‘Nature pro duces families; the most natural state therefore is a people with a national character. y A people is a plant of nature as well as a family, but one with many branches’’. (Herder cited by Schultz, 1998: 87) Ritter, one of the founders of modern geography, shows a similar understanding in combining fragments of spatial and naturalistic discursive fragments. In general, ideas concerning the power of space began to enter man’s conception of the world at the end of the nineteenth century. As Windelbrand so aptly sums it up in 1809: ‘‘No matter what part of the earth we observe, we find religion fighting against religion, denomination against de nomination, race against race, people against people in a tougher conflict than ever before. As the last century rationalised, ours wants to nationalize.’’ It is not surprising that such a construction of geo politics in the political contexts of its time fell on fertile ground. As a scientific support to imperialism geopolitics gained sovereign tasks rather quickly. Consequently, the global space was segmented, conquered, and measured. Quantifying the earth according to exact space measures such as circles of latitude and degrees of longitude was only possible from the imagination of the world ‘‘... as a differentiated, integrated, hierarchically ordered whole’’ (Gregory, 1998). Geopolitical constructions served this imagination by dichotomizing along and with the help of spatial demarcations. The developing parts of the world became the excluded Other: West against East, North against South, Orient against Occident, and sea power against land power – these are only a small part of the broad range of such dichotomizations. Some of these binary imaginations of the nineteenth century achieved prominence that partly can still be found in geopolitical discourses today. For example, the

construction of an antagonism between sea and land, between sea power and land power, formed the basis for Mackinder’s (1861–1947) model that becomes an im portant part of Anglo American geopolitics (Figure 1). In 1904, he presented a dichotomy of power to the Royal Geographical Society that separated the world in states of sea power and land power and thus formed the basis of many geopolitical imaginations still valid today. In this case, Russia is seen as the power center of the continental empire – the heartland (‘pivot area’) – without sufficient waterways to the ocean. All around it there is a seam of areas that do have access to the seas. They stand out due to their conflict causing middle positions and are subject to both oceanic and continental impacts. Around this seam the rest of the world is arranged being purely under oceanic influence (rimland). Among these we find Japan, Great Britain, and the United States. The ‘balance of power’ within this dual world system is the main drive of any development in the field of foreign policy. The conflicts are mainly carried out in the rupture zones. That is why Mackinder considers Eurasia to be the pivot of world politics. For him, controlling this area means reigning the world. From the perspective of the sea powers he sees the danger for them to be reigned by the land power center sooner or later. He confronted the sea based British Empire with this horror scenario. The success of his representation is therefore mainly due to the construction of a discourse of threat and security understandable for the British Empire. Nicholas Spykman (1893–1943) used this threat and security scenario for the American administration in the run up to World War II. In contrast to Mackinder’s at tention to the heartland Spykman emphasized the rim lands. In order to prevent predominance of an individual power in the area of the rimlands he thought it was ne cessary to pursue an interventionist foreign policy. Otherwise the security of the USA would be at stake. This imagination was to become a central element of the geopolitical discourse during the Cold War. The geopolitical representations in the field of German geopolitics in the late 19th cnetury were com pletely different. They were based on the determinist concept of an exceptional geographical position of the German Reich. This thinking led Sombart to unanimous rejection of anything that was somehow close to English or Western European thinking or feeling. The aversion expressed here was directed toward liberalism, positiv ism, and subjectivism. These concepts were opposed by the ideas of community, entireness, and organism. In this nationalist oriented climate the German protagonists of geopolitics – Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer – developed their geopolitical representations. They were so successful because they fit to the prevailing discourse, and so the way from their imaginations to Hitler’s geo politics of living space (Lebensraum) was not very far.

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Source: Mackinder 1904 cited to Ó′Tuathail 1996 modified Draft: Reuber a. Wolkersdorfer Graphic: Schroer

Figure 1 Geopolitical representations of intellectuals of statecraft: Mackinder’s natural seats of power. Modified from Reuber & Wolkersdorfer, 2004.

The State as an Organism – Ratzel’s Biodeterministic Construction of German Geopolitics The basic element of Ratzel’s mode of construction consisted of the nation states’ dependency on nature dynamic, namely, the biological plan of natural selection. Ratzel (1844–1904), who had moved from zoology to geography in his scientific career, built his political geography entirely on a positivistic natural scientific conception of the world. His construction of the rela tionship between politics and space is determined by the physical basis of the nation state. Societies, culture, and economics and their effects on the nation state are hardly dealt with in his discussions. Another crucial point in his construction is his biological analogy of the nation state as an ‘indigenous organism’. The nation state in this re spect is attributed with the traits of a living being, an organism that only displays health and strength when it is capable of growth, in other words, territorial expansion. This form of geopolitics according to Darwin’s hypoth esis legitimates every form of imperialism and ex pansionism. Following Ratzel, as a result of a growing and healthy population, a nation state needs more space to continue the development of its civilization. In this manner, a struggle for more space automatically develops between nation states.

Repeatedly Ratzel makes a close connection between the growing population and the growing space and puts this claim into practice regarding the German Reich in the run up to World War I: Wherever you look space is won and space is lost. Set back and progress everywhere; there will always be reigning and serving peoples. Even the peoples must be ambos and hammer. In no case Germany must limit itself to Europe; as a world power among world powers it can only hope to protect the ground for its people that it needs to grow. (translated from Ratzel, 1906: 377)

That is how Ratzel delivered with arguments of sci entific repute the geopolitical basis for the colonial policy and fleetpolitics of the German Empire. Even after World War I the connection of politics and scientific geopolitical representations carried out here led to a fast expansion of political geography at the universities. With his discourse of the ‘logic’ of growing space Ratzel gave the essential impulse for the development of the ideology of living space (Lebensraum). Thus Ratzel’s theory could not only be connected to the classic concept of geography but also to the ideology of living space of the Third Reich. The reorientation to race as the decisive power in history was already started there.’’ (translated from Schultz, 1998: 217)

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The term ‘geopolitics’ itself was first used by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjelleń. For him, geo politics implied teaching about the state as a geographical organism or as an appearance in space. His geopolitics builds upon Ratzel’s ideas and forms the basis for es tablishing geopolitical discourses both in science and politics. Karl Haushofer and Geopolitics in National Socialism Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) is of particular interest be cause in his person, as well as in the history of his family, the discursive significance of the geopolitical concept can be clearly portrayed. In this respect, Haushofer and his family are of interest within the line of argumentation in this article because of the effect on the development of the geopolitical discourse in Germany as well as in the USA. Karl Haushofer, who considered Ratzel his mentor, shaped the German geopolitical discourse more than any other individual in that time. During World War I he was an officer, rising to the rank of major general. After re lease from the military after World War I, his career as a professor of geography at the University of Munich (1921–39) began. He published many books and papers, was editor of the Zeitschrift fu¨r Geopolitik (Journal of Geo politics, 1924–44), and president of the German Academy. Haushofer’s position in the Third Reich was shaped by his close relationship with Rudolf Hess and by the pol itical standing of his sons Heinz and Albrecht in the Nazi regime. Through these contacts the geopolitical repre sentations of Karl Haushofer had direct influence on the policy of the Third Reich and became eminently powerful. So in the years between World War I and II geopolitical representations achieved, at least in Germany, a hegemonic position in discourse. For this development, Haushofer’s chief pupil, Rudolf Hess, had special significance. Through the extensive contact between Hess and his mentor Haushofer, which among other things led to Haushofer hiding Hess for a few months at his place after the Putsch in Munich had failed, Haushofer’s geopolitical imaginations became part of the Nazi ideology. During Hitler’s and Hess’ period of arrest in Landsberg, the ideological basis of national so cialism originated with Haushofer’s active participation: The myth of the Fu¨hrer and the demand for more Le bensraum (living space) got into the writings in Mein Kampf. That Haushofer did not appear more visibly within the national socialist government was, according to many historians, a result of seeing himself as an emi nence rise in the background. The historical evaluation of Haushofer’s role, and the surviving myth surrounding him, will surely continue. Interestingly enough, the allegorical figure of Haushofer

offered an opposite picture in German and Anglo American historical reconstructions. Especially in American reconstructions, all geopolitics in the German speaking sphere seemed to be developed through Haushofer. As a consequence, part of the American geopolitics of the post war era originated from the myth around the Geopolitical Institute and its director, Haushofer. At least here, Haushofer was considered the ‘scientific brain’ behind Hitler. His discursive excesses even got as far as Hollywood, where in an American propaganda film Haushofer and his Geopolitical Institute are represented as the headquarters of national socialism. ´ Tuathail shows in his Critical Geopolitics, Haushofer As O and his imaginary Geopolitical Institute in Munich were considered the beginning of the conviction that ‘‘... geo politics was something that America had to know.’’ It was assumed that there were hundreds of scientists oc cupied with forming strategic designs of national socialist expansion. When the Americans liberated Munich in 1945 their special mission was to locate this institute at the University of Munich. Reality remained well below the level of the visitors’ expectations. Instead of the Geopolitical Institute, they only found a professor’s office. The American geopolitician Edmund A. Walsh, who was assigned to participate in the Nuremberg Trials, could not conceal his admiration for Haushofer and hence did not criticize the mode of geopolitical repre sentation itself, but accused Haushofer of pursuing the wrong type of geopolitics. His demand for a ‘true instead of a false’ geopolitics locates the discipline within the democratic structure of Western society and can be ex plained at the level of modernizing basic theoretical assumptions. Cold War Geopolitics The years after 1945 were characterized by new forms of geopolitical representations that developed to a much greater extent than before in the scientific and political think tanks of the USA. Their goal was mainly a reframing of the American relation to the Eurasian continent. From the perspective of discourse theory, it is interesting to see to what extent these new represen tations rely on long standing geopolitical imaginations like Mackinder and Spykman. They incorporated the old argument of a ‘natural’ line of conflict between a Western sea power (now the USA) and a central land power (now the Russian Federation). The practical consequence of such a geopolitical representation was the assumption that the political situation after 1945 did not allow for a stable order on the Eurasian continent without the per manent American presence. This was to prevent the ex pansion of the Soviet land power. The geopolitical construction of Mackinder’s heartland theory is more

Geopolitics

than apparent here – it is the core element of the new geopolitical doctrine of the Cold War. The prevailing geopolitical representation led to a clear change or realignment of American foreign policy. You can distinguish here: 1. the post war period with the Truman doctrine that brought the intervention decisions in favor of the outer margins of the Eurasian continent. They became apparent, for example, in the American engagement in the conflicts in Germany, Turkey, and Vietnam and 2. the relaxation of tensions phase under Nixon/Kis singer with its policy of opening toward China as the beginning of a genuine American geopolitics of ‘realism’. The geopolitical imagination of an upcoming ‘Cold War’ was first formulated by the American journalist Walter Lippmann in 1947. The discursive construction of geo political enmity was charged with ideological opposites. Seen from the perspective of the USA it was a fight be tween liberty, democracy, and market economy on the one hand and communism, totalitarian dictatorship, and command economy on the other. From the perspective of the Soviet Union, the framing of good and bad went just the other way round. On 12 March 1947 the American president Harry S. Truman announced his new geopolitical representation in the American congress. With its dualistic approach and its universalistic claim (liberty vs. totalitarism) it polar ized even the parts of the world that so far had not been influenced by post war geopolitics. After the Truman doctrine it became a basic principle of the foreign policy of the USA to deliver active support to all peoples whose putative liberty seemed to be endangered by communist or socialist states or by inner, left wing, and militant minorities. The first examples were Turkey and Greece, but with hindsight also (Western) Germany. For decades the Truman doctrine became the discursive legitimation of the American containment policy and the basic leit motif of the Cold War. A further milestone in this geo political representation was the domino theory that was announced by US president Eisenhower on 7 April 1954. It said that if one state falls, that is, it becomes com munist, the neighbor states will also fall – like domino stones. Regarding, for example, the inner conflicts of Southeast Asia that meant: if South Vietnam becomes communist the neighboring states will become com munist too. ‘‘Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties in Western Europe.’’ The politics of containment of the immediate post war years formed, however, no consistent structure of

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argumentation. It much more oscillated between differ ent axes of argumentation. One scenario for the conflict considered the power struggle between the USA and the Soviet Union to be ended only at the level of inter national confrontation. The other argumentation as sumed that sooner or later the Soviet system would erode internally so that in the political power struggles in Moscow those would win whose will for peace would lead to a quasi self containment of the Soviet ex pansionism. The perspective mentioned first implies that the own security and the security of the West as a whole depends completely on the USA, decisively and actively containing the Soviet Union mainly within the NATO alliance; the second perspective prefers solutions that give global security over to collective institutions like the United Nations in order to prevent history based fears of Soviet threat. These two argumentations might be quite different contentwise; at the level of geopolitical repre sentation, however, they both support the underlying binary worldview of ideological bloc confrontation and the inherent blaming of the ‘other’. From a post structuralist perspective it can be said that the geopolitical representation of the Cold War was successful because it could be connected to from both ends. Historically ... the Cold War served the interests of both the USSR and the United States. For this reason neither sought to alter the nature of the relationship once it had been established. Their goal, therefore, was not so much victory over the other as the maintenance of balance. In this sense the Cold War was ... a carefully controlled ´ Tuathail/Dalby, 1998: S. 51f.) game. (Cox 1990, cit. in O

The 1970s marked in many ways the turning point in international relations. Nixon’s and Kissinger’s geo political imaginations of the ‘grand design’ was the con ceptual consequence of the developments since the beginning of the 1960s (mainly the war in Vietnam) which had not necessarily diminished the power of the US but had made its application in a more and more diversified world much more difficult. Kissinger called it the return to politics of realism and thus a policy closely oriented to the putative political facts and realities. Along with that the ideological discourses of American–Soviet power struggle were reduced whereas the geodeterminist framings were enhanced (referring to e.g., natural re sources, economic potentials, and the geographical position). The Pluralization of Geopolitical Representation after the End of the Cold War With the end of the Cold War the geopolitical repre sentation of a world of ideological blocs and iron curtains fell apart. Facing new processes of regional fragmentation

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within a global network society, this imagination faded away within just a couple of years. New patterns of power on a global scale demanded for new interpretations, new geopolitical representations to deliver a frame for the ongoing transformations, worldwide conflicts and wars of the 1990s, and the new millennium (see Figure 2). Against this backdrop it is not surprising that, already in the early 1990s, a series of new geopolitical narratives began to appear. All of them claimed to offer plausible discursive framings for changing global constellations of power. They did not only arise from the classical field of IR sciences (see below). Among them were, for example, geoecological narratives, which the politicians of Western industrial nations and transnational organizations some times used to frame neocolonial policy. However, those kinds of arguments still did not lead to a stand alone geopolitical regionalization on a global scale. This par ticular discourse rather goes along with established di chotomies with roots in colonial history and the debate on developing countries, that is, spatial dichotomies such as North versus South or developed versus less developed countries, etc. A similarly implicit kind of global geopolitics came at the beginning of the 1990s in the form of an effort to substitute ‘geoeconomics’ for geopolitics. According to Luttwak, political conflicts were more and more fought with economic weapons in this era of increasing (mainly economic) globalization. Visions of a network society, including new forms of global gov ernance, were challenging the traditional relationship of politics and space, especially the role of the nation state in international relations. The deployment of such alternative discourses chan ged due to the conflicts and wars of the last decade. Since

then new geopolitical framings developing during the beginning of the 1990s have been on an upswing in both politics and the media. To bring the recent master frames of these ‘politics of geopolitics’ into some kind of per spective, one might work out two lines of argumentation that can be separated only for academic purposes and that interact in the current geopolitical discourses in various ways: (1) the geopolitics of cultural difference, fragmentation, and conflict; and (2) the geopolitics of universalism and hegemonic superpower. The Geopolitics of Cultural Difference, Fragmentation, and Conflict

In the aftermath of September 11 the discourse of a ‘clash of civilizations’, which had already been promulgated by Huntington in 1993 and immediately used by himself to discursively frame the Balkan Wars, appeared ubiqui tously in the media and public opinion. Even though many politicians sought to emphasize repeatedly that the events did not represent a clash of civilizations, they still reified the basic idea of a geopolitics of cultural differ ence. Huntington was not solely responsible for this. He only gave new life to an underlying discourse of cultural difference that had developed over more than two cen turies. Huntington updated the discursive mapping of the self and the other from the perspective of the ‘modern’ West. These representations had their roots in historic geographical imaginations of power such as Ritter’s ‘Gang der Kulturen u¨ber die Erde’, Kolb’s ‘Kulture rdteile’, and the Orientalism discourse, which has been a central focus of Western thought at least since the ´ Tuathail (1996) so aptly sums era of colonialism. As O it up: ‘‘Huntington’s thesis is not about the clash of

The collapse of the USSR, the German reunification, and the end of the Cold War lead to a pluralization of representations

Geopolitical representations

Fragmentation and conflict

Geoeconomical representation

Environmental representation

Globalization and hegemony

Samuel Huntington: Clash of civilizations

Francis Fukuyama: The end of history

Edward Luttwak: Geo-economics

Vandana Shiva: Global ecology

Michael Klare: Rough-state-doctrine

Zbigniev Brzezinski: The grand chessboard

Manual Castells: Network-society

The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro

George Bush: New world order

Al Gore: Global warming

Hard and Negri: Empire Draft: Reuber/Wolkersdorfer 2007; Graphic: Schroer

Figure 2 Different geopolitical discourses after the end of the Cold War. Modified from Reuber & Wolkersdorfer, 2004.

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civilizations. It is about making global politics a clash of civilizations.’’ The Geopolitics of Universalism and Hegemonic Superpower

The second major geopolitical narrative of the post Cold War era serves the imagination of a new hegemon, the ‘only superpower USA’: Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of The End of History at first glance does not seem to aim for a geopolitical segmentation of the world after the Cold War. Nonetheless, it still has distinct geopolitical impli cations. Fukuyama believes that we are entering an era characterized by ‘‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’’ Fukuyama or ‘George W. Bush’s Aristotle’ (a headline of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung) represents the USA as the ul timate democratic state. His ideas are informed by a re ductionist interpretation of Hegel’s idealistic philosophy of the end of history. This construction, in all its sim plicity, marks the beginning of a geopolitical narrative that helps to pave the way for a new discourse of American hegemony after the end of the Cold War. Even if the ‘end of history’ thesis does not mark the beginning of geography in geopolitical discourse, it still contains an underlying geopolitical narrative which is only a short step away from the Bush (Sr.) doctrine in the first Gulf

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War, and still continues in the geopolitical represen tations and mappings of US foreign policy after 9/11 (Figures 3 and 4). The New Spatial Organization of Power in Geopolitical Representations after 9/11 The attacks on New York and Washington formed the ‘discursive event’ in the face of which the emerging geopolitical representations rose to prominence. At the same time these events may be regarded as a shift in the geopolitical representations of power. For the first time the traditional order of ‘modernity’ (the Westphalian system of territorially defined nation states) was chal lenged by an enemy, who was organized (and acting) according to the principles of network societies. In re sponse to September 11, politics and the media have impressively shown how difficult (if not impossible) it was to comment on and to react to the attacks beyond the spatial framings and representations established in tra ditional geopolitical discourses. Thus, the narration about the conflict had to be (and was) partly reframed as a ‘war between nation states’. This was indispensable since, to quote Dalby, (2003) ‘‘the modern geopolitical reasoning ... operate(s) in terms of a political ontology of states.’’ In this respect, soon and once again the nation state became the most important symbol framing

North Pacific Ocean

North Atlantic Ocean

Indian Ocean

South Pacific Ocean

South Atlantic Ocean American predominance on the ocean American sphere of influence American geopolitical hegemony

Source: Brzezinski 1997 modified Draft: Reuber a. Wolkersdorfer Graphic: Schroer

Figure 3 Geopolitical representations of intellectuals of statecraft: Brzezinski’s only superpower. Modified from Reuber & Wolkersdorfer, 2004.

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Western-Christian Latin-American Orthodox Islamic African Hindu Confucian-Buddhistic

Source: Huntington 1996 modified Draft: Reuber a. Wolkersdorfer Graphic: Schroer

Figure 4 Geopolitical representations of intellectuals of statecraft: Huntington’s clash of civilizations. Modified from Reuber & Wolkersdorfer, 2004.

political reactions as well as the innumerable reports in the media. Since the attacks were understood as ‘national’ affront and ‘attack on America’ (as a nation) – and the proposed counter measure was the ‘international coali tion against terrorism’, this refers to the ‘nationalization’ of the ‘terrorist attacks’ on World Trade Center and Pentagon. The demand to ‘localize’ the Al Qaeda terrorist net work led to the necessity to attach them to a place re spectively; and Afghanistan was established as a first target hosting the enemy. This framing rests on geo political imaginations, which have been developed al ready during the last decade, for example, by the ‘rogue state’ doctrine of Michael Klare, George Bush’s (Sr.) ‘axis of evil’, or more general by the discourse about ‘failed states’ coming from IR think tanks in the USA. Thus, the new storyline of a global ‘war against terrorism’ turned incredibly fast into one of the most powerful doctrines of international geopolitics. For this change the subtle interplay of the two above mentioned geopolitical representations of hegemony (the only superpower) and fragmentation (the clash of civil izations) were particularly helpful. Both of them served as framings for the numerous speeches of politicians as well as reports and comments in the media. Most of them reified the underlying concept of a cultural fragmen tation of the world deriving from that the necessity of a strong US leadership within a ‘coalition of the willing’. Based on such an imagination the wars against Afghani stan and Iraq could be justified toward the world public more easily. However, Huntington’s rhetoric of conflict

did not only fit into the discourses of Western military strategists and politicians but also into the saga of the holy war of the opposite side. Thus, the narrative of the clash of civilizations offered a discourse that also an tagonists such as Osama Bin Laden would easily accept. To quote Agnew, ‘‘Bin Laden is the Samuel Huntington of the Arab world y He is a prophet and organizer of inter civilizational conflict. Bin Laden is the modern Arab geopolitician par excellence’’ (Agnew, 2001). As parts of the currently circulating representations of fragmentation and hegemony even traditional elements of classic American geopolitical imaginations reoccur. This is reflected explicitly, for example, in Brzezinski’s remarks on the USA’s political and military engagement in Eurasia. He suggests that in order to reduce the danger of the USA being on the geopolitical rim their troops always have to be stationed on the borders of the Eur asian continent to have a massive impact on the countries in the Eurasian hinterland in case of a conflict. Brzezinski calls Eurasia the grand chessboard and thus the region where a potential competitor of the USA for the world power might grow up. In his opinion, the priority of an American geo strategy must be to support their geo political interests in Eurasia. Brzezinski’s reasonings contain elements of geopolitical imaginations that were developed in the middle of the last century. In particular, Nicholas Spykman argued already in 1944 that the coastal areas of Eurasia or the ‘rimland’ (as he called it) are the key to control the center. With such a concept he updated the British geographer and geopolitician Halford Mackinder. To some extent, therefore, the geopolitical

Geopolitics

representation of Mackinder serves as a persistent blue print of the foreign policy of the USA: Who rules Eastern Europe – so this imagination – rules Central Asia, and who rules Central Asia rules Eurasia, and who rules Eurasia rules the world. The Pentagon’s New Map

Geopolitical representations like the ones mentioned above are, of course, not the end of all storylines. Due to the changing circumstances in IR at the beginning of the new millennium another couple of them entered the scene. To pick out just one of them, Thomas Barnett’s geopolitics of ‘core and gap’ shall be discussed just in its very general terms in order to show some similarities and differences to the framings above. Thomas P.M. Barnett, professor at the US Naval War College and after Sep tember 2001 a close advisor of US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has designed a ‘new world map of the Pentagon’ (Figure 5). It has been published in the Esquire, March 2003, and in different journals of political science and has called a lot of attention among advisors. In Barnett’s representation, the war against Iraq marks geopolitically a kind of historical turning point – the moment when Washington ‘really’ takes over its role as a guardian of the strategic security in the age of global ization. Barnett’s simplistic geopolitical world order is: regions with stable governments and a high standard

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of living often are, at the same time, well connected within the globalized network society where democracy, liberal media, civil security, and human rights pro tection are part of the basic normative assumptions of society. These parts of the world he calls the ‘functioning core’. In opposite, regions that are hardly touched by glob alization and suffer from repressive regimes with wide spread poverty and diseases and – most important in Barnett’s opinion – with chronic conflicts in which the coming generation of global terrorists is brought up, he calls the ‘arc of instability’. Barnett isolates his geopolitical representation in both a simple and radical way: he draws a line around the majority of US military interventions abroad, and by this he maps the ‘nonintegrating gap’. Obviously, there are outliers excluded geographically by this simple approach, such as Israel isolated in the ‘gap’, a North Korea adrift within the ‘core’, or a Philippines straddling the line. Looking at this mode of representation, it is hard to deny the hidden logic behind the picture: If a country is either losing out to globalization or rejecting much of the content flows associated with its advance, so the implicit message of Barnett’s suggestions, there is a far greater chance that the US will end up sending forces at some point. Conversely, if a country is largely functioning within globalization, it tends not to have US forces sent

Source: Barnett 2003 modified Draft: Reuber a. Wolkersdorfer Graphic: Schroer

Figure 5 Geopolitical representations of intellectuals of statecraft: Barnett’s Pentagon’s new map. Modified from Reuber & Wolkersdorfer, 2004.

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there to restore order and to eradicate threats. The sci entist was selected as the ‘strategist of the year’ in 2003 by the magazine Esquire. See also: Cold War; Critical Geopolitics; Discourse Analysis; Foucauldianism; Hegemony; Imperialistic Geographies; Political Geography; Poststructuralism/ Poststructuralist Geographies.

Further Reading Agnew, J. A. (1998). Geopolitics. Re Visioning World Politics. London: Routledge. Agnew, J. A. (2001). Not the wretched of the earth. Osama Bin Laden and the ‘clash of civilizations’. The Arab World Geographer 4, 112 117. Agnew, J. A., Mitchell, K. and O´ Tuathail, G. (2002). A Companion to Political Geography. Malden: Blackwell. Albert, M., Reuber, P. and Wolkersdorfer, G. (2006). Geopolitik. In Schieder, F. & Spindler, M. (eds.) Theorien der internationalen Beziehungen. Eine Einfu¨hrung, pp 501 535. Opladen: UTB. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Ed.

Barnett, T. P. M. (2005). The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty First Century. Berkley: Berkley Trade. Brzezinski, Z. (1998). The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books. Dalby, S. (2003). Calling 911. Geopolitics, security and America’s new war. Geopolitics 8(3), 61 68. Dodds, K. J. and Sidaway, J. D. (1994). Locating critical Geopolitics. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12, 515 524. Fukuyama, F. (1992). The End of the History and the Last Man. London: Perennial. Gregory, D. (1998). The geographical discourse of modernity. In Gebhardt, H., Meusburger, P. (eds.) Explorations in Critical Human Geography: Hettner Lectures 1, pp 45 70. Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg. Huntington, S. P. (1996). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Touchstone. Mackinder, H. J. (1904). The geographical pivot of history. The Geographical Journal, 23, 421 444. O´ Tuathail, G. (1996). Critical Geopolitics. The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis, MN: Routledge. O´ Tuathail, G. and Dalby, S. (eds.) (1998). Re Thinking Geopolitics. Towards a Critical Geopolitics. London: Routledge. Ratzel, F. (1906). Kleine Schriften. Munchen: Oldenbourg. Schultz, H. D. (1998). Herder und Ratzel. Zwei Extreme, ein Paradigma? Erdkunde 52(2), 127 143. Sprengel, R. (1996). Kritik der Geopolitik. Berlin: Akademie. Walker, R. (1993). Inside /Outside. International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Geopolitics and Religion G. Dijkink, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Chosen (Elected) Nation The idea of having a special mission in the world as nation (sanctified by God). Civil Millennialism Identification of earthly powers or events in terms of religious prophecy. Civil Religion The application of a religious attitude to political and public affairs. Clash of Civilizations Theory predicting that war will increasingly occur between cultural groups, particularly those that are religiously different. Critical Geopolitics Study of beliefs or implicit knowledge in statesmen, intellectuals of statecraft, or the public about geographical power arrangements in the world. Cuius Regio, Eius Religio Whose the region is, his religion: the sixteenth-century principle that the official religion in a country will be the religion of the ruler. It was the first acknowledgment of the legitimacy of Protestantism. Ethnoreligious Conflict Conflict between a religious minority and the state in which religion is an issue. Jihad Struggle for religious purity in one’s own life and in one’s environment, religious ‘war’. Millennialism Utopian expectation of a new world order in which ‘the faith’ will triumph. Sacred Something that transcends the individual and the present; something related to the supernatural world. Secular, Secularization Loss of religiosity and disappearance of religious norms in daily life.

Introduction Geopolitics is traditionally the study of how political power is reinforced or undermined by geographical ar rangements (boundaries, coalitions, spatial networks, natural resources, etc.). Geopolitics also denotes the practical decisions of political and social leaders with respect to geographical arrangements. ‘Critical geo politics’ deconstructs the assumptions about the world behind such decisions. Religion is a way to explain the world (just like geopolitics) and give moral meaning to events and relations between people and their environ ment on the basis of supernatural forces or deities. Re ligions create a bond of solidarity between people and therefore can have an impact in the sphere of power and politics. A religion may also offer its own normative

arguments about geographical arrangements and may in this way act as a kind of geopolitical ‘theory’ based on supernatural rather than natural forces. Both aspects, religious solidarity and religious theory about the world, are relevant in contemporary geopolitics. The study of geopolitics has always pivoted on the state as the main power agency in the world. Since the (Western) state became strongly defined by secular aims and values in the nineteenth century, religion was not geopolitics’ foremost preoccupation. The secular view was dominant when most governments in the world were either European, offspring from Europe (Americas, Australia) or dominated by a European colonizer (Africa, Asia). From the moment that non Western states were able to throw their weight about in the world and had replaced their Westernized political elites, religion could also reappear in world affairs. One factor still smothered the emergence of religious politics on the international scene: communism (or Marxism). Marxism was a tempting ideology in former colonies because it was seen as the logical ‘Third World’ answer to ‘First World’ ex ploitation. The attractiveness of communism in some newly independent states has also been explained from its neat fit to the socioreligious order of society (like Brahmanism in India). Anyhow, the end of the ideological struggle between capitalism and communism created new opportunities for other interpretations of the world. The most significant one in geopolitical terms was the rise of political Islam (Islamism). It touched a large world region that was moreover significant because of its oil resources and antagonistic sentiments issuing in terrorism. It is not surprising that political scientists in the West became more attentive to religion after 1990. New pub lications reflected two perspectives. The first perspective focused on the idea that Western (or American) foreign politics had missed chances to avoid conflicts or failures like the alienation of Buddhists during the American intervention in Vietnam. American policy makers did not understand that religious legitimacy can make or break leaders in other nations. The collection of essays Religion: the missing dimension in statecraft is particularly charac teristic of this perspective. Another perspective boils down to the vision of a new type of world order in which antagonisms between groups are defined by culture ra ther than ideology. Huntington’s The clash of civilisations is the most significant publication in this context. The book experienced a new surge of interest after the attacks of September 11 in New York and Washington.

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Huntington’s is by far the most geopolitical of all studies about the politics of religion appearing after 1990 be cause it extends the familiar idea of strategic blocs (like those of the Cold War) to the world of civilizations, es sentially conceived as religions. These civilizations are portrayed as antagonistic. Although geographers have since long written on the geography of religion, they were not in the forefront in studying the new geopolitical implications of religion. Reflecting the tainted history of geopolitics (after its popularity in Nazi Germany), much effort went into denouncing the classic geopolitical lapses in such views as Huntington’s. Several decades ago the geographer John Kirtland Wright already coined the term ‘geopiety’: the religious interpretation of landscape elements like the endowment with a fertile or safe environment as sign of God’s benevolence or specific geological conditions as witnesses of the Noachian Deluge. Such interpreta tions may play a role in a geopolitical context but in Wright’s essays this extension was never made. Roger Stump’s Boundaries of faith is a combination of a more traditional study in cultural geography and the new interest in the territorial strategies and geopolitical visions of religions. The study partly covers issues of geopolitical interest. Recent work of geographers has been for the greater part inspired by the critical geopolitics perspective. That means a predominant orientation on the (implicit) geo political content of texts and messages of religious leaders and movements particularly among Christians and Muslims. This may be more specifically applied to the question how politicoterritorial conflicts and strat egies are supported by religious ideas or movements: for example, the Palestine–Israeli conflict or the changing conceptions of the nation in a de and reterritorializing world. The pivotal role of the state in geopolitical writing suggests that nation building and its reverse, transna tionalism, cannot be ignored. So, an extensive discussion of religion in the context of geopolitics deals with three issues: religion and nationalism; religion as transnational force; and religion and territorial conflict. These consti tute theoretical chapters rather than a sound classifi cation of political events in the world.

Religion and Nationalism While Kings of late medieval states and early modern states would claim to have received their authority from God, Protestant (Republican) polities rising in the six teenth century more explicitly evoked the idea of a ‘covenant’ between God and people in analogy to the Biblical narrative of the Jewish wanderings to the Promised Land. The idea of a ‘chosen’ people easily rose

in situations where a nation felt threatened or margin alized by such dominant powers as the medieval German Empire (feared by the thirteenth century French Cap etians who, as a reaction, appropriated the status of ‘chosen’ country), the Habsburgs (English and Dutch self image as chosen people in the sixteenth century), or the British Empire (the Boers in South Africa in the nineteenth century). The voluntary exile of early Prot estant settlers in America, aspiring to a religiously more pure community than was possible in the Old World, also raised the expectation that the new millennium with the Second Coming of Christ would start in America. The kind of state that developed in the nineeteenth century transformed the old religious connotation into a more secular ‘exceptionalism’, that means the idea of having a special mission in the world like guiding other people (Britain), propagating democracy (the US), or economic development of poor nations (Europe). Nationalism scholars like Anthony Smith have pointed out that the nation has a ‘sacred dimension’. ‘Ethnic election’ is one manifestation of this dimension. There are many national myths that express the chosenness of the nation like the appearance of an angel to the (alleged) founding father of the nation or the presence of relics that express special divine benevolence (the shrine of Jasna Gora – the Black Madonna – in Poland). More important from the viewpoint of geopolitics is the idea of ‘sacred territory’. It implies that, according to tradition, God has promised the nation a specific territory that not neces sarily corresponds with the current territory of a nation. The occurrence of specific holy events in the past (like the appearance of an angel on the battlefield of Kosovo Polje in the Serbian myth about the historic defeat in the war against the Ottoman Turks) or the presence of sanctuaries that are essential to a religion (Jerusalem) may be an important source for claims on territory and motive for waging war. Other aspects of the sacred dimension of nations that are mentioned are ‘ethnohistory’, particularly in the shape of a celebrated period in national history, and the idea of ‘national sacrifice’, blood spilled for the nation as commemorated by numerous war monuments. All these aspects of the sacred dimension testify to the nation as an immaterial and eternal entity but involve different ways of applying the words ‘religious’ or ‘sacred’. While the ideas of ‘ethnic election’ or sacred territory may appeal to a specific religion or Holy Scripture in order to legitimate such claims, ethnohistory and national sacrifice rather suggest ‘deification’ of the nation itself. The latter is compatible with a strongly secular society like post Revolutionary France, a society highly aware of adminis tering a very special heritage entailing personal obligations and worship. Whereas nationalist movements may easily absorb religion, the above also suggests that nationalism itself constitutes a (pseudo ) religion. This is particularly


strong in longer established states. Religion in the proper sense, however, is rather visible in mobilization against state power. The Evangelical Church was active in co ordinating protest against the communist regime in the last days of the German Democratic Republic. The role of the Roman Catholic Church in keeping alive a critical attitude to international communism in Poland during the Cold War is generally acknowledged. Although it would carry the influence of religion too far to attribute the fall of the Soviet Empire to the Polish pope and the religiously inspired Polish resistance (as some commen tators insist), religion certainly made Poland an awkward member of the international socialist family. The over throw of the Shah regime in Iran in 1979 also depended on the strong religious leadership of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini. The subsequent development of international religious leadership in the shape of a ‘theocratic’ state in Iran may have damaged rather than helped the cause of Shiite minorities in other states. The failure to see the potential weakness of the Shah regime is one of the no torious cases in the story of lacking religious sensitivity of Western (US) foreign policy and intelligence elites. Ethnonationalist struggles for autonomy or in dependence are obviously reinforced by the feeling of being religiously different, but one may doubt whether in such conflicts religion is any different from other cultural markers. Researchers into the causes of ethnonationalist conflict usually reject the idea that religion itself causes ethnonationalist mobilization and religious issues con stitute a minor issue in such conflicts. This usually con cerns limitations on religious freedom of a minority and in some cases a conflict on the ‘ownership’ of a sacred site (Hindus and Muslims disputing the religious origin of the Ayodhya Temple). The fact that religion implies a comprehensive worldview that is incompatible with other religious views does not completely fit the observation that in many countries different religions coexist peacefully.

Religion as Transnational Force The era of ‘globalization’ has brought back the phe nomenon of religion as an influence competing with state power. This is particularly relevant in states that do not have a strong legitimacy rooted in historic freedom struggles and centuries of defense against outside or domestic threats. It is the world where Islam has stret ched its wings: Asia and Africa. Although Islam can create quick transnational solidarities, particularly when Mus lim minorities are in danger (Bosnia) or ‘the faith’ is offended (cartoons of the Prophet published in a Euro pean newspaper), it does not aim at replacing the state. It only wants to replace the moral superiority that the state has assumed in the West. Islam (including so called

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fundamentalist Islam) has surged into an important pol itical movement for three reasons. First, it is the most accessible means of emancipation analogous to nation alism in Western countries. According to certain na tionalism specialists, the adoption of a strict variant of Islam (fundamentalism) by rural people is comparable with the embracing of a ‘high (urban) culture’ by peasants in the course of the nineteenth century nationalist revolutions in Europe. Second, Islam has adopted a welfare role where the state fails to provide such care. The building of mosques goes along with the establish ment of schools, care for the poor, and administration of justice. Even in utterly failing states in Africa, some prosperous native will see it as his task to build a mosque and set up the concomitant social institutions. Third, the Muslim world, and particularly its Arab branch, has a strong feeling of deprivation toward the West which can be partly attributed to the legacy of unfulfilled promises by colonial powers in the early twentieth century, partly to the unsolved Palestinian problem, and partly to the perception that the materially advanced Western world discriminates Muslims. These factors explain why Islam is the most obvious identity for millions of people in Asia and Africa who try to make sense of the world. They expect that their states adopt this identity, not that they amalgamate in one big political unit. The real transnational manifestation of Islam as ‘neofundamentalism’, however, derives from the fact that migration has turned Muslims into minorities in a cul tural alien world, the West. This ‘deterritorialization’ has disengaged traditional (territorialized) Muslim culture and religion. Challenged by the universalistic pretensions of the West, second generation Muslim migrants cling to Islam as a superior identity marker. However, this in volves a rejection of all traditional authorities, dogma, and cultural impurities ending in a strongly individual ized form of religiosity. While this attitude facilitates transnational networks like global terrorism, according to Olivier Roy, networks like Al Qaeda are not true underground movements with a geostrategic perspective. They are just as powerless against the world of states as Islamism is against the dominant nationalism in the Muslim world. In spite of Islamic terrorism, there is no contemporary example of a religion directly acting as transnational political force like the Catholic Church in medieval times or the early Islamic empire. In the world of today, re ligious viewpoints on worldly affairs are mediated by states or intergovernmental organizations like the Or ganization of the Islamic Conference. The Roman Catholic Church has an authoritative voice on policy matters like war or health ethics, but does not mobilize people into a strong transnational political movement. Of course, we may understand ‘geopolitics of religion’ as designation of the strategies that religious institutions

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employ to extend their influence in the world by means of missionary activities or work in the social and health sphere. The expansion of Islam or the surprising success of Evangelical movements (like Pentecostalism) in Latin America would fall under this definition. Converting people is not politics in the usual sense, but since military interventions in other countries nowadays operate under the flag of ‘winning the hearts and minds of people’, we should admit that cultural and political influence are difficult to separate.

Religion and Territorial Conflict The role of religion in ethnonational conflict has been mentioned. Religion is one of the cultural markers that creates a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, religious leaders can have a decisive influence on social mobil ization and a religious worldview implies certain prac tices and norms in daily life that may conflict with the rules of a dominant ethnic group. The religious motiv ation behind the resistance against the dominant political group in Chechnya, the Armenian enclave Nagorno Karabakh, Eastern Timor or Northern Ireland cannot be denied but does not permit any conclusion about the incompatibility of these religions in other settings. While the theory of ‘the clash of civilizations’ offers a (severely criticized) thesis on the inevitability of such conflicts and the prospect of enduring territorial separation between civilizations and religions, the study of (critical) geo politics can more directly address the potency for conflict by looking into religious doctrines in Holy Scriptures or in the interpretations of influential preachers, ayatollahs, imams, priests, or ‘holy men’. These sources may reveal three themes that can cause territorial conflict: holy land, holy war, and millennialism. Holy Land Apart from its nationalist meaning as ‘sacred territory’ (that means the worshipped homeland of a nation), a holy land may have significance for those living outside its territory, most commonly in the peaceful sense of a place of pilgrimage. This is usually based on artifacts reflecting the divine manifestation on Earth or the fact that crucial events of the religious narrative have occurred on that place. This condition may also produce conflict. The presence of American troops in the holy land Saudi Arabia was the reason for attacks on American interests; at least in the declarations of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda companions. Conversely, American support for Israel seems to exceed what a balanced or ‘realist’ Mid Eastern policy would require. The spread in the United States of a Christian doctrine saying that nations will be judged in the Final Judgment according to their attitudes

to Israel is well documented. The question about its in fluence on the White House, however, is controversial. A country may also be treated as a holy land because it is considered as ‘belonging’ to a certain religion. This perspective is rather strong among Muslims who have a tradition of making a sharp distinction between the ‘Land of Islam’ and the ‘Land of War or Unbelief ’. Would a country fall into the hands of unbelievers then a strong reaction is called for. This happened when the Soviet Union installed a pro communist government in Kabul in 1979. The events in Afghanistan mobilized young Arab idealists to revive the idea of jihad as a territorial struggle and participate in the Afghan guerrilla against the infidel occupier. Holy War Holy war, most commonly associated with the medieval Christian Crusades and the Muslim rule of Jihad, is quite ambiguously related with the Holy Scriptures of the two religions. Both the Bible and the Koran contain stories of divinely sanctioned war that suggest a certain exegesis, but these texts do not unequivocally call to propagating the faith with the sword. Jihad basically means that the faith requires a personal struggle with evil temptations. The step to imagining a territorial struggle is obviously tempting but it is certainly not the dominant view among Muslims. The current world in which Muslim migrants are allowed to practice their faith in the midst of another civilization is completely different from the world in which Islam had to be defended militarily. Some ideas in religions reflect conditions in earlier historical periods. Both Christians and Muslims recognize the need to propagate the faith. The course of history shows an al ternation between more extravert and introvert inter pretations of this assignment. Sometimes believers discover that the faith requires ‘acting in the world’, sometimes the emphasis is more on personal devotion. Such modes of introversion or extraversion are induced by the international political context rather than ex plainable by a religion itself. Millennialism Millennialism concerns religious expectations on the end of the current world and the start of a new (earthly) ‘millennium’ in which the world will be reordered ac cording to God’s will. In the Books of Revelation and Daniel, cues can be found on these events involving a final struggle with evil in the shape of a Beast or Devil (the Antichrist). Details about events and places may suggest similarity with current conditions. This may in duce politicians who believe that we are nearing the Great Reconstruction to refrain from solving conflicts and problems or even to accelerate fateful events. Al though the Koran does not provide similar apocalyptic


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details, millennialist movements also occur among Muslims. The portraying of America or the West as the ‘Great Satan’ with which a final battle has started made many Muslim’s hearts quicken particularly when hearing about the attacks of September 11.

See also: Ethnic Conflict; Ethnicity; Modernity; Nation; Nationalism; North-South; Terrorism; War.

Conclusion

Further Reading

Geopolitics has been particularly engaged with territorial conflict and typically applies a zero sum perspective on power that does not fit in very well with expectations of world peace. Religion appeared to be surprisingly com patible with a geopolitical perspective after the events of September 11. This obfuscated the fact that religions or religious leaders may also act as peace promoters on the international scene. The more typical geopolitical ap proach would anyhow be to focus on the universalistic pretensions of believers and see if these lead to territorial exclusionary behavior. There are three collision fronts in which religion plays a role: (1) between ethnic minorities and the state, (2) between states or blocs representing different ‘civilizations’, and (3) between states and transnational religious movements or terrorists. Such collisions are never a ‘logical’ result of the contact be tween different religions. The important thing that geo political analysis can help to make clear is that a so called ‘clash of civilizations (or religions)’ is the consequence of religious bonds of solidarity that have been forged by political events (rather than the reverse). The supposed jihad of Muslims against the West cannot be understood outside the context of what happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The analysis of texts such as produced by Osama bin Laden does not reveal a deep justification of terrorist attacks by Islamic codices; they are rather ad hoc talks with the air of piety. Religion is important as one of the ‘possible’ frameworks for mobilization but collision lines may also run through a religion as the wars between Shiite and Sunni factions in Iraq and the religious wars in early modern Europe show. The interaction between

Agnew, J. (ed.) (2006). Special issue on religion and geopolitics Geopolitics 11, 183 191. Fox, J. (2002). Ethnoreligious Conflict in the Late Twentieth Century. Lanham: Lexington Books. Gellner, E. (1992). Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London: Routledge. Goh, R. B. H. (2004). Asian Christian networks: transnational structures and geopolitical mappings. Journal of Religion and Society 6, 11 13. Hervieu Le´ger, D. (2002). Space and religion: New approaches to religious spatiality in modernity. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26, 99 105. Huntington, S. P. (1996). The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Johnston, D. and Sampson, C. (eds.) (1994). Religion: The missing Dimension in Statecraft. New York: Oxford University Press. Nyroos, L. (2001). Religeopolitics: dissident geopolitics and the fundamentalism of Hamas and Kach. Geopolitics 6, 135 157. O’Brien, C. C. (1988). God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roy, O. (2004). Globalized Islam. The Search for a New Ummah. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, A. D. (2000). The sacred dimension of nationalism. Millennium 29, 791 814. Stump, R. W. (2000). Boundaries of Faith. Geographical Perspectives on Religious Fundamentalism. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

type of political event, type of religion, and territorial aims is the main challenge for geopolitical analysis.

Relevant Websites http://www.hiik.de Heidelberg Institute of International Conflict Research, conflict data. http://www.adherents.com National and World Religion Statistics Church Statistics World Religions. http://www.oic oci.org The Organization of the Islamic Conference. http://www.cidcm.umd.edu University of Maryland, MD. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org World Values Survey Organization.

Georeferencing, Geocoding X. Yao, University of Georgia, Atlanta, GA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Attribute Data used to describe characteristics of things (e.g., spatial features) in a computer database. Coordinate System A mathematical system for recording the location of a point in an n-dimensional space by a set of n values. Frame of Reference The context, perspective, and/or a set of presumptions or rules within which instances are observed. Geocoding The process of associating addresses, place names, or other referents with geographic locations. It is also referred to as discrete georeferencing. Geographic Information System A system to capture, store, display, communicate, transform, analyze, and archive georeferenced information. Projection A systematic transformation of coordinates in a three-dimensional coordinate system to a twodimensional coordinate system. Referent A description that is used to refer to a geographic location.

Introduction to Georeferencing Georeferencing is fundamental to geographic infor mation system (GIS). It refers to the process of assigning locations to geographical objects within a geographic frame of reference. Depending on the spatial resolution in effect, georeferencing mechanisms can be generally classified into metric georeferencing and indirect geor eferencing. A few variations of indirect georeferencing methods exist, among which discrete georeferencing (also called geocoding) is commonly used in many applications. Definition and Properties of Georeferencing The usage of the term ‘georeferencing’ has not always been unambiguous in literature. Some definitions strictly refer to metric georeferencing and/or coordinate trans formation, while some others solely imply the process of discrete georeferencing. A broad definition of georefer encing can be simply put as the process of assigning locations to geographical objects within a certain frame of reference such as a coordinate system. The atom of geographic information is a three di mensional (3 D) unit, represented as ‘location, time,

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attribute’. In order to communicate effectively, we need standard ways to handle the three dimensions. For ex ample, the Gregorian calendar is the system being used worldwide for specifying time. Any moment in the ‘time’ dimension can be uniquely represented in this time system. The calendar serves as a frame of reference to specify time. There are also other calendars that can uniquely assign a time stamp to any moment in the time dimension. In other words, there are multiple possible frames of reference for time specification. Georeferen cing mechanisms serve a similar purpose in the location dimension as the calendar systems do in the time di mension. A referent can be expressed as coordinates, street address, or other forms of measurements in an appropriate geographical frame of reference. Corres ponding to the variety of geographical frames of refer ence, there are multiple georeferencing methods. Two basic properties are fundamental to all georeferencing methods, as discussed below. Uniqueness

A georeferencing method must assign a single reference per location, and every location gets a unique reference. It is noteworthy that the uniqueness is required only over a certain spatial extent in a defined time frame. Spatially, a georeferencing method may be (applied to) the entire world, a country, or any other defined area. Temporally, it could be valid forever, for a specified time period, or until changes occur. Spatial resolution

The spatial resolution of a georeferencing method is the size of the area covered by a single referent. A referent expressed as coordinate (x, y) is a point. Another referent ‘123 Main Street’ pinpoints down to the footprint of a building, while ‘metropolitan Atlanta’ refers to a geo graphic area over 15 000 km2 in size. Each georeferencing method comes with an inherent level of spatial reso lution. Particularly, metric (or coordinate based) geor eferencing can represent any location with no limitation on precision, which means it imposes no limitation on spatial resolution. Other georeferencing methods have a spatial resolution of various sizes depending on the specific referent in use. Taxonomy of Georeferencing Methods The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) categorizes georeferencing mechanisms into coordinate based and non coordinate based georeferencing. These

Georeferencing, Geocoding

are also called metric georeferencing and indirect geor eferencing, respectively, as revealed in Figure 1. The taxonomy virtually organizes georeferencing methods by the level of spatial resolution in effect. Metric georefer encing, with which location measures are taken on a continuous scale, has no limit on spatial resolution. In direct georeferencing, on the other hand, locates discrete units on the Earth’s surface such as street addresses, post code areas, and statistical areas, etc. The spatial resolution of the indirect georeferencing methods are constrained by the size of the georeferenced spatial feature. Many other terminologies are seen in literature, connoting the same meaning as that of the above men tioned terms of georeferencing types. Coordinate based georeferencing is more commonly referred to as ‘con tinuous’ georeferencing or ‘metric’ georeferencing. The non coordinate based georeferencing is also called ‘in direct’ georeferencing. Indirect georeferencing includes, but is not limited to, the popular discrete georeferencing methods and linear referencing system (LRS). Discrete georeferencing is more commonly referred to as geo coding. Figure 1 provides a taxonomy of georeferencing methods and synonymous terminologies.

Georeferencing Methods Metric Georeferencing Metric georeferencing, also called continuous georefer encing, represents locations using their coordinates in the geographic coordinate system or a projection of it. The geographic coordinate system is a 3 D coordinate system for the Earth. It represents every location on the Earth’s surface with a pair of longitude and latitude. Figure 2a shows the geographic coordinate system, in which the prime latitude (01 latitude) is the equator and the prime meridian (01 longitude) is set as the meridian passing through Greenwich, England. Through a projection of the geographic coordinate system, a 2 D coordinate system can be created to approximate the representation

of the 3 D Earth surface in a 2 D coordinate system. Figure 2b shows an example of it. There are a variety of projected 2 D coordinate systems for different parts of the world or different purposes of representation. How ever, in each of all these coordinate systems, a location is uniquely represented by a coordinate. Coordinates in one coordinate system can be trans formed into any of the other coordinate systems. Par ticularly, for example, georeferencing is named for an important procedure performed to remote sensing im ages. This procedure transforms coordinates in a local coordinate system of an image to the geographic co ordinate system (or a projection of it). Indirect Georeferencing Indirect georeferencing is a broad umbrella term for all non coordinate based georeferencing methods. To ex plain the nature of indirect georeferencing, ISO states that indirect spatial referencing methods are based on a relationship with a location defined by a geographic feature or features. The relationship of the position to a spatial feature could be any of the following: 1. containment, where the position is within the geo graphic feature, for example, in a country; 2. based on local measurements, where the position is defined relative to a fixed point or points in the geo graphic feature or features; for example, a given dis tance along a street from fixed point on the street; 3. loosely related, where the position has a qualitative spatial relation with the geographic feature or fea tures, for example, adjacent to a building. The important message from this statement is that in direct georeference methods locate positions according to some kind of relations between the location and spatial feature(s). The necessary information for indirect geo referencing is usually stored as attribute(s) data related to the location. In a nutshell, because indirect georeferen cing methods make use of easily obtainable and

Metric/continuous georeferencing (coordinate-based)

Discrete georeferencing (geocoding)

Georeferencing

Indirect georeferencing (non-coordinate-based)

Linear referencing system

Others (e.g., referencing with qualitative spatial relations)

Figure 1 Taxonomy of georeferencing methods.

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80° 70° 60°

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geographical frame of reference. For georeferencing in GIS, a geographical frame of reference is typically sur rogated by a GIS data set consisting of spatial units, each of which is identified by a unique name or code. As il lustrated in Figure 3a, a country name is used as a ref erent for the geographic territory of the named country. In such a discrete georeferencing, the geographical frame of reference consists of the political boundaries of world countries. There are other types of frame of references. Typical examples include those for geocoding street addresses, postal codes, administrative or statistical re gions, and telephone area codes, etc. Discussed below are some of the examples. Street addresses

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Figure 2 Metric georeferencing. Panal (a) shows the geographic coordinate system. Panal (b) shows an example of it.

meaningful attribute information and tie them to spatial locations, they are very commonly used in human geography, as well as many other fields. According to different types of attribute data and spatial relations used, there are a few different types of indirect georeferencing mechanisms as discussed below. Discrete georeferencing

The most popular indirect georeferencing nowadays is probably the discrete georeferencing, also referred to as geocoding. Discrete georeferencing identifies discrete geographic units on the Earth’s surface. The referents are usually names, indices (e.g., street addresses), or codes (e.g., zip codes). In order to be uniquely identified for the corresponding discrete geographic unit, the referent must have a clearly defined meaning in the underlying

A well known geocoding system is to identify the spatial locations for street addresses, and thus it is also called ‘address matching’. This address matching method in terpolates the location of a street address on the associ ated segment for the named street. The geographical frame of reference used for address matching is a spe cially designed geographic database of a street network. Street address can be expressed in a variety of ways. In the United States, for example, a street address contains street number, street name, city, and the state (or just zip code). In all street address expressions, a part of it serves to narrow down the searching area in which the par ticular street name is uniquely identifiable. Illustrated in Figure 3b is an example of geocoding a US street address ‘2175 W Broad Street’ in Athens, Georgia. The line segment in red indicates a road segment with the street name of interest. The street addresses of starting and ending points are labeled for both sides of the road segment. Because 2175 is an odd number, it means the discrete unit (a land parcel) to be represented is on the side of the street with odd number starting and ending addresses (2101 and 2199, respectively, in this example). The footprint of this parcel that has this address is highlighted in yellow in Figure 3b. It should be noted that an address matching result is a point location, in terpolated between the starting point and ending point of the segment. This point location is shown with a red symbol in Figure 3b. The address matching result is a point location serving as the spatial proxy for a discrete spatial unit. The example in Figure 3b also reveals that address matching imposes special requirements on the under lying street database. It requires that each street line segment in the database has accompanying records of its starting and ending street addresses. These addresses will be used for location interpolation. In the United States, the first generation of this type of street database design was called Dual Independent Map Encoding (DIME) files. It had been adopted by the US Census Bureau since the 1960s to build street databases. Since 1990, these

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Figure 3 (a–d) Examp es of types of nformat on used for d screte georeferenc ng.

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2175 W Broad St. on the parcel map

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Location from geocoding 2175 W Broad St.

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DIME files have been updated, extended, and renamed as Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) files. In the database design of TIGER files, a road segment is considered to have two sets of street addresses, one for the left side and one for the right side of the road, as shown in Figure 3b. Today, many digital geographic data vendors (e.g., NAVTEQ , Geographic Data Technology Inc., etc.) provide high quality street database based on the same design. Administrative or statistical areas

Discrete georeferencing can also be applied to geocode administrative or statistical areas in a country. Each country has a hierarchical system of administrative and statistical areas. For instance, there are state, county, census tract, block group, and more, in the United States. At each level of the hierarchy, an area has a unique name or a uniquely assigned code. The names or codes can be used as referents for geocoding. The geographical frame of reference in use is the GIS database of ad ministrative or statistical areas at each level of the hier archy. In the United States, each administrative or census statistical area is assigned a unique federal information processing system (FIPS) code. Figure 3c shows an ex ample of three levels of administrative/statistical areas in Southeast United States. The two digit codes in blue are the FIPS codes for states. In a state, there is a three digit FIPS code for each county. The county with FIPS code ‘059’ is displayed in an enlarged view for demonstration. Although county code ‘059’ is only unique in the speci fied state, it becomes nationally unique if it is prefixed with the state code. Thus the longer county FIPS code ‘13059’ can be used nationwide – it refers to Clarke County (059) in Georgia State (13). The same principle applies to FIPS code in any subsequent levels in the hierarchy. Figure 3c shows an example of a census tract in Clarke County. Such a coding system allows the FIPS codes to be used as referents for geocoding.

does not necessarily ensure faithful spatial relations. LRS was proposed in response to the need of retaining this topological relation, point ‘on’ a linear feature, when referencing locations within a linear network. For in stance, an accident occurred on a highway. The site, represented as coordinates (x, y) in a coordinate system, may not fall exactly on the highway due to measurement inaccuracies. In response to these kinds of problems, a linear referencing method identifies such a location by recording the linear feature (here the highway) and the network distance of the referenced location to the starting point of the linear feature. This way the linear referencing method warrants the existence of the location on the linear network. Specifically, a typical LRS uses road (or route) name and milepost. The road (route) name is used to identify the linear feature. The milepost measures the network distance of the referenced location to the origin of the road (or route). Figure 4a is an example of an accident location on Highway 80. The location is referenced as (Highway 80, 145.7) in an LRS. LRS also provides the basis for dynamic segmentation that is used to represent any line segment on a linear feature. Dynamic segmentation records the starting and ending location of the segment using LRS. Figure 4b shows an example of dynamic segmentation. The geor eferenced is a road segment of a specified speed limit. The advantage of dynamic segmentation is at least threefold. First, the line segment can be dynamically referenced or modified while the underlying linear feature remains in tact. Second, the topological relationship can be kept be cause the line segment in dynamic segmentation is by definition on the underlying linear feature. Third,

An accident happened at 145.7 mi from the start of highway 80

Highway 80

Postal code

Georeferencing postal codes work in a very similar way. Here the geographic frame of reference in use is the GIS database of geographical divisions associated with postal codes. The referents are the postal codes. Although each country has its own postal code system, a code in any postal system represents a uniquely identifiable geo graphical area in the country of interest. Figure 3d il lustrates such an example of five digit zip codes in the United States. The referent in the figure is the postal code 30307, which is georeferenced as the spatial areas highlighted in yellow in Figure 3d.

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Linear referencing and dynamic segmentation

Although every spatial location can be uniquely repre sented in a coordinate system, metric georeferencing

(b)

Figure 4 (a, b) Linear referencing system and dynamic segmentation.


multiple line segments, even spatially overlapping ones, can be referenced along the same linear feature. Georeferencing with qualitative spatial relations

Spatial relations play an important role in indirect geor eferencing. Discrete georeferencing and LRS are both based on two specific types of relations. Yet, there are many other types of spatial relations that can be used to describe locations. Indeed, it is quite common in people’s daily life to refer to locations using spatial relations be tween the referents and other spatial features. For ex ample, one may describe the location of a post office as ‘‘on Main street, north of the gas station at the intersection of Main and Second street.’’ Such a description provides enough information to locate the post office, thus theo retically it could be georeferenced through the inter pretation of such qualitative spatial relations. This could be particularly useful when discrete georeferencing is not applicable, for instance, when a place has no street address or when the street address is unknown to us. In practice, current GIS technology and online lo cation finding services provide some limited georefer encing capabilities by the use of qualitative spatial relations. These limited capabilities fall in two types: that by the use of topological relation ‘intersection’ and that by the use of proximity spatial relation ‘near’. It is pos sible to find road intersections if the names of the two roads are provided. An example of using ‘intersection’ relation for georeferencing is shown in Figure 5a. In addition, some online map search engines (e.g., Google maps) also allow qualitative inputs of ‘near’ in spatial query. Figure 5b illustrates such an example. It finds all hotels ‘near’ a specific location. However, what is done in these GIS services is to simply translate ‘near’ into a certain geographical buffer distance and return all found locations within the distance. It is an oversimplified in terpretation of this spatial relation because ‘near’ actually means different distances in different contexts. To summarize, current geospatial technology only has very limited capability to support georeferencing with qualitative spatial relations. This remains to be an area for further research.

Using Georeferencing Application of Georeferencing Metric georeferencing lays the foundation of GIS, location based services, and other geospatial applications. The coordinate based georeferencing is used to build GIS databases, some of which can provide the underlying frame of reference for indirect georeferencing. Based on the metrically georeferenced databases, more sophisti cated spatial analysis can be performed. In addition, a state of the practice example is the in vehicle navigation

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systems using global positioning technology to do real time metric georeferencing. The positioning technology obtains coordinates of the current location, which is then georeferenced in the street network GIS database on the fly. Metric georeferencing is also being applied in many other location based services. For example, Global Pos itioning System (GPS) is the georeferencing technology for geocaching, the popular web based loation finding adventure. Indirect georeferencing links the commonly available text based place names, codes, and addresses with met rically georeferenced locations or features. It provides a bridge between textual information and spatial location information. After georeferencing the text based attri butes, more spatial analysis can be conducted based on the locations. Thus, indirect georeferencing is very useful and indeed widely used. Example applications include georeferencing reported addresses through emergency responses, crime records, real estates, package delivery, market analysis, etc. Among indirect georeferencing, address matching is particularly popular. However, despite its popularity, there are several noteworthy common issues with it. First of all, sometimes imperfect matching rates are observed. Two possible problems account for low matching rates. One problem relates to possible imprecision of the underlying street databases, and the other is due to in accuracy of the recorded addresses (referents) for geo coding. If a street goes by several alternative names, the adoption of different names in the database and in the referents could cause unsuccessful matching result. Sec ond, discrete georeferencing is sensitive to spatial and temporal accuracies of the underlying geographic frame of reference. The frame of reference, such as street net works in GIS, may change over time. This can be a particularly critical problem for applications that require such information for planning and emergency response. Accidents that occur on new building sites or new roads cannot be accurately reported and geocoded if the new street information is not available in the database yet. How to Do It Continuous georeferencing can be done through various techniques such as field survey, GPS technology, remote sensing, and photogrammetry, obtaining location infor mation from existing georeferenced maps, or obtaining georeferenced digital data directly from public or private sources. Particularly, in many countries, available to the general public are a variety of digital files of georefer enced locations of cultural and physical features. In the United States, for example, it is the federal mandate that each state hosts a website of so called ‘GIS data clearing house’ for the public to freely access some commonly used georeferenced GIS data. There are also


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Figure 5 (a, b) Georeferencing using qualitative spatial relations.

modern personal digital devices equipped with global positioning capability allowing for instant metric geo referencing. Discrete georeferencing can be done in a GIS pack age. Conventional geocoding GIS functions are available in most GIS packages. There are also web based location finding services that can be used for discrete georeferencing purposes. Popular services can be found

at Google maps, MapQuest, Map on us, and Yahoo maps, to name a few examples. In addition, there are also many online yellow page services for business listing and georeferencing. See also: Geomatics; GIS, Mobile and Locational Based Services; Global Positioning/GPS; Integrated Spatial Data Infrastructure; Projections.


Further Reading

Relevant Websites

Cowen, D. J. (1997). Discrete georeferencing. NCGIA core curriculum in geographic information science, http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/ giscc/units/u016/u016.html (accessed January 2008). Hill, L. L. (2006). Georeferencing: The Geographic Associations of Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISO (2003). Geographic information Spatial Referencing by Geographic Identifiers. ISO 19112. Geneva, Switzerland: International Organization for Standardization. Linear Referencing System (2002). Linear referencing system. Report of a Pilot Project Jointed Conducted by Natural Resources Canada and Land Information Ontario, http://www.geoconnections.org/ publications/reports/LRS 04 2002 E.pdf (accessed January 2008). Longley, P. A., Goodchild, M. F., Maguire, D. J. and Rhind, D. W. (2001). Geographic Information Systems and Science. West Sussex: Wiley.

http://www.maps.google.com Google Maps (there are many other similar location finding, direction finding, or business finding websites). http://www.mapquest.com MapQuest. http://www.maponus.com The Easy Way to Find Businesses and People. http://www.census.gov US Census Tiger Files, US Census Bureau. http://www.maps.yahoo.com Yahoo Maps.

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Geospatial Intelligence K. C. Clarke, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary NGA United States National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the federal agency charged with providing and using geospatial intelligence products to serve a variety of military, civil, and international needs. NIMA National Imagery and Mapping Agency, Created in 1996, Reformed in 2003 as NGA. NPIC United States National Photographic Interpretation Center, was formerly a component of the CIA Directorate of Science and Technology and produced imagery interpretation reports. NRO National Reconnaissance Office. Agency that handled overhead reconnaissance imagery. Merged into NGA in 2003. TPED Intelligence acronym for standardized procedures of imagery acquisition and use: tasking, processing, exploitation, and dissemination.

The collection of information of use in intelligence for the military and for spying goes back to prehistory. Neces sarily, the information includes maps and geographical facts. While in the past, a large variety of media and communications mechanisms were used in military in telligence, after World War II the collection, assimilation, and distribution of intelligence information became highly controlled and increasingly mechanized. Large amounts of geographical data were collected by routine and open means, such as the CIA’s World Fact Book. Collection of map information was initially supported by the creation of maps series such as the US Defense Mapping Agency’s Joint Operations Graphics charts and the topographic coverage of countries around the world. Activities varied by nation, but in most cases the principal mapping agency in any given country is closely affiliated with the National mapping effort, and these agencies also mapped enemy or potential enemy territory. In the predigital era, this en tailed photogrammetry, geodesy, mapping, and charting. After the Cold War, it increasingly included use of data from overhead reconnaissance from aircraft and satellites. As automation of the collection of map and image data became common, greater emphasis was placed on inte gration of the data, and its interpretation for decision makers. At first, separate agencies collected and inter preted geospatial information, but especially since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 there was an in creasing recognition that there were disadvantages to the separate management of intelligence operations.

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The term Geospatial Intelligence was introduced in 2003 and formalized in legal code creating and tasking the United States National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). The goal of the designation was to create a new form of INT or Intelligence, on par with the existing human intelligence or spying (HUMINT), sig nals intervention and decoding (SIGINT), and other forms of intelligence analysis. NGA defines geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, as ‘‘earth referenced infor mation about natural and man made objects or events with National Security implications’’, and also as ‘‘the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial in formation to describe, assess and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth that have national security implications’’. These were the motives behind the creation of NGA from the former National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), itself created to absorb in entirety the former Defense Mapping Agency, the Central Imagery Office, the Defense Dissemination Program Office, and the National Photographic Interpretation Center. NIMA also in corporated elements of the Defense Airborne Re connaissance Office, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central In telligence Agency. A consequence was the merging of two ‘cultures’, a group that had trained and worked with overhead satellite imagery and another group trained as traditional paper cartographers for maps and nautical charts. The creation of GEOINT and the NGA was a con scious effort to remove the historical divisions, a neces sary step toward moving forward with an all digital geographic information system and cartographic en vironment within the United States intelligence agencies. The term was adopted in the NGA’s name both to rec ognize the fundamental property of geographical location associated with the data that NGA and the intelligence community produces and analyzes, and to emphasize the value added analyses that the agency performs to create GEOINT as a distinct type of actionable intelligence. A similar emphasis can be seen at Australia’s Defence Im agery and Geospatial Organisation and the United Kingdom’s National Imagery Exploitation Centre. The prior model of geospatial data, rather than in telligence, centered on map layers or themes, the logical equivalent to map series. From the historical perspective, the goal was to create and supply information largely independently for maps and charts, geodesy and geo physics (measurement and modeling of the Earth’s shape

Geospatial Intelligence

and gravity), precision location (usually with global positioning systems), and photogrammetry. The merging and overlay of the data required advanced geoprocessing, remote sensing and analytics, including time–space an alysis, and analysis of the behavior and interaction of natural and human phenomena at the Earth’s surface. Ensuring an ongoing supply of these themes required efficient TPED, that is, tasking, processing, exploitation, and dissemination of data, over vast geographic areas and at the time intervals of interest. Tasking implies sched uling of data collection and data acquisition, processing includes data integration, georectification, and regis tration, exploitation means analysis, and dissemination is routine, that is, to all who require the data or the ana lytical results, and to the databases where the data are to be archived for potential future reuse, for example, in change detection. This model sufficed for geospatial intelligence de mands during the Cold War. However, recent changes in the demands for intelligence have meant that the tradi tional division of labor works against the contemporary need for speed, accuracy, and synthesis, hence ‘action able’ intelligence. It was this gap that geospatial intelli gence as a new form of intelligence, and not as a set of data flows and standard analytical reports, was intended to fill. Consequently, the driving force behind the cre ation of GEOINT is the increased need for integration. Geospatial intelligence has been called ‘‘a powerful new analytic discipline – the product of increasingly complex sources which, together, are greater than the sum of the parts. GEOINT is emerging as the most valuable tool for envisioning and predicting activity around the world. It serves everyone – from the White House to the pilot house, from the Situation Room to the ready room’’ (Schultz, 2004). The director of NGA has stated, ‘‘GEOINT is about more than pictures. GEOINT makes possible in depth assessments and judgments based on the information that is gleaned from visual depictions. In short, GEOINT is more than imagery, maps, charts and digital displays showing where the bad guys are. GEOINT at its best is the analysis that results from the blending of all of the above into a dynamic, composite view of features or activities – natural or manmade – on Earth’’ (Clapper, 2004).

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The call for synthesis has been echoed in academic geography. Many geographical approaches use scale as an integrating factor, arguing that all scales impact all oth ers. In Geographic Information Science (GIS), standards based interoperable systems are becoming commonplace, usually linked to powerful databases via the Internet. Within information science, new methods and theory of data fusion, knowledge discovery, and data mining allow search tasks with little human intervention. As the geo graphical sciences move beyond the analytical and compartmentalized approach inherent in most early GIS analysis, such as features, layers, themes, overlays, etc., the geospatial intelligence vision becomes more feasible and more useful for geography. In its narrow sense, as a way to do synthesis driven intelligence work, GEOINT is already the focus of considerable research and funding. A challenge will be adopting the broader views of the geographical tradition to the new generation of methods, tools, and approaches that GEOINT is already beginning to create and nurture. See also: Cold War; Maps; Mapping, Topographic; Remote Sensing.

Further Reading Clapper, Jr., (Ret.) Lt. Gen. James R. (2004). Imagine the Power of GEOINT, Pathfinder, vol. 2, no. 1, May June 2004. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Clapper, Jr., (Ret.) Lt. Gen. James R. (2006). Progress in Defining GEOINT, Pathfinder, vol. 4, no. 2, March/April 2006. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. National Research Council (2006). Priorities for GEOINT Research at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Board on Earth Sciences and Resources. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Schultz, M. (2004). Letter to Our Readers, Pathfinder, vol. 2(1), May June, 2004. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

Relevant Websites http://www.nga.mil National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record id=11601 National Research Council. Priorities for GEOINT Research at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. http://www.usgif.org United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation.

Geovisualization M. J. Kraak, International Institute of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, Enschede, The Netherlands & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Cartography The art, science, and technology of making and using maps. Geovisualization A loosely bounded domain that addresses the visual exploration, analysis, synthesis, and presentation of geospatial data by integrating approaches from various disciplines including cartography with those from scientific visualization, image analysis, information visualization, exploratory data analysis, visual analytics, and GI Science. Map A symbolized representation of a geographical reality, representing selected features and characteristics, resulting from the creative effort of its author’s execution of choices, and is designed for use when spatial relationships are of primary relevance. Visual Thinking The thinking process that results from interacting with graphic representations such as maps and diagrams.

Introduction Maps are familiar to all of us. Everyday decisions are made based on maps and the geographic information they represent. This varies from simple route finding from A to B, to locating an event from the news, or studying a weather map. In a professional environment the examples are more complex and might include planning a new railroad, assisting during an earthquake disaster, or understanding the global spread of the bird flu. Maps offer us insight in our geoenvironment, because they have the ability to present, synthesize, analyze, and explore the real world. Maps do this well because they only present a selection of the complexity of reality and visualize it in an abstract way. The cartographic discip line has developed a whole set of design guidelines to realize the most suitable map that offers insight in spatial patterns and relations. In general, professional geog raphers don’t have to be convinced of the unique qual ities of maps to express their ideas, to make a point, to obtain new knowledge, communicate with colleagues, and of course to orientate and navigate. Maps are also appreciated outside the professional community. Maps have been used throughout history and across all cultures in day to day activities. Recent technological and societal developments have acted as a positive stimulus for map creation and use,

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both for professional and for nonprofessional users. The recent success of products like Google Maps and Google Earth has demonstrated this. Both products combine an intuitive interface with a good map design, a wide availability of data, and the possibility of linking your own data to the maps and satellite imagery. It has resulted in a tremendous increase in the number of maps pro duced and disseminated, and allows the wider public to participate in the mapping process. In addition, maps that used to be complicated to produce can now be created to present many alternative views by the single click of the mouse. However, this last aspect is not always realized be cause the view on maps is often limited to its presen tation function. Even the professional geographer might not be fully aware of the possibilities. Although it has to be realized that the traditional role of a map to ‘present’ is still very much valid, today’s challenge is to see the map as a flexible interface to geospatial data, since it offers interaction with the data behind the visual repre sentation. The interactive and dynamic environments in which maps are used, often in combination with other graphic representations, encourage exploration. As such they are used to stimulate (visual) thinking about geos patial patterns, relationships, and trends. The contexts where maps like this operate have led to an extended view on cartography, and can be deemed the world of geovisualization. This can be described as a loosely bounded domain that addresses the visual exploration, analysis, synthesis, and presentation of geospatial data by integrating approaches from disciplines including car tography with those from scientific visualization, image analysis, information visualization, exploratory data an alysis, visual analytics, and GI Science.

Nature of Geovisualization The above developments in the integration of methods and techniques used by different disciplines is a logical step, especially because many challenges being faced in the natural and social sciences have an inherent com plexity and interdisciplinary nature. Examples include: how to assess the vulnerability of regions and their human populations to global environmental change; how to measure and sustain biodiversity; how to predict and cope with changing disease incidence patterns; and how to manage the increasing traffic flows of cities more ef fectively. For each of these problems, georeferencing provides a fundamental mechanism for linking the

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diverse forms of data needed to attack these problems. Currently no fully developed, integrated models of complex human and environmental systems exist. The international research community tries to come to solu tions from different perspectives. The geovisualization perspective has the potential to provide ‘windows’ into the complexity of phenomena and processes involved, through innovative scene construction, virtual environ ments, and collaboration, thus prompting insight into the structures and relationships contained within these complex, linked data sets. The nature of geovisualization research is wide ran ging and in the research agenda established by the inter national cartographic community, particular areas have been identified. These focus areas are closely interrelated and should be seen in connection with each other. They include representation, visualization–computation inte gration, interfaces, and cognitive/usability issues.

they have in mind. This is not trivial, because the geo visualization environments are often composed of mul tiple coordinated views, each of which give a different visual perspective on the data at hand. Changes in one view will result in corresponding changes in other views. Next to the use of the large screens that support these coordinated views, the trend of small screens on all kind of mobile devices can be witnessed as well. To make it all work one has to

Representation

extend our understanding of metaphor for geovisua • lization, and investigate to support the digital earth and • the conceptinterfaces of digital earth as an interface.

In the past, cartography had a more or less fixed set of options available for a correct graphic representation of any type of geographic data. Today technology offers many new extensive opportunities for which the appli cation of existing methods are less certain. Examples are animation, hyperlinking, immersive environments, and multimodal interfaces. Despite these advanced technol ogy driven options, the available software does not cater for all possible map types available, because these require typical human creativity to create. Interaction and dy namics are today a default component of the represen tation tool box. In addition, the amount and complexity of the data to represent is increasing. Large multivariate spatiotemporal data set, including the third dimension as well as time, are available and have to be understood. Based on these observations, there is a need to consider conceptual and technological issues:

• • • • •

to develop a theory for georepresentation and for malizing representation methods, to develop new forms of representation that support the understanding of geospatial phenomena and space–time processes, to adapt representation methods to meet the changing nature of data to be represented, to adapt representation methods to the increasing range in kinds of tasks that visual geospatial repre sentations must support, and to take advantage of recent (and anticipated) techno logical advances in both hardware and data formats.

Interaction Forms and Interface Design In a visual environment the interface is most important. The users should intuitively be able to execute the tasks

extend our understanding of interface design to take • advantage of the potential of virtual environments, develop and assess formalizations for specifying • interface operations appropriate to geovisualization environments,

develop a comprehensive user centered design ap • proach to geovisualization usability, develop the understanding and mechanisms for cap • italizing on the potential of geovisualization to prompt creative thinking,

Integration of Visualization and Geocomputation Although a visual approach to problem solving is very strong, it cannot do without computational support. Most graphic actions that are initiated require computational support, and again graphics are needed to get an insight in computational results. What needs to be done is to address the engineering problems of bringing together • disparate technologies, explicitly the location and time com • ponents ofincorporate multivariate data within visual and ana

• • • •

lytical methods, represent geographic knowledge, incorporate geographic meaning within visualization environments, develop visual approaches to geospatial data mining, and integrate visual and computational tools that enable humans and machines to collaborate in knowledge construction.

Cognition and Usability Issues It is good to see how new tools can be used in one’s discipline, but it is even better to know if those tools work – in other words, to consider the implications of new forms of representation and interaction. Usability studies have to be developed to see when and why the tools do work and for whom. Here the geovisualization

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Geovisualization

community can draw upon experiences in the field of human computer interaction. This requires: development of cognitive theory to support and assess • geovisualization methods in VE & dynamic display, development of an integrated understanding of • metaphors and knowledge schemata for geovisualiza

• • • •

tion interface design, understanding individual and group differences re lated to use and usability of geovisualization, extending our perspective on cognitive and usability issues associated with geovisualization to contexts involving group work, determining contexts in which geovisualization is successful, and developing methods and tools that will enable the kinds of cognitive and usability research called for.

The four focus areas are interdependent, and are all re lated to integrated technologies that take advantage of the potential offered by increasingly experiential repre sentation technologies (multimodal maps), to the meth ods and tools that enable understanding of and insight into the increasingly larger and more complex geospatial data sets, and to a new generation of geovisualization methods and tools that support group work, and human centered approaches to geovisualization.

Alternative Visual Representations In a geovisualization environment, maps are used to stimulate (visual) thinking about geospatial patterns, re lationships, and trends. One important approach here is to view geospatial data sets in a number of alternative ways, for example, using multiple representations with out constraints set by traditional techniques or rules. This should avoid the trap that most researchers tend to rely on, that is, well worn procedures and paradigms. Instead they should realize that creative discoveries, in both art and science, often occur in unusual situations, where one is forced to think unconventionally. In these circum stances it is better to remove mental roadblocks and create some distance from the discipline in order to re duce the effects of traditional constraints. One can choose from many different alternative mapping methods. However, it is not just maps one can use. Other inter active graphics like diagrams and georeferenced imagery should be considered, especially because of the large data set one has to deal with. Many alternative mapping methods are familiar to frequent map users. When it comes to traveling, most of us use public transport maps. Their task is to guide us from A to B, and since one does not have to worry about driving, lots of (traffic) information can be omitted. This can lead to interestingly alternative map designs. The

best known example is the map of the London Under ground originally created by Beck in the early 1930s. The concept of this map has been copied by many other cities, although not always successfully. While designing the map, Beck decided to schematize the route network, as the map image of the city center became too cluttered. The traveler would, according to his opinion, not be hindered by this approach since it was dark underground anyway. The London Underground website has many examples, and one can in website allows one to interact with the network and request the real time situation regarding delays, plan a tour, and buy tickets. Travelers to mountainous areas will be familiar with the panorama map. Most tourist areas can no longer do without them. Often a summer and winter version of the map, each highlighting the characteristics of the re spective seasons, is available. The winter version high lights the magnificent sky slopes while the summer version concentrates on the fine overall view.. These maps are highly appreciated, and despite the fact that the images are geometrically distorted, they give most vis itors a better impression of the area than topographic maps would. Google Earth can be considered an inter esting alternative, since it allows one to combine different graphics representations on top of the satellite imagery draped over the terrain. This might help in the inter pretation of the landscape. Revealing Patterns: Understanding History To illustrate the geovisualization approach, concen trating on representational aspects, Charles Minard’s well known map of Napoleon’s 1812 campaign into Russia (see Figure 1) will be discussed. The map por trays the dramatic losses of Napoleon’s army during his Russian campaign. The author’s purpose of both maps was to stress the senselessness of war. This section illus trates the argument that if one is able to look at the data from different perspectives, for instance via alternative map views, sometimes in combination with other graphics such as diagrams, graphs, or even photographs and videos, one will better appreciate the nature of the data at hand. The map is rather well known and has been mentioned by many researchers earlier. It has been claimed that ‘‘it may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn,’’ and ‘‘a narrative graphic of time and space which illustrates how multivariate complexity can be subtly integrated y so gentle and unobtrusively that viewers are hardly aware that they are looking into a world of four or five dimensions.’’ The Minard map shows several ‘variables’. As with any map, there is location. Next to the major paths, some minor ones are depicted as well. Linked to the retreat path (the black solid band) is a diagram indicating tem perature. Additionally, the map shows the size of the

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Figure 1 Minard’s map from 1861 ‘Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armee Franc˛aise dans la campagne de Russie 1812 1813’, or ‘Napoleon’s March on Moscow’.

army by numbers and by the width of the advance and retreat bands. Names indicate major battles and import ant geographic features. Time is inherent in the map (it shows a clear distinction between the advance (going east) and retreat path (going west)), but absolute indi cations are given only in the temperature diagram. Traditionally, cartographers have three options to display geospatial data with a temporal component. These are a single (static) map, in which specific graphic variables and symbols are used to show change and represent events. Minard’s map is a good example of this category. The second option is a series of (static) maps, sometimes called a small multiple (Figure 2a). The single maps represent snapshots in time, and together the maps make up an event. Change is perceived by the succession of the individual maps depicting the event in successive snapshots. It could be said that the temporal sequence is represented by spatial sequence, which the user has to follow, in order to perceive temporal vari ation. Finally, one can create an animated map. Here change is perceived to happen in a single image by dis playing several snapshots one after the other. The dif ference with the animation from the static series of maps is that the variations introduced to represent an event do not have to be deduced from a spatial sequence, but from real movement on the map itself (Figure 2b). Obviously, Minard’s map includes a temporal com ponent; however, if one were to ask ‘‘what is the situation on August 24?’’, the answer is not straightforward. Even if

one could locate that moment in time, all other campaign details remain visible and may cause confusion. Alter natively, adding a slider to the map would introduce time more explicitly, and allow the user to define the progress of the campaign. However, in this process there is no link between world time and display time. Also, moving the slider with regular intervals would not result in a regular passing of time because Napoleon remained at certain places for a longer period. For instance, in Moscow he paused for more than a month – that is, information that cannot be derived from the original static map. Some of the animations have similar problems because frames exist only for the moment in time that the change is registered. The use of a series of maps (or a small mul tiple), each representing a particular moment in time could be the alternative. In Figure 3, two alternatives are given, each showing a different (traditional) cartographic solution. The maps depict the position of individual French troops on July 24 and August 24. The viewer is not distracted by previous or future moments in time. Additionally, it provides (just as in the original map) an overview of the whole campaign. The path of the cam paign passed up to the particular date has been highlighted. Interesting alternative visualizations have been pro duced by other researchers. They used Minard’s map to demonstrate the capabilities of a scientific and infor mation visualization software. Their products are ex amples of visualizations not influenced by traditional

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cartographic rules. Figure 4 presents two snapshots of the visualization produced by the SAGE software. In the snapshots the map is linked to diagrams, a principle Minard also followed in 1861. The maps in both snapshots are oriented north, with the longitude indication along the horizontal axis. In both diagrams the horizontal axis represents time. In the upper snapshot of the diagram, the vertical axis represents longitude, and in the lower snapshot it represents the number of troops. These combinations reveal some interesting facts when compared with the original map in Figure 1. The diagram in the upper snapshot reveals two battles took place at Pollock (located at the northern path in the map and circled in the diagram) instead of one. The gap in the diagrams in both snapshots shows that Napoleon stayed for a month in Moscow before re turning west, information not found in the original map. These examples show that alternative views can be re vealing and clarifying. What if another dimension is added? Figure 5 pre sents a 3D view in which the height of the columns of the path segments represents the number of troops. The

crossing of the River Berezina is highlighted. Napoleon lost half of his remaining troops during this crossing. This information is also found in the original map, but the 3D view presents this much more dramatically. Other vari ables such as temperature can be represented in 3D view as well. The columns can be colored depending on the temperature, applying color schemes with blue for cold and red for warm. Links with diagrams such as shown in Figure 4 are also possible, including the interaction options presented. The ability to manipulate the 3D scene in space to change the perspective view is a pre requisite, since many interesting facts might be hidden behind objects. If one would have looked at the River Berezina crossing from the north, it would have been hidden by the troops columns representing the advance. Additional layers with other information can be stacked below or even above the campaign information. Based on terrain heights, a fly through can be gen erated demonstrating the impact of the terrain on the campaign. In this particular case, it does not result in a spectacular view since the landscape Napoleon passed by is relatively flat. Google Earth would be an apt program

CARTE FIGURATIVE des pertes successives en hommes de l'Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812−1813. Dressée par M.Minard, Inspecteur Général des Ponts et Chaussées en retraite.

CARTE FIGURATIVE des pertes successives en hommes de l'Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812−1813. Dressée par M.Minard, Inspecteur Général des Ponts et Chaussées en retraite. MOSCOU

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Figure 2 (a) Minard’s map as a set of static maps; (b) two snap shots from an animated Minard map.

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TABLEAU GRAPHIQUE de la température en degrés du thermomètre de Réaumur au dessous de zéro

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to use in this case. Of course, one has to realize that land use patterns would have changed considerably in some places over the last 200 years. Figure 6 displays the path some of Napoleon’s troops took, projected on today’s satellite imagery. Alternatively, software exists which allows one to dress the landscape randomly and apply light conditions, based on season and time of the day. Even a snow cover can be simulated. One has to realize the application

of the rules of nature results in a fictional world, even if real topographic data has been used. Application can be found in virtual reality environments. For ex ample, in a two dimensional animation one can change the background of the landscape depending on the temperature from blue in winter to green in summer. Figure 7 shows how the background color of the map has been used to indicate the temperature during the campaign.

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Figure 3 The campaign in small multiples. Here two pairs of two snapshots with the location of the French troops on 24 July and 24 August 1812 are depicted. Each pair shows an alternative cartographic representation of the data.

The third dimension can be applied from a com pletely different perspective. Figure 8 presents a so called space–time cube in which the x and y axes rep resent the geography and the z axis represents time. Again, this solution would benefit greatly from interactive options to manipulate the viewer’s perspective of the cube. An additional option could be slider planes along each of the cube’s axes. The user can move them through the cube and as such can highlight a time period or location. One could, of course, also change the type of data represented along the axes and, for instance, create temperature versus troops versus time. Revealing Patterns: Predicting the Future For the study of dynamic phenomena, such as the wea ther, and specifically cloud developments, satellite images are the main source. These image repositories are be coming the fastest growing archives of spatiotemporal information and the users are confronted with this flow of data that need to be explored. Here visual exploratory tools are also useful. To predict storms and severe wea ther conditions, images are searched to look for con vective clouds. How are the dynamics of cloud development displayed? An immediate response might be interactive animation. However, despite being interactive, animations have some drawbacks and can easily lead to information overload, limiting their exploratory usage. An additional alternative view that allows the user to reduce the information load and focus attention, could enhance understanding. Next to the animation the visualizations of clouds can be presented in an abstract way, based on quantitative

data, enable essential attributes to be mapped, and have dedicated interactivity. The visual exploration is im proved by coupling computational methods – here used to detect and track clouds – with abstract and selective visualizations of the tracked information in a single en vironment (Figure 9). Tracking reduces the complexity of time series data sets: each cloud feature is described in terms of its attributes (position, size, image intensity, etc.) and its lifetime. This offers quantitative, abstract, and richer graphical representations of each cloud’s evo lution. In particular, the proposed multiple views in combination with the traced cloud paths can show the essence of the object evolution and history. Abstract representations help the user to search for objects of interest (clouds with negative temperature gradients are most likely to be convective and selective interactivity assists the user in focusing the attention on the particular clouds). With the presented functionality, the lower level visual task of detecting and tracking dynamic clouds is performed computationally. Vision can now be com pletely devoted to a higher level visual task. So, the meteorological scientists can pay more attention to ex ploration of convective clouds and generating hypotheses about their dynamics and evolution.

Challenges The examples in the previous section demonstrate that visual support in any phase of the geospatial data handling process can be realized and is helpful. However, they are mostly individual solutions. For a better integration, mechanisms must be pro vided that can visualize the connections between the

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Figure 4 The campaign data in multiple linked views. (a) Linking the map with a longitude-time diagram, and (b) linking the map with an attribute-time diagram. (Based on Roth, S. F., Chuah, M. C., Kerpedjiev, S., Kolojejchick, J. A. and Lucas, P. (1997). Towards an information visualization workspace: Combining multiple means of expression. Human-Computer Interaction Journal 12(1&2), 131 185.)

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Figure 5 Three-dimensional view of the size of Napoleon’s troops during his Russian campaign in 1812.

Figure 6 Napoleon’s campaign mapped on Google Earth imagery.

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Figure 7 The temperature during the campaign: (a) a green map background indicating relatively warm weather; (b) the map with a white background suggesting very low temperatures.

various stages of analysis and show how concepts relate to data, how models relate to concepts, and so forth. Today, one cannot find a single program to execute all the visualization operations discussed. Such functionality is needed, but what is debatable is if we really require this in a single package. With geodata infrastructure approach in the future and its distributed geoservices, it’s more important that one has access to (visualization) functions and data to create the representations required. An im portant precondition is, of course, interoperability, for example, so that the smooth exchange of data and func tions is possible. Currently, these requirements are not yet fulfilled. Standardization initiatives from the Open Geospatial Consortium and work executed following the principles of open source software development will bring these requirements closer to realization. Reaching this goal will facilitate collaboration in solving geopro blems. This approach has become more common in academia; however, many interesting and advanced ex ploratory geovisualization tools are found in experi mental lab environments. These solutions are often open for others to access and apply, but interested researchers as well as other geoprofessionals might find they aren’t always easily adopted. What are the future concerns to be addressed?

always far behind and problematic. Those active at the frontier will make use of new trends and the gap between established practices might widen, while technological progress is faster as ever. Examples are efforts focused around portable and wearable PDAs and other com munication devices that draw upon real time personal global positioning. Such exciting developments are likely to continue to attract significant attention in the near future. This location based personalization re empha sizes one of the original defining themes of visualization as a form of map use – the map devoted to particular needs and designed based upon these requirements. Advances in communication technologies mean that users of such maps can now be loosely connected through phone and wireless networks providing universal access to customizable, map based interfaces to geospatial in formation that may be location and context sensitive. It is interesting to conjecture if geovisualization develop ments are motivated by known requirements and the need for solutions, or developing possibilities and the desire to explore and apply them. This can be considered a cause of concern between approaches that are initiated by user needs and technological opportunities respect ively and draws attention to geovisualization research initiated by ‘demand’ as opposed to ‘supply’.

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Outreach

It is needed to incorporate the new methods and tech niques in existing (cartographic) theories. This process is

Next to an orientation toward ‘technology oriented dis ciplines’ one has to strive to apply the geovisualization

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Figure 8 A space time cube of Napoleon’s march in Russia: (a) the path; (b) the path and number of troops.

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Figure 9 Multiple linked views to study the spatiotemporal characteristics of dynamic phenomena. Right: a view of the space timecube based event graph showing the evolution of the tracked objects. The lower left view is the (animated) image viewer with graphics to focus the user’s attention to the object(s) of interest. In the upper left view the attribute graph displays various characteristics of the tracked objects such as the rate of change of area in time.

knowledge in application fields. A useful example is disaster management, where people might benefit from the tools during their activities before, during, and after disaster management. In other words, geovisualization tools must be used by people solving the large geopro blems. User expectations also rise, and not only by ‘Google Earth type’ of developments. This widespread adoption of techniques initially used to further scientific advancement to meet the information needs of a far wider range of map users, means that the design process must consider and cater for a far more extensive and heterogeneous user group than the ‘maps for experts’, typical of early geovisualization efforts. It is interesting to note that geovisualization techniques are also applied by other disciplines to nongeographic data. The resulting graphics are called spatialization. In these situations the map is used as metaphor to get insight in the data. Incorporation The geodata infrastructure plays a more prominent role in offering data and services. How about specific visualization

services where the user could select representation to execute a process as displayed in Figure 9? In addition, one can witness real time data collection and processing of large volumes of data via remote sensing or sensor web enabled collecting devices in the field. These can generate new and fresh ideas about the role of the map. In this light the incorporation of new technology in geovisualization remains important; incorporation of geovisualization in the geodata infrastructure is important as well. With the trend of geovisualization moving from the realm of experts well into the public domain, it has progressed from a focus on the individual (user, tool, data set) to support collaborative and distributed geovisualization which is facilitated by geoservices available via the geodata infrastrucuture. With distributed geovisualization, the inputs can come from many sources; geovisualization resources can be built from distributed components; and multiple individuals can collaborate with and through the resulting geovisualization tools. Geocollaboration faces some pragmatic problems. Collaboration could be in the same place at the same time or at the same place at different times. However, it is also possible to work at different places at the same time or at

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different places at different times. This will put specific constraints on the software, and data and version man agement. Problems like which of the collaborators is in charge, and how to deal with access right to the data etc. might surface.

See also: Georeferencing, Geocoding; Geospatial Intelligence; Maps.

Collaboration

Andrienko, N. and Andrienko, G. (2006). Exploratory analysis of spatial and temporal data A systematic approach. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Dykes, J., MacEachren, A. M. and Kraak, M. J. (eds.) (2005). Exploring geovisualization. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Hearnshaw, H. M. and Unwin, D. J. (eds.) (1994). Visualization in geographical information systems. London: John Wiley and Sons. Kraak, M. J. (2003). Geovisualization illustrated. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 57(1), 1 10. Kraak, M. J. and Ormeling, F. J. (2003). Cartography, visualization of geospatial data. London: Prentice Hall. MacEachren, A. M. (1994). How maps work: Representation, visualization, and design. New York: Guilford Press. MacEachren, A. M. and Kraak, M. J. (2001). Research challenges in geovisualization. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems 28(1), 3 12. MacEachren, A. M. and Taylor, D. R. F. (eds.) (1994). Visualization in modern cartography. London: Pergamon Press. Peuquet, D. J. (2002). Representations of space and time. New York: Guilford Press. Spence, R. (2001). Information visualization. Harlow: Addison Wesley/ ACM Press Books. Tufte, E. R. (1997). Visual explanations. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. Ware, C. (2004). Information visualization: Perception for design. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

This topic follows the current policy of the Commission on Visualization and Virtual Environments to import and export ideas from other disciplines. In the new field of visual analytics, one is trying to improve insights inherent in large volumes of data, which might sound familiar in geovisualization. The research agenda of this field is stimulating analytical reasoning, the creation of new visual representations and interaction techniques, as well as new data representations and transformations, production, presentation, and dissemination techniques. As in infor mation visualization, the data at hand is not necessarily geographic in nature, but methods and techniques can be exchanged. Geovisualization, which see the maps as an instrument of visual thinking, can contribute the geo graphical component in this field of visual analytics.

Conclusions The geovisualization approach offers a fresh look on geographic data, because it allows maps and other graphics to operate in an interactive and dynamic environment. Maps retain their traditional roles such as presenting geographic facts, but they should also be seen as flexible interfaces to geospatial data; they do offer interaction with the data behind the representation. This makes them instruments that encourage exploration and are used to stimulate (visual) thinking about geospatial pat terns, relationships, and trends.

Further Reading

Relevant Websites http://www.itc.nl International Institute for Geo Information Science and Earth Observation, Geovisualization and Minard’s map. http://www.opengeospatial.org Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. http://www.cs.cmu.edu The SAGE Visualization Group, SAGE, Samples. http://www.berann.com The world of H.C. Berann, The Cartography, Panoramas. http://www.tfl.gov.uk Transport for London, Tube and DLR.

German-Language Geography M. Hess, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction Since Immanuel Kant gave the first geography lecture on physical geography at the University of Ko¨nigsberg (now Kaliningrad) in 1784, German language geography has come a long way. It developed as an academic discipline in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland during the nine teenth century, with the first chair for geography estab lished at the University of Berlin in 1825 held by Carl Ritter, following his appointment as adjunct professor in 1820. Friedrich Ratzel’s two volume Anthropogeographie, published in 1882 and 1891, is widely regarded as a de cisive work and foundation of human geography. In addition, Ratzel is also considered to be the founder of (modern) political geography. During the first half of the twentieth century, German language geography con tinued to develop strongly and to influence the scientific community beyond the language boundaries. The work of geographers such as Otto Schlu¨ter and Siegfried Pas sarge introducing the concept of landscape (Landschaft), but in particular the work of Alfred Hettner, then prob ably the leading methodologist of geography and best known for his concept of regional geography (La¨nd erkunde), has had a profound impact on colleagues abroad. Their ideas have influenced scholars such as cultural geographer Carl O. Sauer of the ‘Berkeley School’ and Richard Hartshorne, one of the most eminent US geog raphers of his time. This period of intellectual develop ment and international exchange of ideas came to an end with the rise of National Socialism and World War II, after which German language geography never regained the leading edge it once had. However, geography rees tablished itself as an academic discipline of scientific and societal relevance and rebuilt its links to the non German speaking world, albeit slowly and gradually. The following sections are not meant to provide a full history of the subdiscipline, but will rather attempt to sketch the continuities and changes that shaped the current intel lectual landscape of human geography.

Developments and International Dialogs As indicated above, German language geography has for decades been what Geoffrey Martin and Preston James called an ‘export product’, whereas post 1945 it was mainly importing ideas, according to the same authors. There are two aspects of this observation that deserve

attention, however: the development and/or adoption of ideas, concepts, and theories themselves and the ways in which these are communicated through language and received through publications in specific languages. In other words, post war geography in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland might either have failed to develop new ideas and rather adopted them from ‘outside’ – mostly from the US and UK geographers – or it has produced new concepts and theories but not communicated them to a non German speaking audience. There are indi cations – although not uncontested – that both readings contain some truth, and the reasons for this perceived ‘loneliness of German geography’ (and, by implication, Austrian, and to a lesser extent, Swiss geography) are manifold and complex. It is safe to assume that political and institutional change during the twentieth century had a major impact on the way German language geography and its role for global academic dialogs developed. The influence that German language geography had early on and which is manifest, for example, in the well known exchanges be tween Alfred Hettner and Richard Hartshorne, or the deep and lasting impact of location theorists, such as Johann Heinrich von Thu¨nen, Alfred Weber, Walter Christaller, and August Lo¨sch, can partly be attributed to the appreciation of German science and philosophy by academics worldwide. With the rise of nationalism and the Nazis coming to power, geography as an academic discipline and how it was linked to the state apparatus came under increasing scrutiny, and ultimately led to an international isolation that would have lasting impacts – despite attempts immediately after the war by Carl Troll and other leading German language geographers to re store the lost reputation of the discipline. This legacy was reflected in the efforts and struggles to formally re organize the institutions of higher education geography in the form of various associations, but maybe more profoundly the impacts were felt in the way human geography, in particular political geography, developed. In West Germany, political geography – let alone geo politics – was basically absent as a research area until the 1980s, when the first major publications began to emerge, grounded mostly in Anglo American critical political geography. An important contribution in this context was Ju¨rgen OXenbru¨gge’s PhD thesis, published in 1983 under the title Politische Geographie als raümliche Konfliktforschung (Political Geography as the Study of Spatial Conflicts). Mean while, human geography in East Germany – in line with

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the state doctrine – had long ago adopted a socialist– Marxist approach, and was organized in a single, unified Geographical Society which was answerable to the state office of the German Democratic Republic. Alongside political and institutional changes, the role of language and the related publication system is im portant in understanding the development of human geography. While the work of early German language theorists was either read in the original language or saw translations into other languages – especially English – this was hardly the case over the last 50 years. Although the publication output increased dramatically, little of this output was published in English, thus minimizing the impact of human geography research in a global aca demic environment where the German language (along with others like French) had become peripheral. As a consequence, the scientific community especially in Germany and Austria was increasingly talking to itself, reinforcing and possibly prolonging its ‘loneliness’. Under such circumstances, it is easy to see why it would be difficult for any theories and concepts developed in German language geography, as well as the results from substantive empirical research, to travel beyond the lan guage community. This has been thematized as early as in the 1960s, for instance, in the work of Dietrich Bartels, and triggered sometimes heated debates about the state and future of German language geography in a global izing world of science, to paraphrase the title of an article by Ehlers. The number of critical reflections about this issue has grown in the last two decades, and this in turn reflects changes in the practice of human geography and its academic environment. It has become increasingly common for German academics to aim for publications in English, the de facto lingua franca of science (and all this entails in terms of the much debated, Anglo American ‘linguistic imperialism’). Most of the younger scholars now have spent time as academics in foreign countries, taking up new ideas from abroad, while at the same time helping to communicate research from the German speaking world to a wider audience. The biannual Ger man Geographical Congress, usually bringing together up to 2000 and more academics and students, offers an increasing number of English language sessions, allowing more foreign colleagues to participate in a meaningful way. Some international publishers have realized the market potential of a large German speaking scientific community and now are present at these conferences, which offers additional opportunities for contacts be tween German, Austrian, or Swiss scholars and inter national publishing houses. At the same time, the number of academics from these countries attending international conferences like the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers or the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) is growing. For example, at the 2007 Global Conference on

Economic Geography in Beijing, German participants made up the fourth largest group after academics from the US, Great Britain, and Canada. Arguably, such de velopments are encouraging as they can help to address the ‘trade imbalances’ in exchanging ideas, theories, and concepts. Some observers however are skeptical about what this means for geography as a discipline.

A Late Discipline? Changing Paradigms and Perspectives German language geography has not only been described as ‘lonely’, it has also been considered to be a ‘late’ science, lagging behind developments in other parts of the world and cognate disciplines – typically by about 10 years. In deed, it is possible to identify a succinct time lag in the adoption and use of different approaches and paradigms in German language human geography. While the quantita tive revolution and the related spatial approach took hold in the US and UK human geography, much of the work in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland was still heavily influ enced by ‘classic’ concepts based on notions of landscape research (Landschaftskunde) and regional geography (La¨nd erkunde). By the time the spatial approach began to find its way into German language geography (amidst much controversy about the future of human geography, espe cially during the 1969 German Geographical Congress at Kiel University), the late US geographer Allan Pred had published his work on the behavioral approach in human geography. Again, this was to become a widely used paradigm in Germany about 10 years later. Similar time lags could be observed regarding other approaches and paradigms like radical geography or feminist approaches. As in other scientific communities around the globe, human geography in the German speaking world today is characterized by a plurality of coexisting heuristic frameworks and research perspectives. In a recent article, Austrian geographer Peter Weichhart identified 12 paradigms currently underpinning research, including post structuralist approaches, new regional geography, and new cultural geography. The latter has made major inroads into German language geography only very re cently, with an overview published in a textbook edited by Hans Gebhardt, Paul Reuber, and Gu¨nter Wolkersdorfer. One of its aims is to provide a picture of scientific plurality and difference, rather than producing a single, dominant conceptual core. Again, while this is not necessarily specific to German language geography, the timing and the arguments made in various debates – often with a missionary zealousness – are a particular feature of its discourse. In other words, the current pluralism of approaches and paradigms is still quite often considered to be a major weakness which jeopardizes the standing of human geography.


In English language geography, by contrast, this plurality has been embraced since the early 1980s a major (and generally positive) element of disciplinary identity. One example of these debates about multiperspectivity and paradigmatic dominance can be found in social geography. Swiss born and educated geographer Benno Werlen challenged established hitherto widely accepted paradigms of German language geography with his major multiple volume publication Sozialgeographie allta¨ glicher Regionalisierungen (Social Geography of Everyday Regionalisations, 1995 and 1997), in which he elaborated on a concept of social geography based on action and structuration theory. His work has attracted substantial criticism, not least accusing him to create a geography without space (Geographie ohne Raum), but also found in creasing recognition within the scientific community. Indeed, his reconceptualization of social geography is one of the few post 1945 German language contributions to have made its way into Anglo American textbooks. Two other recent German language scholars to have contributed substantively to international theoretical advance are Harald Bathelt on the development of a relational geography and Gernot Grabher on the socio economics of space. Like social geography, other fields of human geog raphy have seen similar struggles over competing para digms, for instance, in economic geography or the field of cultural geography. As outlined above, this has not, however, led to ‘Kuhnian’ shifts or revolutions in the sense that one dominating paradigm is gradually super seded and replaced by a new one; the coexistence of multiple approaches is rather something that remains a fundamental characteristic. In the context of German language geography this could be of particular relevance, as the current and prevalent multiperspectivity can be regarded not only as some postmodern ‘irritation’ indi cating an arbitrary understanding of science, as critics would argue, but has the potential to stimulate debates and speed up theoretical developments by way of chal lenging conceptual inertia and standstill. The same ar gument can be made as far as the relationship of human geography in German speaking countries with its neighboring disciplines is concerned. Contemporary human geography in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland has made major progress here, and is clearly engaging in interdisciplinary cooperation as well as recognizing in tellectual contributions in other fields, in spite of ongoing debates about the future of geography between discip linary unity and fragmentation or dissolution. Geo graphy’s engagement in interdisciplinary research is important not least because many German research funding bodies such as the German Research Council put increasing emphasis on national and international col laboration as a precondition for granting awards. Another example where geography features prominently are the

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various frameworks of interdisciplinary research set up and funded by the state of Bavaria.

Organization and Research Areas Geographical teaching and research in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland today is organized in different associ ations which all operate under one national umbrella organization. For Austria, this is the Austrian Geo graphical Society (O¨sterreichische Geographische Gesellschaft) with about 1500 individual and institutional members, among them the five existing university geography de partments. In Switzerland, the main national organization is the Swiss Association for Geography (Verband der Geographie Schweiz), the members of which are the eight university geography departments, four specialized as sociations (teaching, applied geography, geomorphology, and young geographers), as well as the regional associ ations. In Germany, the umbrella organization is the German Society for Geography (Deutsche Gesellschaft fu¨r Geographie, DGfG) with four subsidiary organizations: The Association of Geographers in German Universities, German Association for Applied Geography, University Association for Geographical Education in Germany, and the Association of German Geography Teachers. As in Switzerland and Austria, there are a number of regional geographical associations that among other things act as a vehicle to communicate geographical research to a wider public audience. In terms of scientific exchange, the bi annual geographical congress – organized by varying university geography departments on behalf of the Ger man Society for Geography – is the main platform to bring together not only scholars and students from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, but increasingly also participants from other countries. The 2007 congress at the University of Bayreuth was the first to bring together all subsidiary associations for a common event in an ef fort to improve the dialog between universities, school teachers, and practitioners in applied geography. At university level, geography is a major discipline that is represented at six Austrian universities, eight in Switzerland, and more than 60 in Germany. Taken toge ther, there are currently about 30 000 students enrolled in bachelor, masters, and teacher training diploma courses and degrees. The latter will be ceasing in the near future, as all universities are changing to the bachelor/masters model established in the Anglo American system and introduced in Europe through the Bologna process, which aims to create a European Higher Education Area with comparable institutional models. Geography departments are the main sites for German language geography research, but there are some important non university research centers that play a vital part in developing geographical knowledge, most notably the Leibniz

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Institute for Regional Geography (Leibniz Institut fu¨r La¨nderkunde) in Leipzig. Funded by the German federal government and the state of Saxony, this institute has a rich and eventful history and was refounded in 1992. Today, the institute’s more than 30 academic members of staff conduct research in the fields of theoretical geography, regional geography with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe, and engage in numerous activities of knowledge transfer. In terms of fundamental research, German language geography encompasses all areas of human geography, and thus is well positioned to add to the existing inter national knowledge base – both in terms of generic re search subjects and the spaces and places on which research is conducted. To list all the topical research areas in detail is beyond the scope of this article and there is literature available for a more comprehensive overview of German geography development and trends from the 1950s to the early 1990s. It is notable, however, that while the traditional strength of research on particular regions continues to be a feature of German language geography, as documented in analyses of eco nomic geography and transport geography by Rolf Sternberg and Andreas Kagermeier, formerly neglected but internationally important research topics are now increasingly the subject of novel contributions by aca demics from Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. This is maybe most obvious not only in the field of (critical) political geography, but is also evident in developments of urban geography, social geography, and other areas of human geography. What is more, the traditional bound aries between the various established subdisciplines have begun to blur as research is focusing on substantive issues beyond classic subjects. The comparative strength and early work of German language geography on issues of sustainability is a good indicator for this change, as are the changes we currently witness in the context of DGfG related and independent working groups. New groups are being established now that do not have one of the traditional sectoral or regional foci, but rather center around specific issues, for instance, housing markets, or critically engage with mainstream geography, for in stance, the Critical Geography association (Verein ‘Kri tische Geographie’) in Austria or the working group on political geography (AK Politische Geographie) in Germany. While German language geography has been de scribed as a ‘late’ and ‘lonely discipline’ as far as theory building and international visibility is concerned, it has been and still is strong as an applied science. Whether in urban geography, economic geography, tourism, or any other field of geography, many academics and, of course, the practitioners trained as geographers engage in con sultancy work for political, economic, and social actors at different scales. In a sense, the tradition of regional geography arguably is an advantage when it comes to

informing development policies on the local, regional, and national level, which forms an integral part of geo graphical consultancy (Politikberatung). Applied geography also plays a major part in advising societal stakeholders other than elected politicians and political bodies, for instance, in working with companies, labor unions, or social and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) on a wide range of different issues. The current academic and public discourse of human–environment relations, on the global as well as the local level, should certainly be something through which German language geography can continue to develop as an applied science as well as fostering conceptual work.

Conclusions: Talking to Whom? Language and User Communities For any research to be relevant and have an impact – scientifically as well as in the societies that support it – the results have to be communicated to different audi ences. The audiences human geography is addressing (or ought to address) are not only the national and inter national scientific communities, important as this is to generate and maintain academic reputation. University based geography also has a responsibility to talk to users outside the ‘ivory tower’, and this also means teachers and students in secondary and higher education, policy and decision makers within societies, and not least the wider public and society at large. Language therefore becomes crucial in reaching these different audiences, and therefore it is important that geography continues to publish its conceptual and empirical research in German language. First, there are about 20 000 geography tea chers in German schools alone, and communicating the state of the art geographical knowledge between uni versities, school teachers, and students is maybe more important than ever in a complex, globalizing world fa cing tremendous social, economic, and environmental challenges. Second, the discipline needs to reach the audiences living their lives in various localities, and has to inform politics governing the development of places and spaces at various scales if it wants to continue to be both an academic endeavor and an applied science dealing with real world issues and making sense of the world. At the same time, the discipline must continue to im prove its publication output in English language as well as international conference activities (the 2012 International Geographical Union (IGU) conference will be held in Cologne/Germany), both of which are crucial for the exchange of ideas and research results. A good example of this are the Hettner Lectures at the University of Heidelberg, which started in 1997 and since then bring together distinguished international geographers as guest


speakers, graduate students, and early career researchers. According to the organizers, the annual lecture series is devoted to research frontiers in the borderlands between geography, economics, the social sciences, and the hu manities, and aims to further the exchange of methodo logical and theoretical developments across disciplinary and national boundaries, and to transmit the relevance of geographical thought to a wider audience. German language geography today is well placed to actively con tribute to this exchange, and thus to the development of the discipline both ‘at home’ and internationally. Having a voice both at home and abroad should also be a feature of other linguistic geography communities, like French, Spanish, or Mandarin, in order to further move forward geographical research, even if the (currently?) dominating language of global communication and international ex change is English, as in this brief article. See also: Anglo-American/Anglophone Hegemony; Citation Geography; Geographical Journals; Historical Geography; Human Geography; Interdisciplinarity; Landscape; National Schools of Geography.

Further Reading Burk, T. (2006). Raumtheoretische Positionen in angloamerikanischen und deutschsprachigen sozial und kulturwissenschaftlichen Publikationen seit 1997. U¨berarbeitete Fassung. Berlin. http:// raumsoz.ifs.tu darmstadt.de/forschung/fo05 literatur/ lit raumtheorie.pdf. (accessed in Aug. 2008). Ehlers, E. (ed.) (1992). 40 Years After: German Geography. Development, Trends and Prospects 1952 1992. A Report to the International Geographical Union. Bonn and Tubingen.

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Ehlers, E. (1998). German geography in a globalizing world of science. A documentation and personal interpretation. GeoJournal 45, 57 68. Ehlers, E. (2005). Deutsche Geographie Geographie in Deutschland: wohin des Weges? Geographische Rundschau 57(9), 51 56. Fassmann, H. (2004). Geography in Austria. BELGEO 5(1), 1732. Hartshorne, R. (1958). The concept of geography as a science of space, from Kant and Humboldt to Hettner. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 48(2), 97 108. Harvey, F. and Wardenga, U. (1998). The Hettner Hartshorne connection: Reconsidering the process of reception and transformation of a geographic concept. Finisterra XXXIII 65, 131 140. Kagermeier, A. (2000). German research in transport geography: Life in the space between objective analysis and political advice. GeoJournal 50, 17 24. Kulke, E., Lentz, S. and Wardenga, U. (2004). Geography in Germany. BELGEO 5(1), 81 93. Miggelbrink, J. (2002). Der geza¨hmte Blick. Zum Wandel des Diskurses u¨ber ‘‘Raum’’ und ‘‘Region’’ in humangeographischen Forschungsansa¨tzen des ausgehenden 20. Jahrhunderts. Leipzig: Institut fu¨r La¨nderkunde (Beitra¨ge zur Regionalen Geographie 55). Monheim, H., Schwarte, M. and Winkelkotter, C. (1999). Die deutsche Geographie dreiXig Jahre nach Kiel. STANDORT Zeitschrift fu¨r Angewandte Geographie 3, 46 49. OXenbrugge, J. (1983). Recent developments in political geography in West Germany. Political Geography Quarterly 2, 71 80. Reuber, P. (2000). Conflict studies and critical geopolitics theoretical concepts and recent research in political geography. GeoJournal 50, 37 43. Schultz, H. D. (1980). Die deutschsprachige Geographie von 1800 bis 1970. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte ihrer Methodologie. Berlin. Sternberg, R. (2000). State of the art and perspectives of economic geography taking stock from a German point of view. GeoJournal 50, 25 36. Weichhart, P. (2001). Humangeographische Forschungsansa¨tze. In Sitte, W. & Wohlschlaegl, H. (eds.) Beitra¨ge zur Didaktik des ‘‘Geographie und Wirtschaftskunde’’ Unterrichts, pp 182 198. Vienna (Materialien zur Didaktik der Geographie und Wirtschaftskunde, Band 16). Weichhart, P. and Arnreiter, G. (1998). Rivalisierende Paradigmen im Fach Geographie. In Schurz, G. & Weingartner, P. (eds.) Koexistenz rivalisierender Paradigmen. Eine post kuhnsche Bestandsaufnahme gegenwa¨rtiger Wissenschaft, pp 53 85. Wiesbaden: Opladen.

Gerrymandering R. Morrill, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Gerrymander Territorial manipulation of electoral districts to discriminate against parties, persons, or political interests. Malapportionment Unequal population between districts.

Introduction Gerrymandering refers to the deliberate manipulation of territory to gain disproportionate power in elections. The term ‘gerrymandering’ immortalizes the name of the Massachusetts governor, and the name of the cartoonist, Tisdale, who in 1821 likened the shape of one manipu lated district to a salamander (Figure 1). The purpose of gerrymandering is to help ‘your side’ and to hurt the ‘other side’, whether this refers to political party, a racial or ethnic group, kinds of territory (urban, rural, suburban, rich, poor), or individuals (incumbents or challengers), and thereby to obtain a higher share of seats than of votes. While the most publicized examples of gerry mandering recently have bizarrely shaped congressional districts (see examples below), gerrymandering is prac ticed at all levels of government in which there are electoral districts with single members – legislatures, county and city councils, and many others. And clever map drawers can gerrymander – that is successfully discriminate – without resorting to extreme irregularity.

How to Gerrymander There are various means of gerrymandering electoral districts (see Figure 2): 1. Splitting or dilution of the concentrations of the other side, so as to leave them a minority in as many districts as possible; cracking is a form in which the district of an incumbent of the other party is split. 2. Packing or concentrating the other side in as few districts as possible, so that many of their votes are ‘wasted’, while also creating many districts with moderate margins for your side. 3. Placing incumbents of the other side in the same re vised districts. 4. Creating multimember districts where your party is in the majority.

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Dilution is effective where the other party has enough support in one area to elect one representative, but splitting can prevent any representation. Packing is the ideal tool where the other party has enough votes – in a region or metropolis – to elect two or more representatives. Carving a district out of the densest central concentration will pack minority party voters so that they receive 85–90% of the vote, thereby ‘wasting’ 35–40%. Placing two incumbents of the other party in revised districts was a key component of the infamous DeLay Texas redistricting. Multimember districts in which one party has a majority was historically an effective way of preventing minority representation, for example, Blacks, from representation in local and state government, mainly in the south, but it also works for partisan dis crimination, as in the Indiana legislature (Indianapolis). Most gerrymanders are executed by the very legis lative bodies they control, the state legislatures, city or county councils, an obvious but accepted conflict of interest, but even bipartisan commissions or state or federal courts are not immune from the temptation and practice. At the very least, courts routinely approve gerrymanders, no matter how extreme.

Examples of Gerrymandering Many wonderful and egregious examples of gerry mandering are widely viewable on websites (please see the section entitled ‘Relevant website’). Monmonier’s book, Bushmanders and Bullwinkles, shows several. Also look at the US Congressional District Atlas. Two famous examples of rather irregular gerrymandering are repro duced here. Figure 3 shows part of the recent and court approved Texas redistricting plan and Figure 4 the famous original 1992 North Carolina congressional dis trict plan, and its notorious first and twelfth districts – racial gerrymanders. While gerrymandering often does take the form of extremely irregular districts, subtler gerrymandering can appear reasonably compact, while using any one of these four tools. Changes to the congressional districts of Mississippi illustrate the transition from traditional communities to a historic discriminatory gerrymander against black voters, by splitting the north to south trending community via east–west districts (Figure 5). Similarly, Republican districters have sometimes been able to reduce democratic representation to a single ‘packed’ core seat, while splitting the remain ing democratic vote area into several surrounding

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districts, each with a majority of suburban Republicans (e.g., Minneapolis, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston).

Gerrymandering and the Courts Gerrymandering was rarely challenged before the late 1960s, in part because it was simply accepted as ‘politics as usual’, and also because it was not as outrageous or as necessary. Malapportionment, or unequal population among districts was by far the more obviously unfair form of electoral discrimination, and even this was not struck down by the US Supreme Court until 1962 (Baker vs. Carr). US Courts have both condemned and endorsed ger rymandering, but only with respect to discrimination against a racial or linguistic minority. How can this be? Gerrymandering was considered ‘just politics’ until critical decisions on the basis of the Voting Rights Act (1965, and subsequent amendments), which outlawed racial dilution, disallowed retrogression, and required

‘preclearance’ of plans by the Department of Justice in states with a history of racial discrimination. The most definitive decision was Thornton versus Gingles (1986), which established the standard that race can be one but not the only factor in drawing a district, but that it is reasonable to design ‘majority minority’ districts where practicable. The basic problem with race conscious dis tricting was the risk of packing in the large urban ghet toes and of extreme irregularity in assembling sufficient minority numbers in rural and small city parts of the south. The one criterion of racial representation was elevated at the expense of others, such as compactness or nonracial communities of interest. The Department of Justice, many legislatures, and courts began the1990 round of redistricting with the expectation of striving for proportionality, even if heroic gerrymandering was required. This led to creation of well publicized irregularities in many redistricting plans, with disparate parts connected by strips of interstate highway, as in the North Carolina 12th District (Fig ure 4). The gerrymandered districts did elect a record

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number of minority members in the 1992 elections, but at the expense of any geographic semblance of community. Voters in several states filed actions against plans. In the majority of such cases the Supreme Court did reject the plans as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, and required less draconian plans (Turner vs. State of Arkansas). Yet several other infamously irregular plans were found to be acceptable.

Unresolved Issues This leaves unresolved two aspects of gerrymandering and electoral fairness: those of party and of territory (e.g., urban, suburban, and rural small town), but there is no judicial consensus to invalidate manipulation against a political party or recognized place or community. Compactness and community of interest are viewed as

‘desirable’ but not as essential. Courts have ruled against recognition of any kind of community except race or language, and have accepted blatant and intentional political gerrymanders. Although the courts reference inexcusable irregularity in striking down a racial gerry mander, they totally fail to be concerned with convoluted districts that are political (Badham vs. Eu, Bandemer vs. Davis). After both 1990 and 2000, Republicans, when in control, ingeniously pursued creating racial majority– minority districts, as this frequently eliminated liberal white democrats. The most extreme case after 2000 was in Texas, where the Republicans replaced a court drawn plan, leading to a massive shift of seats to the Repub licans. The plan was upheld at all levels, revealing that the US is not ready to tackle the unfairness of partisan gerrymandering, no matter how seriously it dis enfranchises voters, in a winner take all electoral system.

Gerrymandering Texas redistricting plan US House of representatives 110th Congress 12

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What is fairness and why does it matter? Fair repre sentation means that citizens’ votes are meaningful, that over time and over a small set of districts, the shares of seats won is proportional to the share of votes received – that some peoples’ votes are not weightier than others. The problems with gerrymandered districts which violate this sense of fair representation include distrust of gov ernment, apathy, not voting and withdrawal from the political process, lack of competition, and lack of change (shift of voter preferences does not translate to a shift in representation, a consequence of the almost automatic reelection of incumbents). Lack of competition results in many districts with no opponents even willing to run. The further risk is nonresponsiveness and corruption of government. Gerrymandering, Computers, and GIS

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Party workers, in presumably smoke filled rooms, have always used a combination of maps and knowledge of returns by voter precincts to accomplish their gerry mandering. The geographic information system (GIS) revolution in geography, in two respects, has also created a revolution in redistricting and therefore in gerrymandering technology. First was the development of computer car tography, in turn dependent on the creation of digital line (boundary) files and second was the extension of the census

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Figure 3 Racial gerrymandering in Mississippi.

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party, usually results in the most extreme gerrymanders, one that creates open seats for them, while placing the other party’s incumbents against each other, packing the other party’s voters, and creating many marginal districts for themselves, although this can be risky if there is a very large shift in voter allegiance.

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down to the block level. The availability of data at the block level, together with efficient and interactive GIS packages ironically made it far easier to carry out ever more egregious gerrymanders, for example, by using stretches of highway to connect disparate parts of a district. Yet, excellent programming models exist which could draw fair and compact districts. The best models not only achieve political fairness between the parties, but also compactness and respect for communities of interest and the integrity of political boundaries; these are almost never used.

Redistricting Reform Does it matter who does the districting? Plans drawn by truly independent commissions, as in Iowa, or the courts will be the least gerrymandered. Bipartisan commissions or divided legislatures tend to gerrymander for max imum protection of incumbents, although the plans may be reasonably balanced for the major parties. Legislatures controlled by one party, with a governor of the same

Bipartisan redistricting commissions (usually still ap pointed by the parties, which still have to approve the plan) and the adoption of formal criteria for districting are the two reforms easiest to achieve. Several states have such commissions, which do at least give lip service to good government criteria such as compactness, com munity of interest, and avoidance of breaking up political jurisdictions. Only very few, such as Iowa and Hawaii, have technical commissions completely independent of parties. Increased political fairness and competitiveness would be truly possible only where the location of in cumbents is ignored – this is probably impossible. Multimember districts with some form of pro portional representation is difficult to introduce in the United States, with its long history of single member districts, but they are widespread, even the norm in much of the world. Guinier proposed multimember (3) districts as a solution to the racial and fair representation dilemma raised by the North Carolina redistricting case (Shaw vs. Reno) – wise and clever, but utterly rejected. A variety of techniques is available, such as concentration of votes on one of the three candidates, or the ‘single transferable vote’, in which an individual’s vote is allocated to the first preference, and then after candidates are elected or eliminated, then unneeded or unused votes transferred in accordance with voter’s preferences. Finally, the US Supreme Court could decide that political gerrymandering is an unconstitutional in fringement of fair representation and could reject a plan that disproportionately discriminates against one party. This is the most likely eventual solution, but one that is not imminent. In gerrymandered election districts The voters don’t choose their politicians The politicians choose their voters! See also: Electoral Cartography; Electoral Districts; Electoral Geography.

Further Reading Archer, J. C. and Shelley, F. (1986). American Electoral Mosaics. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. Grofman, B. (ed.) (1990). Political Gerrymandering and the Courts. New York: Agathon Press. Grofman, B. (ed.) (1998). Race and Redistricting in the 1990s. New York: Agathon Press.

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Guinier, L. (1994). Tyranny of the Majority. New York: Free Press. Johnston, R., Shelley, F. and Taylor, P. (1990). Developments in Electoral Geography. New York: Routledge. Monmonier, M. (2001). Bushmanders % Bullwinkles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morrill, R. (1981). Political Redistricting and Geographic Theory. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. Morrill, R. (1987). Redistricting, regions, and representation. Political Geography 6, 241 260. Shelley, F., Archer, J.C., Davidson, F., and Brunn, S. (eds.) (1996). Representation and gerrymandering. Political Geography of the United States, ch. 6, pp 155 192. New York: Guilford Press. US Bureau of the Census (1993). Eongressional District Atlas, 103rd Congress. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.

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Relevant Websites http://www.westmiller.com Fair Vote 2 K Initiative (view from the right), Westmiller. http://www.fraudfactor.com Fraud Factor: Gerrymander and Redistricting Fraud, Fraud Factor. http://www.gerrymanderingmovie.com Gerrymandering: A New Document. http://www.fairvote.org Gerrymandering, FairVote. http://geography.about.com Gerrymandering, Geography at About.com. http://www.motherjones.com Gerrymandering: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count, Mother Jones.

Ghettos T. Slater, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Apartheid A term meaning ‘separation’ in Afrikaans, referring to a period in South Africa from 1948 to 93 when the ruling white supremacist National Party divided the country into four racial groups and created separate residential areas for each group along a distinct racial hierarchy. Assimilation The process of an ethnic minority group acquiring the characteristics and sharing the resources of the ‘host’ or majority group through residential settlement patterns and/or behavior. Banlieue The French word for ‘suburb’, it is now most commonly applied to the declining working-class zones of the French urban periphery housing relatively high concentrations of ethnic minority residents. Blockbusting A profiteering tactic deployed by realtors or developers to convince white homeowners to sell their houses by telling them that black people are moving into their neighborhood, exploiting fears of lowered property values. The price of the house is then raised by the realtors when sold to black people. Cite´s The French word to describe large estates of cheaply built high-rises situated in the banlieues. Ethnic Enclaves An urban settlement where the dense clustering of one or many ethnic groups occurs, a consequence of group solidarity, cultural affinity, kinship ties, and occupational concentration, and usually accompanied by economic and social activity tied to the ethnicity of the group(s) in question. Ethnoracial Group A group classified along the lines of skin color, caste, culture, and/or religion. Ghetto A space deployed by discriminatory authorities to isolate, contain, and exploit a single ethnoracial group; a place to cast out (permanently) a group outcast from society. Index of Isolation A measure of how often individuals from a particular group are likely to meet other individuals from their group – a group is ‘isolated’ if it rarely comes into contact with different groups. Index of Segregation A measure of the percentage of a minority population which would have to change its location in order to replicate the distribution of the rest of the population of a city. It has a range of 0 (no segregation) to 100 (total segregation). Jim Crow A system of legally enforced racial segregation (separate and inferior schools and public spaces, along with separate churches and clubs) in the southern states of the USA lasting from roughly

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1865–1965. The term comes from a minstrel show song-and-dance routine entitled Jumping Jim Crow. Redlining A term coined in the late 1960s by community activists in Chicago to describe the government-initiated (in 1935) practice of marking a red line on a map to delineate the area where banks would not invest (especially through rejecting mortgage loan applications). During the heyday of redlining these areas were almost always black inner-city neighborhoods. Segregation Either voluntary or involuntary, the exclusion of a social group from the rest of society, usually used in reference to spatial residential patterns, but it can also relate to economic, social, and political spheres.

Introduction ‘Ghetto’ is without question one of the most misunder stood and inappropriately deployed terms both within and beyond geography and the social sciences. It is regularly used (or abused) as a metaphor to describe the spatial clustering of any social group (student ghetto, immigrant ghetto), or indeed simply a dilapidated and/or poverty stricken urban area, rather than correctly used to account for and analyze the selected few areas on the planet that exhibit the involuntary spatial confinement of a single ethnoracial group (in line with the history of the term). It is also something of a surprise, perhaps even an embarrassment to those who patrol the disciplinary walls of geography, that the majority of the most widely read and cited scholarship on ghettos – inherently geo graphical expressions of extreme racial oppression – has come not from geographers but from sociologists. Fur thermore, arguably the strongest and most famous studies of ghettos tend to have in common their anchoring in ethnographic methodologies – very few geographers re searching the formation and social conditions of ghettos have contributed to this tradition pioneered by the Chicago School. The paucity of geographical research that is accurately tuned in to the history of the term, together with the qualitative geographical disengagement and increasing confusion emanating from countless (and rather numbing) indices of segregation/isolation, means that analytical and policy errors toward marginal neigh borhoods, whether ghettos or not, should come as little surprise.

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Origins: The Jewish Ghetto Perhaps due to the power of stereotypical representations of ghettos in the United States, and more recently the rise of the ‘ghetto fabulous’ discourse, it is seldom ac knowledged that the term ‘ghetto’ in fact comes from Renaissance (sixteenth century) Venice. Following the defeat of the Venetians by the French at Agnadello (northern Italy) in 1509, Jews fled into Venice in in creasing numbers, and quickly gained in social status via the professions of, inter alia, moneylending and medicine. Fledgling fear and hatred of Jews by the ruling Christians was in part a consequence of a campaign for the moral reform of the city following the weakening of its regional power at the time. Jews were viewed by the Venetian authorities to be the sole source of moral corruption, as well as carriers of disease (the spread of syphilis was incorrectly attributed to ‘overly sensual’ Jewish religious practices, rather than to the growth of prostitution; and, ironically, Jews making profits through usury was seen as tantamount to prostitution, and thus disease). There were widespread calls for the expulsion of all Jews to save the city from further moral degeneracy and contamination, but that would have been economic suicide for Venice, which desperately needed the high taxes, rents, and skills that the Jewish population provided. The solution of the Senate of Venice was thus complete spatial segregation, not expulsion: in 1516 all Jews were rounded up into an abandoned foundry called ghetto nuovo (‘ghetto’ originally meant ‘foundry’ in Italian) (see Figure 1). The ghetto was surrounded on all sides by water, not unusual in Venice, yet its walls were the highest in Venice, its outer windows and doors permanently sealed, its two bridges to the rest of the city guarded, and its surrounding canals patrolled by police boat. Jews were allowed out into the city during daylight hours only for economic reasons, but they had to wear special yellow badges – the same color as the scarves prostitutes were forced to wear. At dusk, Jews had to return to the ghetto or face serious consequences. (It remains something of a mystery why Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Shylock, moved with so much freedom around the city!) While oppression and violence toward Jews in Europe did not begin in Renaissance Venice (ghettoization was in fact a huge improvement on massacre, which happened to Jews in medieval York under Henry II), the Venetian Ghetto became a blueprint for cities throughout Europe. The same fears about disease and moral upheaval, in tandem with the same needs to retain and exploit a Jewish population for its economic function, saw the involuntary segregation of Jews in cities across the con tinent, as geographically distant as Rome, Frankfurt, Prague, and Amsterdam. While they are often referred to today as ‘Jewish Quarters’, historically they were ghettos in both form and function. Yet while characterized by

Figure 1 Jacopo dei Barbari’s woodcut drawing of the Venetian Ghetto, 1500. Reprinted from Sennett, R. (1994). Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York: Norton & Co.

intense overcrowding, squalor, disease, and deprivation, they were also zones of collective consciousness, soli darity, and social organization. Because ghetto Jews were subject to territorial confinement by night and overt ra cial ostracization during the day, Jewish culture and community had no option but to develop in the densely packed ghetto. The peculiar combination of spatial en trapment and social cohesion saw the emergence of a ‘city within a city’, with its own institutions and ad ministrative priorities. Everything from synagogues to markets, from schools to charities formed and developed behind ghetto walls, amplifying the rigid segregation of the Jews from the rest of society, yet strengthening bonds and kinship among ghetto dwellers, to the extent that strong divisions between Ashkenazic and Shephardic Jews collapsed in city after city under the experience of complete and involuntary ethnoracial containment. If we adhere to this historical fact – important if the ghetto is to be correctly distinguished from other marginal spaces that emerge from a different set of structural constraints (requiring a different set of analytical lenses) – then the ghetto can be defined as a space deployed by discrimin atory authorities to isolate, contain, and exploit a single ethnoracial group; a place to cast out (permanently) a group outcast from society.

Transatlantic Connections: The AfricanAmerican Ghetto From the late nineteenth century onward, as urbanization accelerated in the cities of the north and eastern United States (partly fuelled by immigration from Europe), ethnic ‘clustering’ intensified as a consequence of group solidarity, cultural affinity, kinship ties, and occupational concentration. Three crucial factors distinguish the

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famous (and most studied) example is the ‘Black Belt’ of Chicago’s South Side (see Figure 2), the Bronzeville of Drake and Cayton’s magisterial 1945 study, Black Me tropolis, and an area that housed an almost all black population, and 92% of Chicago’s entire black popu lation by 1930. Bronzeville is often the ‘dual definition’ marker used by many analysts to define a ghetto: almost the entire population in the area was comprised of one ethnic group, and almost every member of that ethnic group in the entire city lived in that one area. It must be noted here that, first, African Americans are the only group ever to experience urban ghettoiza tion in the United States (a legacy of entrenched systems of racial oppression, and of the white supremacy so in grained in the power geometry of American capitalism); and second, that the African American ghetto has not been consigned to history as a feature of the Fordist metropolis, but is still a feature of the urban landscape in city after city across the post Fordist Rust Belt of the United States. Following World War II, the color line hardened even further due to the influence of federal Zones of city growth N

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resultant ‘ethnic enclaves’ (Little Italies, Little Polands, Little Irelands, etc.) from ghettos – first, they were not products of ethnoracial control and containment by ex ternal overarching powers (one residential block in an ethnic enclave often contained people of many different nationalities); second, segregation within and between them was neither extreme nor rigid; and third, they were ‘temporary’ spaces for the many thousands of European immigrants residing in them, acting as springboards for an assimilative leap into the American ‘melting pot’ once plentiful opportunities for upward social mobility and class ascension were captured (many ethnic enclaves dissolved within two generations). A grave and terribly influential error of the Chicago School of Sociology, an extraordinary flowering of urban scholarship that drew their inspiration from the natural sciences in order to document the human urban equivalent of animals adapting to and competing in their natural habitats, was to equate ghetto with ethnic enclave and predict that all ethnic groups would assimilate into American society after initial clustering in their ‘natural areas’. This was not the experience for one group, African Americans, who from the early twentieth century migrated in mas sive numbers from the southern states to northern cities for the twin reasons of fleeing Jim Crow racism and ab ject rural poverty, and for employment in the booming factory based industries of the north (where unskilled labor was desperately needed to grease the engines of Fordist capitalism). The arrival of substantial numbers of blacks in northern cities, just like the arrival of Jews in Venice four centuries earlier, was seen by whites as a disturbing threat to racial purity, the moral order of the time, and the livelihoods of working class whites employed in the same industries. Blacks encountered harassment, hostility, and violence from whites, strictly on the basis of the color of their skins, together with a brutal tightening of previ ously porous systems of segregation in employment, education, and especially housing. For a black person, to cross the residential color line that emerged was to risk serious physical harm inflicted upon them by whites who had been socialized en masse into regarding blacks as subhuman (a legacy of slavery). Furthermore, neighbor hood organizations lobbied successfully to prevent blacks from moving into white neighborhoods, while realtors set in motion a profiteering process of ‘blockbusting’, thus trapping African Americans in overcrowded residential areas where they quickly had to develop their own in stitutions to ensure the delivery of basic needs. This is another clear parallel with the Jewish ghetto, another city within a city, this time black within white, bounded by the walls set up by racism smouldering at the core of American society, and filtered through private and public institutions that ensnared a group that was nonetheless necessary for capitalist gain. Without question the most

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Figure 2 The location of Chicago’s ‘Black Belt’, 1945. Reprinted from St. Drake, C. and Cayton, HR. (1993). Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (first publ. 1945). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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government initiatives in spurring rapid suburban ex pansion. Mortgage loans for white families led to what became known as ‘white flight’ to the suburbs, and the construction of highways enabled transportation between downtown employment centers and the suburbs. The problem of ghetto overcrowding was addressed by a federally sponsored program of urban ‘renewal’, whereby freeway construction ploughed through existing ghettos and residents were relocated into vast public housing projects invariably built alongside the freeways, effect ively turning public housing into reservations for the black urban poor, often termed ‘second ghettos’. For ex ample, between the early 1950s and early 1960s, the Chicago Housing Authority built 33 housing projects comprising 21 000 units, 98% of which were built in neighborhoods almost all black. Combined with the dis criminatory practice of ‘redlining’, which made it im possible for black homeowners to sell up and leave ghettos, systematic capital disinvestment amplified en trenched mechanisms of racial exclusion to ensure that ghettos expanded and persisted, rather than dissolved and eroded. It is therefore no surprise that the Kerner Commission report of 1968, following the widespread black uprisings or ‘ghetto riots’ of the 1960s (described by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the ‘‘language of the un heard’’), concluded that one factor above all underlay all social and economic malaise – racial segregation. One could be forgiven for assuming that the gains of the Civil Rights Movement in the US led to the gradual dismantling of the structural apparatus that had confined African Americans to ghettos, but ghettos persisted through the 1970s and onward due to massive economic restructuring and its effects on the poorest African Americans confined to ghettos. The major spatial impact of Civil Rights and the abolition of overt racism within housing markets (redlining was officially outlawed in 1977) was to facilitate the departure only of middle and lower middle class blacks from ghettos, leaving behind a subproletariat lacking the political clout, the institutions, the education, and the services required for upward mobility. The advent of neoliberalism triggered the rapid decline of manufacturing (and thus decent wage blue collar employment), the suburbanization of alternative employment, and the growth of the de regulated low wage service sector labor market (which offered no social protection, unionization, or opportunities for promotion). The outcome was the removal of the ability of young black men able to support a family, so the number of female headed families grew exponentially at a time when welfare payments were cut back, leading to deep ening ‘feminized’ poverty on a staggering scale in eco nomically traumatized cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Buffalo. The contemporary post Fordist African American ghetto is thus a different animal from its Fordist

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predecessor in terms of social organization and structural constitution. The neoliberal state has systematically dis mantled the welfare state that allowed people to survive outside the formal economy, and has replaced it with a punitive ‘workfare’ state which coerces people into the de regulated low wage labor market. Young black men who either reject or are rejected by this labor market often turn to the criminal economy in order to survive, and thus come face to face with the increasingly punitive arm of the neoliberal state (police, courts, jails, prisons), which easily justifies its actions (mass incarceration) by blaming the ‘underclass’ poor for not exercising ‘personal responsibility’. This has led some scholars to argue very convincingly that ghettos and prisons have become a single, interconnected system for the punitive spatial entrapment and management of the black urban poor.

Other Examples Ghettos in the United States, then, while unique urban phenomena in the Western Hemisphere, are not un precedented – they are closely tied to the Jewish ghettos of Europe in exhibiting the involuntary containment, exploitation, and control of a single demonized group. While ghettos in the accurate geographical, historical, and sociological sense of the term are rare urban forms, there are other zones of oppression and exclusion scat tered throughout the world that can be termed ghettos. The areas that contain Japan’s taboo Burakumin popu lation, descendants of the country’s rural outcasts, are a case in point. The premodern Tokugawa (or Edo) period (1603–1868) saw the organization of Japanese society into the four class categories of samurai, peasant, artisan, and merchant. Below the merchant class were the outcast groups of hinin, usually town guards, street cleaners, and executioners; and eta, usually butchers, tanners, leather makers, and undertakers. Hinin literally translates to ‘nonhuman’, while eta literally translates to ‘filthy’ – re flections of the attitudes held toward them (hinin/eta villages were rarely printed on official maps). Unlike Jews in European cities and blacks in American cities, the descendant Burakumin were never an immigrant group, yet they were widely perceived as a different race and officially labeled outcasts by the Tokugawa government. Burakumin were only permitted certain types of clothing, not allowed to leave their burakus (rural hamlets) to enter towns at night, and banned from entering Buddhist and Shinto sites of meditation and worship. Rigid and total segregation was enforced via strict rules controlling the size of their houses and settlements, and even laws pro hibiting their windows from facing tracks and roads. As the Tokugowa era gave way to the Meiji period, in 1871 the Burakumin were emancipated, but akin to the African American experience this did not lead to simple

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acceptance and assimilation into Japanese society. The Burakumin became an increasingly urbanized population and experienced new patterns of segregation through the mechanisms of housing (Burakumin populations were invariably forced into the poorest neighborhoods of Japanese cities with the worst public services – Kyoto in particular contains many segregated, poor Burakumin), marriage (there was strict monitoring of family regis tration records to prevent marrying into other groups), education (separate schools), and employment (they were informally barred from industrial employment, and forced to work traditional, low paying, ‘unclean’ jobs). Yet, in line with a chief characteristic of ghettos, to meet their own needs the Burakumin developed their own institutions replicating those of the society which had excluded them, and organized efficiently to lobby for urgent action to counter discrimination. While there have been considerable gains in Burakumin rights since the 1960s, and evidence of desegregation in many cities and villages, Burakumin ghettos still exist in tandem with the discrimination that created them – while the latter may be more subtle than in the past, continuing prejudice is reflected in the resistance non Burakumin children often encounter from their parents when they wish to marry Burakumin. Another example of ghettoization which departs from the textbook model but still exhibits the same organizing principles is the townships of apartheid South Africa. The white supremacist National Party came to power there in 1948, viewing itself as ‘God’s chosen race’ to ‘civilize’ the southern tip of black Africa, despite the fact that whites were massively outnumbered by black Afri cans in that country. Hendrik F. Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs in the early 1950s and widely regarded as the architect of apartheid (a word literally meaning ‘separation’ in Afrikaans), viewed complete and total racial separation as the ‘answer’ to conflicting material interests and cultures, to perpetuating white rule (via economic control of vast mineral resources), and to re versing the decline of the white population. Shortly after it came to power the government enforced the classifi cation of South Africa’s population into four casually defined but tightly policed racial groups, with a distinct hierarchy – whites, Indians, ‘coloureds’ (mixed race), and Africans (later ‘blacks’). In keeping with the accurate meaning of the ghetto term, the National Party realized that South Africa’s economy needed a vast supply of cheap non white labor, but also felt that under no cir cumstances should that labor live in city centers or anywhere near desirable (white) areas. Therefore, they legislated in de jure racial segregation to intensify, extend, and cement in place the de facto segregation that already existed, via the Group Areas Act (1950), called ‘‘one of the cornerstones for preserving a white South Africa’’ by Minister of the Interior, T. E. Donges that same year.

Between 1950 and 1993 it is estimated that over 1.5 million people were forcibly removed from their homes under the Group Areas Act, and relocated to other parts of South African cities, away from whites. ‘Group Areas’ (both business and residential) were ‘proclaimed’ by the government for occupation/ownership by a specific racial group, and persons of any other racial group became ‘disqualified’ persons who had to move out before a government deadline (usually 3 months). This vast, brutal system of social engineering through spatial manipula tion led to the creation of vast township ghettos involuntarily confining, exploiting, and controlling sub ordinated racialized groups, with devastating psycho logical, economic, and social consequences for displaced persons. The legacy of the Group Areas Act is a highly segregated urban landscape with millions of non white township dwellers living in grinding poverty, now amp lified by the neoliberalization of South Africa, extreme overcrowding via mass migration from all over sub Sa haran Africa, and the spreading AIDS pandemic. Town ships, then, can accurately be termed ghettos, but they are unusual in that they are relics of racist ‘minority’ rule that sought to enclose a ‘majority’ population, and are located inside cities systematically and ‘entirely par titioned’ along racial fault lines.

Case Study: The Myth of Contemporary European Ghettos It should be clear from the discussion above that not all segregated areas are ghettos. Ghettos should be viewed as a peculiar, extreme type of urban form rooted in discrimin ation toward a particular group of people loathed by their oppressors, to the point where the oppressed are forced to develop their own institutions behind the parameters of their involuntary confinement to necessitate their survival. To designate as ghettos any other segregated areas, such as gated communities of affluent white suburbanites, residen tial concentrations of students in neighborhoods adjacent to universities, or even the diverse neighborhoods of Western cities themed along ethnic lines (‘Little Italy’ in Toronto; ‘Japantown’ in San Francisco; ‘Banglatown’ in London), is to erase over 500 years of the term’s history and to begin any analytical focus from an entirely inappropriate conceptual point of departure. Yet time and time again, ‘ghetto’, a morally loaded term carrying with it a set of pernicious representations, is used incorrectly by scholars and espe cially by policymakers. Two recent examples from Britain and France, reinforcing the myth that ghettos on a par with African American ghettos exist in European cities, serve to illustrate problems of misuse. The fear of nascent ghettos is a recurrent one in Britain, but went into overdrive in September 2005, fol lowing a declamatory yet high profile speech entitled

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‘After 7/7: Sleepwalking to Segregation’ by Trevor Phillips, then Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality (now the Commission for Equality and Human Rights). Phillips argued that Britain has some residential districts (in Bradford and Leicester) that are nearly as segregated as Chicago’s South Side, and ‘‘are on their way to becoming fully fledged ghettos – black holes into which no one goes without fear and trepidation, and from which no one ever escapes undamaged.’’ Not sur prisingly the national media picked up on this part of the speech and massaged it into a colossal moral panic about the failures of multiculturalism, integration, community cohesion, and immigration policy (Figure 3). However, the speech was written without careful attention to the 2001 census, which revealed that there is not a single administrative ward, let alone neighborhood, in Britain in which the population is 90–100% ethnic minority, whereas tracts with these percentages are commonplace in the US. Furthermore, for all ethnic minority groups identified by the census, indices of segregation in fact fell between 1991 and 2001. If he did do much preliminary reading, Phillips was most likely misled by research on segregation using less reliable indices of isolation, which did imply that Britain’s ethnic minorities were becoming more isolated. Regardless of what measures were consulted, however, Phillips was painfully unaware that geographers have been at the forefront of published research confirming that Britain does not have ghettos. In Leicester, for ex ample, the only city in which a segregation index rose between 1991 and 2001 (from 30 to 39 for people of Black Caribbean descent), local residential concentrations of ethnic minorities are most definitely not a consequence of the involuntary spatial containment and control of an outcast single group that has since developed its own

Figure 3 Trevor Phillips, along with some of the headlines his speech created. Reprinted from The Observer, 25 September 2005.

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parallel institutions for survival. All ethnic minority groups in that city and elsewhere remain heavily dependent on the welfare state to supply basic needs, and even if discrimination is present both in public and pri vate institutions (such as in housing and employment), Britain’s often ethnically diverse neighborhoods offer no material for sensible comparison with the hostility and systematic racial exclusion that historically and geographically characterize rigid ghettoization. There are two dangers of labeling as ghettos those British neighborhoods that house a greater proportion of ethnic minority groups than others. First, it creates reputational ghettos, bogus territories that are none theless avoided through fear and damaged through stigma, perpetuating the harmful discourse of ‘self seg regation’ and stirring up another myth, that of ethnic withdrawal from society. Second, it obscures the in creasing segregation that is happening in Britain – be tween rich and poor (not between white and non white, or between Christian and Muslim, for example) – and deflects social policy attention away from class stratifi cation/inequality and inappropriately toward fictitiously broad racial divisions. Britain is not the only country to experience ill informed policy led ‘ghetto blasting’. French urban policy toward its poorest neighborhoods has for some years now been guided by the myth that the cite´s (housing projects) in the working class banlieues (suburbs) of its largest cities are very similar, if not identical, to African American ghettos in the United States. A few weeks after Trevor Phillips’ speech was fun nelled through hysterical national media in the UK, the legend of structural and geographical equivalence between the black American ghetto and the French urban periphery was reinforced by the policy and media reaction to the major civil disturbances that occurred in several banlieues in city after city across France for a period of nearly 1 month. The uprisings were a reaction to many months of severe police oppression and harassment of marginalized first and sec ond generation immigrant communities in those areas, mostly from North and West African nations. On 27 October 2005, these ‘zero tolerance’ surveillance tactics of then In terior Minister (and now President), Nicolas Sarkozy had culminated in the death by accidental electrocution of two teenagers trying to escape ‘routine’ police questioning in the banlieue of Clichy sous Bois. In the weeks that followed, as cars and buildings burned on the streets of urban France, commentators and pundits quickly resuscitated long run ning debates over immigration policy and the failures of assimilation ideology, the tensions between Islam and the secular policies of the French state, and in particular the dilapidation and deepening misery of the cite´s, which in demographic composition (large ethnic minority popu lation), socioeconomic condition (crushing poverty and widespread unemployment), and behavioral features (pan demic despair cum violence) were viewed to be the

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European example of the American ghetto, as they have been viewed for decades. While the deterioration of living conditions and de clining life chances in the French urban periphery since the advent of the intertwined processes of post industrialism and neoliberalism cannot be disputed, to designate as race ghettos the cite´s and/or banlieues robs these areas of an appropriate conceptual and analytical framework that otherwise may go some way toward ex plaining their plight. Why, then, are they not ghettos, as the respected source of BBC News repeatedly claims that they are (see Figure 4)? Two crucial reasons (among many) begin to explain why. First, a brief glimpse at censuses of population, or even a few hours spent there, will reveal that the population residing within them, just like in many other ‘notorious neighborhoods’ in Euro pean cities, is characterized by remarkable ethnic het erogeneity, as opposed to the strictly enforced (from without) ethnic homogeneity of ghettos. What unites the marginalized urban population of France is (working) class position, not racial subjugation via spatial entrap ment. Second, residents in housing projects of suburban France have regular contact with and dependency on (through employment and consumption practices) resi dents of adjacent neighborhoods or those in the central

city. This was not the case in recent memory in Chicago’s West Side ghetto, for instance, where so segregated and contained were the residents of one housing project, the Henry Horner Homes, that a young African American boy repeatedly asked his mother if all black people lived in housing projects, and if all black people were poor. With the possible exception of religious institutions, in no cite´ or banlieue of (sub)urban France will a rigorous analyst find evidence of a set of parallel institutions forming to serve the basic needs of the excluded popu lation – by contrast with what is common to all ghettos, the same analyst will quickly discover that these are areas where the tentacles of the welfare state, while shorter than in previous decades, still stretch into and attempt to assist lives of those for whom employment is precarious or absent and opportunities for upward mobility limited by language and skills.

Conclusion Contrary to the powerful imagery associated with the ‘ghetto fabulous’ discourse, an attempt by hip hop in dustry moguls in the United States to celebrate the tri umph of those who have escaped ghetto poverty through

Figure 4 Urban legends are reinforced through inappropriate misuse of ‘ghetto’. Reprinted from the BBC News Website.

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music and fashion (and now live lives of lavish con sumption amidst ‘bling bling’ Cristal champagne, ex pensive jewellery, and stretch limousines), ghettos are far from fabulous, and instead should be viewed as tragic urban forms that result from fear, oppression, and hatred. If there is anything fabulous about ghetto life, it is the extraordinary ability of their residents to form insti tutions of their own in the absence of external concern, and to form strong communities that, contra the Chicago School, are not ‘socially disorganized’ around the de monic imagery of the criminal ‘underclass’, but are or ganized in collective response to brutal confining forces that seek to isolate yet exploit, and contain yet retain. Reclaiming the ghetto term from inappropriate usage and restoring it through direct linkage to its historical/geo gaphical roots is vital if policies toward marginal neigh borhoods are to be accurately formed and sensitively implemented. See also: Chicago School; Gay Geographies; Multicultural City; Planning, Urban; Race; Redlining; Segregation; Segregation Indices; Segregation, Urban; Slums; Suburbanization; Underclass; Urban Morphology.

Further Reading Anderson, E. (1978). A Place on the Corner. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Commission for Racial Equality (2005). Trevor Phillips’ speech, ‘After 7/ 7: Sleepwalking to segregation’. http://83.137.212.42/sitearchive/ cre/Default.aspx.LocID 0hgnew07s.RefLocID 0hg00900c002.Lang EN.htm (accessed Jul. 2008). Drake, S. and Cayton, H. (1993). Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (first publ. 1945). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hane, M. (1982). Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan. New York: Pantheon Books. Hannerz, U. (1969). Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community. New York: Columbia University Press. Hart, D. (1988). Political manipulation of urban space: The razing of District Six, Cape Town. Urban Geography 9, 603 628.

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Hirsch, A. (1998). Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940 1960 (2nd edn.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Johnston, R., Forrest, J. and Poulsen, M. (2002). Are there ethnic enclaves/ghettos in English cities? Urban Studies 39, 591 618. Kotlowitz, A. (1991). There are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing up in the Other America. New York: Doubleday. Ley, D. (1974). Association of American Geographers Monograph Series, 7: The Black Inner City as Frontier Outpost: Images and Behaviour in a Philadelphia Neighbourhood. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. Massey, D. and Denton, N. (1993). American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Peach, C. (1996). Does Britain have ghettos? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 21, 216 235. Philpott, T. (1978). The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighbourhood Deterioration and Middle Class Reform. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sennett, R. (1994). Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Wacquant, L. (1997). Three pernicious premises in the study of the American ghetto. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 21, 341 353. Wacquant, L. (2001). Deadly symbiosis: When ghetto and prison meet and mesh. Punishment and Society 3, 95 134. Wacquant, L. (2007). Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Western, J. (1996). Outcast Cape Town (2nd edn.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wilson, W. J. (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Relevant Websites http://www.blhrri.org Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Institute. http://www.districtsix.co.za District Six Museum, Cape Town: Documents and Explains the Group Areas Act. http://www.fcit.usf.edu Excellent Photographs of the Venetian Ghetto, A Teachers Guide to Holocaust, Florida Center for Instructional Technology. http://www.urbandecay.ca Remarkable Photographs of Chicago’s Ghetto Neighborhoods and Public Housing Projects (Before They Were Knocked Down by the Federal HOPE VI Program). http://www.detroityes.com The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, DetroitYES.

GIS and Cartography M. F. Goodchild, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Canada Geographic Information System A computer-based system constructed by the Government of Canada in the 1960s, believed by many to be the first GIS. Choropleth Map A map depicting statistical data for irregularly shaped reporting zones such as countries, using variations in shading or color. Class Interval A range of values associated with a single shade or color on a choropleth map. Deconstruction The scholarly practice of inferring hidden agendas from the content of published material. Geovisualization Presentation of geographic information in visual form. Google Earth An Internet service that allows the user to manipulate a virtual image of the Earth. Map Scanner Device for converting the contents of a map into a digital image. Mercator Projection One of the most popular ways of distorting the Earth so that it can be shown on a flat paper medium; the Earth is stretched at high latitudes. Object-Oriented Database Design A technique for representing phenomena in a digital database.

Introduction Map making is an ancient field dating from the first ef forts by humans to create pictorial representations of the world around them, by drawing on the walls or mud floors of caves. Cartography, the modern discipline of map design, compilation, and publication, is most often associated with the paper map, a flattened representation of the curved surface of the Earth, but it may also refer to the creation of globes, and increasingly it refers to the use of digital computers to manage the acquisition, manipulation, and eventual display of geographic infor mation on the screens of computers. The advent of digital technology in the 1960s began a transition in the field of cartography that continues today. Geographic information systems (GISs) are computer applications concerned with the manipulation of geo graphic information, and today these software packages are capable of the representation, analysis, and visual ization of virtually any form of information about the distribution of features and phenomena on the surface of the Earth. The initial developments of GIS occurred in

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the 1950s and 1960s, as computers became powerful enough to manage the large volumes of data being col lected from satellites or digitized from paper maps, and today virtually all geographic information is in digital form, stored in a computer, at some point in its life. These definitions clearly overlap substantially, and while there might have been a period in the 1960s and 1970s when it was possible to distinguish between a cartography focused on the paper medium and a GIS focused on digital systems, today the distinction is hopelessly blurred. Many cartographers now prefer the term geovisualization, and many GIS professionals consider themselves expert in the design of maps. The following sections explore the many dimensions of the relationship between cartography and GIS, and end with a brief speculation on the relationship’s future.

The Power of the Digital Medium In the 1960s, it was not at all obvious that there would be advantages to representing geographic information in digital form. Computers were still regarded as fast cal culators, capable of finding numerical solutions to dif ferential equations. They had little memory capacity, and the devices needed to digitize or draw paper maps did not yet exist. When the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS) was developed, it was to serve one spe cific purpose: to calculate the areas of irregularly shaped features, and to present the results in tabular, numeric form. To do this, a number of historic breakthroughs had to be made. A map scanner had to be built, software had to be designed to perform tasks that computers had never performed before, and methods had to be found to rep resent geographic features as linear strings of binary digits on magnetic tape. By the 1970s these breakthroughs had paved the way for the management and manipulation of many forms of geographic data, and for the cartographic production process to begin a slow migration to digital media. Just as word processors allow easy editing of digital text, car tographers also welcomed the ability of digital media to support rapid editing, and to perform the complex nu meric operations involved in map projections. Within a decade the entire cartographic process had migrated to digital media, and today it is rare to find any part of the process being conducted manually or in analog form. Geographic data are increasingly digital throughout their life history.

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The digital transition, implicit in the development of GIS, had profound effects also on the nature of cartog raphy. No longer were maps condemned to be static once printed, since digital maps could be edited, updated, and corrected at any time. As the graphics capabilities of personal computers grew, it became possible to represent dynamic phenomena, and cartographers began to in vestigate the potential of animated maps. The acoustic channel, now supported on personal computers with sophisticated sound systems, was explored as a means of augmenting maps, and systems were built that allowed users to interact with maps in both visual and auditory senses. Thus one could explore a digital representation of a wilderness area, zooming to greater detail or accessing textual information associated with specific features, and even hearing the sounds associated with places and their animal inhabitants. Many researchers found the tradi tional term cartography too limiting as a description of this new, much richer world, and began to describe their field as geovisualization. Today the effects of this transition can perhaps be seen most clearly in the various virtual globe services that are now available, typified by Google Earth. These services provide access to vast stores of imagery and digital map data through a simple interface that a child of ten can learn in a few minutes. The user is able to visualize geography as if looking at and manipulating a globe, with none of the distortions that are introduced when the Earth is flattened for a paper map. The virtual globe can be manipulated by rotating and zooming, from resolutions of 10 km to less than a meter. Information can be merged from a vast range of sources using the techniques now popularly known as mashups, and these extend to three dimensional repre sentations of buildings and structures. The user’s viewpoint can be shifted from vertically above to oblique, and it is possible to simulate a flight over the surface. Google Earth is in many ways more akin to the tra ditions of map making than to GIS. Little of the analytic power of the latter is present; instead the emphasis is on visual representation of the Earth’s surface, and an im portant measure of the service is the degree to which its results resemble the real thing. By emphasizing imagery, and allowing the user to overlay other information on an imagery base, one ensures that the result is familiar, recognizable, and readily understood. By contrast, dis plays generated using GIS tend to be highly abstracted, and while the information they present will likely be precise and in most cases accurate, the GIS lens clearly provides a more analytic and less intuitive view of the world. Indeed, it is common for researchers to combine the two technologies, using GIS to analyze patterns, search for anomalies, test hypotheses, and compute nu merical results, and using Google Earth to provide additional contextual information that may not be pre sent in the highly abstracted GIS database.

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GIS as Threat Google Earth abandons many of the cherished icons of cartography such as projections, rendering them largely irrelevant, and in this sense can be seen as threatening to a discipline’s cherished expertise. Similarly, GIS enables anyone equipped with data and a few simple tools to produce a map that previously would have required the expertise of a trained cartographer. While great efforts have been made by developers of the more elaborate GIS packages to include support for sophisticated cartographic techniques, such as methods of cartographic generalization and alternative techniques for assigning class intervals to choropleth maps, nevertheless it is easy to find examples of the misuse of GIS. For example, several recent news stories of the missile threat of North Korea have included maps purporting to show the areas reachable by missiles of a given range launched from Pyongyang – by drawing concentric circles on a Mercator projection. Any cartog rapher, and hopefully most trained GIS users, would know that the scale of the Mercator projection changes rapidly at high latitudes, and that on this projection the locus of equal distance from Pyongyang is only a circle when the distance is vanishingly small. Unfortunately, the result is a severe underestimate of the areas that can be reached (Figure 1). It is sometimes argued, therefore, that GIS, and the popularization of digital geographic information tech nologies in general, represents a threat to the field of cartography – that ‘GIS is killing cartography’. Map making, it is argued, is a sophisticated pursuit that is best left in the hands of experts. Maps are often persuasive, capable of influencing opinion and policy; and just as the playing of concert pianos is limited to a few experts, so also the creation of maps should be limited to trained professionals. Attempts have been made in several juris dictions to restrict mapping practice to accredited pro fessionals, in some cases with success. Another dimension to this argument surfaced in the early 1990s as part of a rapidly emerging social critique of GIS. In the late 1980s, Brian Harley had introduced the concepts of deconstruction to cartography, arguing that all maps were social constructions that could be read as texts for evidence about the agendas of their makers. These arguments found ready acceptance, since maps have always been important as tools of power, and mapmakers have often followed quickly on the heels of conquerors. The selection of features for maps, and the styles in which selected features are rendered, are part of the process of cartographic design, and clearly open to conscious or subconscious manipulation for purposes that range from visual clarity to more sinister coercion. At the time, cartographers saw GIS as a new and wildly popular tool that appeared insensitive to these ethical arguments. GIS seemed to be grounded in the naı¨ve assumption that one could achieve a scientifically

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Figure 1 A circle centered on Pyongyang and superimposed on a Mercator projection. Similar maps appeared in several newspapers and magazines to illustrate the threat of North Korean missiles with 10 000 km range. However the locus of points that is 10 000 km from Pyongyang is not a circle on the Mercator projection, and includes the North Pole and much of the continental US.

rigorous description of the world, and store it in precise form in a digital computer – that the contents of a GIS database represented the results of objective, replicable scientific measurement. The ability to compute measures such as area to large numbers of decimal places served to reinforce this view, and it was clear that GIS was being marketed by commercial software developers as a sci entifically rigorous approach to geographic problems. To cartographers influenced by Harley, GIS users were the barbarians, sensitized to none of the nuances of mapping practice or to the tension between cartography as science and cartography as art. These critiques came to a head in the early 1990s, and led to a series of meetings in which each side slowly achieved an understanding of the other’s position. Today, the social context of GIS is one of the major themes of GIS research, and many developments have addressed the issues raised by Harley and others. The notion of objective truth, reflected in the use of such terms as accuracy and error, has been replaced by concepts of uncertainty and of the relationship between truth and power, in the real ization that many aspects of GIS practice are not replic able, that many of the key definitions are inherently vague, and that seemingly objective technologies can be molded to the agendas of their owners and sponsors.

GIS as Science GIS is an attractive computer application, combining the visual and the numeric, and it is not surprising therefore that it has captured the attention of many professionals

with backgrounds in science and engineering. Cartog raphy may indeed be part art and part science, but to these scientifically minded GIS users the new world of GIS offers the opportunity to escape the constraints and vagueness of the past, by developing new ways of de scribing the world that are indeed replicable and ob jective. Science has always attempted to sweep away the vague and subjective, replacing terms such as cold, warm, and hot with replicable measurements on standard scales – why not, therefore, replace the vague and partially subjective classifications of a soil map with measures of soil properties that are both replicable and useful to farmers? From this perspective the power of GIS lies in its ability to improve on past practice, rather than to replicate it in a digital environment. The transition to digital technology had both tech nical and economic impacts on map making. On the technical side, it allowed entirely new approaches to map design that escaped the constraints of manual cartog raphy. For example, line widths could be varied con tinuously, rather than being constrained by the width of a nib or scribe tool. Shading and color could also be varied continuously, leading to many more possibilities in the portrayal of spatially continuous phenomena such as topography or temperature. In short, the new technology helped to underscore for the first time the degree to which cartographic practice had been constrained by the technology of manual map making – by the marks a human could make with a pen and ink. Nowhere is this more evident than in the debates over interval free choropleth maps. These maps are used to portray statistical information, such as population density

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(a)

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(b)

Figure 2 Two choropleth maps of Milwaukee census tracts, showing percent black. (a) Uses five classes following the Jenks natural breaks method of class interval selection. (b) Uses 32 classes, and approaches the Tobler interval-free technique.

or average income, for irregularly shaped reporting zones such as countries or postal code areas. The attributes of each area are shown using color or shading, each color or shade corresponding to a defined part of the range of observed values. The relationship between value and color or shade is usually shown in a legend on the map, and the set of possible shades or colors is usually limited to less than ten, reflecting the difficulty of generating many different shades or colors with traditional tools. There is a vast literature in cartography on alternative methods of partitioning the range of values – of defining what are often known as class intervals. In the late 1970s Waldo Tobler had suggested that in the digital world this use of a finite set was no longer necessary, and that one could instead establish a con tinuous relationship between observed value and color or shading density in what he termed interval free chor opleth mapping. This would have the advantage that the information lost during classification would be preserved, since it would no longer be necessary to lump a range of values into each class, and as a result the map would show a more accurate picture of the data (note, however, that choropleth maps also distort the spatial aspects of data by averaging or lumping spatially continuous phenomena within discrete, irregularly shaped areas). Accuracy and the avoidance of information loss are clearly close to the heart of scientifically trained professionals. The response from the cartographic community was overwhelmingly negative, and today it is difficult to find mention of this technique in textbooks, or implemen tations in software (ESRI’s ArcGIS, the leading GIS software, supports many strategies for defining class

intervals but does not support interval free choropleth mapping, or allow the number of classes to exceed 32). Many cartographers argued that the assignment of class intervals was a vital part of the cartographer’s art, and an essential tool in using the map to tell his or her chosen story about the data (Figure 2). Today there continues to be a strong association be tween GIS and science. The term ‘geographic infor mation science’ was coined in 1992, and serves two somewhat distinct purposes: first, to describe the set of fundamental scientific questions and principles that underlie GIS, and second, to describe the use of GIS in a scientifically rigorous context. Cartography as a discip line clearly overlaps strongly with both interpretations of GIScience, but while there have been efforts to em phasize the scientific aspects of cartography, most notably in the analytic cartography pioneered by Waldo Tobler, the artistic underpinnings of the field remain as im portant as ever.

Current Research Both cartography and GIScience have developed and published strongly overlapping research agendas in recent years, and a comparison makes interesting reading, for both the similarities and the differences. Both emphasize representation, and the need for continuing research on how to extend existing methods to capture phenomena that are complex, dynamic, and three dimensional. Auto mation of the map making process, and particularly the thorny problem of automatic generalization, remains a

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Figure 3 An analysis of the relationship between vegetation cover (each green area is a different vegetation cover type) and elevation (the black and white image). The results of such a GIS analysis are more likely to be presented in numeric form in a table (the column headed ‘MEAN’ shows the average elevation for each SPECIES).

concern of cartographers, as does the design of user interfaces, particularly in devices such as mobile phones that offer only limited area for visual display, and the role that cognitive science can play in helping to address such issues. Both fields are concerned about uncertainty, and how to convey what is known about it to the user; and both fields are concerned about the rapidity of technolo gical change, and the abilities of researchers and devel opers to exploit innovation.

The Power of the Visual In the mid 1960s design of the CGIS there was no support for visual output or for map making, and al though the database included full representations of the contents of maps, the only output was tabular and nu meric, in the form of summary measures of area (Fig ure 3). Even today a tension continues between visual and numeric output in GIS, and one still finds the oc casional pejorative use of phrases such as ‘merely making a map’, implying that numerical analysis is the true purpose of GIS, whether it is the inductive search for pattern and anomaly or the deductive testing of hy potheses. Recent advances in data modeling, particularly the adoption of object oriented techniques of database design and CASE (computer assisted software engin eering) tools, have made it possible to represent phe nomena in GIS that were never suitable topics for map making, including events and transactions, flows, and fine resolution time series.

At the same time maps and visual displays remain a central part of all geographic information technologies, and provide much of the attraction that draws new re cruits to the field of GIS. Maps are in many ways visual trophies that can be incorporated to great effect in pre sentations and posters, and hung on walls for purposes that go far beyond the objective representation of infor mation. GIS is still explained to the uninitiated using the metaphor of maps, and students are still judged in GIS classes in part on the visual quality of the maps they produce. Students are trained to be sensitive to the de gree to which maps can mislead and even lie, and to the importance of careful visual design in telling a desired story.

The Relationship Today The past few decades have seen a steady convergence of cartography and GIS, as the former has become more embedded in the digital age, and as GIS professionals have grown more sensitive to the issues that cartog raphers address. Both fields have made strong efforts to emphasize the principles underlying their techniques, and to show that dealing with spatial information, par ticularly information about the surface of the Earth, re quires a special perspective based on special concepts. The question ‘‘What is special about spatial?’’ has been asked many times, and has been addressed very effect ively by recent research.

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Nevertheless significant differences remain, and it is possible to identify different flavors in the ways geo graphic information technologies are used. To a cartog rapher the primary means of communicating the results of investigation is through the map. To GIS users, how ever, the map is only one way of communicating infor mation, which may also be presented in the form of text, numbers, sounds, and images or illustrations that would not qualify as maps in the normal sense of the term. Maps are compelling, but other media may be more appro priate in a given context. The definition of a map is changing also, and there is an increasing interest in maps that distort the geometric world in specific ways; in animated and three dimensional maps; and in maps of spaces other than the geographic. Cartography has much older roots than GIS, even though analog precursors of many GIS functions can be found dating from hundreds of years ago. This tends to give cartography a more scholarly flavor, and it will be many years before society accords the same value and significance to historic applications of GIS as it does to historic maps. Maps are accorded places in libraries that GIS databases are not, and often used as decoration; and the English language assigns a single word to a prac titioner of cartography but not yet one to a practitioner of GIS (GISer can be found in some of the critical writing of the early 1990s but was not widely adopted). The legacy of Brian Harley lives on in the general perception that cartography is the more artistic, sub jective side of geographic information technology, and GIS the more scientific, objective side. Scientists using computers to make maps are more likely to call what they do GIS than cartography, and more likely to assume that the information they work with is the result of scientific observation and measurement.

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To the outside world, however, these nuances are largely invisible. By now the general public is well aware that important things are happening in geography, whe ther it is as a result of a GPS enabled navigation system in a car, or exploring the world through Google Earth, or geotagging a photograph. In this world, the concepts and principles in which both cartographers and GIS pro fessionals are trained are largely invisible, and it is pos sible for entire books to be written on the subject of map making with Google Maps without a single reference to the literature of either field. Formal training in what it means to think and express oneself spatially remains the preserve of a few, in contrast to formal training in thinking numerically or in the use of language. See also: Art and Cartography; Critical Cartography; Critical GIS; GIScience and Systems; Geovisualization.

Further Reading Clarke, K. C. (1990). Analytical and Computer Cartography. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Clarke, K. C. (2001). Getting Started with Geographic Information Systems. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Dykes, J., MacEachren, A. M. and Kraak, M. J. (2005). Exploring Geovisualization. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Erle, S., Gibson, R. and Walsh, J. (2005). Mapping Hacks: Tips and Tools for Electronic Cartography. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media. Goodchild, M. F. (1988). Stepping over the line: Technological constraints and the new cartography. American Cartographer 15, 311 319. Jones, C. B. (1997). Geographical Information Systems and Computer Cartography. Harlow: Longman. MacEachren, A. M. and Kraak, M. J. (2001). Research challenges in geovisualization. Cartography and Geographic Information Science 28(1), 3 12. McMaster, R. B. and Usery, E. L. (eds.) (2005). A Research Agenda for Geographic Information Science. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Slocum, T. (2003). Thematic Cartography and Geographic Visualization. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

GIS and Society T. Nyerges, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Alternative Representations Different approaches to portraying geospatial information to address a particular task. Critical GIS Social theoretic issues that underlie geographic information science and systems. Geographic Information and Society A relationship between geographic information use and a context within a society. Geographic Information System (GIS) A combination of database management capabilities for collecting and storing large amounts of geospatial data, together with spatial analysis capabilities to investigate geospatial relationships among the entities represented by that data, plus map display capabilities to portray the geospatial relationships in two- and three-dimensional map form. Participatory GIS Members of community group(s) directing the use of GIS to address community outcomes. Public Participation GIS Members of a community responding to local government request to participate in the governance process of that community. Social Construction Influences from society directing development and use of geographic information systems. Society A community, nation, or broad grouping of people having common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests, or more specifically an enduring and cooperating social group whose members have developed organized patterns of relationships through interaction with one another. Spatially Integrated Social Science Social science explicitly recognizing a spatial component that improves understanding in the science.

Scoping GIS and Society Activity Geographic information system (GIS) technology has emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century as an integrative information technology. In its most basic form, a GIS includes database management capabilities for collecting and storing large amounts of geospatial data, together with spatial analysis capabilities to in vestigate geospatial relationships among the entities represented by that data, plus map display capabilities to

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portray the geospatial relationships in two and three dimensional map form. In the 1980s, a collection of academic researchers, software industry, and US federal agency personnel participated in a group process to de fine the term GIS as a combination of hardware, software, data, people, procedures, and institutional arrangements for collecting, storing, manipulating, analyzing, and dis playing information about spatially distributed phenom ena for the purpose of inventory, decision making and/or problem solving within operations, management, and strategic contexts. Three perspectives are represented within that definition. The first perspective involves components of a system: a combination of hardware, software, data, people, procedures, and institutional ar rangements. The second perspective includes processes utilized within a system: for collecting, storing, manipu lating, analyzing, and displaying information about spa tially distributed phenomena. The third perspective provides motivation for system use: for the purpose of inventory, decision making and/or problem solving within operations, management, strategic contexts; such contexts include use by governments, businesses, research and not for profit organizations, as well as by community groups. The definition implies a relationship to society because it contains references to people, organizations, and purposes for using information technology. During the 1980s and 1990s, GIS was adopted by subunits within organizations like governments and businesses. As such, GIS technology is pervasive in larger organizations across the world at the present time. GIS applications exist in dozens of sectors including but not limited to: libraries • agriculture/farming, weather – research and • ecosystem management news media • census enumeration – federal, state, and local • defense intelligence • public utilities – gas, cable, electricity, and water • exploration – oil and gas • environmental management • forest and timber management • mining • ground and surface water resources • public health • historic preservation and archaeology • national security • land management • local, state, and federal government planning • marine and coastal resources •

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refining • petroleum telecommunications • highway–rail transit transportation • and many more • In the early to mid 1990s, many researchers began to question the overall intent of the technology and its seeming bias toward larger organizations, in contrast to individuals and community groups. It was about then that concerns about development and use of information in societies across the world began to surface to look behind some of the technological assumptions of systems, showing that it privileged certain groups of people over other groups in society. In the 2007 online version of the Merriam Webster’s dictionary, the term ‘society’ is taken to mean a community, nation, or broad grouping of people having common traditions, institutions, and col lective activities and interests, or more specifically an enduring and cooperating social group whose members have developed organized patterns of relationships through interaction with one another. The overarching concern in the societal use of GIS is how this technology will influence – and be influenced by – events, processes, mechanisms, and structures of society. What influences GIS adoption, development, and use within different societal contexts? In what ways is GIS shaping society and, in turn, in what ways is GIS being shaped by society, and by which segments of society? Research addressing the interrelationships between GIS and society will, of necessity, often be an aspect of other GIS research, programmatically and at the project level, and also of more general research into the relationship between new information technologies and society. Nonetheless, examining relationships among GIS and society as a focus of study in itself is worthwhile. During the mid 1990s, much of the motivation for GIS and society research was coming from critics of GIS technology resulting in a seemingly polarized view about GIS–society relations. There were enthusiasts of GIS and related technologies expounding on the positive forces ‘for good’, as GIS was aiding in the expansion of human capacities for knowing accurately and intervening cre atively in their ‘worlds’. In contrast to that view were those who were/are ultimately highly critical of GIS, seeing the technology as yet another form of technology leading to the ‘colonization’ of everyday lives, a tech nology with enormous potential to render people much more visible, locatable, traceable – to become ‘objects’ of a new ‘governmentality’. Still others worried about everybody being ‘geo coded’, hence the term ‘geoslavery’ was coined to imply that people can be tracked every where and at anytime. GIS and its related technology of geospatial positioning devices provides for extended visibility, surveillance, and traceable data trails. The latter activities are part of research that claims GIS and

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related geospatial technological activities fall within the broader critiques of Western philosophy, capitalist and neoliberal political economies, changing forms of gov ernmentality, and other topics, all of which seemingly conspire to demand a more ‘visible’ social (and some times ‘natural’) world – in which everything can, in principle, be appropriately ‘geo coded’. The fear that ‘big brother is watching us’ now exists in everyday life. The hundreds of video cameras in downtown London, and in other major cities around the world, wherein the cameras installed by police departments watch at all hours the everyday moves of traffic and pedestrians on the streets. Of course, the cameras did capture images of the subway bombers in the summer of 2005, and the cameras con tinue to patrol for crime everyday, perhaps a benefit by original intent. The debate about the ‘good’ side and the ‘evil’ side of geographic information technologies continues, but in a much more nuanced form. The simple polarization of ‘good and evil’ is a naı¨ve perspective. The simplicities of such bipolar thinking begin to unravel quite readily once one begins to more fully research, deconstruct, and re construct the relationships at play. Thus, the naı¨ve per spective has given way to a ‘critical GIS’ perspective. Agents, whether as industrial/commercial, governmental, or not for profit oriented have their particular interests to pursue in a world that continues to change, with the fears of ‘information good’ and ‘information evil’ still before us. To unravel simple perspectives, all information intents need be situated to understand the particularities about GIS technology development and use. This more systematic pursuit of geographic information and society relations is part of a growing interest in wanting to create a foundation for how we see the development and use of geographic information. While GIS and society studies were developing dur ing the mid 1990s, many researchers of the GIS and society effort, as well as many other GIS researchers from various research niches, were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the conceptual underpinnings of GIS software. Those researchers wanted to explore under lying GIS concepts, and to help articulate a science if one could, and thus the S in GIS became associated with the term science – a GIScience. An international conference by that name occurs every two years. Many GIS re searchers see the phrase GIScience and Society as an expanded perspective for GIS, particularly researchers who view GIScience as part of the broader field of information science, and those who adopt a critical GIScience perspective. While all that was occurring, other researchers in the late 1990s were seeing new developments of hardware and software associated with the Internet, and thus some researchers started to use the term services for the S in GIS. The technical activity spawned still further interest

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in societal aspects of GIS and thus, some now see all four words – science, systems, services, and society – being associated with the S, while the GI (geographic infor mation) part has been broadened to ‘geospatial’ infor mation. Consequently, the S in GIS has become a rather expansive idea as the technology continues to spread worldwide in more dimensions than can be counted in any practical sense. Additional relationships between GIS and society can be glimpsed through topics such as Critical GIS; Feminism, Maps and GIS; Geographic In formation Science and Systems; GIS and Cartography (Relationship); Mobile GIS/Mobile Mapping/Location based Services; Public Participation GIS; Qualitative GIS; and to some extant by Social and Cultural Geog raphy, Society; Development, Civil Society; and Phil osophy, Society space. With all of the above activity, it is not difficult to believe that GIS as science, systems, services, society, research, and practice is very alive and well across the world. However, although the topic of GIS and society is quite vibrant, there are many tensions at play. The re search and practice aspects of GIS and society are in full blossom year round. Together and separately, research and practice involved with GIS and society are respon sible for creating major interests in the still emerging interest of geographic information. GIS and society re search is different than GIS and society practice, but both are very important in their separate and combined ways. There is a link between the two – as inabilities, in equities, and overall challenges with using geographic information in practice has motivated research to im prove practice. Research, as the systematic pursuit of knowledge to further societal aims, and practice, as the pursuit of action to further societal aims are blooming. The material herein tends to address more of the re search and educational aspects, because it is that process that is better documented than the practice. Nonetheless, the practice of GIS is very important, and it continues to grow by leaps and bounds as GIS applications diffuse to topics and situations around the world. Researchers as well as practitioners, and particularly many that are not geographers, around the world find map based ex pression to be quite powerful and engaging.

A Chronology of GIS and Society Research Events Since the early 1990s there have been several research events – workshops, conferences, special issue journals – contributing to the development of GIS and society re search activity. Much of the research activity reports on aspects of practice, but the emphasis is on research as systematic investigation. The US National Science Foundation funded the National Center for Geographic

Information and Analysis (NCGIA) in the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s to synergize the development of the basic concepts – toward a basic science of geographic information. In 1993, NCGIA sponsored a GIS and So ciety Research Workshop at Friday Harbor Washington, and from that a special issue of Cartography and GIS was published in 1995 to present many of the basic issues relating GIS to society. These two activities are often cited as the major motivation for GIS and society research. A few years later, in 1996, the NCGIA sponsored a research workshop about public participation GIS (PPGIS) at the University of Maine that was reported in a special issue of Cartography and GIS in 1998. Only a few months later in 1996, the NCGIA Varenius project sponsored a broader workshop about GIS and society, the results of which were reported in a technical report. Then, in 1998, the NCGIA Varenius project sponsored a research workshop titled Empowerment, Marginal ization, and PPGIS, and a research report was produced to document the results. In the same year, the NCGIA Varenius project sponsored a research workshop about Geographies of the Information Society, after which a book titled Information, Place, and Cyberspace was published in 2000 to document the findings. To add more mo mentum to the effort, the University of Minnesota in cooperation with NCGIA sponsored the International Conference on GIS and Society; a proceeding was pub lished to document the effort in 1998. In 1999, several of the researchers from the NCGIA Varenius project authored a summary and prospective article about geo graphic information and society. The GIS and society research effort started to focus a bit more with the NCGIA Varenius project sponsored workshop titled Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems, with many of the contributions being published in the form of a book in 2002. In 2003 to follow, the Association of Geographic In formation and Laboratory in Europe and the US Uni versity Consortium for Geographic Information Science cosponsored a workshop about access to geographic in formation and participatory processes that was followed with a special issue of the Urban Regional Information Systems Association Journal. Moving into the topic of crit ical GIS, a special issue on GIS and Social Science was published in Cartographica in 2004. The NCGIA research activity moved in the direction of a workshop reported later in a book titled Spatially Integrated Social Science. This was followed by a long term and more general per spective on the GIS and society research agenda de veloped by several co authors who were members of the University Consortium on Geographic Information Sci ence and published by Taylor & Francis in 2005. Continuing as a subset of the GIS and society research activity, there were six PPGIS conferences 2002–07

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sponsored by the Urban and Regional Information Sys tems Association (URISA). The first few were separate conferences, but PPGIS has now been included as a one day co convened event with the annual URISA confer ence. Several of the documents – reports, journal issues, and books – created from those events are listed in the further readings section.

Research Themes and Topics Based on a review and synthesis of the topics contained in the above documents, seven themes appear to be fairly representative of the research activity underway. of Geographic Information and Society • Fundamentals Spatially Integrated Social Science • Alternative Representations of Geographic Infor • mation and Society and Institutions • Organizations Ethical and Legal Issues • Group, Public, Participation, Community Issues • GIS/Society Impacts and theandSocial Construction of • GIS An exhaustive coverage of the themes and topics would take considerable space; therefore, a sample presented below presents the reader with a basic appreciation for the breadth of the research. We will start with the fun damentals of geographic information and end with the social construction of GIS. In many respects, one might say this sequence starts with topics that are more related to deep seated longer term issues and ends with more everyday connections. This is not to say that the former are more associated with basic research and the latter more applied, but it is suggestive that the former themes are more ‘academic society’ and the latter are more ‘everyday society’. Within theme 1, fundamentals of geographic infor mation and society, among the fundamental concepts are ontological and critical social theoretic perspectives on geographic information creation and use. Studies of ontology in geographic information science have been a major activity over the past 10 years, involving how in dividuals and organizations understand the world around them. These studies focus on interpretations of what exists within the realm of reality for an individual and/or organization. Of course, groups of people reenforce each others’ ontological perspectives but this perspective has not yet received much attention in the research. Critical social perspectives about how geospatial information is created and interpreted are part of a growing research activity. The meaning of information deals with identity of place as relates to power relations of place, and of course the two issues are related. Regardless of how people understand their connections to place in the

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world, new technological methods, such as location based services in mobile devices, continue to get de ployed in everyday reality. Furthermore, applications about basic issues such as hunger, employment, and housing also continue to be investigated. Within theme 2, spatially integrated social science deals with a latent understanding about how many of the social sciences connect to geospatial perspectives, but without explicitly recognizing those connections. Once again, an ontological perspective is important, and per haps even more important as scale matters in social sci ence applications. Research is underway to explore the changing significance of key geographical concepts in the information age as applied to nonspatial social sciences and reflected in the character of GIS. Social networks are being given a spatial dimension (call spatialization), and studies of the World Wide Web (WWW) are taking on an explicit spatial dimension to understand relations among rather abstract information concepts. For example, re searchers are using GIS to better understand communi cation breakdowns that occurred during hurricane Katrina in 2005 on the US Gulf Coast. Lending a spatial dimension to communications networks fosters deeper understanding of the social connections and gaps about information flow. Alternative representations of geographic information and society within theme 3 focus on geovisualizations depicting the nature of geospatial knowledge, for ex ample, local knowledge about place versus technical knowledge developed from data measurements. Often times alternative cartographic map representations can portray realities from different perspectives and thus provide a sense that multiple realities exist, for example, about how to develop natural resources in a community. Some researches focus on the knowledge and its differ ences and other researchers focus on the cartographic design and geovisualization methods. Applications relating to Native American (indigenous) Indian or Australian Aboriginal issues are part of this theme. Geovisualizations of spatial equity and their connections to urban environmental justice issues are also quite important. Organization and institutional issues associated with GIS have been investigated for quite some time. Part of this research, in theme 4, has examined the roles of GIS in the public, private, and not for profit sectors, and the relationship of organizations and institutions to social change – as an external influence, while another part of the research has looked at the influence of GIS in or ganizational change – an internal influence. One of the long term methodological topics has been about system integration, and this leads to integration of various geospatial technologies like remote sensing, GIS, and global positioning systems. Along these lines, different levels of local, national, and global data infrastructures

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are emerging, making it easier to acquire spatial data in a variety of data formats; but at the same time, these readily available datasets influence (bias) what we know about the world. Studies about the appropriateness of data use can be counted among these studies, but they are best contextualized to specific organizations. As such, studies about the implementation of GIS within and across organizations have been very important types of studies. Data fitness for use is a major part of those kinds of studies. Ethical and legal issues as the basis of theme 5 address ethics and legality in geographic information use. It might be legal to use certain kinds of data for certain applications, as for example, housing location from some of the readily available mapping programs from Google and Yahoo, but is it ethical to use such data when one highlights certain characteristics about households. Place and identity are very important issues for those who fear a loss of such identity in the digital age. Al though we can promote easier public access to infor mation, at the same time security leaks associated with private information present a privacy and confidentiality dilemma. Therefore, these studies must focus specifically on the types of information to be made available, about whom, and at what aggregate level of resolution. Another important topic associated with this theme involves error, risk, and liability of data use. Making decisions with poor quality data can involve both ethical and legal challenges, particularly when such data are originally known to be of poor quality, rather than discovered later to be of poor quality. What it means to be of good and poor quality is all part of this research area. Theme 6 has perhaps the largest number of re searchers of any subarea in the GIS and society realm. Groups, participation, public, and community are all issues that require rather nuanced interpretations to understand how collections of people make use of geo graphic information. Whether the public is constituted of average individuals or collections of stakeholder groups, and how they might work with GIS data either in face to face settings or across the WWW are issues of concern for researchers in this subarea. Among some of the sub topics are concerns about empowerment and marginal ization of community groups. What kind of participatory processes, for example deliberative democratic or rep resentative democratic, are better for what kinds of issues, like involvement in hazardous waste cleanup in local communities, is a major concern. There might be edu cational, social, political, and economic barriers to access to information, and perhaps there are exemplary ways that communities can overcome such barriers. Much of this deals with political power relationships that influence who has access to GIS information for community (or for that matter local government) decision making. Many studies have empowered community groups, making use

of existing GIS technology, to address community problems. Some researchers have been more successful than others, despite the fact that most GIS software de signs were not intended for casual users. Enabling com munity groups in decision processes has been more or less successful, given the current state of software us ability by diverse groups. Consequently, software devel opment for decision support of diverse groups is an important topic associated with this theme. New software designs that foster alternative representations of infor mation from participatory perspectives can be considered part of the effort to develop second generation GIS – or GIS2. Modeling and implementation of new partici patory processes are part of the GIS2 activity. WWW based approaches to participation are counted among these activities. The final theme provides, perhaps, some of the best examples of GIS and society research. How GIS influ ences changes in society and how society influences changes in GIS are among the most prevalent of topics. Power relations associated with information within or ganizations and societies are among the topics. Societies across the world are moving toward increased digitaliza tion. However, the gap in access to digital resources – called the digital divide – might be growing wider in some countries than others. Studies, in some cases, are not about access to computers, but who has access to training. Online communities are growing. The phenomenon called social computing, mostly for the young, is becoming ever more pervasive. How the social aspects of computing influence the development of computing systems, and how the computing systems change the dynamics of people inter acting with people, and virtual worlds continue to grow in importance as more and more people are affected by these developments. A major issue in this research theme is the social reflexivity that occurs when the technology is used to create ‘social class’, wherein it is supposedly being used to identify social class to be used by various geodemo graphic marketing organizations. A problem arises when the act of identifying groups together with marketing pizzazz is actually creating consumption patterns, rather than responding to the whim of a consuming public. Clearly, this kind of research links to other themes such as the institutional and organizational theme 4 and the eth ical issues of theme 5. In 2005, the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science completed development of a nearly 10 year effort to articulate a Research Agenda for Geographic Information Science. Chapter 10 of that book describes five of the themes listed above and provides an array of re search questions that will likely help guide GIS and so ciety research for some time to come. The themes for integrated social science and alternative representations are two additional themes drawn out in this new synthesis.

GIS and Society

Ongoing Debates As GIS and society research has emerged, several cri tiques were levied against GIS technology, and those critiques remain part of the rich debate about various topics – clarifying, questioning, and rethinking – rela tionships between GIS and society. The debates provided below are sequenced roughly in the order in which they appeared in literature. Some are more vibrant than others at the time of publication of this encyclopedia. A foundational debate is about the representational character of a Cartesian geometry. Cartesian geometry, like Cartesian thinking in general, is formed by identi fying dimensions that are mutually exclusive when it comes to measuring data values. This same fundamental bias of exclusivity is questioned when it comes to de scribing phenomena of everyday reality. It is hard to break the world into finite categories and expect to provide full insight, when the world is always in flux. A second debate is about ethics and privacy as it concerns the use of geographic information. Many re searchers would like to provide very fine resolution lo cations for the whereabouts of delivery drivers, mountain climbers, children, and pets among other cherished humans and animals. However, other researchers claim that such high resolution knowledge is an invasion of privacy, and it is unethical. Many of the concerns depend, of course, upon the situation. But writing laws and regulations cannot always take circumstances into ac count. So, the debate continues about what to do de pending on the situation. A third major debate is about the nature of partici patory processes that involve geospatial/geographic in formation interpretation, understanding, and decision making. Participatory GIS adherents would like the term ‘participatory’ to refer to a bottom up, grass roots effort by community members to engage in discussion about their world, while making use of geospatial/geographic information. A frequent process involves community resource mapping. In that view, a community is not the same as a public. PPGIS researchers agreed that such a view is very important, but do not bother to distinguish that view from searching for a better way to characterize publics as stakeholder groups, and support all groups with geospatial information technologies appropriate to the needs of those who wish to use it. The discussion has been ongoing for years. Only with additional systematic research results that address all of the issues can re searchers sort through the important aspects of the debate and provide informed perspectives that aid understanding. A fourth debate focuses on the level of detail needed in evaluations of peoples’ use of information. This debate is about whether sophisticated research designs are necessary for building knowledge about GIS use. The

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debate is perhaps more about how much work is neces sary and sufficient to build knowledge that is valid – when validity has a variety of interpretations and meanings. Nonetheless, without research designs it is impossible to know how information and findings can be triangulated to build knowledge. Some proponents con tend that more research using qualitative research ap proaches are necessary to provide nuanced insight into the character of GIS. Other proponents contend that both qualitative and quantitative based (or mixed methods as they are commonly called) research methods are neces sary to provide comprehensive insights. Both qualitative and quantitative have a place. However, the real debate is perhaps over whether the term qualitative GIS is actually communicating some thing new, as all studies start out with forming categories of something, whether in database design categories or studies about politics and information use, then from those categories we refine our observation (measurement) into more nuanced levels of specification – the quanti tative measurements needed to make finer distinctions. Other discussions among many topics exist, but these four debates provide the reader with a sense that there is much more to be done, as GIS and society topics con tinue to emerge for investigation. See also: Civil Society; Critical GIS; Ethical Issues in Research; Feminism, Maps and GIS; GIScience and Systems; GIS and Cartography; GIS, Mobile and Locational Based Services; GIS, Public Participation; Qualitative Geographic Information Systems; SocietySpace.

Further Reading Burrows, R. and Ellison, N. (2004). Sorting places out? Towards a social politics of neighborhood informatization. Information, Communication and Society 7(3), 321 336. Craig, W. J., Harris, T. M. and Weiner, D. (eds.) (2002). Community participation and geographic information systems. London: Taylor and Francis. Goodchild, M. F. and Janelle, D. G. (eds.) (2004). Spatially integrated social science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, T. and Weiner, D. (eds.) (1996). GIS and Society: The Social Implications of How People, Space, and Environment Are Represented in GIS, Specialist Meeting 19, http:// www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/Publications/Tech Reports/96/96 7.PDF Janelle, D. and Hodge, D. (eds.) (2000). Information, place, and cyberspace. Berlin: Springer. Longley, P., Goodchild, M., Maguire, D. and Rhind, D. (2005). Geographic information systems and science. Chichester: Wiley. McMaster, R. and Usery, E. L. (eds.) (2005). A research agenda for geographic information science. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Obermeyer, N. J. (1998). The evolution of public participation GIS. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems 25(2), 65 66. Pickles, J. (ed.) (1995). Ground truth: The social implications of geographic information systems. New York: The Guilford Press. Poiker, T. and Sheppard, E. (ed.) (1995). GIS and society, special issue of Cartography and Geographic Information Systems vol. 22(1).

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Schuurman, N. (2006). Formalization matters: Critical GIS and ontology research. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96(4), 726 739. Schuurman, N. and Kwan, M. P. (2004). GIS and Social Science. Cartographica 39(1). Sheppard, E., Couclelis, H., Graham, S., Harrington, J. W. and Onsrud, H. (1999). Geographies of the information society. Internatinal Journal Geographical Information Science 13(8), 797 823.

Relevant Website http://www.urisa.org PPGIS Conference topics 2005, Urban and Regional Information Systems Association.

GIS, Mobile and Locational Based Services J. Raper, City University, London, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Application Logic They are programming statements that execute computations and transformations on data in line with some technical or business purpose. Content Management Systems (CMS) They manage large collections of multimedia data and metadata. Creative Commons It is a body designing and promoting licences for the exploitation of copyright on a wide range of discretionary terms. Differential GPS It is the practice of correcting GPS code signals at a survey site using known errors in the GPS code signals occurring at a nearby known location. Dijkstra Algorithm It is an algorithm that computes the shortest path between two points in a network. General Packet Radio System (GPRS) It is a method of transmitting data to and from the Internet over a digital cellular phone service, usually at speeds of up to 64 kbps. Geocaching It is a treasure hunt using mobile devices to find fixed caches with log books. Geodetic Control It is a physical monumentation linking survey observations and known earth dimensions. Geopositioning It is a technology to find current location in global or local coordinates and supply it to ubiquitous computing services. Georeferencing It is the assignment of coordinate values to a feature recorded in a spatial database. Global Positioning System (GPS) It is the US government-funded satellite positioning system available on a wide range of mobile devices. Ground Control It is the physical monumentation linking aerial survey and earth-surface coordinates. Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) It is an automated self-adapting transport infrastructure. Java Midlet It is a java application program that can execute independently on a computing platform in either signed (approved) or unsigned (nonapproved) modes. Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) It is a system for measuring the time taken for the pulse of a survey laser to be emitted, reflected, and returned to an instrument, which can be converted to a distance measurement. Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) It is an integrated system on a silicon chip containing microelectronics and micromechanical systems.

Ortho-Rectified It is the rotation, scaling, and warping of an image until it fits the shape and configuration of the land surface depicted in an image. Photogrammetry It is the technique of making precise measurements on photographs, whether aerial or terrestrial. Primary Triangulation They are the precisely known connections between the survey stations known most accurately in a triangulation network. Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) They are handheld computers controlled using a stylus and touch screen. Real Time Kinematic GPS It is the practice of correcting GPS signals at a survey site using GPS phase signals at a nearby known location and measuring the precise difference in position from the known location to the survey site. Ubiquitous Computing It is a model of computing in which devices interconnect and share services pervasively through wired and wireless communications. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) They are small remote-controlled planes designed to carry monitoring or military equipment such as aerial imaging technology. Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Browser WAP is a protocol for the display of marked-up (selfdescribing) web content that is suitable for display on small screens, such as those on mobile devices.

Introduction The technologies of mobile global information systems (GIS)/mobile mapping/location based services (LBS) first emerged in the mid 1990s when it became possible to integrate global positioning systems (GPS), mobile data connections, and geographic information into a portable device with a screen. The early solutions (e.g., the Bosch TravelPilot in 1995) were in car navigation systems with GPS receivers, maps on CD, a screen showing directions, and traffic reports broadcast on radio frequencies. However, the release of personal digital as sistants (PDAs) such as the Palm (1996) and iPAQ (in 2000) allowed the creation of battery operated systems with maps downloaded into PDA memory and GPS re ceivers connected by cable. With the widespread imple mentation of the general packet radio system (GPRS) on mobile devices after 2000, it became possible to link

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mobile devices to the Internet wirelessly, thus adding real time information to the system. These technologies remained restricted to pro fessional surveyors or in car navigation in high end cars until the first mobile devices with GPS navigation, Internet access, and onboard GIS software arrived in consumer form in 2003. These integrated systems have been reduced in expense and form factor since 2003, and the increasing bandwidth of mobile communications has allowed greater use of the Internet to provide real time information based on current location in LBS. The technology for mobile GIS/mobile mapping/LBS has advanced to the level where it is both in use in pro fessional and consumer settings, and adaptations of working practices and lifestyles are underway. Mobile GIS and mobile mapping are the professional implementations of this technology and require training and system integration to use. In contrast, LBS are designed for use on consumer devices with no prior knowledge. The prospect of such capabilities becoming ubiquitous has profound implications: for example, le gislation has dictated that all new third generation (3G) mobile phones in Japan must have a GPS capability so that emergency services can pinpoint callers and avoid sending duplicate responses to the same incident.

Mobile GIS The development of mobile GIS has allowed the tech nology of spatial representation to move out of the la boratory and into the field, allowing a move toward a more egocentric type of representation. Using a portable mobile device in the field has brought GIS closer to the data and to the settings where the data are produced and consumed. This has changed the way decision making and data capture with GIS can be carried out. Defining Mobile GIS The defining characteristics of mobile GIS are: integrated into a mobile device, • geopositioning GIS data capture tools, • a set of GIS analysis/data • can be used in the field, andmanagement functions that • access to networks from the field. Mobile GIS based on this design are now used widely in industry and public services, sometimes based on ruggedized mobile devices. Mobility permits ubiquitous availability, true portability, autonomous use, and data re evaluation, all of which save time and increase efficiency in dealing with spatial distributions. The range of tasks for which they are well suited includes field mapping, navigation, geocoding, and ground truthing.

Implementing a mobile GIS is not simply a case of transferring the office system into the field, as the field use of GIS is a different kind of activity. Field use of mobile GIS involves detachment from services such as power and fixed networks, and involves immersion in the environment, which raises questions about the ability of the user to make appropriate judgments on matters such as classification schemes. Field use of mobile GIS is also a social process involving teamwork and engagement with people: hence, an exercise to identify and record vacant lots might uncover a property being occupied without consent. Poorly trained users and badly designed data capture schemes can be compromised by the realities of information systems use ‘on the street’ where there are distractions and dangers. Using Mobile GIS Field mapping with mobile GIS allows the recording of point, line, and area features directly into the system. Using a stream of positions from (say) a GPS receiver, allows the user to occupy the target locations and record them into the appropriate feature category, for example, a set of positions defining a parcel boundary. As the lo cations are occupied, the user can add attributes to tag the observation with an identity. Precise surveying at sub centimeter accuracy to mark out new developments or to establish geodetic control are beyond the scope of mobile GIS and require heavyweight survey equipment and deeper skills. Note that in some countries surveying must be carried out by certified surveyors, whose work will be covered by guarantees of professional competence. Mobile GIS can also be used for navigation. Navi gation involves following a route (e.g., to find a given address) or moving directly toward a target location (e.g., a previously used environmental sample point). Mobile GIS can be used for route finding in conjunction with road network data: this is a key function in the transport logistics industry. Most shortest route calculations are based on the Dijkstra algorithm, suitably weighted with constraints (e.g., low bridges) and additional information (e.g., congestion). Congestion information can be ac quired from roadside speed monitors or from vehicles moving on the road network. Mobile GIS can be used to navigate directly to specific points over land or sea using direction indicating displays (such as compasses) or audio (using sound volume or pitch). Mobile GIS cannot be used to support high precision navigation of large marine vessels or the maneuvering of structures into position. Mobile GIS can be used to geocode incidents, fixed assets, or mobile ‘agents’. Using geopositioning and data capture tools, the operator can record position and at tributes, and integrate the observations with existing databases of both fixed and mobile agents. Mobile GIS


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are designed to be used as primary data capture tools so that both geographic context and previous data are available to data collectors. Ground truthing with mobile GIS allows existing geographic information to be checked for accuracy and updated directly. Being in the field with a mobile GIS allows the shape, neighborhood, and identity of features to be updated; and it also allows imagery to be checked or interpreted through a direct field assessment. Case Study In the last few years, a new class of handheld ruggedized devices with high accuracy GPS, large internal memory, ‘working day’ battery lives, cameras, and embedded GIS software has emerged from survey manufacturers at moderate cost. These ‘all purpose’ mobile GIS devices have become pervasive in environmental sampling, rapid response incident mapping, remote area survey, and asset inventory. City and Kingston Universities in London have been involved in a two decade long coastal monitoring project, on the North Norfolk coast, England, that has now migrated from traditional surveying using a theodolite to standalone mobile GIS tools consisting simply of a handheld device and a correction service (Figure 1).

Mobile Mapping The development of new digital measuring and pos itioning technologies has created a wide range of new mobile mapping techniques where previously heavy and expensive equipment was needed. The arrival of mobile mapping means that mapping can become more oppor tunistic, less labor intensive, and more regularly updated. These technologies are primarily used by professionals as the cost of the new tools is still not reduced to the consumer level, and the new technologies are mostly still quite complex to use. Defining Mobile Mapping Mobile mapping is not one coherent field of integrated technologies, but a technological frontier where indi vidual technologies are being used to enhance specific mapping tasks. The first modern maps were made with theodolites in the late eighteenth century by finding absolute positions of fixed, typically high points from solar observations, then measuring out the edges of large triangles over the landscape to find the positions of other high points. From this ‘primary triangulation’, finer resolution triangulations were constructed and points of interest (POI) were positioned within this framework until a full landscape model was constructed with topo graphy and urban structure. This mapping infrastructure was refined incrementally by national surveys in the

Figure 1 The author with three levels of mobile GIS attached to the survey pole (from bottom to top): mobile phone with ArcPad GIS and standalone Bluetooth GPS, Trimble GeoExplorer with ArcPad GIS and differential GPS, and Leica GPS 1200 with kinematic GPS. Photograph by J. Raper.

nineteenth century until it became possible to update large areas simultaneously from aerial photography in the early twentieth century. Map revision is still con ducted through a combination of aerial photography and ground survey with modern theodolites, though now based on GPS rather than solar observations. Mobile mapping technologies have reduced the cost and logistics of all these mapping processes by the use of digital technologies. While most framework maps are still made by national surveys, the availability of these tech nologies has had the effect of democratizing the mapping process and allowing maps to be made for purposes ranging from planning to pressure group campaigns. Participatory mapping groups have begun to make copyright free maps by capturing GPS tracks from large numbers of individuals. Using Mobile Mapping There are five groups of technologies being used in mobile mapping: 1. The first technology group includes the range of geopositioning tools available, led by the US Global Positioning System (GPS) (and being followed by the

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Russian GLONASS and European Galileo systems). GPS positioning can be carried out at a range of ac curacies from centimeters with real time phase based kinematic GPS, to 1–2 m with differential code based GPS and to 5–30 m by standalone systems. Raw GPS data are presented in latitude/longitude using the WGS84 geodetic datum, and need to be transformed into the coordinates used in national mapping. A variety of other geopositioning tools are available based on terrestrial wave based systems such as mo bile phone signals, radio or TV signals, and a host of short range communications signals such as WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Ultra Wide Band (UWB), and radio frequency identity (RFID). 2. The second technology group includes aerial or ter restrial digital image capture. Aerial photography with film cameras has been the standard for mapping data capture for almost a century, but has now largely been replaced by digital equipment. At the high end this is a very capital intensive undertaking requiring special planes, gyro stabilized platforms, and large format cameras. However, the introduction of low cost digital cameras and video camcorders has made it possible to carry out ad hoc aerial imaging from light planes with detachable camera mounts or model planes and un manned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In order to produce mapping that can be integrated into GIS, the captured imagery must be ortho rectified and georeferenced from GPS collected on the plane or from ground control taken from maps. This can be done in many GIS, though the full toolset for these operations can be found in photogrammetric systems, especially for stereo imagery handling. The same technologies can be used to undertake terrestrial imaging from a suit ably stabilized vehicle, though the processing of the imagery to permit accurate measurement of objects within the image or their positioning in map co ordinates requires complex transformations that are limited to specialized software and research. Aerial and terrestrial imagery produced is often highly de tailed and can be collected ‘to order’ at the time it is needed, for example, when the foliage is off the trees. 3. The third technology group includes a wide range of portable and affordable remote sensing techniques. LIDAR data can now be collected by relatively small and light units that can be mounted on vehicles or even trolleys. Aerial LIDAR data collection needs specially adapted planes to realize the full accuracy of the technique; however, there is a growing range of terrestrial applications in which the LIDAR scanner is moved slowly through the environment capturing precisely positioned data points in three dimensions, several hundred times per second. This has made it possible to image buildings, structures, and even crime scenes to a resolution of less than 1 cm and to import

the three dimensional model created into a GIS. This model can be combined with digital photography to create photorealistic models. This technique has also been used to detect human movement in crowded places such as railway stations by setting the LIDAR sensor at ankle level and integrating between imaging cycles to identify movement within the field of view. 4. The fourth technology group includes a range of advanced measuring technologies that can be used in tandem with geopositioning. The most pervasive is the inertial navigation system (INS), which uses acceler ometers and gyroscopes to measure movement and distance directly. These are important where GPS cannot get a signal, for example, tunnels. INS have to be calibrated and maintained and without correction, for example, from a GPS; their measurements drift out of synchronization. INS can be implemented using ‘micro electro mechanical systems’ (MEMS) allowing them to be small and integrated with GPS to fill any gaps in coverage. Measurement of distances up to a kilometer can also be carried out using handheld laser rangefinders with the data recorded in a mobile GIS. Laser rangefinders can be used to measure accessible distances, for example, two sides of a triangle, so that inaccessible distances can be computed using Py thagoras’ theorem. 5. The fifth technology group includes the range of wireless networking protocols, viz. WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular networks. Mobile mapping is greatly enhanced by access to geopositioning correction ser vices (e.g., differential GPS) and by the ability to read and write data from remote servers from the field. Case Study The OpenStreetMap organization is one of the largest and most active participatory mapping movements in the world. OpenStreetMap use mobile mapping techniques based on GPS to gather road centerlines recorded by many different users and integrate them into a single map. The maps created are licensed using a Creative Commons ‘attribution share alike’ method so that the data can be used in any way, so long as derivative products also allow sharing. Other groups use GPS to create art on the Earth’s surface either using ‘free drawing’ on open areas like beaches, or using the shapes of roads to spell out words, for example, gpsdrawing.com (Figure 2).

Location-Based Services In contrast to mobile GIS and mobile mapping, which are professional tools, LBS are aimed at consumers. LBS are information services whose content depends on location:


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Figure 2 A collaboratively produced OpenStreetMap of the Isle of Wight, UK. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/ Image:Iow 2006-06-06.png. (Collaboratively produced mapping by OpenStreetMap) From promotional images offered on site.

they require a mobile device, a geopositioning service, and access to networks. LBS take a wide variety of forms ranging from integrated systems like a personal navi gation device (PND) (also called a ‘sat nav’ in the UK) right across to information delivered on standard mobile phones. This diversity reflects the range of user needs that exist for location information in context. Gartner group estimated that the global market revenues for LBS would grow from $485m in 2007 to $8bn by 2011, a truly startling rate of growth. Defining LBS LBS can be defined by technology, by information type or by business models. Each of these approaches will be reviewed in turn. Using a technological framework, LBS can first be divided into integrated systems and second, into services running on open hardware platforms. In the ‘integrated’ case, hardware suitable for the end use is designed and software is written specifically for this. PNDs designed for a vehicle are the most widely used example of this approach with millions in circulation, although small network connected tags without screens for child track ing are growing fast. In the ‘open’ case LBS are designed to run within the computing context provided by a suitable mobile device, which may range from a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) browser, through a Java Midlet to a proprietary LBS program running on the device. In these ‘open’ cases the primary challenge is integrating the wide range of elements (e.g., geoposi tioning, application logic, user interface, and payment systems) into a service that can operate in real time and also degrade gracefully if any element is missing, for example, geopositioning. The computing, networking,

and interface demands of LBS and their users make them one of the most challenging applications to create, and only a few fully commercial services are running in 2008. LBS can also be differentiated by information pro vision. Some LBS are built around a ‘mobile search’ paradigm where the LBS provide a mobile interface to georeferenced information resources. Google Maps for Mobile and Microsoft Virtual Earth Mobile offer this kind of LBS, which are close analogs of their desktop search services. Other LBS are tied to specific locations and are built on geospatial content management systems (geo CMS) so that the services deliver content derived from or designed in association with the locations of operation. Some LBS are designed to generate and ex change location based data (e.g., location based gaming) or to facilitate location based collaboration. Finally, some LBS are dedicated navigation devices with information about points of interest. Novel business models are needed to support LBS as the value that can be placed on a service that is geared to location is difficult to model, especially given the ex tended nature of the LBS value chain (Figure 3). The value chain connects satellite services, location technol ogy (e.g., GPS), chipset integration, handset design and the operator infrastructure to the network middleware, service portal, authentication module, mapping, and the LBS application. Who should get what share of the revenue is a complex business problem made more dif ficult by the free at the point of use model that domin ates Internet services. The most successful solutions have involved LBS that integrated the whole value chain into a single proposition, for example, personal navigation systems in which everything is included in a single package. The largest such services in the world are based in the Far East, for example, Navitime pedestrian

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Satellites Location infrastructure Chipset Handset Operator Middleware Portal Authentication Mapping LBS

Figure 3 An LBS value chain. Diagram by J. Raper.

navigation service in Japan. However, some service pro viders also use a rental business model to simplify and assure the user experience. Using LBS The range of potential uses of LBS is very wide. Since people and goods are perpetually in motion in the world today, it is inevitable that systems to manage and leverage location on mass market mobile devices will be widely used. Early successes (using the classification in the previous section) are technically integrated, navigation focused devices delivered in all in one packages. In fu ture, devices will have more powerful processors; there will be better device positioning, lower data costs, and a move to a web based platform. This will encourage the development of new LBS that do not need to create their own integrated hardware/software system but will be able to use standardized interfaces and services to create innovative offerings. LBS applications already span a very wide area. The most widely used applications are personal navigation systems offering routing to POI; however, these systems are already offering traffic updates and friend finder functions. Mobile guides are also popular, often based on a rental model in a place, such as a museum, historic site, or protected area, where the use of the LBS is a powerful proposition. Location based gaming is also growing in popularity through geocaching and the type of gaming that uses real space as a dimension of a gaming appli cation. LBS are being developed for mobility assistance and personal transportation planning, and also for ve hicle to vehicle LBS using mobile ad hoc networks to form part of intelligent transport systems (ITS). LBS are also developing in personal security for older people or those with cognitive disabilities, for offender tracking,

Figure 4 An older user of an LBS mobility support system. Photograph by J. Raper.

and for health management, for example, organ donation networks. Further diversity in applications can be ex pected as the infrastructure and services mature (Figure 4). LBS clearly have the potential to discipline and to emancipate by virtue of their universality and power. Tracking records are likely to become a battleground of human rights and privacy over the next few years as LBS become more widely used. However, tracking is not al ways an intrusion into privacy, as there are occasions when mobile phone positioning has saved lives, for ex ample, in mountain and sea rescues. LBS have been used to create art installations based on real time mobile transactions, for example, Wiki City in Rome, or by the use of the tracking record as a drawing tool. Child tracking devices have also been used to monitor the amount of exercise taken by children as part of health promotion initiatives. Location based social networking allows social connections to be defined on the basis of location or spatial behavior. Research has also been undertaken into location ‘cloaking’ by which users can anonymize their tracking data and obscure their location. Case Study LBS have also been shown to be useful as mobility support tools for blind and older people, especially to


identify buildings or POI and to provide local transpor tation information. The LBS4all project developed an application called the Address Finder that used a GPS and digital compass to identify buildings when pointed at by users. The Address Finder used a screen reader to read out the descriptions and the distances to addresses, which were played through standard earphones plugged into a consumer PDA. See also: Geodesy; GIScience and Systems; Global Positioning/GPS; GIS, Public Participation; Mapping, Topographic; Photogrammetry/Aerial Photography; Surveying.

Further Reading Dearman, D., Hawkey, K. and Inkpen, K. (2005). Rendezvousing with location aware devices: Enhancing social coordination. Interacting with Computers 17, 542 566. Dobson, J. and Fisher, P. (2003). Geoslavery. IEEE Technology and Society 22, 47 52. Jiang, B. and Yao, X. (2006). Location based services and GIS in perspective. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 30, 712 725. Laurier, E. (2000). Why people say where they are during mobile phone calls. Environment and Planning D 19, 485 504.

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Mountain, D. and Macfarlane, A. (2007). Meeting the needs of mobile users of information systems. Journal of Information Science 33. Raper, J. (2008). ArcPad: The Field User’s Guide. Redlands. CA: ESRI Press. Raper, J. F., Gartner, G., Karimi, H. and Rizos, C. (2007). A critical evaluation of location based services and their potential. Journal of Location Based Services 1(1), 5 45.

Relevant Websites http://www.esri.com Arcpad Mobile GIS. http://www.informaworld.com Informaworld (Journal of Location Based Services). http://www.placelab.org Intel Place Lab. http://www.lbs4all.org LBS4all project. http://www.mrl.nott.ac.uk Mixed Reality Lab, Nottingham. http://www.navitime.com Navitime pedestrian navigation. http://mobilesearch.nokia.com Nokia Mobile Search. http://www.opengeospatial.org Open Geospatial Consortium Inc. http://www.openmobilealliance.org Open Mobile Alliance. http://www.openstreetmap.org OpenStreetMap.

GIS, Public Participation S. Elwood, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary GIScience Basic research field that studies fundamental issues arising from geographic information, especially its representation, manipulation, and analysis in digital form. GIServices Geographic information services, typically delivered online, such as mapping, route selection, query and retrieval of spatial data, or spatial data analysis. Markup Languages Computer language systems that typically use tags to designate the structure, format, or presentation of enclosed text, images, or files, as in the case of HTML, a markup language for visualizing content on the World Wide Web. Participatory Action Research A research design and method in which individuals and communities, sometimes in partnership with academic researchers, collaborate to identify major issues, concerns, and problems; design and carry out research; and apply research results to address their needs and concerns. Spatial Data Infrastructure Local, national, or global system that enables geospatial data to be compiled, shared, and made available to users, often over the Internet. Includes data, technologies, standards, and institutions.

Introduction Public participation geographic information system (PPGIS) emerged in response to a number of issues raised in social and political critiques of GIS in the mid 1990s. These critiques focused on the epistemologies and ontology of GIS, the significance of its intellectual and labor histories for its use and impacts, and its implications for participation and power in decision making. Other concerns included its potential for surveillance and invasions of privacy, and the social and political impli cations of how people and place could or could not be represented in a GIS. PPGIS coalesced around several issues raised in these ‘GIS and society’ debates. Critics had argued that GIS in its then current form was not able to include and represent diverse forms of spatial know ledge, tending to best support the inclusion of quantita tive or cartographic forms of information. Thus, they argued, GIS was unlikely to include the knowledge, needs, and priorities of a diverse range of social groups.

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Additionally, critics were concerned with barriers posed by the substantial hardware, software, data, and skills requirements of GIS, noting that these limitations would impinge upon participation in GIS based decision mak ing processes. Rather than reject GIS completely, a number of researchers and practitioners began exploring ways of reworking GIS software and data structures, as well as different ways of incorporating GIS into partici patory processes, to try to address these concerns. These efforts focused particularly on a small but growing number of nontraditional GIS users such as activist groups, nongovernmental agencies, community based organizations, and participatory research collaborations, and other institutions experiencing unique needs and constraints in gaining access to and using GIS. PPGIS has come to include a diverse set of social, political, and technological practices that seek alternative approaches to creating and using GIS in a wide variety of application contexts. These have included urban com munity development, community resource management, land reform movements, and environmental justice activism. This diversity of applications, as well as the continuing growth of initiatives referred to as PPGIS, make it difficult to provide an exhaustive or fixed defin ition of its characteristics or specific practices. PPGIS initiatives tend to involve spatial data collection and GIS use by, with, and for grassroots groups, local residents, or nongovernmental institutions, to support their research, collaborative decision making, advocacy or activism, or efforts to change local conditions. Many are character ized by a commitment to including multiple forms of spatial knowledge in a GIS and also in the decision making processes in which it is used. PPGIS projects seek to understand and mitigate differences in knowledge and power that may give some individuals and social groups greater role or influence in planning and decision making processes. Research on PPGIS explores the intersecting tech nological and sociopolitical processes that shape and are produced through these kinds of GIS initiatives. Working from an early proposition that the social and political implications are strongly contingent, researchers have identified institutional, political, and other factors that shape the sustainability and effectiveness of PPGIS ini tiatives. Other PPGIS projects have used digital sketch boards to incorporate residents’ own maps, or had par ticipants take photos of important community sites, assets, or problems. Other research has sought to identify characteristics of PPGIS processes that are likely to


foster meaningful participation by diverse individuals and social groups, and inclusion of their knowledge and priorities. PPGIS research also examines how GIS and spatial data are used in collaborative decision making processes, to understand their role at different stages of these processes, especially in contentious decision mak ing or conflict resolution. Finally, this research also en gages the technologies of GIS, developing techniques for adapting GIS software and data structures to incorporate qualitative and noncartographic representations of spatial knowledge. The following sections expand this discussion of PPGIS as research and application areas, discussing key conceptual debates within PPGIS research in its first decade, examining its practices in more detail, and ex ploring new technological and methodological develop ments affecting future PPGIS research and practice. Conceptual Debates in PPGIS PPGIS research has focused on understanding how spatial technologies, spatial data, and social and political processes together shape knowledge, participation, and power in PPGIS initiatives, as well as in the social situ ations they seek to influence. The theoretical traditions informing PPGIS research are diverse, including political and social theory, social studies of technology, organiza tional theory, and feminist theory and method. Some of these conceptual discussions have been def initional in nature, seeking to delineate key elements of PPGIS such as participation, public, or access. With re spect to participation, a major point of debate has been what sort of involvement or actions should be considered participation in a PPGIS initiative. Is participation de fined by direct manipulation of GIS software for analysis and mapping? Or might involvement in defining project goals, contributing data, or directing others in use of the GIS be sufficient to count as participation? As PPGIS has grown and developed, there is growing agreement that participation need not be solely defined as direct use of the GIS software, and that the collaborative decision making processes of PPGIS might feature a range of different types of participation. Researchers have de veloped a number of frameworks for conceptualizing different types and modes of participation in PPGIS. Many of these recognize different forms of participation with reference to Arnstein’s ladder of participation, a framework developed to describe different degrees of public involvement in planning and policy decisions. Agreement on how to define the public in PPGIS has proved similarly challenging. Does the public consist of any interested person, the residents of an area directly affected by a planning or decision making process, or organizations charged with representing the views and needs of a particular group? Drawing heavily on planning theory and urban and political geography, most

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contributions to these debates propose that there are multiple publics who might participate, depending on issues or problems it engages, spatial knowledge being gathered, geographical areas affected, or policies re quiring involvement by particular individuals or groups. Because of these shifting and multiple definitions of the public, some researchers have proposed removing the problematic term altogether, in favor of the moniker ‘participatory GIS’. However, some PPGIS researchers and practitioners informed by critical development the ory argue that participatory GIS is not an appropriate characterization for many initiatives undertaken under the auspices of PPGIS. Specifically, the wish to differ entiate between forums that are initiated and controlled by grassroots groups, activists, and local residents, and those that are not bottom up, perhaps being initiated and controlled by government institutions as part of a col laborative planning program. The term ‘participatory’, they contend, should only be used to describe the former type of initiative, to avoid glossing over critical differ ences in autonomy and power that exist within PPGIS. One of the central goals of PPGIS has been articu lated as empowering marginalized communities and so cial groups by fostering greater access to GIS, spatial data, and the decision making processes in which they are used. Thus the notion of access has also received considerable attention. Early on, PPGIS researchers noted that ability to procure hardware, software, and digital spatial data for GIS use was an important part of access, but was not a sufficiently expansive conceptual ization. Many grassroots groups, even when they had achieved this sort of access, still reaped few benefits from their GIS use. Some had difficulty obtaining spatial data appropriate to their unique needs. Others did not have an understanding of cartography and spatial information to be able to apply their GIS resources to their activities and problem solving efforts. Access in PPGIS is now typically conceptualized more broadly to include notions of hardware and software provision, appropriateness of existing spatial data, and conceptual or cognitive access – meant to characterize participants’ ability to understand and use results. Beyond these definitional debates about key tenets of PPGIS, researchers have sought to theorize the mech anisms and process that structure participation, spatial data and technology access, and the social, political, and material impacts of PPGIS. Researchers have focused on explaining how participation and power are negotiated in PPGIS and in GIS based decision making processes more broadly, and also on understanding how GIS based spatial knowledge and visual representations in PPGIS may be used for particular social and political goals. Most of the conceptual contributions in these arenas have been developed from inductive research conducted with in dividuals and institutions involved in PPGIS initiatives.

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Research designs vary, including participatory action research, single and comparative case studies, experi mental designs, ethnographic studies and survey re search; and researchers have relied on qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. Research on the negotiation of participation and power in PPGIS demonstrates that axes of social differ ence such as race, class, gender, age, and status or role in a community affect the knowledge that participants contribute to a PPGIS initiative. For instance, in a community resource management project, local women may have key knowledge about forest resources, but gender roles may inhibit their involvement in community meetings at which resource management decisions are made. As well, power differences along these same lines have been shown to structure the degree to which indi vidual and social groups may be able to influence pri orities, research practices, implementation strategies, or outcomes. Other research has emphasized the need to better understand how and when participants use spatial information and GIS in processes of deliberation and conflict resolution. That is, participants use spatial knowledge for different purposes at different moments in collaborative decision making – at some moments to gather information for defining a problem, or at other times to establish and defend particular positions. Another contribution emerging from PPGIS research has been the proposition that the definition, validation, and use of spatial knowledge play a significant role in deter mining participation and power. Early research showed that in many planning and decision making situations, quantitative and cartographic forms of knowledge are granted great weight than qualitative or experiential ac counts of spatial knowledge. These ‘knowledge politics’ can have several conflicting implications for the negoti ation of participation and power in PPGIS. Some grass roots groups are able to represent their knowledge, needs, and priorities in these terms, gaining greater influence with key decision makers (though sometimes in direct competition with and to the detriment of other grassroots groups). But because participants may have different forms of knowledge to contribute, there is also the potential for exclusion of those whose knowledge is less easily in corporated in a GIS. Additionally, PPGIS research has explored how participation and power are negotiated through visualization of spatial knowledge. The strong appeal of GIS for many grassroots groups lies in its cap acity to enable creation of visual representations of people and place. Recent research examines maps generated in PPGIS initiatives as visual texts that produce narratives about places and their needs and characteristics, to better understand how participating individuals and institutions use these narratives to advance particular political projects. Another major strand of research has explored the contingent nature of PPGIS projects, as part of efforts to

understand why these initiatives may have particular social and political impacts and to identify factors af fecting their sustainability and effectiveness for grassroots groups. A multitude of case studies in the PPGIS lit erature have shown that these impacts are not primarily technologically determined, nor can they be attributed to singular factors such as a grassroots group’s available resources. Some of these studies have documented the importance of public spatial data availability for many PPGIS initiatives, showing how this access is structured by local and national policies, legal structures, as well as cultural traditions or citizens’ expectations around access to public data. For example, the United States policy and tradition suggests that government data be made readily available to citizens, usually on an ‘at cost’ basis, whereas in many European countries, access to these same na tional level data are restricted by policy or in practice through high costs. Not all PPGIS initiatives need or use public or governmental data, but many do, even if only to provide their own critique or reinterpretation of these data. Because of the unique capacities and needs of the grassroots institutions that tend to be involved in PPGIS, a number of institutional or organizational factors also play an important role. These factors include stability of organization’s staffing and funding, as well as the strength of their collaborative relationships with other organiza tions and individuals who might be able to provide needed resources such as data and training. Grassroots groups that can creatively share resources and ideas for data access and GIS application are generally much more able to sustain their GIS activities and use them to advance their social and political goals. Institutional knowledge is another important determining factor, in volving not just knowledge about GIS and spatial data, but also about ways of acquiring data, sources of technical assistance, or successful strategies for using spatial data and maps to influence political processes. In sum, conceptual debates and contributions of PPGIS have focused upon defining its central tenets of public participation and access; theorizing its socio political and organizational/institutional processes; and understanding its unique knowledge politics and visual ization practices. These contributions have informed efforts to facilitate sustainable and inclusive PPGIS ini tiatives. As well, these contributions from PPGIS re search are significant for GIS and society research on the social, political, and economic implications of GIS and digital spatial data development; urban and political geography research on collaborative governance and participatory democratic practice; and GIScience re search on qualitative data representation, visualization, and spatial data infrastructures (SDIs). As PPGIS research has developed, so too have in ternal and external critiques of its conceptual and applied contributions. Some researchers have expressed concern


about what they perceive as an overemphasis on facili tating grassroots GIS access, at the expense of continued efforts to better understand its impacts. This critique bears careful consideration on its own merits but also because of the extremely rapid growth of GIS initiatives that are self identified by sponsors or participants as PPGIS. These initiatives vary tremendously with respect to the nature or degree of participation that occurs; with some purportedly PPGIS initiatives being initiated and directed in a top down manner, with quite limited con tributions from supposed participants. While the growth of participatory spatial technology initiatives around the world is exciting, it is essential to continue critically examining their impacts and participatory processes. Other critics have charged that PPGIS research remains theory poor, having yet to formulate a largely case based body of research into theoretical propositions that could serve as a conceptual foundation guiding and informing PPGIS research. Some scholars have argued that future research in PPGIS needs to move toward a PPGIScience, by which they mean a more systematic approach to in vestigating fundamental questions about the use and impacts of GIS in grassroots contexts or public partici pation forums. PPGIS in Practice There exists a wide range of technological, methodo logical, and political practices that are considered part of PPGIS. Some focus specifically on software or spatial data, while others have addressed the processes in which GIS is applied. PPGISs have involved intervention in both the technologies of GIS as well as the participatory processes in which it is used. These practices include changes to GIS at the level of software or data structures, and efforts to alter collaborative or participatory pro cesses in which GIS is used. Software and data interventions in PPGIS have sought ways of diversifying the range of spatial knowledge, perceptions, and experiences that may be included and represented in a GIS. Multimedia approaches to GIS, for instance, are oriented toward including sounds, narra tives, pictures, animations, or sketches in a GIS. Using this approach, a GIS might include oral history narratives describing a place, its important characteristics, or the needs of people living in it. A planner’s land use map of an urban neighborhood might be supplemented with children’s sketches of their perceptions and experiences in that neighborhood. Some multimedia GIS use the Internet to hyperlink these alternative forms of spatial data to specific locations on a map. Other software modifications enable three dimensional representations of space and use this third dimension to include non Cartesian spatial knowledge such as time, emotion, or perception of experiences in a place. While these

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modifications focus on visualization and representation of diverse spatial knowledge, other software level inter ventions have focused on incorporating qualitative or noncartographic data directly into GIS databases. Tech niques for extending existing structures for metadata to include more information about the social, political, and institutional contexts in which it was created (and which have bearing on how it can and should be used) are one such approach. Using markup languages such as UML or XML to represent attribute data in a GIS has been considered as a means to diversify the types of ‘attributes’ of spatial locations that may be incorporated. Alongside these data and software developments in PPGIS, researchers and practitioners have also de veloped participatory approaches that offer alternative ways of using GIS in research, planning, problem solving, and decision making. Participatory sketch mapping and other techniques for collaborative spatial data develop ment are commonly used in PPGIS initiatives. Some projects use focus groups for planning and carrying out a GIS application and implementation of its results, while others incorporate GIS into a broader participatory action research framework. Other projects incorporate additional audio or video technologies to try to create new ways for potential participants to become involved and to contribute their knowledge and concerns. Trying to overcome time or mobility barriers that might exclude participants, some PPGIS initiatives have developed web based forums that allow participants to contribute information, respond to and revise data and maps being developed, or weigh in on decisions or actions being considered. Electronic polling systems and digital sketch boards have been used in some cases to try to facilitate involvement of large groups of people in a PPGIS pro cess, or to more readily incorporate participants’ con tributions (in the form of sketch maps or markup of an existing map) into a GIS. Because grassroots groups, activist organizations, and small nongovernmental or ganizations often have difficulty assembling the necessary hardware, software, and specialized skills for GIS, PPGIS projects tend to rely on a range of collaborative strategies for initiating and sustaining GIS use. Some PPGIS pro jects involve university–community partnerships, work ing with university students and faculty. Some rely upon intermediary organizations (usually nonprofit groups) that provide technical expertise for grassroots groups. Others collaborate closely with other grassroots GIS users to share data, technology, and expertise. The practices that characterize PPGIS are closely related to other alternative and participatory approaches to cartography or information technology use, includ ing countermapping, community informatics, and com munity mapping. Countermapping, a term emerging from social and political geography and critical cartog raphy, involves spatial data collection and mapping to

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support activist and resistance efforts. Some counter mapping efforts use GIS and others do not. Counter mapping typically creates alternative or reinterpreted representations of people and place, to try to disrupt hegemonic representations that silence or oppress mar ginalized groups, and has been used especially effectively in indigenous groups’ political and social movements. Community informatics involves the use of information and communication technologies in community devel opment efforts, often initiated by and for the use of local level community development organizations and their residents. While most community informatics initiatives involve the Internet or wireless technologies, many also involve the collection and dissemination of spatial data with these technologies, and some incorporate maps or GIS. For example, one such community informatics ini tiative, Neighborhood Knowledge California, dissemin ates demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental spatial data and maps for neighborhood activism and revitalization to its members through a web portal (http://nkca.ucla.edu). Finally, community mapping involves spatial data collection and mapping efforts by local residents of place, often to research concerns and problems, or gather in formation about local resources and assets. Increasingly, the term community mapping is used to identify projects that are carried out in collaboration with primary and secondary school students, as part of community service projects or active learning curricula. Countermapping, community informatics, and community mapping, even when they do not specifically employ GIS software, share with PPGIS an emphasis on participation and self rep resentation in spatial data creation and use and on in cluding diverse spatial knowledge for self empowerment by marginalized individuals, communities, and social groups. New Developments in PPGIS and Future Directions The previous two sections on PPGIS and its conceptual debates and contributions reflect upon a research and application area that is constantly changing. Ongoing technological and methodological developments in GIScience are changing PPGIS, opening a number of new questions about how these developments will affect the negotiation of participation, power, and spatial knowledge. In recent years, some PPGIS initiatives have begun to incorporate and rely on Internet GIS, mobile and handheld technologies, and freeware mapping and analysis softwares, many written using open source pro gramming languages. Here, the term Internet GIS is used to refer to online GIServices, GIS based Internet map ping systems, web portals for acquiring and sharing spatial data, and a range of other distributed GIS

practices that use the Internet as a platform. In particular, the emerging new forms of user customized web services known as Web 2.0 are an important development and new resource for PPGIS. These developments include open source applications that allow users to add mapping functionality to their own web services, or create inter faces that allow their website users to add their own new spatial data or narrative information about locations on a map. These developments open new possibilities for PPGIS, and some help overcome some of the unique barriers faced by nontraditional or grassroots GIS users. Web based geoportals have made existing spatial data far easier to obtain, thought with the caveat that many user interfaces are not designed for users with limited com puter or GIS experience. Internet mapping systems make it possible for individuals and grassroots groups to pro duce their own maps without having their own GIS software. Though a common criticism of these sites is the limited ability for users to tailor data and maps to meet their own needs, the interactivity of Internet map systems continues to expand. Some sites now enable users to sketch objects on the screen and have these objects in cluded as a temporary layer in their map display; or to carry out more powerful spatial queries and download resulting data sets. These expanded functionalities may help PPGIS participants expand their access to existing spatial data or gain access to GIS capabilities without needing to have GIS software on a local computer. A few well resourced PPGIS initiatives use the Internet to publish their own data and maps, or host their own Internet mapping sites. The rising functionality and diminishing costs for mobile technologies such as Global Positioning System (GPS) units or handheld devices for spatial data entry are altering local data collection in many PPGIS initiatives. Local data collection by participants has long been a hallmark of PPGIS, but the growing accessibility of wireless and handheld devices can expand local partici pants’ ability to create their own digital spatial data, or edit these data in the field. On the software side, a growing number of PPGIS projects are beginning to use free or low cost mapping and analysis software, usually downloaded from the Internet. The obvious benefit of freeware in PPGIS is the ability of under resourced communities and organizations to gain access to GIS without purchasing expensive software. But also, for freeware that uses open source code, benefits may include adapting software to particular needs of a PPGIS ini tiative, its participants, and its constituent community. These new technological developments in GIS are changing available ways that PPGIS initiatives can col lect, obtain, visualize, and disseminate spatial knowledge. But it is important that future research in PPGIS not overstate their benefits or overlook ways they introduce


new barriers or challenges for grassroots GIS users. For all the promises of wireless and mobile technologies in GIS, their relative costs continue to be high and wireless service limited to a small number of places around the world. Most Internet GIS sites and online GIServices are quite difficult to use without high speed Internet access, and here too, the global extent of such services are quite limited. Many online GIS resources continue to be de signed in ways that are difficult for novice users to navigate. Finally, relatively little is known about the na ture or impacts of internet mediated participation in PPGIS initiatives, so this must be included as part of future PPGIS research. Another new development in GIScience that holds promise for future PPGIS research and practice is an emerging body of work on qualitative GIS. Qualitative GIS focuses on (but is not limited to) developing ways of incorporating qualitative data or carrying out qualitative analysis of spatial knowledge in a GIS. Software level interventions in qualitative GIS are particularly in triguing with respect to their future potential for PPGIS. Some of these techniques modify existing spatial data structures so that qualitative spatial knowledge such as sketch maps or images can be directly incorporated into a GIS database. Other scholars are working on ways of adapting GIS software to facilitate qualitative analysis of these data. As with Internet GIS, it is important not to overstate the immediate benefit of such developments to PPGIS initiatives and to remain attentive to ways in which they may worsen existing barriers to participation and access or introduce new ones. Nonetheless, qualita tive GIS is likely to be a fruitful source of new ap proaches that directly speak to one of the central goals of PPGIS: diversifying the forms of spatial knowledge that may be included, represented, and analyzed in a GIS. Over the past decade, PPGIS has developed into a diverse set of technological, social, and political practices, as well as a sub area of GIScience research. PPGIS has significantly influenced GIS through its software and data structure interventions, as well as through efforts to facilitate GIS based decision making processes that are more inclusive and robustly collaborative. As well, PPGIS has contributed to a reconceptualization of GIS as a sociopolitical process, pushing beyond more tech nology focused definitions. There remains a great deal of work to be done. PPGIS practitioners and the institutions that support them will continue to face challenges posed by unequal access to hardware, software, and digital spatial data, as well as by ever emerging new technolo gies in GIS. On the conceptual side, PPGIS research needs to continue efforts to connect its conceptual con tributions to GIScience research more broadly. This

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diverse interdisciplinary research area will continue to face the challenge of developing theoretical frameworks that are sufficiently nuanced in their contributions to GIScience, social, and political theory. See also: Counter-Mapping; Critical Cartography; Critical GIS; Digital Divide; Feminism, Maps and GIS; GIScience and Systems; GIS and Society; Indigenous Knowledges; Indigenous Mapping; Internet/Web Mapping; Maps and Protest; Mapping, Non-Western; Mental Maps; Nongovernmental Organizations; Participation; Participatory Action Research; Qualitative Geographic Information Systems.

Further Reading Craig, W., Harris, T. and Weiner, D. (eds.) (2002). Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems. London: Taylor and Francis. Elwood, S. (2006). Negotiating knowledge production: The everyday inclusions, exclusions, and contradictions of participatory GIS research. The Professional Geographer 58(2), 197 208. Ghose, R. (2007). Politics of scale and networks of association in public participation GIS. Environment and Planning A 39(8), 1961 1980. Knigge, L. and Kwan, M. (eds.) (2006). Special Issue: Qualitative GIS. Environment and Planning A 38. Kwan, M. (ed.) (2002). Special Issue: Feminist Geography and GIS. Gender, Place and Culture 9, 3. Kyem, P. (2004). Of intractable conflicts and participatory GIS applications: The search for consensus amidst competing claims and institutional demands. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94(1), 37 57. Obermeyer, N. (ed.) (1998). Special Issue: The Evolution of Public Participation GIS. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems 25, 2. Onsrud, H. and Craglia, M. (eds.) (2003). Special Issue: Access and Participatory Approaches in Using Geographic Information. The URISA Journal 15, APAI & APAII. Pickles, J. (1995). Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems. New York: Guilford. Ramasubramanian, L. (1999). GIS implementation in developing countries: Learning from organizational theory and reflective practice. Transactions in GIS 3(4), 359 380. Sheppard, E. and Poiker, T. (eds.) (1995). Special Issue: GIS and Society. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems 22, 1. Sieber, R. (2000). GIS implementation in the grassroots. URISA Journal 12(1), 15 51. Sieber, R. (ed.) (2001). Special Issue: A PPGIScience? Cartographica 38(3/4), 1 4. Talen, E. (2000). Bottom up GIS: A new tool for individual and group expression in participatory planning. APA Journal 66(3), 279 294. Wong, S. and Chua, Y. (2004). Data intermediation and beyond: Issues for web based PPGIS. Cartographica 38(3/4), 63 79.

Relevant Websites http://www.iapad.org Integrated approaches to participatory development. http://www.urisa.org The Urban Regional Information Systems Association.

GIScience and Systems M. F. Goodchild, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Attribute Table A table with one row allocated to each feature and one column allocated to each defining characteristic. Buffer Dilation of point, line, or area features by a defined distance. Datum A mathematical reference model for global coordinates. Geodesy The science of precise Earth measurement. Geoportal A single point of entry to a distributed collection of data sets. Hybrid Model A data model in which feature attributes and topological relationships are stored in a relational database, while point coordinates are stored elsewhere. Join Combination of attribute tables based on common keys. Map Algebra A language for manipulation of raster layers using symbolic representation. Metadata Description of the properties, format, quality, and lineage of a data set. Object Orientation An approach to data modeling that recognizes, among other principles, that classes of features can inherit properties from more general classes. Overlay Calculation of a new topologically rich layer from two or more input layers. Polygon An area represented as a sequence of points connected by straight lines. Polyline A line represented as a sequence of points connected by straight lines. Projection A mathematical transformation of a curved surface to a plane. Raster Representation of space as a collection of equal, rectangular areas ordered in a defined sequence. Relational Database A data model in which all information is represented in tables linked by common keys. Topology In mathematics, properties that are invariant under distortion of the containing space; in GIS, relationships between features such as adjacency and connectivity. Vector Representation of space by identification of features contained in the space, and use of coordinates to specify locations of features.

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Introduction Geographic information can be defined as information linking places on or near the Earth’s surface to the properties present at those places. In essence, any item of geographic information must possess both a specification of location, in the form of a place name, geographic coordinates, street address, or some other suitable format; and a specification of such properties as atmospheric temperature, average income of residents, or elevation above mean sea level. Thus both an informal statement such as ‘it is cold today in Santa Barbara’ and a more formal one such as ‘at 12 noon local time on January 25 at latitude 34 degrees 26 minutes 41 seconds North, lon gitude 119 degrees 48 minutes 26 seconds West the air temperature in a Stevenson screen was 12.6 Celsius’ are examples of statements meeting this definition. Traditionally humans have handled such statements in a variety of ways: for example, as elements of the contents of maps, as observations recorded on paper, or as statements printed in text or communicated through speech. Over the decades many conventions have been adopted to codify practice, as for example in the stand ardization of longitude following the International Me ridian Conference of 1884, or the adoption of the World Geodetic System of 1984. Increasingly, however, and in line with trends in society generally, geographic infor mation has been converted to digital form, and has be come just one of a myriad of different forms of data that pass along the Internet and are stored on the hard drives and CDs of contemporary digital technology. The term geographic information system (GIS) was coined in the mid 1960s to describe a computer system for handling geographic information in digital form. Motivations for the adoption of GIS take many forms. One of the earliest was the need to analyze, to produce summaries of the amounts of area devoted to different uses on the Earth’s surface. Digital processing appeared to offer enormous advantages in the form of precise computation, replacing manual processes that were fre quently tedious, labor intensive, and inaccurate. Another motivation arose in statistical agencies such as the Bureau of the Census, where digital processing had the potential to automate various operations, from the management of door to door interviews to the aggregation of statistics for multiple reporting zones. Still another arose in map producing agencies, since digital processing offered the possibility of easy editing, rapid calculation of map


projection equations, and automated plotting. By the late 1970s these applications had converged, as it became clear that the commonalities were sufficient to support a distinct type of computer application. A substantial software industry emerged, major efforts were made to standardize terms and methods, and education programs evolved in many universities and colleges. The term geographic information science (GIScience) was coined in 1992. As with many scientific tools, in cluding the telescope and the microscope, the develop ment and adoption of GIS provoked a series of fundamental questions: what theory of the geographic world did GIS implement; could the traditional processes of manual cartography be formalized in computational systems; how could one measure the uncertainties in herent in any representation of the world? GIScience is variously defined as the science behind the systems; the set of fundamental questions raised by GIS; the research field that will define the next generation of GIS; the body of knowledge that GIS implements; and the use of GIS as a tool for scientific research. As a science of geographic information it represents a subset of information science; while its relationship to the discipline of geography, and to other disciplines that deal with the surface and near surface of the Earth, is a subject of continuing debate.

Applications of GIS A vast number of applications have been identified since GIS was first defined. Virtually all human activities deal in some sense with the surface of the Earth, and ‘everything that happens, happens somewhere’. Yet rates of adoption vary dramatically, and are determined by a number of factors. The first set of adoptions occurred in activities that have relied strongly on the use of maps. Many of the first sales of GIS software occurred in the early 1980s to agencies concerned with the management of natural re sources, notably the forest industry and its regulatory agencies. By the late 1980s virtually all such agencies had adopted GIS, making investments that were massive even by today’s standards. Mapmaking agencies have already been mentioned, and the advantages of computerized map production are so dramatic that virtually all such agencies had adopted some form of GIS by the late 1980s. Another strong group of early adopters were corpor ations and agencies with large quantities of geographic ally distributed assets, who required GIS to maintain inventories, manage assets, and schedule maintenance. The utility companies and agencies – water, gas, electric, telecom – found the case for GIS compelling, and by the 1990s had become one of the mainstays of the GIS industry.

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It has been argued that the academic GIS community has consciously or subconsciously ignored its military and intelligence roots. Many of the original technical developments were made in this domain, in remote sensing, missile guidance, positioning, and many other areas. Today digital geographic information technologies are indispensable to military operations and intelligence gathering. Among academic disciplines, geography was under standably an early adopter of GIS. By the early 1990s any discipline concerned with physical or biological dimen sions of the Earth’s surface had adopted GIS as a standard tool, but within the social sciences adoption was rather slower, due in part to the debates that still rage in these disciplines over the appropriate roles of scientific method, data, and experimentation. Adoption has been strong in the more empirically based disciplines, such as criminology and archeology, and rather slower in the more theoretically and conceptually oriented disciplines of economics or sociology. The twenty first century has brought a new awareness of the vulnerability of modern society, and several major disasters have shown the importance of geographic in formation technologies in all aspects of planning, re sponse, and recovery. GIS played a significant role in the recovery effort following the attacks of 11 September 2001. After Hurricane Katrina it was painfully evident that anyone with a broadband connection anywhere in the world could view the events as they unfolded and at high resolution – whereas those close to the disaster had no access to the necessary power, computers, and Inter net connections.

Concepts of GIS The Layer The layer is perhaps the most conspicuous and iconic concept of GIS, having its roots very early in GIS history and capturing one of its strongest motivations. It proposes that the geographic world can be represented as a series of thematic layers, each carrying information relevant to one particular thematic domain. To mapping agencies, each layer might correspond to the information por trayed in one color of ink on a topographic map: contours of topographic elevation in brown, urban areas in pink, or wooded areas in green. To Ian McHarg, a landscape architect seeking to develop a new model for a depart ment at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1950s, each layer represented the perspective of one discipline; the geologic layer captured the factors believed by geologists to be important in planning; the ecological layer captured factors originating in concern for bio logical conservation; and various social layers captured factors related to the economy and human populations.

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By stacking the layers, one could combine factors in various ways. A power line, for example, might require one distinct set of weights to be applied to each dis cipline’s layer, while a new shopping center might require a different set of weights. This notion of partitioning geographic variation into a number of thematic layers underlies much traditional practice in cartography, where each layer might be the subject of a different printed map, or might be depicted on a single map in a distinctive color. From another perspective, it captures the ability of GIS to relate seemingly unrelated information through common geo graphic location. Only in a GIS, it is argued, can one combine detailed information on the ethnicity of a city’s neighborhoods with detailed information on patterns of atmospheric pollution, to address the central question of environmental equity: do minorities bear a dis proportionate impact from industrial pollution? Only in a GIS can one combine a map showing the distribution of schools with one showing the distribution of liquor out lets. While all of these tasks could in principle be completed manually, the effort needed to redraft onto transparent media and to correct for differences of scale and map projection is often prohibitive. Raster and Vector Digitization is a form of coding, and in the binary rep resentations of computers it implements a coding scheme capable of reducing the phenomena of a domain to a linear sequence of two values: 0 and 1, or ‘on’ and ‘off ’. Most domains have by now developed standard coding schemes to do this with their particular phenomena. In music, for example, the dominant standards are MP3 and MIDI. Digital representation of geographic information similarly requires a suite of coding schemes, and in es sence much of the development effort in GIS over the past few decades can be summed up as ‘finding the equivalent of MP3 for maps’. Two classes of coding schemes emerged very quickly, based in part on discoveries already made in computer graphics. Raster schemes represent the map as a regular array of square or rectangular picture elements of fixed size, and record the contents of each element as a simple value in some binary code, proceeding in a standard sequence that is often row by row from the top left (northwest corner). Suppose, for example, that the first four cells of the top row contain the values 5, 5, 4, 4, denoting the presence of land cover categories 5 and 4. Then a simple coding scheme would allocate 4 bits to each cell, and record the binary equivalent of each cell’s integer value as the sequence 0101010101000100. All detail smaller than the cell size is necessarily lost in this ap proach, unless special rules are adopted to recognize the presence of very small features in each cell’s coded value.

Vector schemes, on the other hand, first identify each feature on the map. Features might include patches of homogeneous land cover, roads and rivers, contours, or point like phenomena such as oil wells. Each type of feature is first categorized as point like, line like, or area like, and the location of each feature is then recorded in a suitable coordinate system such as latitude/longitude. Points will be given a simple pair of coordinates; lines will be represented as sequences of points connected by straight line segments (termed polylines), and areas will be represented as similar sequences connected in loops (polygons). In the early days of GIS development each system was predominantly one or the other, and raster GIS and vector GIS competed for a while. Before long, however, every major GIS package developed tools for handling both, and today one expects to be able to input, store, manage, and analyze data in either form, transforming from one to the other as necessary. Figure 1 shows an example in which both raster and vector data are displayed. There are many dimensions to the choice between raster and vector, some of them more subtle than others. Simple epithets such as ‘raster is vaster but vector is correcter’ are superficially true but largely unhelpful on closer examination. In reality the following issues are important in deciding which to use in a particular situation: Volume. Representing an area such as a county in • vector requires the coding of a number of coordinates,

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and this can be done to a high precision with the use of many numerical digits. To achieve the same pre cision in raster would require the identification of each cell lying inside the area, and matching the precision of vector coordinates could require a vast number of cells. However many elegant methods of data compression can be applied to raster data. Moreover allocating many numerical digits to a co ordinate will increase precision but will not neces sarily improve accuracy, and in practice the positional accuracy of vector coordinates is often disappointingly low. Data source. Imagery collected from Earth observing satellites is an increasingly important source of data for GIS. Such data invariably arrive in raster form, with a cell size determined by the sensor’s designer. Raster formats also dominate data on topographic elevation. Processing. Although many operations can be carried out on either raster or vector representations, some are either faster or only possible on one. For example, the calculation of a viewshed, or the area visible from a point on a topographic surface, is exclusively raster, while routing tasks such as determining the shortest


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Figure 1 A GIS display of land cover in an area north of Santa Barbara, California. The map covers approximately 21 km from left to right. The California vegetation map of 1977 provides the coarse vector polygons (note the straight edges) superimposed on the raster National Land Cover Dataset with a spatial resolution of approximately 30 m. The polygons are colored by dominant species, while the raster cells are colored according to a land-cover classification.

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path through a network are exclusively vector. Al though most software packages are able to handle both raster and vector, some are still primarily identified with one or the other. Decision context. GIS analysis is often used to support decisions of a spatial nature, such as the development of land use plans. Implementation of any plan is likely to involve existing spatial units of some kind, such as land parcels or agricultural fields. It makes sense, then, to tie the choice of raster or vector to the geometry of the decision units – for example, a plan for parcels of land would likely be developed using vector repre sentations in which each parcel appears as a polygon.

Entries in attribute tables may take many forms, and the number of forms has increased as the technology for handling tables has evolved. Entries may be numeric, ei ther whole numbers (integers) or decimal numbers (reals), or alphanumeric, including names, text descriptions, or dates. They may also include images, such as photographs of a site, or sounds, such as interview responses. Finally, entries may be keys pointing to entries in other tables – for example, a point feature denoting the home location of a patient might point to a record in another table describing the attributes of the hospital at which the patient was treated. Such keys are a central concept of the relational model, which was introduced to GIS in the 1970s and dominated database thinking until recently.

Attribute Table

Topology

In the vector world, the characteristics of points, lines, and areas are termed attributes, and represented in the form of attribute tables (Figure 2). Each table stores the attributes of one class of features, all of which have the same topological dimension (all points, all lines, or all areas), and all of which have the same set of defined attributes. For example, a class of land parcels might have numerous associated attributes: owner, area, assessed value, identification number, etc. Each feature occupies one row of the table, and each attribute occupies one column.

In mathematics, a property is said to be topological if it is invariant under stretching and distortion of the con taining space. If a loop is drawn on a rubber sheet, for example, it is impossible to break open the loop by stretching the rubber, and thus the distinction between area, line, and point is a topological distinction. Topo logical properties are important in GIS, since they include such useful spatial properties as adjacency and connectivity, properties that are important in many forms of analysis. For example, a system to plan optimum routes through a road network must include

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Figure 2 A screen shot of ESRI’s ArcMap showing census data by tract for the city of Milwaukee. The screen simultaneously displays part of the tract attribute table and a map in which each tract is classified by its percent black population.

representation of the connections between network links, and important properties of such connections including turn restrictions or grade separations at intersections. The need to represent topological properties emerged very early in the history of GIS, and by the 1970s was regarded as essential to success, at least in vector systems. The vegetation polygons of Figure 1 illustrates a type of map – often termed an area class map – that is very common in land management applications. If each area on the map was digitized separately as a polygon, then each internal boundary would be represented twice, and it might be difficult to ensure that the two versions were identical. Moreover, it would be possible to edit each polygon in dependent of its neighbors, possibly producing gaps and overlaps that in principle cannot occur in such maps. These problems can be overcome by the simple expedient of treating the common boundary between two areas as the basic record. In the Canada Geographic Information Sys tem (CGIS), widely regarded as the first GIS, area class maps were stored in a linear sequence on magnetic tape, each common boundary being recorded as a coded rep resentation of (1) the attributes of the area on its left, (2) the attributes of the area on its right, (3) the number of points needed to capture the boundary’s geometry as a polyline, and (4) a sequence of coordinate pairs. CGIS had no table of polygon attributes, but obtained all of its results,

including measurement of polygon areas, by processing this linear sequence of boundaries. By 1980, a consensus had emerged among GIS de velopers on the representation of area class maps in topologically rich form. Each internal boundary between two areas would be termed an arc, and its attributes would include pointers to the areas on its left and right, and to the boundary network junctions or nodes at its start and end. Each area would have an attribute table defining its properties, and perhaps pointers to the arcs forming its boundary. The points defining the polyline representation of each arc would be stored separately, and because the number of points per arc was variable the file containing these points would not have the normal tabular structure – for this reason this approach was termed hybrid. Simple extensions to this basic model allowed for the storage of street networks, administrative boundary maps, and many other forms of geographic information, and it survives today in the form of Environmental Systems Research Institute’s (ESRI’s) coverage model. Object Orientation By the 1990s, dramatic advances in computing power, storage capacity, and software had made many of these


arguments for topology superfluous. Moreover the con cept of the common boundary as a fundamental com ponent of geographic information seemed to conflict with the intuitive ways in which humans view the world and its representations in maps. Object orientation emerged in the late 1990s as a new, more powerful and at the same time simpler way of representing the world that treated topological relationships as optional extras rather than as essential properties. ESRI’s shapefile model provides an appropriate ex ample. In this approach, introduced in the late 1980s, each feature is stored as a point, polyline, or polygon. Where boundaries are shared, they occur in the database twice, and powerful routines exist to compare and correct differences between them. Similarly topological prop erties such as connectivity can be computed by analyzing the geometry of features, and automatically ignoring small gaps or overshoots when these fall below estab lished distance thresholds. Features can be linked during edit to ensure that moving one feature also moves any other features tied geometrically to it. The set of relationships allowed in object oriented databases is much richer than in the earlier relational approach. Links between features, such as between a patient and a hospital, are termed associations. The concepts of aggregation and composition allow complex features to be formed as collections of other, simpler features, matching a common property of geographic information. For example, an airport, which might be depicted at a coarse scale as a point, might be linked to its constituent runway, hangar, terminal, and other features, each of which might be depicted in fine scale visual izations. A state might be modeled as an aggregation of counties, and a county as an aggregation of cities. None of this was possible in the earlier approach. Finally, object orientation adds the concept of in heritance. Many classes of features can be regarded as specialized versions of other, more general classes. For example, a county is a specialized form of polygon in GIS representation; a bicycle path is a specialized form of transportation link, which is itself a specialized form of polyline. Specialized classes inherit all of the properties of more general classes, and add new properties of their own. For example, all polylines have the properties of length and number of defining points; all transportation links have these properties, plus such other properties as number of lanes, travel speed, and degree of congestion; and bicycle paths have these properties plus others more relevant to cyclists, such as whether the path is on or off road. The adoption of object oriented concepts is a major step in the evolution of GIS. While previous approaches were intimately tied to the map as the source of geo graphic information, object orientation has been applied to the successful representation of phenomena that have

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never been associated with maps, including events, transactions, flows, and interactions. In this sense, then, GIS has been able to move beyond the map metaphor in recent years. Nevertheless, the metaphor remains a powerful way of describing GIS, as ‘a computer con taining maps’. But today one might also describe a GIS without using the map metaphor, as ‘a computer con taining descriptions of features on the surface of the Earth, in which the geographic location of each feature is identified as part of its record’. Figure 3 shows the UNETRANS model, an appli cation of object oriented principles to the representation of features relevant to transportation applications of GIS. It supports representation of the basic transportation network; of the physical assets associated with the net work, such as traffic lights and signage; of features important to navigation on the network, such as con nectivity and turn restrictions; of vehicles on the net work; and of the routes and schedules of public transit. Overlays and Joins The set of possible topological relationships between features is very rich, and while topology may no longer be as important in the representation of geographic data, it plays a very important role in the kinds of analysis needed to support GIS operations. In network analysis, for example, the connections that exist between network links provide the essential basis for planning routes, de termining least cost and least time paths, and many more sophisticated forms of analysis that fall under the broad headings of logistics and location analysis. Some of the most notable advances in GIS research have concerned the enumeration of possible relationships between features, and the identification of these rela tionships is a basic function of all GIS software. Suppose that two layers exist for the same area, one depicting current land use as a collection of nonoverlapping, space exhausting area features, each showing an area of uniform land use; and a second layer showing a similar depiction of land capability for agriculture. Suppose further that the analyst wishes to determine the area of land that is both (1) currently not used for agriculture and (2) of high potential for agriculture. Intuitively one would think of overlaying the two maps, assuming that one was trans parent, and measuring the appropriate areas of overlap (Figure 4). In vector GIS terms, the task is known as the polygon overlay problem, and results in a new layer in which each polygon is homogeneous with respect to its characteristics on both of the input layers. Operationally this requires the calculation of every intersection be tween the two sets of polygon boundaries, plus the as sembly of new and generally shorter boundary segments into new polygons. In practice the task is often plagued by the existence of large numbers of slivers, which result

Figure 3 The UNETRANS mode , an object-or ented data mode for transportat on app cat ons of G S. Each box represents one c ass of features, and the nks between the boxes represent var ous types of re at onsh p.

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Figure 4 A screen shot of ESRI’s ArcMap showing census tracts (red) overlaid on postal ZIP code boundaries (red) for an area of central California. Polygon overlay might be used in such a case to estimate missing attributes of ZIP codes, such as population, based on areas of overlap with tracts.

when boundaries which should be identical on both maps in fact differ by small amounts. In raster the problem is formulated a little differently, since the input attributes must be combined in some way for each pixel, and the spurious polygon problem does not apply because of the raster’s finite resolution. Overlays can be defined for any combination of point, line, or area features. The point in polygon problem arises when a layer of points is overlaid on a layer of polygons, in order to determine the containing polygon of each point. It is frequently applied in the analysis of point data to examine relationships between the density, count, or attributes of points and the attributes of con taining areas. For example, one might use it to analyze the relationship between the number of instances of a disease in an area and the socioeconomic attributes of the area, or the area’s average levels of atmospheric pollution. A join occurs when the results of overlay are used to combine the attributes of the relevant features. For ex ample, a point in polygon overlay might be used to add the attributes of each containing polygon to those of each point. In this way the name of the containing county might be added to each record in a set of points denoting accidents; or the name of the nearest street might be

added to each record in a set of points representing tourist attractions and other landmarks. Buffers Another commonly employed function in GIS is the computation of a buffer. Any feature can be dilated by a specified distance to create a new feature known as a buffer. For example, a width of 100 m on either side of a stream might be designated as off limits for logging, or requiring special kinds of agricultural practice, to limit erosion and contamination. In some jurisdictions it is common for buffers to be used in notifying residents of proposed new developments, or to ban certain kinds of activity within a specified distance of schools (Figure 5). In vector GIS, buffering points result in polygonal ap proximations to circles; buffering lines result in pol ygonal bands on either side of each line and around its ends; and buffering areas result in new dilated polygonal areas. Buffer widths can be varied based on the attributes of individual source features. The raster form of the buffer operation is notably different. In its simplest form, a layer is first defined as the source, and selected cells of that layer are labeled

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Figure 5 A screen shot of ESRI’s ArcMap showing half-mile exclusion buffers drawn around every school in South-Central Los Angeles.

appropriately. The buffer operation then results in a new layer in which cells are labeled if they fall within the prescribed distance of a labeled cell on the source layer. The task can be generalized so that every output cell receives a measure of distance from the nearest cell on the source layer, rather than a binary indicator of whether distance is below a specified value. It can be further generalized if a layer of travel speed or travel cost or friction is available, in which case the buffers can be made to spread at variable rates, an operation that is virtually impossible in vector GIS. Map Algebra Provided the various layers in a raster GIS are precisely co registered, the operations of a raster GIS are in many ways simpler to organize and execute than their vector equivalents. Some of the most successful early GIS, particularly GIS designed to run on small computers, were based on raster representations, and much greater progress has been made in systematizing and standard izing raster operations. The most successful of these is map algebra, introduced in the late 1980s. Suppose that each layer in a raster GIS is addressed symbolically, just as scalars, vectors, and matrices are addressed in mathematics or in programming languages. Then the

instruction ‘C ¼ A þ B’ might be interpreted to mean: ‘take the values stored in each pixel of layer A, add them cell by cell to the corresponding values in layer B, and store the result in a new layer C.’ The need to loop through every cell of the raster is implicit. In map algebra virtually all raster GIS functions are arranged in four categories. Functions that compare layers cell by cell, such as the previous example, are termed local. Focal functions compare or convolve a cell with its neighbors, and are commonly used to smooth rasters by averaging, or to predict the direction of water flow on a raster of elevations. A zone is defined as a contiguous patch of cells of the same value, and zonal operations address such properties as area, for example by creating a new layer in which each value is the number of cells in the containing zone. Finally, global operations are performed on an entire raster layer, for example by computing the mean value of the layer or other summary statistics. Projections and Geodesy Any analysis of the Earth’s surface is inevitably compli cated by the fact that the surface is not flat. Curvature matters least in the analysis of small areas, but grows in importance as the extent of the analysis approaches global dimensions. While one might argue that all


computer based analysis should respect the reality of curvature, in practice there are several strong arguments for projection, in other words for flattening the surface prior to its representation and analysis, despite the in evitable distortions that ensue. First, the paper medium is flat, and much human activity still revolves around the paper map, despite the popularity of digital media. Second, flattening is essential if one is to be able to visualize the entire Earth’s surface at once. Third, it is impossible to rasterize a curved surface, so any raster must involve some form of projection. Finally, many of the operations of GIS were devised for the analysis of small areas and assume a flat surface. To project the Earth’s surface it is first necessary to find a mathematical form that approximates what is in reality a very complicated shape. Many such math ematical forms are in use in various parts of the world, though they are increasingly being replaced by a single universal form known as the World Geodetic System of 1984 (WGS84); though the latter does not provide such a good fit to any specific part of the Earth, its universality provides certain advantages. Nevertheless GIS users must confront the fact that in most areas of the Earth at least two such mathematical forms or datums are in common use; in North America WGS84 competes with the earlier North American Datum of 1927 (NAD27). Several map projections based on these mathematical forms are commonly encountered in GIS. High precision projections such as the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) divide the surface into a number of zones to minimize distortion, ensuring that distances are distorted by only a few parts in ten thousand, and that directions and small shapes are correctly preserved. When estimation of area is important then a projection such as Albers, which preserves area correctly while distorting distances and shapes, is commonly used. Any projection implies a planar coordinate system and a set of equations that transform to and from latitude and longitude. Finally, many GIS applications use the so called ‘unprojected’ or cylindrical equidistant projection, which simply maps latitude to y and longitude to x. Its exaggeration of longitude relative to latitude increases rapidly at high latitudes, it distorts shapes and areas, but its simplicity is often attractive. Metadata Since the advent and popularization of the Internet vast investments have been made in sharing geographic data sets, particularly data sets representing commonly used features such as roads, rivers, and political boundaries. Whenever a data set is acquired from some remote source it is essential that the prospective user understand the data’s basic properties, such as its contents, quality, projection, datum, and format. Metadata are defined as data about data, and have become an indispensable part

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of the entire data sharing enterprise. They can be as sembled into catalogs, and used to search for data meeting specific requirements. They also allow the user to determine the suitability of any data set for a specific use, to determine the data set’s format and the meaning of its various components, such as its attributes, and the conditions under which the data were compiled. The first widely accepted standard for metadata was promulgated by the US Federal Geographic Data Com mittee in the early 1990s. Since then it has been refined, and adopted after suitable modification by many national and international agencies. Its description of quality is based on five components: positional accuracy, attribute accuracy, logical consistency, completeness, and lineage. Nine other components are described, including details of the projection and datum, the date of validity, and the definitions of attributes. Geoportals A geoportal can be defined as a single point of access to geographic data sets located on servers distributed over the Internet. By providing a single point of access, geo portals allow users to search for data that might exist on any one of thousands of servers in data warehouses and digital libraries. A geoportal includes a catalog, which is compiled either manually from information sent by data custodians, or automatically by harvesting robots that scan the Internet much as do the operators of search services such as Google. Thus a geoportal might contain metadata records describing tens of thousands of data sets, all of which are actually held on remote servers. The user is able to search the catalog, identify suitable data sets, and retrieve them from their host servers using appropriate protocols, and after addressing such access issues as licensing or use fees. Geoportals are increas ingly important elements of the evolving spatial data infrastructure, or the system of institutions, standards, and protocols by which geographic data are assembled and distributed for use in many parts of the world.

The Agenda of GIScience The first attempts to define a research agenda for GIScience, and to clarify the relationship between GIScience and the technology of GIS, occurred in the late 1980s. In the UK, the Department of the Envir onment’s Committee of Enquiry into the Handling of Geographic Information (the Chorley Committee) saw three specific stimuli: the rapidly falling costs of hard ware, which had reduced the cost of entry into GIS and related activities from $500 000 at the beginning of the decade to $10 000 at the end; the advent of COTS (commercial, off the shelf) software to perform the basic operations of GIS; and rapid growth in the availability of

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spatially referenced digital data. In the US, the National Science Foundation announced a competition for a Na tional Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA), to advance the theory and methods of GIS, to promote the use of GIS across the sciences, and to in crease the nation’s supply of experts in GIS. The first research agenda was published in 1988 by Rhind, who identified problems in what he termed the handling of geographic data: the volumes of data in volved, the numerous types of queries that might be addressed, the prevalence of uncertainty in geographic data; the need for integration of data among organiza tions; and the lack of awareness of such issues as scale. He recognized that the solution of the more generic of these issues would come with time from mainstream infor mation technology; but that issues that were more spe cific to the geographic case would have to be solved by an active research community focused on GIS. He saw a substantial role for knowledge based or expert systems in the automated extraction of features from images; the integration of disparate data sets; the development of intelligent search procedures; the automation of carto graphic generalization; the development of machine based tutors; and the elicitation of knowledge from data. He also recognized the importance of research into better methods of visualization for geospatial data; the role of organizations; the legal issues of liability and intellectual property; and the costs and benefits of GIS. The NCGIA research agenda, published in 1989, has much in common with Rhind’s, but already shows signs of a search for the more fundamental issues of GIScience, in contrast to the practical issues of GIS. Five major research areas are identified: ‘Spatial analysis and spatial statistics’, the techniques • used to model uncertainty in geospatial data, to mine

• • • •

data for patterns and anomalies, and to test theories by comparison with reality; ‘Spatial relationships and database structures’, ad dressing the representation of real geographic phe nomena in digital form, and the interface between digital structures and human reasoning; ‘Artificial intelligence and expert systems’, reflecting Rhind’s concern for the role of advanced machine intelligence in GIS operations; ‘Visualization’, and the need to advance traditional cartography to reflect the vastly greater potential of digital systems for display of geographic data; and ‘Social, economic and institutional issues’, the host of social issues surrounding GIS.

The NCGIA went on to propose 12 specific research initiatives within this general framework: ‘Accuracy of spatial databases’, focusing on error • models for geographic data with strong links to the

• • • • • • • • • • •

discipline of statistics, and attempting to characterize the errors inherent in both raster and vector representations; ‘Languages of spatial relations’, including principles of spatial cognition and linguistics; ‘Multiple representations’, the need to integrate dif ferent representations of the same phenomena on the Earth’s surface, which might be raster or vector, or generalized at different scales; ‘Use and value of geographic information in decision making’; ‘Architecture of very large GIS databases’; ‘Spatial decision support systems’, the design of sys tems to support decision making by groups of stakeholders; ‘Visualization of the quality of geographic infor mation’, through methods that explicitly display in formation about the uncertainty associated with data; ‘Expert systems for cartographic design’, using in telligent systems to augment the skill of cartographers; ‘Institutions sharing geographic information’, in cluding research on the impediments to sharing be tween agencies; ‘Temporal relations in GIS’, the extension of GIS data models to include time; ‘Space–time statistical models in GIS’, the extension of spatial analysis to include time; and ‘Remote sensing and GIS’, researching the issues in volved in the integration of data acquired by remote sensing with data from other sources.

Eventually, NCGIA sponsored a total of 21 research initiatives between 1988 and 1996. Very substantial progress was made on most of these topics in the years following their publication. In add ition, four factors contributed to the evolution of these research agendas in the 1990s: first, the continued arrival of new technologies, including most notably the World Wide Web, the Global Positioning System, object orientation, and mobile computing; second, the broad ening of the research community, to include active par ticipation by new disciplines, including linguistics and cognitive science; third, the trend away from technical issues of systems to fundamental issues of science; and fourth, the recognition that certain topics were in effect dead ends. This last perhaps accounts for the virtual disappearance of expert systems, despite their promin ence in Rhind’s 1988 agenda. In 1996 the recently formed University Consortium for Geographic Information Science published the first edition of its research agenda, the result of a successful consensus building exercise amongst the thirty or so research institutions that were then members (the num ber has since risen to more than 80). The agenda had ten topics:


‘Spatial data acquisition and integration’, including • new sources of remote sensing, ground based sensor

• • • • • • • • •

networks, and fusion and conflation of data from dif ferent sources; ‘Distributed computing’, and the issues of integrating data and software over large heterogeneous networks; ‘Extensions to geographic representations’, addressing particularly the third spatial dimension and time; ‘Cognition of geographic information’, including studies of the processes by which people learn and reason with geographic data, and interact with GIS; ‘Interoperability of geographic information’, including research to overcome the difficulties of different for mats and lack of shared understanding of meaning; ‘Scale’, and the complex issues surrounding repre sentations at different levels of detail; ‘Spatial analysis in a GIS environment’, advancing the analytic capabilities of GIS; ‘The future of the spatial information infrastructure’ and the institutional arrangements that provide the context for GIS; ‘Uncertainty in geographic data and GIS based analy sis’, advancing understanding of the nature of differ ences between raster and vector databases and the real phenomena they attempt to represent, and including the modeling and visualization of data quality; and ‘GIS and society’, the study of the impacts of GIS on society, and the societal context in which the tech nology is used; these issues are increasingly recog nized under the more general heading of critical GIS. UCGIS later added four emerging themes to the list:

‘Geospatial data mining and knowledge discovery’, the • development of methods for extracting patterns and

• • •

knowledge from very large data sources; ‘Ontological foundations of geographic information science’, addressing the fundamental components on which our knowledge of the Earth’s surface is based; ‘Geographic visualization’; and ‘Remotely acquired data and information in GIScience’.

A somewhat different approach to framing the research agenda was taken by NCGIA’s Project Varenius, a re search effort begun in 1996 to advance the fundamentals of GIScience. In this strikingly simple model, GIScience was anchored by three concepts – the individual, the computer, and society – represented by a triangle, with GIScience at the core. Research about the individual would be dominated by cognitive science, and its concern for understanding of spatial concepts, learning and rea soning about geographic data, and interaction with the computer. Research about the computer would be dom inated by issues of representation, the adaptation of new technologies, computation, and visualization. Finally, research about society would address issues of impacts

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and societal context. Many research issues would involve the interaction between the three corners of the triangle. While all of these various attempts to define the re search agenda of GIScience have intellectual merit and show a definite emergence of consensus, they all lack the compelling appeal of such scientific mega projects as Martian exploration or the mapping of the human ge nome. But the concept of Digital Earth perhaps has the ability to capture popular imagination. The term was coined by then Senator Al Gore in 1992 and elaborated in a much quoted 1998 speech: Imagine, for example, a young child going to a Digital Earth exhibit at a local museum. After donning a head mounted display, she sees Earth as it appears from space. Using a data glove, she zooms in, using higher and higher levels of resolution, to see continents, then regions, countries, cities, and finally individual houses, trees, and other natural and man made objects. Having found an area of the planet she is interested in exploring, she takes the equivalent of a ‘magic carpet ride’ through a 3 D visualization of the terrain. Of course, terrain is only one of the numerous kinds of data with which she can interact. Using the system’s voice recognition capabil ities, she is able to request information on land cover, distribution of plant and animal species, real time wea ther, roads, political boundaries, and population. She can also visualize the environmental information that she and other students all over the world have collected as part of the GLOBE project. This information can be seamlessly fused with the digital map or terrain data. She can get more information on many of the objects she sees by using her data glove to click on a hyperlink. To prepare for her family’s vacation to Yellowstone National Park, for example, she plans the perfect hike to the geysers, bison, and bighorn sheep that she has just read about. In fact, she can follow the trail visually from start to finish before she ever leaves the museum in her hometown. She is not limited to moving through space, but can also travel through time. After taking a virtual field trip to Paris to visit the Louvre, she moves backward in time to learn about French history, perusing digitized maps overlaid on the surface of the Digital Earth, newsreel footage, oral history, newspapers and other primary sources. She sends some of this information to her per sonal e mail address to study later. The time line, which stretches off in the distance, can be set for days, years, centuries, or even geological epochs, for those occasions when she wants to learn more about dinosaurs.

Almost 10 years later it is possible to recognize many but by no means all of the elements of this vision in such services as Google Earth, and research is underway both to realize the remaining elements of the concept and to examine its deeper social meanings.

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Google Earth has had a massive impact since its launch in 2005, in introducing many of these concepts of GIS to tens of millions of users. Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and many other Web services have only increased the impact. Today, the term neogeography is being used to describe a renewed interest in geography on the part of users of these services. Moreover, nu merous Web sites such as Wikimapia, Flickr, and Open StreetMap are allowing millions of individuals to create and integrate their own geographic information in large repositories, potentially bypassing the traditional means of geographic information production, which has been dominated by the national mapping agencies. Other technologies, such as remote sensing, GPS, and RFID (radio frequency identification), are challenging traditional notions of locational privacy, as it becomes increasingly possible to track the geographic positions of individuals and vehicles, and to obtain information from them in real time. The term spatial web is being used to describe a future in which many features in the geo graphic world will be responsive in the way that aircraft are responsive to air traffic controllers: able to report their positions and identify themselves automatically. This future already exists in many retail stores where items for sale carry RFID tags, in many areas of livestock farming, where every animal is tagged, and in modern construction, where the components of a building are able to identify themselves. Despite the longstanding nature of many of the con cepts reviewed in earlier sections, the world of GIS is evolving more rapidly than ever. The number of people directly engaged in some aspect of its use has increased by many orders of magnitude since the early days of GIS in the 1980s, and seems set to continue increasing as services become easier to use, and as people recognize the im portance of information about location in their daily lives. See also: Geomatics; GIS and Cartography; GIS, Mobile and Locational Based Services; GIS, Public Participation.

Further Reading Arctur, D. and Zeiler, M. (2004). Designing Geodatabases: Case Studies in GIS Data Modeling. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press. Bugayevskiy, L. M. and Snyder, J. P. (1995). Map Projections: A Reference Manual. London: Taylor and Francis. Cho, G. (1998). Geographic Information Systems and the Law: Mapping the Legal Frontiers. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Department of the Environment (1987). Handling geographic information. The Report of the Committee of Enquiry Chaired by Lord Chorley. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Duckham, M., Goodchild, M. F. and Worboys, M. F. (eds.) (2003). Foundations of Geographic Information Science. New York: Taylor and Francis. Goodchild, M. F. (1992). Geographical information science. International Journal of Geographical Information Systems 6(1), 31 45. Goodchild, M. F., Egenhofer, M. J., Kemp, K. K., Mark, D. M. and Sheppard, E. S. (1999). Introduction to the Varenius project. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 13(8), 731 746. Gore, A. (1992). Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Knowles, A. K. (ed.) (2002). Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press. Longley, P. A., Goodchild, M. F., Maguire, D. J. and Rhind, D. W. (1999). Geographical Information Systems: Principles, Techniques, Management and Applications. New York: Wiley. Longley, P. A., Goodchild, M. F., Maguire, D. J. and Rhind, D. W. (2005). Geographic Information Systems and Science (2nd edn.). New York: Wiley. National Research Council (2003). IT Roadmap to a Geospatial Future. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. National Science Foundation (1999). Geographic information science: Critical issues in an emerging cross disciplinary research domain. Report of the National Science Foundation. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation. http://www.geog.buffalo.edu/ncgia/ workshopreport.html (last accessed April 2008). Pickles, J. (ed.) (1995). Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems. New York: Guilford Press. Rhind, D. W. (1988). A GIS research agenda. International Journal of Geographical Information Systems 2(1), 23 28. University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (1996). Research priorities for geographic information science. Cartography and Geographic Information Science 23(3). Zeiler, M. (1999). Modeling Our World: The ESRI Guide to Geodatabase Design. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press.

Global Commodity Chains L. van Grunsven, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Arm’s Length Trade The buying and selling of standardized commodities based on price. Codification The transfer of complex tacit information into standard sets of written instructions that can be generally understood. Commodity Chain The full range of activities that are required to bring a product from its conception to its end use and beyond. Externalization The transfer of operations to outside the boundaries of the firm (via inter alia outsourcing). Fragmentation The subdivision of the value chain (operations) of a commodity in individual operations to be carried out either inside the firm or by different firms. Governance The exercise of coordination and control over the structuring of value chain operations, organizationally and geographically. Industrial Upgrading Improvement of the ability of a firm to move to more profitable and/or technologically sophisticated capital- and skill-intensive economic niches. Lead Firm A firm that through its position in the value chain and ownership of specific assets is able to coordinate and control the structuring of the value chain, from which it derives power. Vertical Integration The organization of all operations of the value chain of products within a single firm.

Global Commodity Chains: Key Ideas and Concepts Globalization has led to increasingly diverse, complex, and dynamic forms of industrial organization, divisions of labor, and geographies of production and consumption. The architecture of cross border economic activity and its meanings being far from straightforward, the search has been for devices enabling a grasp of this diversity, complexity, dynamics, and geographies of the patterning of production versus consumption. One of these devices is the global commodity chain (GCC). Coined in the 1980s, in various aspects thinking surrounding this concept has evolved over the past decade. The understanding of the implications of a GCC view on the functioning of the global economy has improved as well. In part, this is a result of substantial empirical research conducted firstly into the – dynamics

of – organizational and territorial structures of pro duction and consumption, and the links between these, as to a range of commodities in various sectors; and secondly, into the implications of these structures for specific actors operating in them. Central in commodity chain thinking is the idea that moving a commodity from initial conception to final use can be thought of as a process consisting of a number of sequential operations linked in a chain (each of which add value). Organizationally, thus a core idea is seg mentation and separation of a process in discrete activ ities, each of which however is necessary. Roughly, main operations are design/product development, procure ment of inputs, production, distribution, marketing, selling/retailing, and servicing consumers (see also Fig ure 1). Deep segmentation involves the additional sep aration of main operations in more specific processes. Isolated operations may be identified as ‘nodes’, both organizationally and territorially. (Global) commodity chain analysis focuses on describing and explaining the organizational and territorial construct of individual nodes within the entire sequence, the linkages (conceived as transactions) between nodes in the overall process, how these are shaped, as well as the implications for individual nodes and actors in these of the construct of the overall process. The above is reflected in definitions of commodity chain. Prior to its popularization in the GCC literature during the 1990s, it was described as ‘a network of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity’. Since then, a terminological jungle has come to characterize the literature. The table below (Table 1) gives an overview of the different – to some extent overlapping – terms and definitions found. Fre quently, the term (global) value chain is used as substitute for (global) commodity chain. A more recent definition is: ‘the full range of activities that are required to bring a product from its conception to its end use and beyond’. A definition like ‘a set of networks (nodes) clustered around one final product or service and linking firms, industries, and communities to one another across the world econ omy’, expresses the ‘global’ element brought into it by globalization discourse. Over the last decade or so, con ceptual elaboration of GCC departed from four main dimensions: 1. An ‘input–output structure’, or the sequence of interrelated value adding activities, as depicted above, as well as the configuration of the actors carrying out main (and sub) operations. The latter are seen to range

539

540

Global Commodity Chains (a) Retailer/brand-name company owned brand Retailer or Brand-name company

Design

Buying

Marketing

Logistics/ distribution

Intermediaries

Own retail outlets

Other retail channels Manufacturer Raw material procurement and production coordination

Sample making

Raw materials

Production


Production subcontractors

Output

(b) Manufacturer-owned brand Manufacturer Design

Merchandising

Marketing

Own retail outlets

Other retail channels

Raw material procurement and production coordination

Raw materials

Sample making

Production


Production subcontractors

Output

Figure 1 Clothing intra-industry commodity chain configurations according to brand-name ownership (simplified). Source: Adapted from Hassler, M. (2003). The global clothing production system: Commodity chains and business networks. Global Networks 3, 513 531.

from a single firm that internalizes the entire chain to an array of firms (brought together in a network) performing individual processes. 2. A ‘governance structure’, or the coordination and control of transactions in the process and the power relations that determine how economic surplus is

distributed within the chain. A distinction here could be made between two, not quite independent, aspects: who governs, in terms of the nodes, and the forms coordination assume. Some actors in the chain (lead firms) have power over others, setting the terms under which others in the chain operate. The latter are seen

Global Commodity Chains

Table 1

541

Networks and chains: terminology and definitions

Concept/term (synonyms)

Definition

Focus/what it highlights

Supply chain

Generic label for input output structure of valueadding activities, beginning with raw materials and ending with finished product The different stages of the process of supply (inbound logistics, operations, out-bound logistics, marketing and sales, and after-sales) and the support services the firm marshals to accomplish this task

Input output structure

Porter’s value chain

Value system (Commodity/production value chain, (French) Filie`rea ) Production chain (Commodity chain value system/ chain (French) Filie`re) Commodity chain (Value system/chain, (French) Filie`re, production chain) Value chain (Commodity/production chain, value system (French) Filie`re)

International/global production network (Supply base) Global commodity chain (Global value chain)

A sequence of productive (i.e., value-adding) activities across industries (inter-industry linkages) leading to/supporting, end use A transactionally linked sequence of functions in which each stage adds value to the process of production of goods or services A network of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity A sequence of productive (i.e., value added) activities often across industries (interindustry linkages) leading to, and supporting, an end use (product or service)

A set of interfirm relationships that bind a group of firms into a larger economic unit and in which actors coordinate activities across countries and even continents A set of networks (nodes) clustered around one final product or service, linking firms, industries, and communities to one another across the world economy

Draws away attention from the physical transformation to where value is added in the process of bringing a product or service to the end user Gaining competitiveness through management of the value chain as a system

Input output structure Coordination and regulation of chains Geographical configuration Input output structure Governance structure Relative value of activities required to bring a product or service from conception through phases of production to end use and disposal Value chains as repositories for rent Governance/systemic efficiency required for effective functioning of chain

Geographical configuration, international dimension

Territorial embeddedness/social and institutional context

Networks as strategic assets Distribution of wealth within chain is outcome of relative intensity of competition within different nodes; nodes rather than national economies are locus where surplus accrues

a The French Filie`re approach is not so much centered around a distinct school of thought or a unified theoretical framework. Instead it is a loosely knit set of studies with the common characteristics that they use the filie`re or chain of activities and exchanges as a tool and to delimit the scope of their analysis. It is thus less a theory than a ‘meso level’ of analysis. Source: Own compilation from various sources.

to range between two extremes, namely arm’s length trade and vertical integration. 3. A ‘geographical configuration’, referring to the spatial structure or territoriality of nodes. As each node can by itself be conceived as a network connected to other nodes with related activities, not only the geographical location of nodes is relevant but also the geographical structure of internal and external linkages. The ter ritoriality of chains ranges from high geographical concentration to high geographical dispersion, from

the local scale to the global scale. This is influenced by technologies of transport and communication, by international trading arrangements, and by a range of other factors that will be referred to later in this article. 4. A ‘social and institutional context’, referring to the norms, values, and regulatory frameworks in various fields and at different scale levels within which nodes are embedded, to which actors are subjected and that impact options as to other dimensions.

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An often made observation is that – when these dimen sions are combined and observed through time – there appears to be a trend for commodity chain activities to be divided among (many) different firms and spread globally over many locations rather than contained within a single firm and a single location. Increasingly the GCC framework embodies the notion of organizational, trans actional, and geographical stretching whereby commod ities are produced (in externalized networks) by firms located in less developed countries, to be sold to con sumers in countries at the other side of the globe by production or retailing firms that orchestrate the cross border production and flows of these commodities. Hence the term global commodity chains. Reflecting the main direction of academic work, below we elaborate on the insights that have evolved as to the governance dimension.

Types and Governance of GCCs Within the GCC framework, increasing diversity, com plexity, and dynamics of industrial organization, divisions of labor, and geographies of production and consumption are captured through the idea that GCCs are hetero geneous in terms of the firms or actors that drive the chain, how the chain is configured, and how linkages and transactions are managed. These have rendered govern ance a key point of attention. Governance is considered key also as it determines not only how and on what terms producers are inserted into the global division of labor and the returns to them, but also the capacity to exercise power over other parts of the chain. This capacity exists in gradations reflected in governance within a chain perspective taking on different forms. The term lead firm is associated with assuming critical governing roles. By positioning themselves stra tegically in the chains, firms can – by exercising some form of power – diminish transaction costs, enhance their capacity to raise entry barriers, and increase economic returns. Over the past decade, gradually more sophisticated typologies of governance have been developed and a rather refined ‘theory of governance’ has been advanced. Initially, the focus was on ‘who governs’ and thus on the dominant actor in the chain. Table 2 depicts current typology of firm actors in commodity chains. Pre dominantly, in the literature a distinction was made be tween ‘buyer driven commodity chains (BDCCs)’ and ‘producer driven commodity chains (PDCCs)’. In the former, governance is in the hands of large retailers or branded marketers and relationships between actors are trade based. Such chains were held to be typical for consumer nondurable industries such as garment, foot wear, and toys. In the latter, coordination is in the hands

of large producers and relationships between actors are investment based. These were held to be typical of consumer durable industries such as automobiles, com puters, and aircrafts. This simple dichotomy has later on been reworked into a typology based on brand name ownership (as a main driving force) that also to some extent conveys how governance can be configured as different forms of brand name ownership create different coordination systems of intra and interfirm relationships resulting in characteristic ways in which chains operate. While avoiding the identification of specific drivers (or main actors) with specific sectors or industries, by recognizing that there are various possible intrasector or intra industry forms of brand name ownership, this typology still distinguishes only two types of governance, ac cording to whether a brand name is owned by a retailer/ brand name company or by a manufacturer. In case of the former, chain configuration tends toward sourcing of products whereby the retailing or brand name company concentrates on the decisive nodes of product design, marketing, and coordination of an ex ternal manufacturer network. However, intermediaries like representative offices or agents may take over, in part or wholly, producer network coordination. In case of the latter, chain configuration appears to tend toward main taining product development, production, and distri bution in the firm’s internal organizational structure (vertical integration), leading to an intrafirm network of wholly or partly owned production facilities. The two configurations are depicted in Figure 1, applied to the clothing sector. A recently proposed theory of governance, besides outlining a more complete typology, postulates that substantial variations in governance result from the interplay of three main variables. The complexity of transactions. More complex transac tions require more interaction among actors and thus stronger forms of governance. The ‘codifiability’ of transactions. In some industries schemes have been worked out to transfer complex in formation into standard sets of written instructions (co dification) in a manner that can be handed off between partners with relative ease. If suppliers have the com petence to act upon such instructions, and if the schemes are widely known and used, then outsourcing with little monitoring is likely to emerge. If not, then lead firms might either keep operations in house, leading to more vertical integration, or exert tight control over and monitor sup pliers, or have a dense relationship with suppliers. The competences of suppliers. The ability to receive and act upon complex instructions from lead firms requires a high degree of competence on the part of suppliers. The transfer of such instructions can be achieved by widely known standards and protocols or through intense


Table 2

543

Commodity chain actors

Actor

Scope of activity

Other names

Firm examples (USA)

1. Integrated firm

Product strategy Product definition Design Manufacturing Subassembly Component manufacturing Marketing, sales, and distribution Sales Marketing Value-added packaging and system

Modern corporation Dinosaur

Phillips The ‘old’ IBM The ‘old’ Ford

Marketer Distribution Reseller Value-added reseller Brand-name firm OEM Anchor firm

Amazon.com Sears Gap Banana Republic Dell Nike Daimler The ‘new’ Ford The ‘new’ IBM

System supplier OEM supplier First-tier supplier Contract manufacturer Full-package supplier Global supplier

Flextronics Celestica Solectron TSMC, UMC Dana, Delphi UPS, Fedex Arthur Anderson Intel Microsoft BF Goodrich

2. Retailer

integration

3. Lead firm

4. Turn-key supplier

5. Component supplier

Product strategy Product definition Product design Manufacturing End-user sales End-user marketing Complex parts and services Process R&D

Discrete elements (component parts and services)

Lower-tier supplier Specialized supplier Sub-contractor Commodity producer

Source: Gereffi, G. and Kaplinski, R. (eds.) (2001). The value of value chains: Spreading the gains from globalization. Sussex: Institute of Development Studies. IDS Bulletin 32., No. 3.

interaction. Where competent suppliers do not exist, lead firms must either keep the function in house or outsource it to suppliers that they tightly monitor and control. The more complete typology of chain governance posits arm’s length trade among firms and vertical inte gration at opposite ends of a spectrum of coordination, with network relationships constituting an intermediate mode. As to the network category three distinct types are identified: modular, relational, and captive. This resulting typology is as follows. Arm’s length trade. This entails the buying and selling of products among firms and individuals with interaction limited to exchanging goods and services for money. The governance mechanism is price. Transactions may be repeated. Transactional dependence (i.e., the costs of switching to new partners) is low for both parties. As the information that needs to be exchanged and knowledge that needs to be shared are straightforward, linkages between chain activities are ‘thin’. Drivers are: easy co dification of transactions, simple product specifications, and producers having the capability to make the product without involvement from buyers. Modular commodity chains. Suppliers in these chains make products or provide services to a customer’s spe cifications. Irrespective of the detail of instructions,

modular suppliers are highly competent, with an ability to provide ‘turn key’ or ‘full package’ services. They can deliver complete products, often using generic machinery that spreads investments across a wide customer base and keeps switching costs low. As buyer–supplier interactions can be complex (with high volume of information flowing across), linkages are necessarily thicker than with buy ing/selling. At the same time codification schemes and the embodying of much of the knowledge in modules can keep interactions between partners from being very dense. Thus, drivers are the ability to codify complex product specifications, technical standards reducing variation, high competence of suppliers reducing the need for direct monitoring and control. Relational commodity chains. This governance pattern is driven by the inability to codify product specifications necessitating the exchange of knowledge in person, complex transactions, and supplier capabilities that in volve complementary competences. To support dense interactions and knowledge sharing, partners have deep understanding of one another. There is mutual de pendence regulated through reputation, social and spatial proximity, family and ethnic ties, contracts that impose high costs on breakage, and the like. As trust and mutual dependence take a long time to build up, are difficult and

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time consuming to reestablish with new partners, and proximity is limited to a small set of firms, the costs of switching to new partners tend to be high. Captive commodity chains. This last network style gov ernance pattern is driven by substantial ability to codify high complexity of product specifications accom panied by low supplier capabilities. Small suppliers are dependent on larger, dominant lead firms that provide a large share of the business and process technology. This raises switching costs for suppliers who are therefore ‘captive’. There is a high degree of monitoring and control by the lead firm, which also creates dependence for the lead firm on its ‘captive’ supply base as a whole. Given power relationships, suppliers have to conform to the modes of interaction specified by the dominant customer, leading to ‘thick’ linkages and high switching costs. Vertical integration. This pattern is characterized by transactions taking place inside a single firm, coordinated by managerial control. This occurs when product speci fications cannot be codified, products are complex, highly competent suppliers cannot be found, there is a need to manage complex webs of inputs and outputs, and to control resources like intellectual property. Table 3 summarizes how the ‘values’ of the variables discussed earlier combine into the different governance types. Apart from the above typology and interpretation, the theory also postulates that governance is dynamic. The form of coordination tends to change (in a predictable way) as and when there is a change in any (or more) of the variables listed above. Obviously, such changes do frequently occur. For example, the theory states that rising supplier competence might result in captive net works moving toward the relational type while better codification schemes enable modular networks. Con versely, when a new technology renders an existing co dification scheme obsolete and effectively lowers the

Table 3 Governance type Market Modular Relational Captive Hierarchy

competence level in the supply base, one might expect modular coordination to become more relational, and if competent suppliers cannot be found, then captive co ordination and vertical integration will become more prevalent. One illustration in the clothing sector is the case of the Spanish company Inditex, owner of the Zara and other middle/higher segment brand names, which has adopted a unique and complex fast fashion business model. The demands imposed by the model have re sulted in Inditex adopting a vertical integration form of coordination, supplemented with a captive network of small scale producers in close proximity to its own production hub. Table 3 also summarizes the main types of transition that one is likely to encounter. It may be noted that the theory has been set up from a dominant lead firm perspective. Apart from stating that competences of suppliers may change, it generally pays little regard to how governance is influenced by strategies that may be adopted by nonlead firms (suppliers), ren dering more power to these firms than the theory seems to allow for. For example, many suppliers in the clothing sector explicitly pursue a multiple client base, in order to avoid lock in into captive transactions with high de pendency. Second, in network type chain the theory as sumes direct linkage between Western lead firm and supplier. Recently, it has been argued that non Western intermediaries are starting to figure more prominently in such chains, not only increasing the variation of gov ernance types but also significantly influencing power relations, as these intermediaries assume a more exten sive chain coordination role.

Integration in GCCs and Industrial Upgrading: The Role of Governance GCC discourse has substantially contributed to the de bate on globalization and local industry development in

Key determinants of global commodity chain governance Complexity of transactions Low 1 High High High High

2

Ability to codify transactions

3

High High 4 Low High Low

Capabilities in the supply base High High 6 High 5 Low Low

Degree of explicit coordination and power asymmetry Low

High

1. Increasing complexity of transactions also reducing supplier competence in relation to new demands: from modular to captive. 2. Decreasing complexity of transactions and greater ease of codification: from captive/relational to modular. 3. Better codification of transactions: from relational to modular. 4. De codification of transactions: from modular to relational. 5. Increasing supplier competence: from captive to relational/modular. 6. Decreasing supplier competence: from modular/relational to captive. Source: Gereffi, G., Humphrey, J. and Sturgeon, T. (2005). The governance of global value chains. Review of International Political Economy 12, 78 104.


developing countries by arguing that incorporation into GCCs driven by Western lead firms constitutes the best option for development of the capabilities of local firms thus creating the conditions for upgrading. Contract manufacturing in BDCCs is seen to enable ‘latecomer’ firms in developing countries to overcome the dis advantages of being far removed from lead user markets and sources of technology. Achieving partici pation in global chains requires local firms and industries to engage in initial learning and upgrading of quality to meet the minimum conditions of lead firms. It is sub sequently seen as putting firms in developing countries on a fast track to growth, upgrading and improvement of competitiveness as it provides access to resources, thus speeding up, and bringing down the cost of, learning processes. Industrial upgrading is defined as an improvement of the ability of a firm to move to more profitable and/or technologically sophisticated capital and skill intensive economic niches. Integration in global commodity chains is perceived in first instance to allow four different shifts: (1) ‘process upgrading’, transforming inputs to outputs more efficiently by reorganizing the production system or introducing better technology; (2) ‘product up grading’, implying firms move into more sophisticated, higher unit value, product lines; (3) ‘functional up grading’, implying firms acquire new functions or abandon existing ones so that they increase the overall skill content of their activities (e.g., complement pro duction with design or marketing); and (4) ‘intersectoral upgrading’, where firms apply the competence acquired in a particular function of a chain to move into a new sector. Particularly, functional and intersectoral up grading is seen to possibly lead to a repositioning of (groups of) firms in global markets. Linked to this categorization of shifts is a specific firm development model depicting the trajectory firms are able, are even ‘supposed’, to follow according to the upgrading proponents. The so called organizational succession and export learning model suggests a trajec tory of moving from simple assembly to original equip ment manufacturing (OEM) on the basis of third party designs and brands, to own design manufacturing (still third party brands but significant design input), to eventually own brand manufacturing (OBM). The latter necessitates functional upgrading. Figure 2 portrays process, product, and functional upgrading in an inter related way, triggered by profit opportunities provided by fast growing export markets, access to which is secured through integration in GCCs. With new insights produced by more empirical re search, the above portrayal of industrial upgrading has increasingly become contested. First, criticisms concern the failure to properly define and problematize the up grading concept, that is, to distinguish between the

545

‘process’ of upgrading and upgrading as an ‘outcome’. Second, it is often ignored that upgrading means to do things differently, and/or to do different things – com pared to competitors! Third, viewing upgrading from an internal perspective, external processes, for example, in the global and local social and institutional environment, are often overlooked. Most importantly however, much of the earlier dis course presents a ‘conveyer belt’ picture of industrial upgrading, conceiving longer term development trajec tories as unilinear and unproblematic. More recent thinking has acknowledged the role of governance in shaping upgrading opportunities, producing alternative trajectories. Thus it is suggested that firms in captive networks are likely to experience rapid product and process upgrading, but opportunities for functional upgrading are severely curtailed. The former can be understood from factors discussed already in the above, the latter meets with obstacles such as lead firm power and resource requirements. The limited interest of lead firms in networked firms broadening their roles in GCCs and high switching costs lead networked firms to con tinue in their existing role (path dependency) producing ‘lock in’. The point of switching costs (associated with the necessity to invest in learning beyond production to acquire sufficient competences in other nodes of the chain) also often leads firms in relational and even modular chains to voluntarily stick to their existing position and emphasize on outperforming other firms in the same node. On the other hand, functional upgrading is much more common among local firms in developing countries that ‘choose’ to operate outside global com modity chains and/or pursue other routes toward building export (capability). This brings us to consider a few of the shortcomings of GCC thinking identified in the literature.

Global Commodity Chain Thinking: Some Shortcomings and Notes The Typology of Commodity Chains Revisited: Away from Western Centrism Global commodity chain thinking has increasingly been criticized for a rather narrow interpretation of how firms from developing countries can integrate in global in dustries and markets. By giving a central position to Western lead firms, by arguing that firms from developing countries start by exporting as suppliers, and by arguing the crucial role of this in building competences, GCC thinking is marked by Western centrism, as a result ig noring a larger variety of possible development paths of firms and routes to export. Recent research has unveiled growth trajectories of local firms in a range of industries that start with producing own brand products for the

546


Exports Process technology

Technology frontier

Product technology

T0

T1

T2

T3

Simple activities

Complex activities*

Marketing

Simple OEM/subcontracting

ODM

OBM

Process technology

Simple assembly

Process adaptation

Incremental improvements

Process development

Applied research

Process R&D

Product technology

Assessment selection

Reverse engineering

Prototype development

Design for mfr.

New design

Product R&D

*No stages or linearity implied, but a general tendency to catch up cumulatively, through time with capabilities building systematically upon each other.

Figure 2 Product and process upgrading over time. Source: Adapted from Hobday, M. (1995). East Asian latecomer firms: Learning the technology of electronics. World Development 23(7), 1171 1193.

domestic market, followed by a gradual broadening and deepening of functional roles and competences through the coordination of domestic (national) chains. This is subsequently used as a springboard for penetration in foreign markets through exports. Thus, reversing the order, functional diversification preceeds exports and from own brand, manufacturing firms may diversify into OEM for third parties. It has been established that the most successful local firms in terms of functional diver sity and range of competences are often marked by never having been incorporated in global chains serving Western lead firms. Underlying are decisions taken early in the life course of the firm, in large part determining their subsequent development. Not only is there a lack of recognition of different chain strategies of firms in developing countries, but also extra global chain processes have been viewed mostly in a negative way and extra chain possibilities for develop ment have been largely ignored. Instead, the disadvan tages of exclusion from global chains have been pointed out at length. Although not without legitimacy, it over emphasizes the link between connections to global chains and possibilities for local development.

Underdiscussed Aspects It has been argued that the omissions observed above stem largely from an under researching of other di mensions of commodity chains besides input–output and governance structure. Not only has there been little work specifically on dynamic geographies, but also too much emphasis on within chain factors and too little on extra chain aspects, influencing configurations. First, the regulatory environment that refers to the conditions under which control over market access and information are exercised is perceived to have remained hitherto under researched. Second, it has also been argued that the local industry environment, in terms of (national) institutional arrangements, has not been duly considered, although ‘national business systems’ may be highly in fluential. The fact that similar global processes have produced differential outcomes at the local level under scores the importance of placing commodity chains in the wider context of the institutional environment and re gional economy in which they are embedded. Also, the role of consumption in shaping the archi tecture of chains has remained under researched.


Research has privileged sites of production over sites of consumption. However, retailers are significant as actors holding knowledge about consumption. Trends in con sumer tastes, desires, and behaviors are in fact a key consideration and with it differential cultures and cul tural change that underlie many facets of consumption by influencing meanings attached to specific goods in a dynamic way. It has been argued that more explicit consideration of the consumption aspect would produce much richer geographies of commodity systems. The Value of a Chain Perspective GCC thinking has met with reservation as to the idea of sequentiality and unidirectional linearity in the con ception of how goods are moved. An alternative ‘school’ has emerged arguing that the morphology of relationships between production, distribution, and consumption is better depicted by the network metaphor. This metaphor perceives the connections between actors (nodes) as complex webs of interdependence, connecting firms through the exchange of commodities and binding toge ther additional agents through supporting multidirectional flows of information, knowledge, and materials. Such a conception avoids privileging one node over another. An evaluation of the merits of a network perspective rather than a chain perspective is outside the scope of this article. No matter the outcome, GCC analysis has contributed much to deepening understanding of the diverse archi tectures and implications of economic globalization pro cesses and linked international trade dynamics. These have helped to provide rationale for new development policy initiatives that will be part of the agendas of multilateral agencies for some time to come. See also: Consumption; Firms; Global Production Networks; Globalization and Transnational Corporations; Governance, Corporate; Industrial Organization; Spatial Division of Labor.

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Further Reading Dicken, P., Kelly, P. F., Olds, K. and W Ch Yeung, H. (2001). Chains and networks, territories and scales: Towards a relational framework for analysing the global economy. Global Networks 1, 89 112. Gereffi, G. and Kaplinsky, R. (eds.) (2001). The Value of Value Chains: Spreading the Gains from Globalization. IDS Bulletin 32, No. 3. Sussex: Institute of Development Studies. Gereffi, G. and Korzeniewicz, M. (eds.) (1994). Commodity chains and global capitalism. Westport, CT: Praeger. Gereffi, G., Humphrey, J. and Sturgeon, T. (2005). The governance of global value chains. Review of International Political Economy 12, 78 104. Gibbon, P. (2001). Upgrading primary production: A global commodity chain approach. World Development 29, 345 363. Hassler, M. (2003). Crisis, coincidences and strategic market behaviour: The internationalization of Indonesian clothing brand owners. Area 35, 241 250. Hassler, M. (2003). The global clothing production system: Commodity chains and business networks. Global Networks 3, 513 531. Henderson, J., Dicken, P., Hess, M., Coe, N. and W Ch Yeung, H. (2002). Global production networks and the analysis of economic development. Review of International Political Economy 9, 436 464. Hobday, M. (1995). East Asian latecomer firms: Learning the technology of electronics. World Development 23(7), 1171 1193. Hopkins, T. K. and Wallerstein, I. (1986). Commodity chains in the world economy prior to 1800. Review 10, 157 170. Hughes, A. (2000). Retailers, knowledges and changing commodity networks: The case of the cut flower trade. Geoforum 31, 175 190. Humphrey, J. (2005). Shaping Value Chains for Development: Global Value Chains in Agribusiness. Eschbor: Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) Gmbh. Leslie, D. and Reimer, S. (1999). Spatializing commodity chains. Progress in Human Geography 23, 401 420. Schmitz, H. (ed.) (2004). Local Enterprises in the Global Economy: Issues of Governance and Upgrading. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Sturgeon, T. (2002). Modular production networks: A new American model of industrial organization. Industrial and Corporate Change 11, 451 495.

Relevant Websites http://www.globalvaluechains.org Global Value Chains Initiative.

Global Positioning/GPS J. Lee, The University of Seoul, Seoul, South Korea & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Datum Basis for measurement of position on the Earth’s surface. Geoid The surface mapped by all of the local variation from the ellipsoid. Geostationary Satellite Broadcast-corrected GPS signals provided by WAAS control stations for use by aviators or civilians equipped with GPS/WAAS receivers. Geographic Information Systems It is designed to capture, store, display, communicate, transform, analyze, and archive georeferenced information. Location-Based Services It provides personalized services to the subscriber of the system based on their current position. Orthometric Height The height of a point above the geoid. The height obtained by GPS is referred to the reference ellipsoid (ellipsoidal height) and should be converted to the orthometric height using geoid models built in GPS receivers. Selective Availability To degrade the autonomous GPS accuracy for security reasons, intentionally implemented by the US DoD, but terminated on 1 May 2000.

Overview of GPS GPS is a space based navigation system nominally con sisting of a 24 satellite constellation that provides pos itioning and timing information to military and civilian users worldwide. GPS satellites circling the Earth every 12 hours broadcast continuous GPS signals on two different L band frequencies, L1 and L2. In addition to the GPS satellites, the system consists of a worldwide satellite control network and GPS receiver units that acquire the GPS signals and translate them into positioning and tim ing information. GPS provides several services including highly accurate and three dimensional location infor mation, precision velocity and timing services, and ac cessibility to an unlimited number of global military, civilian, and commercial users. The basic idea behind GPS to determine a user’s lo cation is relatively simple. If the distances from a user (a GPS receiver) to three GPS satellites and the satellite locations are known, the location of the user can be determined by applying a well known triangulation survey

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mapping procedure. The receiver will be located at the intersection of three spheres; each has a radius of one receiver–satellite distance and is centered on that par ticular satellite. Theoretically, three distances to three simultaneously tracked satellites along with their co ordinates are needed. The positioning information is the partial outcome of GPS signal processing. The accuracy of positioning was limited to 100 m for the horizontal com ponent, 156 m for the vertical component, and 340 ns for the time component under selective availability (SA) policy. With terminating the SA on 1 May 2000, the ob tained horizontal accuracy is expected to improve to about 22 m (95% probability level). To further improve the GPS positioning accuracy, the GPS relative positioning meth ods are developed and the modernized GPS signals (L2C, L5, and L1C) are designed and will be utilized in the near future. In this case, the level of positioning accuracy will be improved to few meters or a subcentimeter. The fact that the topographic surface of the Earth is highly irregular makes it difficult to determine the user’s location. To overcome this problem, geodesists adopted a smooth mathematical surface, called the reference sur face, to approximate the irregular shape of the Earth. One such surface is a biaxial reference ellipsoid, known as the geodetic datum. A geodetic datum is a math ematical surface, or a reference surface, with a well de fined origin (center) and orientation. The satellite coordinates as given in the broadcast ephemeris refers to the World Geodetic System of 1984 (WGS 84) reference system. The WGS 84 is a 3 D, Earth centered reference system developed by the former U.S. Defense Mapping Agency now incorporated into a new agency, National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA). It is the official GPS reference system. In addition to the geodetic datum, the so called vertical datum is used as a reference surface to which the heights (elevations) of points are referred. The geoid is often selected to be the vertical datum. The height of a point above the geoid is known as the orthometric height, which is usually found plotted on topographic maps. However, in the case of GPS, the obtained heights are references to the reference ellipsoid, not the geoid, known as the ellipsoidal heights. Many GPS receivers and software package have built in geoid models for automatic conversion between ortho metric and ellipsoidal heights. Time plays a very important role in positioning with GPS. The GPS signal is controlled by accurate timing system devices, the atomic satellite clocks. In addition, measuring the distances from the receiver to the satellites

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is based on both the receiver and the satellite clocks. Two time systems, the coordinated universal time (UTC) and the GPS time, are very important to GPS users. UTC is an atomic time scale based on the international atomic time (TAI). TAI is a uniform time scale, which is com puted based on independent time scales generated by atomic clocks located at various timing laboratories throughout the world. GPS time is the time scale used for referencing the GPS signals. It is computed based on the time scales generated by the atomic clocks at the monitor stations and onboard GPS satellites. The GPS time scale was set to UTC on 6 January 1980. However, due to the leap seconds introduced into the UTC time scale, GPS time moved ahead of the UTC by 13 seconds on 1 January 1999. The difference between GPS and UTC time scale is given in the GPS navigation message.

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) The GNSS was declared by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) consisting of the satellite navigation systems including interoperable regional and local augmentation systems. Currently, one of the satel lite navigation systems is fully operational and widely available to civilian users, which is NAVSTAR GPS (Navigation System Timing and Ranging Global Pos itioning System) owned by the US government. The GPS was developed by the US Department of Defense (DoD) in the early 1970s with other technical resources such as the Defense Mapping Agency and NATO nations. The initial operational capability (IOC), a constellation of 24 operational satellites, was completed in July 1993. The GPS was officially declared to have achieved full oper ational capability (FOC) on 17 July 1995. Currently, the NAVSTAR GPS is managed for DoD by the NAVSTAR Joint Program Office (JPO) located at Los Angeles Air Force Base. The JPO oversees the development and production of GPS satellites and conducts field tests for all GPS equipment and techniques used by the US military. The civilian point of contact for NAVSTAR information is the U.S. Coast Guard’s Navigation Center (NAVCEN). The NAVCEN provides system status in formation in the form of a document called a Notice Advisory to NAVSTAR Users (NANU). Civil users have input to NAVSTAR system issues through the Civil GPS Service Interface Committee (CGSIC), which is organ ized by the Coast Guard. Other satellite navigation systems, which are partially operated or under construction, are Russian GLONASS (Global Navigation Satellite System) program and European Galileo program. GLONASS is Russia’s ver sion of GPS. The first GLONASS satellite was launched in 1982, but the system remains partially operational due

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to political and economic issues. The system is used to augment GPS for applications using real time kinematic (RTK). As of 25 September 2006, there were ten func tional GLONASS satellites. The country intends to make GLONASS fully operational (24 satellites) by 2010. Galileo is the European counterpart to GPS. Unlike GPS and GLONASS, which are financed and controlled by their countries’ respective military organizations, Galileo is controlled by civilians. The system is designed to provide five levels of services from open (simple pos itioning available to everyone) to public regulated (en crypted, integrity, continuous availability) services. In December 2005, the first Galileo test satellite (GIOVE A) was launched, and two further experimental satellites are planned by the second half of 2008. The full con stellation (27 satellites plus three spares) will be deployed between 2007 and 2010, according to a report by the European Space Agency. Perhaps, the greatest advantage of Galileo will be its interoperability with NAVSTAR GPS and GLONASS. The improved geometry of having an average of 20 sat ellites in view (more than twice than what we have) will improve the level of accuracy, reliability, and availability. These satellite systems are important components to develop and implement the GNSS. The GNSS improves efficiency for all users, and benefits all modes of trans portation as well as multiple nontransportation related applications. As the number of GNSS increases, GNSS is slowly but most certainly replacing GPS as the acronym used when discussing satellite navigation.

GPS Segments The NAVSTAR GPS consists of three major segments: space segment, control segment, and user segment. The current GPS constellation (as of May 2006) consists of 29 satellites: one Block II satellite, fifteen Block IIA satellites, twelve Block IIR satellites, and one Block IIR M satellite. This is the nominal 24 satellite constellation and five spare satellites. The first Block II satellite was launched in February 1989; the most recent Block IIR M satellite (Figure 1) was launched on 26 September 2005, which is the first modernized GPS satellite. The GPS satellites are placed in six orbits labeled A through F, which are inclined by 55o with respect to the equator. GPS satellite orbits are nearly circular (an elliptical shape with a maximum eccentricity of about 0.01), and the semimajor axis is about 26 560 km above the Earth’s surface. The corresponding GPS orbital period is about 12 sidereal hours. Since more satellites are currently available than the nominal 24 satellite constellation, an orbital plane contains four or five satellites (Figure 2). The satellites are identified by the space vehicle number (SVN) and the pseudorandom noise (PRN).

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Figure 1 GPS Block IIR-M satellite. Source: http://pnt.gov/ public/images/IIR-M 2.jpg

Figure 2 Navstar constellation: GPS Block IIA, IIR/M, IIF. Source: http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/images/ SPAC GPS NAVSTAR IIA IIR IIF Constellation lg.gif

Each GPS satellite (except Block IIR M) transmits a navigation signal including two carrier frequencies (L1 and L2), two digital codes (P code and C/A code), and a navigation message. The L1 frequency is for either mili tary or civilian users and the precise L2 frequency is for military only. The Block IIR M satellite is designed to broadcast two new military signals and a second civil signal (L2C). The carriers carry the codes and the navi gation message as binary biphase modulations. The car riers and the codes are used to calculate the distance from the user’s receiver to the GPS satellites, while the navi gation message contains the location of the satellites as a function of time along with other information. The

transmitted signals are controlled by highly accurate atomic clocks onboard the satellites. The three dimen sional location of the receiver can be determined by the calculated distances and the positions of satellites at the moment of transmission. The control segment of the GPS consists of a worldwide network of tracking stations with a master control center (MCS) and five ground control stations. The MCS, located in Colorado Springs, CO, USA, is the central processing facility of the control segment and is manned at all times. The five monitor stations are located in Colorado Springs, Hawaii, Kwajalein, Diego Garcia, and Ascension Island. The primary task of the oper ational control segment is tracking the GPS satellites in order to determine and predict satellite locations, system integrity, behavior of the satellite atomic clocks, atmos pheric data, the satellite almanac, and other consider ations. The information is packed and uploaded into the GPS satellites through the S band link from three of the monitor stations (Kwajalein, Diego Garcia, and Ascension Island). All of the monitor stations and the ground con trol stations are unmanned and operated remotely from the MCS. Monitoring the GPS integrity is also one of the tasks of the MCS. The status of a satellite is set to an unhealthy condition by the MCS during satellite main tenance. This satellite health condition appears as a part of the satellite navigation message on a near real time basis. Scheduled satellite maintenance is reported in a message called NANU, which is available to the public through the US NAVCEN. The user segment includes all military and civilian users. With a GPS receiver connected to a GPS antenna, a user can receive the GPS signals, which can be used to determine a user’s position anywhere in the world. The NAVSTAR GPS is currently available to all users worldwide at no direct cost, while the Galileo system will provide two levels of services: free direct charge service and chargeable service that offers additional features. In 1980, only one commercial GPS receiver was available on the market, at a price of several hundred thousand US dollars. Recently, more than 500 different GPS receivers are available and the price varies from about US$100 for the simple handheld units to about US$15 000 for the sophisticated survey purpose units. Commercial GPS receivers may be divided into four types, according to their receiving capabilities: single frequency code receivers, single frequency carrier smoothed code receivers, single frequency code and carrier receivers, and dual frequency receivers. Single frequency receivers access the L1 frequency only, while dual frequency receivers access both the L1 and the L2 frequencies. GPS receivers can also be categorized based on their number of tracking channels. Presently most GPS receivers have 9–12 independent (or parallel) channels, with each channel dedicated to continuously


tracking a particular satellite. When selecting a GPS receiver, many features should be considered: cost, ease of use, power consumption, size and weight, internal and/ or external data storage capabilities, interfacing capabil ities, and multipath mitigation.

GPS Position and Travel Time Measurements As a dual use positioning system, the US DoD provides two levels of GPS positioning and timing services: the precise positioning service (PPS) and the standard pos itioning service (SPS). PPS is the most precise autono mous positioning and timing service. It uses precision code (P code), which is accessible by authorized users, in cluding military forces. The expected positioning accuracy provided by PPS is 16 m for the horizontal component and 23 m for the vertical component (95% probability level). SPS, which is less precise than PPS, uses coarse acquisition code (C/A code), which is available free of charge to all users worldwide. After discontinuing the SA, the SPS autonomous positioning accuracy is presently at a com parable level to that of the PPS. The GPS codes, C/A code and P code, are carried by two carrier frequencies (or sine waves), which are the L1 carrier frequency generated at 1575.42 MHz and the L2 carrier frequency generated at 1227.60 MHz. All GPS satellites transmit the same L1 and L2 carrier frequen cies. The GPS navigation message is a data stream added to both the L1 and L2 carrier as binary biphase modu lation. The navigation message contains, along with other information, the coordinates of the GPS satellites as a function of time, the satellite health status, the satellite clock correction, the satellite almanac, and atmospheric data. Each satellite transmits its own navigation message with information on the other satellites, such as the ap proximate location and health status. The current GPS signals structure was designed in the early 1970s. To meet the future requirements, a GPS modernization program has been undertaken to provide signal redundancy and to improve positioning accuracy, signal availability, and system integrity. The modern ization program includes a new GPS civil signal known as L2C on the L2 frequency, the third frequency (1176 MHz) primarily for the civil aviation community, another proposed civil frequency (L1C) for the survey/ mapping community, and two new military codes (M codes) on both the L1 and the L2 frequencies. Two major benefits of the modernized GPS signals are to enhance the ionospheric correction and to track better in tough GPS conditions (such as under tree foliage). The Block IIR M and IIF satellites are designed to broadcast the new GPS civil signal (L2C), and the first IIR M satellite was launched in September 2005. Eight IIR M and ten

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IIF satellites are scheduled for creation and launch by 2010. The Block IIF satellites are also designed to broadcast the third GPS civil frequency known as L5, which will be available by 2014. GPS III is a long range program expected to satisfy civil and military require ments through the year 2030. The modernized GPS signals are very similar to the proposed Galileo signals (L1, E5a, and E5b). The system interoperability will improve the level of accuracy and signal availability. In order to determine the GPS receiver’s position, as discussed above, the distances from the receiver to three simultaneously tracked satellites and the satellites’ co ordinates are needed. Because the coordinates of GPS satellites can be obtained from the navigation message transmitted by GPS satellites, the distances between the satellites and the receiver need to be measured by using two measurement methods: a pseudorange measurement and a carrier–phase measurement. The pseudorange is a measure of the range, or distance, between the GPS receiver’s antenna and the GPS satellite’s antenna, using either the P code or the C/A code. When the PRN code is transmitted from the satellite, the receiver generates an exact replica of that code at the same time. After some time, the transmitted code will be picked up by the re ceiver. By comparing the transmitted code and its replica, the receiver can calculate the signal travel time in space. Multiplying the travel time by the velocity of the signal gives the distance between the satellite and the receiver. The velocity of the signal is equal to the speed of light (299 729 458 m s 1). Another way of measuring the range to the satellite is a carrier–phase measurement using either the L1 or the L2 frequencies. The range would simply be the sum of the total number of full carrier cycles plus fractional cycles at the receiver and satellite, multiplied by the carrier wavelength. The ranges deter mined with the carriers are far more accurate than those obtained with the pseudoranges. From the measurements three spheres can be obtained: each has a radius of a receiver–satellite range and centered on that particular satellite. The receiver will be located where three spheres intersect (Figure 3).

GPS Error Sources Both GPS pseudorange and carrier–phase measurements are affected by several types of systematic or random errors and biases. The errors may be classified as errors originating at the GPS satellites, errors originating at the GPS receiver, and errors due to signal propagation (at mospheric refraction). In addition, the accuracy of the computed GPS position is affected by the geometric distribution of the GPS satellites in view. The errors from the satellites include GPS ephemeris errors, satellite clock errors, and the effect of SA. The SA

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Figure 3 Determining position by three spheres intersect. Source: http://www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/gps/work.html Copyright Owner: Smithsonian Institution, http://photo2.si.edu/ copyright.html

was intentionally implemented by the US DoD to de grade the autonomous GPS accuracy for security rea sons, but was terminated on 1 May 2000. The ephemeris errors are involved in the estimated satellite positions, because the satellite positions as a function of time are predicted from previous GPS observations at the ground control stations. The error is usually on the order of 2– 5 m, and can be corrected in the postprocessing mode. Each GPS Block II and IIA satellite contains cesium and rubidium atomic clocks. The Block IIR satellites carry rubidium clocks to provide the frequency and the timing requirements for generating the GPS signals. The GPS satellite clocks, although highly accurate, are not perfect. The clock errors cause additional errors to the GPS measurement because of the assumption that the receiver and satellite clocks are synchronized with each other. GPS receivers use inexpensive crystal clocks, which are much less accurate than the satellite clocks. The errors originating at the receiver include receiver clock errors, multipath error, receiver noise, and antenna phase center variations. Multipath is a major error source for both the carrier–phase and pseudorange measure ments. Multipath error occurs when the same GPS signal from a satellite arrives at the receiver antenna several times as a direct signal and reflected signals through different paths. Multipath distorts the original signal through interference with the reflected signals at the GPS antenna. The error in the pseudorange measure ment is much larger than that in the carrier–phase. With new advances in multipath mitigation techniques, the pseudorange multipath error is reduced to several meters or submeters, even in a highly reflective environment.

The signal propagation errors include the delays of the GPS signal as it passes through the ionospheric and tropospheric layers of the atmosphere. It is assumed that the GPS signal travels at the speed of light in a vacuum (free space). The ionosphere is a dispersive medium, which bends the GPS signal and changes its speed as it passes through the various ionospheric layers to reach a GPS receiver. The inability of L2 only receivers to handle the ionospheric propagation delays is one of the greatest sources of error in GPS positioning. The new modernized GPS signals (including L2C and L5) are designed to correct the ionospheric errors accurately. The tropospheric delay depends on the temperature, pressure, and humidity along the signal path through the troposphere. The delay results in positioning errors on the order of 2.3–28 m. Several mathematical models are used to predict surface meteorological measurements to reduce the tropospheric error. The last error source affecting the positioning accuracy is based on the satellite geometry, which represents the geo metric locations of the GPS satellites as seen by the receiver. Good satellite geometry is obtained when the satellites are spread out in the sky. In order to examine the effect of the satellite geometry on the quality of the measured 3 D position of a receiver, the value of the position dilution of precision (PDOP) can be measured. The PDOP represents the contribution of the satellite geometry to the 3 D pos itioning accuracy. To ensure high precision GPS pos itioning, a suitable observation time should be selected to obtain the highest possible accuracy using GPS mission planning software. A PDOP of five or less is usually recommended.

GPS Data and Correction Services and Techniques Positioning with GPS can be performed in two ways: point positioning or relative positioning. GPS point positioning employs one GPS receiver that measures the pseudor anges to determine the user’s position instantaneously, as long as at least four satellites are in view. Although the positioning mode is used mainly with relatively low ac curacy required, GPS decision makers and scientists have developed technologies to improve the accuracy of GPS in many ways: (1) modifying the GPS signal structures (L2C, L5, and L1C), (2) performing its interoperability with GLONASS or Galileo system, and (3) developing ad vanced techniques in GPS receiver to reduce clock errors and multipath errors. GPS relative positioning, called differential positioning, employs two GPS receivers simultaneously tracking the same satellites to determine their relative coordinates. One receiver is selected as a base receiver, which remains sta tionary at a site with precisely known coordinates. The


other receiver, called a rover receiver, is set up over a point for which coordinates are sought (referred to as the un known point). In principle, because the measurements of two receivers simultaneously tracking a particular satellite contain more or less the same errors and biases, if we take the difference between the measurements of the two re ceivers (called differential positioning), the similar error will be removed or reduced. Carrier–phase and/or pseudorange measurements can be used in relative positioning. A variety of the relative positioning techniques are used to provide a post processing or real time solution, which include real time kinematic (RTK) GPSs, state wide multisite base station network systems, differential GPS (DGPS) and the wide area augmentation system (WAAS). The RTK sur veying is a carrier phase based relative positioning techni que, and is suitable for determining the coordinates of the rover’s location within about 5–10 km from the base receiver in real time. As a survey purpose system, the ex pected positioning accuracy is on the order of 2–5 cm. The RTK with a single reference station is limited to the rela tively small area surrounding the reference station. In order to overcome this problem, a system based on a number of widely separated reference stations has been developed at state and federal levels in the United States. Most state governments (departments of transportation) have developed a state wide multisite base station network sys tem. The RTK network systems determine the differential errors between the reference stations within the network. Once the rover receiver provides its approximate position to the control station, the raw measurements of the rover’s position are calculated based on the differential errors. The error corrections can be processed by post processing or real time modes. The US government has designed and implemented two different augmentation systems to improve the pre cision of C/A code, which are the DGPS radio beacon system and the WAAS. The DGPS developed and managed by the NAVCEN is a code based relative pos itioning technique. The Coast Guard DGPS designed with the surface (maritime and terrestrial) user is fully operational and meets all the standards for the harbor entrance and approach phases of navigation. In the DGPS, a reference station creates the real time DGPS corrections in a standard format called Radio Technical Commission for Maritime Service (RTCM). These cor rections are digitally modulated using minimum shift keying (MSK), and transmitted from the radio beacon. A user equipped with an MSK beacon receiver can receive the transmitted DGPS corrections within the coverage area of a particular beacon station. DGPS is designed to provide better than 10 m navigation service (95%), but typically provides better than 1 m horizontal positioning accuracy (95%) when the user is less than 100 nautical miles from the DGPS transmitting site. Accuracy then degrades at a rate of approximately 1 m per hundred

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nautical miles as the user moves away from the trans mitting site. A total of 56 maritime DGPS sites provide coastal coverage of the continental United States, the Great Lakes, Puerto Rico, portions of Alaska and Hawaii, and portions of the Mississippi River Basin. WAAS developed by the Federal Aviation Adminis tration (FAA) provides augmentation information to GPS receivers to enhance the accuracy and reliability of position estimates for civil aviation. The signals from GPS satellites are received at 25 widely spaced wide area reference sta tions (WRS) sites. The WRS locations are precisely sur veyed so that any errors in the received GPS signals can be detected. The GPS information collected by the WRS sites is forwarded to the WAAS master station (WMS) via a terrestrial communications network. At the WMS, the WAAS augmentation messages are generated. These mes sages contain information that allows GPS receivers to re move errors in the GPS signal. The differential message is broadcast from two geostationary satellites. The GPS/ WAAS receiver processes the WAAS augmentation message to calculate the user’s position by assessing in factoring the signal delay caused by various error sources. WAAS is currently available only in the United States. On the average, WAAS and DGPS accuracy are virtually the same. The WAAS architecture is designed to provide uniform 7 m accuracy (95%) regardless of the location of the receiver – within the WAAS service area.

GPS Applications GPS has been available for civil and military uses since 1995. Especially, after terminating the SA in 2000, nu merous new GPS applications have been developed in many areas. Because GPS provides high accuracy pos itioning, global availability, and cost effectiveness, the information technology has found its way into many applications replacing conventional methods in most cases, including surveying and mapping, land, sea, and air navigation, search and rescue operations, spacecraft op erations, military applications, recreational uses, and other specialized uses. The GPS also has been used a means of gathering data on human activity data for social science research. With the positioning and tracking abilities of GPS and geocomputational capabilities of geographic information systems (GIS), it is now more feasible than ever before to study human activities and movements in space and time. It covers a wide range of topics such as migration, residential mobility, shopping, travel, and commuting behavior based on Torsten Hagerstrand’s time geography model. The time geo graphic perspective has inspired generations of social scientists, especially geographers and transportation re searchers, in the description and analysis of human ac tivities in space–time.

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In addition, these locational devices are equipped with mobile GIS software (such as ArcPad) and can generate on screen georeferenced maps to support users’ operations onsite (e.g., providing navigational guidance). The GPS/ GIS system provides a cost effective, efficient, and accurate tool for creating utility maps, for managing forestry and natural resources, for helping retail business in delivery and real time inventory monitoring, and for providing vehicle drivers with route guidance. Using vehicle navigation sys tems (VNS) seen in Figure 4, the GPS determined vehicle location is superimposed on an electronic digital road map containing in its geographic information such as street names and directions, business listings, attraction points, and other relevant information. Once the drive inputs a des tination, the VNS finds the best route to reach the destin ation with considerations of traffic impedance factors such as shortest distance or travel time distance, one way roads, turns, traffic volumes, and rush hour restrictions. The driver usually gets directional information to the destination with audio and/or visual indications. Some manufacturers add cellular systems to provide weather and traffic information and to locate the vehicles in case of emergency. Recent advances in wireless communication make it possible for drivers to remotely access the Internet from their vehicles, and for control centers to track and monitor criminal of fenders or vehicles such as rental cars, police cars, or utility vehicles. Recently, nearly all new cellular phones, called GPS phones have some GPS receiving capability built in. This allows the phones to transmit a user’s location to a public safety answering point (PSAP) after dialing 911 ac cording to the United States Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Enhanced 911 (E911) program. Also, the GPS phones are used for providing location and

Although GPS provides high accuracy positioning in a cost effective manner, it requires, at all times, a direct line of vision between the receiver’s antenna and the satellites. Otherwise, the receiver cannot pick up the signal. The signal loss is caused by obstruction of the GPS satellite signal due to buildings, bridges, and other objects. The signal loss must be identified and corrected to avoid large errors in computing coordinates. This signal ob struction problem was successfully overcome by integrating GPS with other positioning systems. The integrated system is better than either system alone. GPS/LRF (laser range finders) integration was developed to overcome the signal loss in areas with heavy tree canopy, and the integrated GPS/DR (dead reckoning) system is widely used in auto matic vehicle location (AVL) applications. In order to ob tain high accuracy positioning in obstructed areas and/or under dynamic conditions, GPS can be integrated with a relatively environment independent system, the inertial navigation system (INS). Although the temporal GPS signal loss problems were resolved by integrating with other positioning system as mentioned above, GPS is not able to provide positioning information inside buildings or built environments. It is still a challenging problem in most indoor LBS in urban areas because 70% of LBS are being initiated indoors where GPS

Figure 4 Vehicle navigation systems. Source: http:// news.cnet.com/i/bto/20070417/AVICS2 Map 4in 300dpi 270x241.jpg Copyright Owner: Pioneer Electronics Inc.

Figure 5 GPS phone: Nokia N95. Source: http:// www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2007/05/03/ n95 high gps 05 narrowweb 300x496,0.jpg Copyright Owner: Nokia Inc.

tracking services including vehicle or employee’s location tracking, turn by turn direction services, location based services (LBS) for recreations and business activities (Figure 5).

Issues


fails to deliver an acceptable end user performance. In re cent years, 3 D indoor positioning techniques have been developed to improve the quality and quantity of these data and to reduce their cost using location aware devices such as cellular phones, wireless PDAs, GPS receivers, and radiolocation methods. The positioning within mobile networks using only the information related to the base network transmitter is a very cost effective method, but it is very inaccurate and not practically applicable for LBS. The only advantage, compared to GPS positioning, is the pos sibility of working inside buildings. None of techniques increases the accuracy by more than 50 m. An Indoor GPS or Assisted GPS (A GPS) has been used to detect highly attenuated GPS signals indoors. A GPS, however, requires the use of modified handsets that receive the GPS signals and then send those readings to a network server. Wireless LANs (WLANs), radio frequency identification (RFID), WiFi, and Bluetooth are used to track mobile users in closed spaces such as buildings and tunnels. These systems for location positioning run on a standalone server and give the x, y position and the floor of the mobile unit. Despite providing accurate positioning for indoors, however, the positioning technologies have problems with implemen tation because they require a reference database for average signal measurements at fixed points throughout a building. Although there are currently developments in the LBS that seeks to provide better coverage of location information inside buildings, much further research is still needed to address this problem. The positioning technologies including GPS and others prove to be a great enhancement in civil or military applications, but the technology has recently created privacy concerns among civilian applications. General privacy concerns relate to the collection, storage, and release of personal information – the nature and level of detailed data and the accessibility to stored data.

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In order to deal with the geosurveillance challenges, both technological and legal solutions should be proposed to prevent access to the data by unauthorized users, and to protect individual human rights and personal privacy. See also: GIScience and Systems; Remote Sensing; Spatial Databases; Time Geography.

Further Reading El Rabbany, A. (2002). Introduction to GPS: The Global Positioning System. Boston, MA: Artech House. Gakstatter, E. and Flick, J., (2006). Navigating the world of GNSS. Geospatial Solutions Apr/06, 22 25. Goodchild, M. F. and Janelle, D. G. (eds.) (2004). Spatially Integrated Social Science. New York: Oxford Press. Kennedy, M. (2002). The Global Positioning System and GIS: An Introduction (2nd edn.). New York: Taylor & Francis. Kwan, M. P. and Lee, J. (2005). Emergency response after 9/11: The potential of real time 3D GIS for quick emergency response in micro spatial environments. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 29, 93 113. Leick, A. (2004). GPS Satellite Surveying (3rd edn.). New Jersey: John Wiley. Tsui, J. B. Y. (2000). Fundamentals of Global Positioning System Receivers A Software Approach. New York: John Wiley.

Relevant Websites http://www.esa.int European Space Agency home page (Galileo system). http://gps.faa.gov Federal Aviation Administration Satellite Navigation home page (WASS). http://gps.losangeles.af.mil NAVSTAR Global Positioning System Joint Program Office Home page. http://www.glonass ianc.rsa.ru Russian Space Force Home Page (GLONASS system). http://www.navcen.uscg.gov US Coast Guard Navigation Center Home Page.

Global Production Networks N. M. Coe, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction As economic globalization has accelerated, a consider able body of literature has evolved that attempts to ex plain how global industries are organized into systems of chains or networks, and how, in turn, the nature of those systems affects the opportunities for economic develop ment and upgrading for the various regions and firms involved. One increasingly important strand of this work concerns the geographical analysis of global production networks (GPNs), using a framework developed pri marily by researchers in Manchester and their collabor ators. In short, GPN analysis seeks to reveal the multiactor and multiscalar characteristics of transnational production systems – and their developmental impli cations – through exploring the intersecting notions of power, value, and embeddedness. This article seeks to provide an initial synopsis and evaluation of this emerging and fast developing area of research. It will proceed in four sections: first, the theo retical background and context for the GPN approach are reviewed; second, the main conceptual building blocks of GPN analysis are introduced; third, the im plications of the framework for understanding (subna tional) regional development are considered; and fourth, the most significant challenges facing ongoing research in this area are profiled.

Theoretical Antecedents Before introducing the notion of GPN in more detail, it is important to situate the approach within the wider literatures on economic globalization. Over the past 20 years or so, a plethora of research avenues have emerged using notions of ‘chains’ or ‘networks’ to conceptualize production systems. Each of these approaches emphasizes the interconnected structures of different economic ac tivities, with each link or element in the chain adding value in some way to the production process under consideration. Some of this work has emerged from the business/managerial literature, such as that on value chains, and some from the sociological literature, such as that exploring the social embeddedness of economic net works. The GPN approach has particularly developed, however, from the critical evaluation of two network/ chain lines of enquiry (see Table 1). First, emerging from the development studies tradi tion and world systems theory is the notion of the global

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commodity chain (GCC). These have been defined as interorganizational networks linking households, firms, and states together across the global economy. Each GCC has four interrelated dimensions: an input–output struc ture, a territoriality, a governance regime, and an insti tutional framework. While an impressive body of work has been produced since the concept’s initial formulation, several clear limitations have become apparent. Despite identifying four dimensions analytically, in reality gov ernance structures – and in particular rather crude dis tinctions between producer and buyer driven chains – have dominated discussion and research in the field. Moreover, in terms of exploring the territoriality or geography of commodity chains GCC analyses have, until recently at least, tended to focus on the national scale with less attention paid to the processes of local and regional economic development within countries. The approach has also proven to be relatively weak at re vealing the ways in which firm networks link together, and are constitutive of societies with different social and institutional frameworks, and relatedly, there has been little consideration of firm ownership patterns, and in particular how firms of different nationalities may adopt varying organizational structures and strategies. More recently, the notion of the GCC has been partly superseded by the work that conceptualises global value chains (GVCs). GVC research has made significant ad vances with respect to two of the criticisms of GCC re search raised above. Through looking at supplier capabilities and different forms of knowledge within value chains, a more sophisticated typology of govern ance regimes has been developed, with captive, modular, and relational forms being identified alongside traditional market and hierarchy forms. Equally, GVC studies have started to profile the different ways in which subnational clusters of economic activity are ‘plugged into’ GVCs. Second, emerging from investigations into the soci ology of scientific knowledge, actor network theory (ANT) is an approach that emphasizes how entities in networks are shaped by, and can only be understood through, their relationships to other entities. A key implication for study of transnational production systems is that space and distance have to be seen not in absolute terms, but as interrelations of influence, power, and connectivity. ANT also involves a rejection of traditional binaries such as structure agency, and recognizes that nonhuman forms (especially technologies) are an integral component of networks. Through its conceptualization of social systems as complex networks of power relations with emergent

Global Production Networks

Table 1

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Theoretical antecedents to the GPN approach Global commodity/value chains (GCC/GVC)

Actor-network theory (ANT)

Varieties of capitalism (VoC)

Global production networks (GPNs)

Disciplinary background

Economic sociology Development studies

Sociology of science

Political science

Economic geography

Object of enquiry

Interfirm networks in global industries

Value-adding chains Governance models Organizational learning

Variations in national institutions and systems of capitalism Organization of production regimes

Global network configurations and regional development

Orienting concepts

Heterogeneous networks of association between human and nonhuman actors Relational networks Human and nonhuman actors

Industrial upgrading and rents

Immutable mobiles Topological surfaces

Market-related institutions Modes of coordination

MNC literature International business Trade economics

Sociology of science Post-structuralism

Classical political economy Institutionalism

Corporate, collective, and institutional power Societal, network, and territorial embeddedness Relational economic geography GCC/GVC, ANT, VoC

Intellectual influences

properties, ANT has a lot to offer the study of GPNs in both theoretical and methodological terms. However, the utility of ANT to the study of global economic networks is somewhat constrained by its downplaying of the structural preconditions and power relations – that is, power ‘beyond’ the network – that in effect provide the ‘rules of the game’ for the formation and operation of production networks. In developing a GPN perspective, approaches looking at production chains and networks need to be augmented with insights from work that emphasizes the particular ities of what are variously called ‘varieties of capitalism’, ‘national business systems’, or ‘welfare state regimes’ (see Table 1). The argument here is that different societies exhibit significant social and institutional variation – due to differences in culture, polity, education system, fi nancial regulations, and so on – and therefore embody different production and welfare regimes, labor market practices, and capacities for state economic management. These variations will leave a distinctive imprint on the elements of production networks that originate from, and/or are located in, particular national territories. The downsides of such an approach include an inclination toward developing rather crude typologies of national formations on the one hand, and a tendency to neglect intranational variation in political, institutional, and economic formations on the other. Ultimately, however, when undertaking research into GPN, it is necessary to steer a delicate path between overemphasizing the transformative effects of the net works in the various economies where they are situated, and overstressing the extent to which national conditions

Value creation, enhancement, and capture

shape their operations in particular countries. Instead, the aim should be to explore the mutual transformation of both the firms and the places in which they are em bedded. Let us now move on to look in more detail at how the GPN approach conceptualizes these complex interactions.

Outlining the GPN Approach Building upon elements of the cognate approaches introduced above, the GPN framework emphasizes the complex intra , inter and extrafirm networks involved in any economic activity, and how these are structured both organizationally and geographically. A GPN can thus be broadly defined as the globally organized nexus of interconnected functions and operations of firms and nonfirm institutions through which goods and services are produced, distributed, and consumed. The GPN approach can usefully be distinguished from its antecedents in five respects: First, through the explicit consideration of extrafirm • networks, it necessarily brings into view the broad

•

range of nonfirm organizations – for example, supra national organizations, government agencies, trade unions, employer associations, NGOs, and consumer groups – that will (or may) shape firm activities in the particular locations absorbed into GPNs. Second, GPN analysis is innately multiscalar, and considers the interactions and mutual constitution of all spatial scales from the local to the global.

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this is an avowedly network approach that seeks • toThird, move beyond the analytical limitations of the

• •

‘chain’ notion. Production systems are seen as net worked ‘meshes’ of intersecting vertical and horizontal connections in order to avoid deterministic linear interpretations of how production systems operate and generate value. Fourth, the governance characteristics of GPNs are taken to be much more complex, contingent, and variable over time than is suggested in GCC/GVC analysis in particular. Fifth, and finally, a central concern of GPN analysis is not to consider the networks in an abstracted manner for their own sake, but to reveal the dynamic devel opmental impacts that result for both the firms and territories that they interconnect.

The operationalization of the framework depends on the analysis of three interrelated variables (see Figure 1). First, processes of value creation, enhancement, and capture are scrutinized. Second, the distribution and operation of power of different forms within GPNs is considered. Third, the embeddedness of GPNs – or how they constitute and are reconstituted by the economic, social, and polit ical arrangements of the places they inhabit – is investi gated. The consideration of embeddedness is a distinctive characteristic of the GPN perspective, and is reflective of a desire to highlight the important sociocultural and in stitutional contexts of all economic activities. Before going any further, it is important to consider the oper ationalization of these key variables in more detail. First, the term value is used to refer to the various forms of economic rent that can be realized through market, as well as nonmarket transactions within GPNs. Rent is created in a situation where a firm has access to scarce resources that can insulate them from competition Categories

Value - Creation - Enhancement - Capture

by creating barriers to entry for competitor firms. Firms in GPNs may be able to generate rents in a number of ways: from asymmetric access to key product and process technologies (technological rents), from the particular talents of their labor force (human resource rents), from particular organizational skills such as ‘just in time’ production techniques (organizational rents), from various interfirm relationships that may involve the management of production linkages with other firms (relational rents), or from establishing brand name prominence in major markets (brand rents). In certain sectors and circum stances additional ‘exogenous’ rents may accrue to some firms as a consequence of preferential access to natural resources (resource rents), the impacts of government policies (policy rents), the uneven availability of infra structure (infrastructure rents), and the nature of the fi nancial system (financial rents). At least three implications flow from this broad in terpretation of value and its realization. First, while rents provide a source of sustainable income, they require considerable investment over time, meaning that they are both cumulative and dynamic. Second, particular firms will not be able to create all of these different forms of rent, but rather will specialize to a degree on certain kinds of inter and extrafirm network relations. Third, value may take on different forms as it is transferred through GPNs. Once the value characteristics of a given GPN have been identified, it is then possible to think dynamically about the potential for value enhancement through firm to firm processes of knowledge and tech nology transfer, and industrial upgrading. Ultimately, it is important to consider which firms, and which locations, in the GPN succeed in capturing value, which leads dir ectly to the second key GPN variable, power. Power in a production network context can be thought of as the ability of one actor to affect the behavior of Power - Corporate - Collective - Institutional

Embeddedness - Territorial - Network - Societal

Dimensions Agents

Structures

Firms - Ownership - Architecture Institutions

Networks (business/political) Configuration Coordination

- Governmental - Quasi-governmental - Nongovernmental

- Architecture - Power configuration - Governance Sectors - Technologies - Products/markets

Development

Figure 1 The global production network framework a schematic representation. Source: Henderson, J., Dicken, P., Hess, M., Coe, N. M. and Yeung, H. W.-C. (2002). Global production networks and the analysis of economic development. Review of International Political Economy 9, 436 464. Figure 1. Reproduced with permission of Taylor and Francis Ltd.


another actor in a manner contrary to the second actor’s interests. This interpretation of power is based upon three assumptions. First, that power is seen as relational, meaning that it is not a commodity that can be accrued like money or land, but rather it varies according to the actors involved in the network, the structural and in formational resources (i.e., rents) that they have at their disposal, and the skill with which they are mobilized. Second, and relatedly, power structures at a given point in a network will influence and be influenced by power structures at other stages of the network. Power relations in supply networks are therefore transaction specific. A GPN can be seen as a series of exchange relationships, and variations in the power balance along the network will affect the ability of its members to capture value. Third, any given interfirm relation cannot be purely about power as there is always a measure of mutual interest and dependency involved. While the relationships among participants are rarely symmetrical, firms in a production network to some degree depend on each other and work together for mutual benefit. These understandings of corporate power need to be augmented, however, by the recognition of other sources of power relations – most notably the institutional power held by the state and various suprastate organizations, and the collective power of labor unions, trade associations, nongovernmental or ganizations (NGOs), and the like – that may also shape the structure and nature of GPNs. Third, three specific yet interrelated forms of embeddedness are employed within the GPN framework. Societal embeddedness connotes the importance for eco nomic action of the cultural, institutional, and historical origins of the economic actor in question. As such, it is the one that is most frequently mobilized for explanatory purposes in the varieties of capitalism literatures intro duced earlier. For example, when a company invests overseas it takes with it some of the social and cultural attributes that it has acquired in the process of its evo lution within the context of its home base. These can include attitudes toward labor management relations, working conditions and welfare benefits, how supplier networks should be organized, and the appropriate role for host country governments in the business environ ment. Network embeddedness refers to the network structure, the degree of functional and social connectivity within a GPN, the stability of its agents’ relations, and the importance of the network for its participants. In addition to interfirm relations, network embeddedness also takes account of the broader institutional networks including nonbusiness agents (e.g., government and nongovernment organizations such as trade unions) that are often in volved. It highlights the connections between hetero geneous actors that constitute a GPN (i.e., organizations and individuals), regardless of their location, and is therefore not restricted to one geographic scale.

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Territorial embeddedness captures how firms and in stitutions are ‘anchored’ in different places. GPNs do not merely locate in particular places; they may become embedded there in the sense that they absorb, and in some cases become constrained by, the economic activ ities and social dynamics that already exist in those places. This ‘anchoring’ will reflect a firm’s dependence on the particular resources, labor markets, state policies, and so on found in particular places. A key element of territorial embeddedness is the extent and nature of the relationships formed between transnational corporations and local firms. These forms of embeddedness, both on their own and together, will clearly affect the prospects for economic and social development in given locations.

GPNs and Regional Development With these ‘building blocks’ in place, we can now move on to consider how these ideas can help us to understand (subnational) regional development in a globalizing world. Importantly, analytical attention needs to be paid to both endogenous growth factors within specific regions and also to the strategic needs of translocal actors co ordinating GPNs. Regional development can thus be conceptualized as a dynamic outcome of the complex interaction between region specific networks and GPNs within the context of changing regional governance structures. We argue that it is these interactive effects that contribute to regional development, not inherent re gional advantages or rigid configurations of globalization processes. Despite certain path dependent trajectories, regional development remains a highly contingent pro cess that cannot be predicted a priori. In this view, endogenous factors are necessary, but insufficient, to generate regional growth in an era in which competition is increasingly global. There is no doubt that, for development to take place, a region must benefit from economies of scale and scope derived from the local human, technological, and institutional resource base. In Figure 2, the term ‘regional assets’ is used to describe this necessary precondition for regional devel opment. In general, these assets can produce two types of economies. First, economies of scale can be achieved in certain regions through highly localized concentrations of specific knowledge, skills, and expertise. Second, economies of scope can exist if these regions are able to reap the intangible benefits of learning and the co operative atmosphere embedded in these agglomerations. GPN analysis suggests that economies of scale and scope embedded within specific regions are only advantageous to those regions – and bring about regional development – insofar as such region specific economies can com plement the strategic needs of translocal actors situated within GPNs. As shown in Figure 2, when such a

560


Global production networks Focal firms Subsidiaries, partners, and suppliers Customers

Strategic coupling process

Regional institutions Government agencies Labor organizations Business associations

Regional development Value creation Value enhancement Value capture

Dependency and transformations

Regional assets Technology Labor Local firms Natural resources

Figure 2 Global production networks and regional development. Source: Coe, N.M., Hess, M., Yeung, H.W.-C., Dicken, P. and Henderson, J. (2004) Globalizing regional development: a global production networks perspective. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29, 468-484, Figure 1. Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Publishing.

complementary effect exists between regions and GPNs, a coupling process will take place through which the ad vantages of regions interact with the strategic needs of actors in these GPNs. Regional development thus de pends on such a coupling process that evolves over time in relation to the rapidly changing strategic needs of GPNs and the rather slow transformations in regional economies of scale and scope. In Figure 2, the coupling process is seen to work through the processes of value creation, enhancement, and capture identified earlier. The fact that a region is ‘plugged into’ a GPN does not automatically guarantee its positive developmental outcome because local actors in this region may be creating value that does not maximize the region’s economic potential. Hence, re gional assets can become an advantage for regional de velopment only if they fit the strategic needs of GPNs. The process of ‘fitting’ regional assets with strategic needs of GPNs requires the presence of appropriate in stitutional structures that simultaneously promote regional advantages and enhance the region’s articulation into GPNs. It is crucial here that the notion of ‘regional’ in stitutions includes not only regionally specific insti tutions, but also local arms of national/supranational bodies (e.g., a trade union’s ‘local’ chapters), and extra local institutions that affect activities within the region without necessarily having a presence (e.g., a national tax authority). These multiscalar regional institutions are important because they can provide the ‘glue’ that ties down GPN in particular localities. Three dimensions of such institutional structures are crucial to regional development. The first dimension in volves the creation of value through the efforts of regional institutions in attracting the location of value added

activities, for example, training and educating the local workforce, promoting start up firms and supplier networks, facilitating venture capital formation, and encouraging entrepreneurial activities. Secondly, value enhancement es sentially involves knowledge and technology transfer and processes of industrial upgrading. The influence of regional institutions – government agencies, trade unions, employer associations, and so on – can be significant here. The third dimension of regional institutions in promoting regional development rests with their capacity to ensure value cap ture. It is one thing for value to be created and enhanced in some regions, but it may be quite another for it to be captured for the benefit of these regions. Issues of power and control are critical in the analysis of value capture and the distributional aspects of re gional development. Generally, the more a region is articulated into GPNs, the more likely it is able to reap the benefits of economies of scale and scope in these networks, but the less likely it is able to control its own fate. However, in certain circumstances, regional insti tutions may mobilize their region specific assets to bargain with transnational firms such that their power relations are not necessarily one way in favor of the latter. The bargaining position of these regional insti tutions is particularly high when their region specific assets are highly complementary to the strategic needs of transnational firms.

Future Challenges and Research Priorities The GPN approach – broadly conceived – is currently gathering momentum. A wide range of studies have now


been undertaken across a number of sectors – for ex ample, retailing, temporary staffing, software, financial services, telecommunications, clothing, and automobiles – and across a broad range of (interconnected) geog raphies. It is fair to say, however, that thus far the theoretical development of GPN analysis has tended to outstrip the empirical elucidation of the dynamics being considered. Undertaking research in this vein is chal lenging both theoretically and methodologically. Theoretically, GPN analysis seeks to tread a difficult path along the intersection of two important binaries – namely those of structure/agency and economy/culture. In the context of a broader globalization literature that tends to emphasize the structure/economy dimensions, GPN analysis must take care not to overstress the agency of economic actors, and the way in which their actions are shaped by sociocultural formations, when trying to cor rect the overall balance. Methodologically, GPN research has tended to proceed through the collection of sector specific, multisite, qualitative interview materials. Ac cordingly, the results of many studies have tended to be indicative rather than comprehensive. Such research ar guably needs to be combined with more quantitative and extensive research techniques: this is particularly im portant if the aggregate effects of different yet overlap ping GPNs for territorial development are to be deduced. We can also point to a range of substantive issues that merit further elucidation under the broad umbrella of GPN research. Five will be outlined here. First, research is needed that unpacks the complex, multiscalar terri toriality of GPNs. This creates complex dialectical re lationships within and between firms engaged in the material processes of production, and the political and social actors and institutions embedded at different ter ritorial scales. In turn, these relationships will determine the extent to which the strategic coupling of GPN and regional assets drives economic development in par ticular localities. Second, research in this vein has tended to focus primarily on interfirm relationships, and in particular, the governance of those relationships. A significant contri bution of GPN research thus far has been to draw at tention to the wide range of extrafirm connections – to a wide variety of state and nonstate organizations – that are an integral part of a GPN. What remains left out, how ever, is what goes on inside firms; the firm still remains something of a ‘black box’ in this kind of research. In ternal investment decisions within large firms, for ex ample, will have a significant influence on the structure of GPNs and their developmental impacts. Third, we need to know more about how governance structures within GPNs are increasingly being shaped by technological and organizational innovations that are codified in a series of global standards. Such standards vary greatly in terms of the aspects of GPN they apply to – for

561

example, technological or labor conditions – and they may take ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ forms, for example, enforce able rules or less binding codes of conduct. Standards are both produced through actions within complex govern ance structures and are a means to subsequently exert power through those governance structures. These dy namics are innately geographical on at least three levels. It is important to recognize the multiple scales at which global standards are negotiated. Many of the private and public actors involved – firms, NGOs, consumer groups, trade unions, etc. – are distinct at the local, regional, national, and international level – thereby creating new institutional arrangements that link across geographical scales. We can also think about the various territories or networks covered by the jurisdiction of different forms of standards. Finally, we can think about the impacts of standards initiatives which may be felt at geographically disparate points of production networks. Fourth, there is a significant gap in the GPN literature with respect to labor. Where they are discussed, workers are often seen in economistic terms as an asset under lying the structure of production networks. Equally, the labor process within the firm is rarely explored in relation to dynamics of value creation and enhancement. Links could productively be forged to the small but growing body of work that has emerged over the last decade or so under the banner of ‘labor geographies’. Such work has a desire to open up analytical space for the agency of workers, and worker groups, to shape the geographies of capitalism. The labor geographies literature is not with out its problems: it tends to be driven by case studies of successful actions; it tends to focus primarily on unions and union strategies, manufacturing sectors, and de veloped world examples; and the notion of ‘agency’ is oddly rather underdeveloped and thinly conceptualized. Nonetheless, this is a potentially analytically and polit ically rich line of enquiry that can, in certain contexts at least, serve to reveal the active and constituent role of workers within the value dynamics of GPNs. Fifth, there appears to be a neglect of final consumption in GPN and cognate analyses, reflective, perhaps, of a productionist legacy in work of this kind. Even where the whole network, from production to consumption, is identified conceptually, there is seemingly a tendency in empirical terms to focus on the production ‘stage’, and a resulting assumption that the key dynamics shaping the system as a whole emanate outward from there. There is a need to more fully integrate the role of final con sumption in our understandings of these systems. Most encouraging perhaps is the growing range of studies looking at the impacts of different kinds of consumer politics and initiatives (e.g., the UK’s Ethical Trading Initiative, Fairtrade labelling, and the US campus anti sweatshop campaigns). The potential of these approaches lies in the way that they seek to integrate shifting notions

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of responsibility and ethical consumerism with the changing governance of production networks. To conclude, GPN research is a new, ambitious, and still developing economic–geographical perspective on the processes of economic globalization and their impacts. While considerable progress has been made in conceptualizing the complex organizational and geo graphical structures of GPN, much remains to be done in theoretical, methodological, and empirical terms. See also: Embeddedness; Global Commodity Chains; Globalization and Transnational Corporations; Networks; Regional Production Networks.

Further Reading Bair, J. (2005). Global capitalism and commodity chains: Looking back, going forward. Competition and Change 9, 153 180. Coe, N. M. and Hess, M. (2006). Global production networks: Debates and challenges. http://www.sed.man.ac.uk/geography/research/ gpe/gpnworkshop.htm (accessed on 28 July 2007).

Coe, N. M., Hess, M., Yeung, H. W. C., Dicken, P. and Henderson, J. (2004). Globalizing regional development: A global production networks perspective. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29, 468 484. Dicken, P. (2005). Tangled webs: Transnational production networks and regional integration, SPACES 2005 04. Marburg: Department of Geography, University of Marburg. Dicken, P. (2007). Global shift: Mapping the changing contours of the world economy (5th edn). London: Sage. Dicken, P., Kelly, P. F., Olds, K. and Yeung, H. W. C. (2001). Chains and networks, territories and scales: Towards a relational framework for analysing the global economy. Global Networks 1, 89 112. Gereffi, G., Humphrey, J. and Sturgeon, T. (2005). The governance of global value chains. Review of International Political Economy 12, 78 104. Henderson, J., Dicken, P., Hess, M., Coe, N. M. and Yeung, H. W. C. (2002). Global production networks and the analysis of economic development. Review of International Political Economy 9, 436 464. Hess, M. (2004). ‘Spatial’ relationships? Towards a re conceptualization of embeddedness. Progress in Human Geography 28, 165 186. Hess, M. and Yeung, H. W. C. (2006). Whither global production networks in economic geography? Past, present, and future. Environment and Planning A 38, 1193 1204. Kaplinsky, R. (2005). Globalization, poverty and inequality. Cambridge: Polity.

Globalization and Transnational Corporations P. Dicken, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Investment by a transnational corporation in productive assets outside its home country aimed at controlling their use. Transnational Corporation (TNC) A business organization (firm) that has the power to coordinate and control operations in more than one country, even if it does not own them. Transnational Production Network An interconnected set of functions of production, distribution, and consumption organized across national boundaries by a transnational corporation.

Introduction ‘Globalization’ has become one of the most dominant and controversial issues of the early twenty first century. The transnational corporation (TNC) is one of its major, some would say its most important, agents. Where does geog raphy fit in all this? Does globalization, as is so often alleged, render geography irrelevant? Are TNCs place less institutions with less and less connection with places and communities? These are the key questions addressed in this article.

Geographical Perspectives on Globalization Globalization Is Geography The myths continue to circulate. ‘Globalization’ means the ‘end of geography’, the ‘death of distance’, the emergence of a ‘borderless world’, of ‘a level playing field’, of – in the words of one recent best selling author – ‘a flat world’. These are powerful discursive images that play a very important role in the ways in which in fluential economic and political actors make decisions that affect all our lives. But they are wrong; they are, indeed, myths. Globalization does not mean the end of geography. In a very real sense, globalization is geog raphy. It consists of a whole syndrome of processes (economic, social, cultural, political) that occur in highly uneven and geographically differentiated forms. It in volves both a stretching and an intensification of pro cesses and relationships across a spectrum of spatial scales which are, themselves, being continuously recon figured through processes of spatial switching (at the

same geographical scale) and scalar switching (as pro cesses are switched between different spatial scales). Globalization, in fact, is both a product and a creator of multiple geographies of immensely complex and dy namic scalarity. Geographies of Globalization The nature of all social processes (in the broadest sense), and the actors or agents involved, is that they are literally ‘grounded’ or ‘embedded’ in specific places. The nature of that grounding – the contexts in which they are cre ated – is highly significant in influencing (though not determining) how such processes develop and how actors behave. At the same time, social processes and actors create new geographies, especially through the con nections they make within and between spaces. In the case of economic activities, during the past century and, especially, during the past 40 years, there have been enormous shifts in the contours of the global economic map. Such changes, however, have not occurred along a simple unidirectional trajectory. Processes of localization of economic activities remain very powerful; indeed, the clustering or geographical concentration of activities not only persists but is the norm. At the same time, there are different forms of geographical dispersal of economic activities: inter nationalization (simple extension across national bound aries but with low levels of functional integration); globalization (extensive geographical spread with a high degree of functional integration); and regionalization (the operation of ‘globalizing’ processes at a more geo graphically limited (but supra national) scale, as in the case of the European Union (EU) or other less developed regional groups). Quite clearly, globalization is not a universalizing tendency. The global economic map is continuously being re configured. Old geographies of production, distribution, and consumption are continuously being disrupted; new geographies are continuously being created. In that sense, the global economic map is always in a state of ‘be coming’; it is never finished. But the new does not simply obliterate the old. On the contrary, there are complex processes of path dependency at work. What already exists constitutes the pre conditions on which the new develops. Geographically, the global economy has become in creasingly multipolar. New centers of production – new geographical divisions of labor – have emerged in parts of what had been, historically, the periphery and

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semiperiphery of the world economy. Most significant of all has been the resurgence of Asia (especially East Asia, and including, most recently China) to a position of global significance commensurate with its importance before ‘the west’ overtook it in the nineteenth century. At the same time, many parts of the world remain, to a greater or lesser degree, disarticulated from the engines of economic growth. The contours of the global economic map reflect a landscape of staggeringly high peaks of affluence and deep troughs of deprivation interspersed with plains of greater or lesser degrees of prosperity. A Synoptic Geographical Perspective on Globalization Such dynamic geographies of globalization are the out come of extremely complex actions and relationships between economic, political, and social institutions and actors all of which are deeply embedded in specific geographical structures. Figure 1 provides a synoptic perspective. It is an approach that emphasizes the essentially networked nature of the global economy, one that conceives of economic processes (production, distribution, consumption) in terms of connections of activities, linked through flows of both material and nonmaterial phenomena (like services) into circuits and networks. Such circuits and networks constitute re lational structures and processes in which the power relationships between the key ‘actors – firms, states, in dividuals, social groups – are uneven. Networks are al ways in flux; they are always in a process of becoming. They also, of course, do not exist in isolation. In par ticular, they are embedded within the broader macro structures of the global economy as well as grounded in the prevailing geographical structures of the real world. Within the geographically differentiated macro structural framework, it is primarily the actions of, and especially, the interactions between, the five actor cen tered networks shown in the central section of Figure 1 that shape the changing geographical configuration of the global economy at different spatial scales. Such inter actions are sometimes conflictual, sometimes collabora tive but, overall, the system is one in which power relationships tend to be asymmetrical. Some actors are, without doubt, more influential and powerful than others. The remainder of this article focuses on one such powerful economic actor – the TNC.

Transnational Corporations The Myth of the Global Corporation A parallel myth to that of the ‘flat world’ of globalization is that of the ‘global corporation’ – placeless behemoths whose gargantuan footprints trample unhindered across

national boundaries, emasculating the autonomy of na tion states, rendering policy makers powerless, and ob literating local cultures. Again, this is a myth that must be refuted, although there is absolutely no doubt that TNCs have become major shapers of the global economy and its geography. But they are far more varied in size, in structure, and in their geographies than the global cor poration stereotype suggests. Indeed, very few of even the world’s 100 leading TNCs can be regarded as ‘global’ corporations in terms of their geographical extent. The vast majority of the top 100 TNCs still retain more than half of their activities in their home country. In fact, TNCs come in all shapes and sizes, from the so called global corporations operating in scores of countries to TNCs operating in only one or two countries outside their home base. What they all have in common is that they operate in different political, social, and cultural environments. In so doing, however, they retain many of the characteristics of the places/countries from which they originate. The nature and characteristics of a TNC’s ‘home base’ continue to exert a significant influence on its behavior. Transnational Corporations and States A TNC is a firm that has the power to coordinate and control operations in more than one country, even if it does not own them. By the very fact of operating across national boundaries – whether in just two, or in scores of, countries – a TNC ‘incorporates’ part of a state’s terri tory into its own network. It is this interpenetration of autonomous national spaces that is at the heart of the potential conflict between TNCs and states. The basis of a TNC’s power lies in its potential ability to take ad vantage of geographical differences in the availability and cost of resources and in state policies and to switch and reswitch operations between locations. However, this does not necessarily mean that TNCs always have the advantage. It can be argued that TNCs and states exist in symbiosis, each needing the other. For example, states need firms to generate material wealth and provide jobs for their citizens; conversely, firms need states to provide the infrastructural basis for their continued existence, both physical (the built environment) and social (a legal system to protect private property and to regulate busi ness transactions). In fact, TNCs and states are continuously engaged in intricately choreographed negotiating and bargaining processes. On the one hand, TNCs attempt to take ad vantage of national differences in regulatory regimes (such as taxation or performance requirements, like local content). On the other hand, states strive to minimize such ‘regulatory arbitrage’ and to entice mobile invest ment through competitive bidding against other states. The situation is especially complex because there is a


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‘Varieties of capitalism’ geographically specific configurations of socio-cultural practices and institutions

Outcomes

Processes of ‘embeddedness’

CSOs

States

Firms Consumers

Processes

Labor

Circuits and networks of interaction, mediated through differential power relationships in global production networks and through transnational social networks

Space - Time processes Evolutionary trajectories: path dependency/contingency Space as ‘relational’ (topological/multiscalar)

Macro structures (institutions, conventions, etc.) of capitalist market system

Processes of ‘embeddedness’

Uneven geographical distribution of ‘goods’ and ‘bads’; ‘winners’ and ‘losers’

Figure 1 A synoptic geographical perspective on globalization. Source: Dicken, P. (2007). Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy. 5th edn. London: Sage Publications, London, Figure 1.3.

territorial asymmetry between the continuous territories of states and the discontinuous territories of TNCs and this translates into complex bargaining processes in which, contrary to much conventional wisdom, there is no unambiguous and totally predictable outcome. TNCs do not always possess the power to get their own way. In the complex relationships between TNCs and states – as well as with other institutions – the outcome of a specific

bargaining process is highly contingent. States still have significant power vis a` vis TNCs, for example, to control access to their territories and to define rules of operation. In collaboration with other states, that power is increased (the EU is an example of this). So, the claim that states are universally powerless in the face of the supposedly unstoppable juggernaut of the ‘global corporation’ is nonsense; the question is an empirical one.

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Geographies of Transnational Corporations Geographical origins and destinations

Probably the earliest, genuine TNCs were the colonial and merchant trading companies that emerged in Europe from the fifteenth century onward – companies like the Hudson’s Bay Company and the English and Dutch East India Companies. Like the later manufacturing TNCs, which developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, such companies originated from the dominant economic nations of the day, notably Britain, the United States, and Germany. Today, most of the world’s TNCs still originate from the developed economies – around 95 of the world’s largest 100 nonfinancial TNCs and some 90% of the world’s foreign direct investment (FDI). Nevertheless, changes are occurring. An increasing number of firms from newly industrializing economies (NIEs) is beginning to transnationalize, notably firms from the fast growing economies of East Asia (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and, most recently, China), some Latin American countries (notably Brazil), and some Indian firms (especially in the IT sector). The geo graphical origins of TNCs are clearly becoming more diverse, albeit slowly. In contrast, the destinations of TNC activities remain very strongly concentrated geographically. Three quarters of the world’s FDI goes to developed countries in a

complex network of cross flows of investment. Of the one quarter going to developing countries, around three quarters of that investment is located in just ten countries – the fastest growing NIEs of East Asia, in particular. Figure 2 maps the geographical pattern of FDI and shows its extraordinary unevenness. Outside the ‘triad’ of North America, Europe, and East Asia, the activities of TNCs, at least as measured by FDI, are spread very thinly indeed. Why firms transnationalize

The most basic motivation for firms to establish trans national operations is, of course, to enhance their prof itablility. Developments in the enabling technologies of transportation, communication and product and process technologies, together with the trend toward greater political liberalization of trade and investment regimes, have both increased the possibilities for transnational operations and also intensified inter firm competition at much enlarged geographical scales. Operating across borders, whether directly or indirectly, has become the norm, even for some relatively small firms. The days when only large firms that had established a strong market position in their home countries could move abroad are long gone. In some cases, new firms operate transnationally from the very beginning.

Figure 2 The global geography of foreign direct investment. Source: Dicken, P. (2007). Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy. 5th edn. London: Sage Publications, London, Figure 2.22.


There are two major sets of reasons why firms trans nationalize their activities: (1) the attraction of new markets and (2) the differential geographical availability of assets and resources. Market orientation

Much TNC investment continues to be market oriented. A firm may have reached saturation point in its domestic market so that increasing profitability may depend on expanding its market beyond its home territory. It may have identified new markets that require a direct pres ence in order to serve them efficiently; for example, transportation costs may be excessive (although this is less and less the case in the case of many products) to make exports uneconomic. Access to the market may be restricted because of political regulatory structures (such as import tariffs). The idiosyncratic nature of a particular market may necessitate a direct presence in order to understand, and to cater to, such specific circumstances. Both for political, as well as cultural reasons, it may be desirable for a TNC to appear to be strongly embedded in a local market. In other words, both the size and the particular characteristics of markets continue to influence the locational decisions of TNCs. Asset-oriented investment

The ‘assets’ that firms need to produce and sell their products and services are geographically very unevenly distributed, and, therefore, may need to be exploited in situ. Traditionally, of course, it was the geographical lo calization of many natural resources that drove much of the early development of TNCs. It is no coincidence that many of the early leading TNCs were in the natural resource sectors, including energy and industrial re sources as well as in agriculture. However, developments in transportation and communications technologies, as well as in production process technologies, have in creased the ability of firms to access other unevenly distributed assets on increasingly wide geographical scales. This is most notably the situation in the case of human assets – the skills and knowledge embodied in people in specific local settings, with their particular assemblages of social and cultural institutions and prac tices. Such assets are, again, very unevenly distributed geographically. It is really only in the past 50 years or so that these kinds of assets have come to play a significant role in transnational investment. Initially, it was the attraction of cheap – and usually unorganized – labor that was the primary attraction for firms in certain industries, such as textiles, garments, footwear, toys, and consumer electronics, to establish production abroad. The so called ‘new international division of labor’ that sprang into prominence in the literature of the 1970s and 1980s was based upon the

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claims that firms in the western industrialized countrie were fleeing the constraints of high cost, militant labor to tap cheap and malleable labor in developing countries Without doubt, some types of transnational investment have been – and remain – very sensitive to geographical variations in labor costs. But it is not only labor costs that are the major driving force. Except in those industries where unskilled – and, therefore, cheap – labor is important, it is other attributes of human capital that have become more significant. In particular, it is increasingly the availability of well edu cated, highly skilled and strongly motivated workers lo cated in ‘quality’ communities that are exerting a very strong influence on TNCs. Of course, where these attributes are combined with relatively low costs, the attraction is much reinforced. Such circumstances underpin much of the current transnational investment in East Asia, in the emerging market economies of Eastern and Central Europe, and in some cities in India (e.g., the much quoted example of the IT cluster in Bangalore).

How firms transnationalize

There are two major ways in which firms develop transnational activities: one is through what is known as ‘greenfield’ investment; the other is through engagement with other firms, through either merger and acquisition or some form of strategic collaboration. Greenfield investment is simply the building of totally new facilities (an administrative office, a factory, a re search and development facility, a sales and distribution centere, and so on). By definition, it adds to the pro ductive stock of both the firm itself and the country/ community in which it occurs. For that reason, it is generally the type of investment most favored by host countries. However, greenfield investment is far from being the most common mode of overseas expansion. Building a totally new facility, especially one of a sig nificant scale, is a risky venture. For that reason, a firm may prefer to establish a presence in an overseas location through an involvement with an existing firm. Many firms have preferred to merge with, or to acquire, another firm to establish, or to expand, their presence in a par ticular overseas location. Another widely used mode of TNC expansion is to enter into a strategic collaboration with one or more other firms. Many companies are forming not just single alliances but networks of alliances, in which relationships between partner firms are increasingly multilateral, ra ther than bilateral. Unlike mergers and acquisitions, in which the identities of the merging partners are com pletely subsumed, in an alliance, only some of the par ticipants’ business operations are involved; in every other respect the firms remain not only separate but also usually competitors.

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‘Webs of Enterprise’: Geographies of Transnational Production Networks TNCs can best be envisaged as ‘networks within net works’, with highly complex and dynamic internal and external geographies reflecting the ways these networks are configured and connected. By the very nature of their dispersed geographical spread across different political, cultural, and social environments, TNCs are far more difficult to coordinate and control than firms whose ac tivities are confined to a single national space. They re quire, in other words, a more sophisticated organizational architecture. However, there is no single solution adop ted by all TNCs but, rather, a diversity of different ways of coordinating TNC networks. Some of this diversity reflects the different geographical origins of TNCs, with a tendency for TNCs from different countries to prefer a particular organizational form. However, a few generalizations can be made. Char acteristically, the corporate headquarters of TNCs in variably remain in the firm’s home country (often in the community in which the firm originated). Some kinds of headquarters functions may well be dispersed to key locations within the firm’s transnational network, usually in key cities. These may, for example, be regional head quarters functions or possibly specialized control func tions for specific lines of business. Core research and development (R&D) facilities also still tend to remain in the home country although some kinds of R&D have become increasingly dispersed, particularly to tap into localized sources of scientific and technological expertise, both institutional (as in the case of universities or other research institutions) and human (pools of key scientific and technical workers), or to adapt new products to local conditions. Conversely, sales and marketing functions tend to be dispersed to locations in key markets, while production functions are sensitive to the technical needs of the specific sector in question. Compared with corporate headquarters and R&D facilities, production activities have become more dis persed geographically in the search for key assets and/or proximity to markets. A number of geographical con figurations of TNC production activities are apparent. One option is to concentrate production at a single lo cation. Such globally concentrated production generates economies of scale in production but increases trans portation costs and lessens the firm’s knowledge of distant markets. A second option is to produce specifically for a local/national market. Here economies of scale are lim ited by the size of the market. A third option is to create a structure of specialized production for a regional market (such as the EU, North America, or East Asia). A fourth possibility is to segment the production process and to locate each part in different locations – a form of transnational vertical integration of production.

Of course, TNCs never work with a blank surface. They have to deal with a complex mix of facilities that have been built up, or acquired, over a period of time and whose structure, at any one time, may no longer be ap propriate for changing circumstances. For that reason, TNCs are constantly engaged in processes of re structuring, reorganization, and rationalization. TNC networks are always in a perpetual state of flux. At any one time, some parts may be growing rapidly, others may be stagnating, and others may be in decline. The func tions performed by the component parts and the rela tionships between them will alter. Such restructuring and rationalization inevitably causes tensions between TNCs and other ‘stakeholders’, notably governments and labor. Changes to a firm’s geographical configuration often occur as a result of the firm’s decision on what to produce for itself, in house, and what to externalize to in dependent suppliers. The ‘make or buy’ decision has become particularly critical as competition has intensi fied as firms strive to increase their efficiency to enhance or maintain profitability. TNCs, therefore, are highly dependent on other firms for many of their needs. The specific relationships between TNCs as customers and other firms (including other TNCs) as suppliers, both organizationally and geographically, are changing rapidly. Pressures on suppliers to deliver ‘just in time’; pressures on them to reduce prices; pressures on them to take on more responsibility and risk have come to characterize most global industries. The geographical extent of such transnational pro duction networks is highly variable. In fact, few such networks can be described as being truly ‘global’. A marked recent trend is for such networks to have a strong regional dimension, that is, networks organized on a multinational scale of groups of contiguous markets. In some instances, such a tendency is reinforced by regional political structures but this is not a prerequisite. Simple geographical proximity is in itself a powerful stimulus for integrating operations. Transnational production net works organized at the regional scale are evident in most parts of the world, but most especially in the three ‘triad regions’ of North America, Europe, and East Asia. In North America, the establishment of the NAFTA is leading to a reconfiguration of corporate activities (par ticularly involving Mexico) to meet the opportunities and constraints of the new regional system. In Europe, the increasing integration and enlargement of the EU has led to substantial reorganization of existing corporate networks and the establishment of pan EU systems by existing and new TNCs. Such regional re configurations increasingly incorporate the transitional economies of Eastern Europe, especially those that have recently become members of the EU. However, the process is complicated. On the one hand, supply side forces encourage a pan EU structure of operations to


take advantage of scale efficiencies. On the other hand, demand side forces are still articulated primarily at the country specific level, where linguistic and cultural dif ferences play a major role in the demands for goods and services. In effect, the strategic tensions between global integration and local responsiveness are played out at the EU regional level. Although East Asia does not have the same kind of regional political framework as the EU or NAFTA, there is very strong evidence of the existence of regional production networks organized primarily by Japanese firms, although non Asian as well as some other Asian firms (e.g., from Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) also tend to organize their production networks regionally. Within East Asia, a clear intraregional division of labor has developed consisting of four tiers of countries: Japan; the so called ‘four tigers’ of Hong Kong, Korea, Singa pore, and Taiwan; the South East Asian ‘later indus trializers’ – Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines; China, together with, at least potentially, countries such as Vietnam. The Ties That Bind Transnational corporations are, undoubtedly, one of the – arguably the most important – primary shapers of the contemporary global economy. There is no doubt that their significance is increasing as more companies, from a widening range of home bases, become transnational at an earlier stage of their development. But TNCs are far more diverse than is often claimed. Not all are ‘global’ corpor ations. Indeed, very few are. TNCs come in a whole variety of shapes and sizes and there remain significant differences between TNCs from different countries of origin. Diversity, rather than uniformity, rules. Both the organization and the geographies of large TNCs, and of their transnational production networks, are immensely complex and dynamic. In a very real sense, the global economy can be pictured as intricately connected localized clusters of activity embedded in various ways into different forms of transnational cor porate network that, in turn, vary greatly in their geo graphical extent. Some TNCs are globally – or at least regionally – extensive; others are more restricted geo graphically. In all cases, however, firms in specific places – and, therefore, the places themselves – are increasingly connected into transnational networks. Inevitably this creates tensions between TNCs and other significant actors in the global economy: states, local communities, labor, consumers, and civil society organizations. TNCs not only have their own geographies, but they also create

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new geographies in which places across the world be come incorporated. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of heated debate. See also: Agglomeration; Embeddedness; Foreign Direct Investment; Global Commodity Chains; Global Production Networks; Globalization, Economic; Networks; Regional Production Networks; Transnational Corporations in Developing Countries.

Further Reading Amin, A. (2001). Globalization: Geographical aspects. In Smelser, N. J. & Baltes, P. B. (eds.) International Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, pp 571 587. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Bridge, G. (2002). Grounding globalization: The prospects and perils of linking economic processes of globalization to environmental outcomes. Economic Geography 78, 361 386. Coe, N. M. and Yeung, H. W c. (2001). Geographical perspectives on mapping globalization. Journal of Economic Geography 1, 367 456. Dicken, P. (2000). Places and flows: Situating international investment. In Clark, G. L., Feldman, M. P. & Gertler, M. S. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography, pp 275 291. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dicken, P. (2003). ‘Placing’ firms: Grounding the debate on the ‘global’ corporation. In Peck, J. A. & Yeung, H. W c. (eds.) Remaking the Global Economy: Economic Geographical Perspectives, pp 27 44. London: Sage Publications. Dicken, P. (2004). Geographers and ‘globalization’: (Yet) another missed boat? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29, 5 26. Dicken P. (2006). Economic globalization II: Corporations. In Ritzer G. Blackwell Companion to Globalization. ch. 16. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Dicken, P. (2007). Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy (5th edn.). London: Sage Publications. New York: The Guilford Press. Dicken, P., Kelly, P. F., Olds, K. and Yeung, H. W c. (2001). Chains and networks, territories and scales. Global Networks 1, 89 112. Dicken, P. and Malmberg, A. (2001). Firms in territories: A relational perspective. Economic Geography 77, 345 363. Kelly, P. F. (1999). The geographies and politics of globalization. Progress in Human Geography 23, 379 400. Peck, J. A. and Yeung, H. W c. (eds.) (2003). Remaking the Global Economy: Economic Geographical Perspectives. London: Sage Publications. UNCTAD (annual). World investment report. Report of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. New York: United Nations. Yeung, H. W c. (1998). Capital, state and space: Contesting the borderless world. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23, 291 309. Yeung, H. W c. (2002). The limits to globalization theory: A geographic perspective on global economic change. Economic Geography 78, 285 305.

Relevant Websites www.unctad.org United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Globalization, Cultural K. N. Rankin, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Articulation A joining together of diverse elements in the constitution of societies structured in dominance; a Gramscian interpretation of articulation is engaged here, which involves, as Stuart Hall has noted, a focus on the production of meaning through practice such that the connection or link must be positively sustained by specific processes and can under some circumstances be overthrown, leading to new connections – rearticulations – being forged. Conjuncture The notion of conjuncture comes from Antonio Gramsci who sought to develop a method of moving from abstract Marxian laws of economic development to concrete analyses of ‘current relations of force’. As Stuart Hall has argued in bringing Gramsci’s work to bear on contemporary issues, a conjunctural analysis involves both a materialist premise, that the analysis of political and economic structures must be grounded in their material conditions of existence; as well as a historical premise, that the specific forms of these relations cannot be deduced a priori from abstract economic laws, but must rather be made historically and spatially specific. Flexible Accumulation The regime of accumulation characteristic of post-Fordism, involving methods of production that are considered flexible, such as flexibly deployed labor, easily programmable machines, and just-in-time production. Frankfurt School A group of radical scholars who established critical theory as a central trajectory of ‘Western Marxism’, and who were associated with the Institute of Social Research founded in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923. Historical Materialism An analytical method associated with Marxism rooted in a premise that social relations are grounded in their material conditions of existence and emerge out of concrete historical developments. Post-Fordism A collection of workplace practices, modes of industrial organization, and institutional forms identified with period since the mid-1970s, following the era referred to as Fordist – and commonly understood to extend to associated modes of social regulation. Postmodernism Emerging first in architecture, a theoretical orientation that expresses skepticism toward modernist universalisms, especially metanarratives that privilege the vantage point of the artist, theorist, or observer, and favors instead a popular eclecticism in theory, art, philosophy, and social science.

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Post-Structuralism A theoretical orientation that rejects the formalism of structuralist linguistics and its epistemological subject. Practice Theory A field of anthropological inquiry which consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a common interest in exploring the ‘processes’ through which cultural systems are produced and reproduced, and how they change – and which is associated with the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Marshall Sahlins.

Introduction The term ‘cultural globalization’ evokes images of mal nourished children drinking coca cola in impoverished agrarian settings, of satellite television broadcasting MTV and American sitcoms in remote Himalayan vil lages, and of the consumption of ‘exotic’ novelties – Thai food, flamenco dance, African music – in metropolitan centers all over the world. The study of cultural global ization is motivated variously by a worry about the col onization of cultural life by capitalism, a celebration of the cultural hybrids that emerge as people, images, ideas and money traverse the globe, and an expectation that ‘culture’ itself could become a site of resistance to prevailing ideologies and conditions. As such, cultural globalization as an object of academic study emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during a period of rapid functional integration of economic activities across the globe, but in which ‘the economic’ was perceived to be an inadequate lens for assessing experiences of disjuncture and entanglement, as much as the symbolic, ideological and discursive dimensions of global interconnectedness. It was taken up with particular vigor in cultural studies, where the emphasis has been on representational politics, as well as in anthropology and geography, which have tended rather to explore some of the contradictions between the production and experience of cultural globalization. ‘Circulation’ and ‘flow’ are the fundamentally geo graphic metaphors engaged in academic and popular venues alike to capture the movement – of people, ideas, money, cultures, and information – that constitutes cul tural globalization. As anthropologist Anna Tsing has noted, circulation and flow replace the metaphor of ‘penetration’ once used on the critical left to characterize the incorporation of peripheral regions into the capitalist world system; while penetration evokes the


violence of rape, circulation and flow evoke more benign images like blood coursing through the body. Their use signals a shift in focus from production to exchange and consumption as constitutive domains of globalization in an era of post Fordist flexible accumu lation. It also signals the turn in human geography and across the social sciences to ‘culture’ as a category of analysis, as circuits and flows index interconnections among peoples, places, and ideas – relationships forged at least in part through negotiations over mean ings, values and beliefs, as well as through social networks and associations. These metaphors have served a range of contradictory claims about the politics of globaliza tion – that it frees people and capital from restrictive regulation; that the rapid expansion of communications technology gives more people access to information; and that the cultural disjunctures associated with movement ultimately present a challenge to American cultural hegemony. Despite this apparently indiscriminate celebration across the ideological spectrum, it is possible to dis tinguish a range of epistemological framings and moral valuations in the geographic and related literatures on cultural globalization. This article aims to tease out these differences by presenting a typology of approaches to the circulation metaphor and their attendant representations of ‘the cultural’ and ‘globalization’. One approach em phasizes the flow itself – what is being circulated, where, how, and to what effect. Within this epistemological ru bric, we can find moral valuations that are both positive (in the form of postmodern celebrations of difference) and negative (in Frankfurt School type alarm about the Americanization or standardization of culture and the destruction of local differences). A second approach considers instead the political–economic conditions of circulation. Here the emphasis is on closing the space between the economic and the cultural by considering the economies of cultural globalization and the cultures of economic globalization. The prevailing normative in terpretation in this scenario is critical – for example, lamenting the commodification of the aesthetic or chronicling the alternatives to capitalism in people’s everyday practices around the world. But considerable normative ambiguity remains, insofar as this epistemo logical framing can also be deployed in the service of neoliberal capitalism – by, for example, injunctions to ‘get the institutions right’, promote social capital, strengthen civil society, and so on. The article argues that more sound normative footing can be found in a third approach, which challenges the unity of the circulation metaphor and the implication of ‘the global’ and ‘the cultural’ in a reductive binary logic. Drawing on the explicitly Gramscian concepts of the conjunctural and the hegemonic, the articulation ap proach traces historically and geographically specific

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processes of spatial interconnection. In so doing, it rejects the abstract determinisms and inexorable forces so fre quently conjured up by notions of ‘cultural globalization’, to chronicle the distinctive cultural forms of capitalism taking shape in different regions of the world. It adopts an explicitly critical stance along the Marxian lines of seeking to understand the world in order to change it. The article is organized into three sections, which discuss each of the three approaches, followed by a concluding section that considers the implications of the favored ‘articulation’ approach for methodology and political praxis in human geography.

Flows-and-Impacts Approach The crudest versions of the flows and impacts approach express a worry about the export of American mass consumer culture around the world. Framed in this way, the research problem becomes one of specifying the ‘cultures of globalization’ as well as determining the impacts of cultural globalization on various peoples and places. Attempts to specify an essential global culture generally focus on the diffusion of ideologies of con sumption through communications and information media, and an attendant convergence of cultural styles as Western ‘values’ of consumerism are embraced around the world. Thus, geographers have speculated on how increased access to mass media has set in motion a trend toward individualization, rooted in the growing import ance of material consumption for expressions of indi vidual identity. Anthropologists have likewise attempted to specify a ‘culture of neoliberalism’ featuring con sumption as a primary determinant of identity, the eclipse of social class as a relevant social category, and the emergence of race, gender, and age as key principles of identification and mobilization. Such cultural homogen ization theses also find expression in much of the lit erature on the cultural industry which laments the incorporation of increasing domains of cultural life into webs of capitalist organization. Not even the aesthetic remains as a sanctuary from the economic colonization of culture. A corollary to this line of thinking is to speculate about the dilution of traditional ‘local’ cultures, for example, the decline in significance of territorially based group identity in the wake of processes of individualization. Now, it is certainly reasonable and necessary to pay attention to the ways in which corporate capital aims to diffuse certain consumerist practices as elements of mass culture – eating fast food, dressing fashionably, pursuing the exotic, and so on. But, as many cultural geographers have pointed out, cultural homogenization theses too easily elide the production of dominant cultural ideology – consumerism – with historically and geographically

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contingent cultural practices – consumption as a process of meaning making and social reproduction situated in relation to class processes and associated power relations. It is one thing to say that the neoliberal project of the 1980s sought to make private, market based choice cen tral to social life, quite another to claim that it succeeded in producing economically ‘rational’ subjects. Perhaps the most significant danger of the elision between the pro duction and practice of culture lies in the way it echoes, even fuels, some extremely regressive cultural national isms prevalent in many parts of the world today. Claims being made in many postcolonial states about the cultural essence of the nation rest on similar arguments about the threats to local cultural distinctiveness posed by the colonizing force of Western culture. Much violence has been committed in the name of resistance to Western cultural imperialism, not least the rolling back of core liberal rights and protections against (particularly gen der) discrimination. The cultural homogenization thesis also perpetuates the familiar common sense binary of the global local, whereby the ‘local’ is not only opposed to the ‘global’ in an essentialist manner, but also contained within it. As such, it denies agency to the people who are assumed to passively and uncritically absorb the ideolo gies and lifestyle positions of corporate controlled media, along with fetishizing information technology by attrib uting it with transformative powers. The more interesting geographic work in the flows and impacts genre asks about how dominant cultural representations are ‘indigenized’ in particular times and places. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has been par ticularly influential among cultural geographers, for his formulation of the ‘disjunctive global economy of culture’ constituted by nonisomorphic flows of people, technol ogy, images, money, and ideas. The landscapes formed by the intersection of these flows – which he designates as ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes and ideoscapes – in turn constitute the ‘imagined worlds’ for historically and geographically situated peoples and groups. Global flows connect people in far flung lands, but not in a linear or predictable fashion; they are frag mented, irregular, move in many different directions, and look different from different locations and perspectives. In so doing they constitute multiple, distinctively ‘non Western’ capitalist and postsocialist modernities. Appa durai thus moves beyond static center periphery models to emphasize relationality and interconnectedness and poses a challenge to the notion of globalization as un folding teleology. In this way his work resonates with, and in fact informs, much of the work on transnationality in cultural geography, which has similarly engaged re lational theorizing to consider how transnational cultural flows forge connections across and between entities formerly theorized as discrete and autonomous – thus dispensing with rigid state centric narratives of

globalization processes. Studies of consumption in cul tural geography and related disciplines have also taken their cue from Appadurai, to examine ‘the social life of things’ – how the commodities that are flowing change physically and symbolically as they move through global space, to what ends they are used, and how they create new meanings wherever they go. In this way, commod ities themselves provide a lens for exploring inter connections between locations and movements, as well as the politics of consumption. The focus here on how people find meaning in and respond to globally circulating forms of material culture (as well as migration, technology, finance, and ideology) suggests that the ‘impact’ of cultural globalization is not homogenization, but rather fragmentation, not smooth transmittal but disjuncture. An emphasis on indigeniza tion would seem to suggest that the deepening of local particularities is in fact a defining characteristic of cul tural globalization – and indeed many of the contri butions to Frederic Jameson and Masao Miyoshi’s Cultures of Globalization are committed to documenting the vitality of indigenous languages, peasant political move ments, ritual revitalizations, and other local emergences of difference as constitutive dimensions of globalization. Paradoxically, these emergences may be motivated by elite consumption in global cities of the North and South, as much as by articulated resistance to cultural nation alisms or cultural imperialisms. A related, more explicitly post structuralist inter pretation of fragmentation attributes a subversive quality to the cultural mixing that transpires particularly in the ‘liminal spaces of in between’ (as in, in between cultures, communities, or nations). ‘Hybridity’ is the designation that cultural critic Homi Bhabha attaches to such processes – suggesting that they entail a progressive appropriation and rearticulation of dominant cultures. Processes of transculturation, creolization, and hybrid ization that transpire most vigorously at the margins or in liminal spaces of cultural contact, that is, have the po tential to destabilize cultural purities, subvert categorical oppositions (e.g., local/global), and create the conditions for cultural reflexivity. A related set of arguments posits cultural globalization as entailing eclectic contacts and borrowings that encourage the proliferation of new cul tures – representing culture as impure and disorderly combinations, in contrast to its hegemonic represen tations as isolated and regulated tradition. We have here a view of the world as fundamentally decentered and a claim that cultural hybrids themselves constitute a cri tique and subversion of cultural imperialism and at tendant forms of domination. Reservations about accounts of fragmentation, indi genization, hybridization, and the like have centered on their generally positive moral valuation and political nai viteé. In an effort to overcome essentialist interpretations


of culture as tradition or barrier to change, such accounts end up celebrating flow itself. Geographer Katharyne Mitchell has been among the most cogent critics of post structuralist interpretations of transnationalism and cul tural globalization – suggesting that the tendency to attri bute a progressive politics to cultural expressions of in betweenness results in neglect of the oppressive socio economic forces that often underlie conditions of hybridity and transnational flow. As she puts it, ‘‘[i]n an era of global capitalism, the heralding of subject positions ‘at the mar gins’ too often neglects the actual marginalization of sub jects’’ – the poverty, under employment, ambivalent citizen status, cultural misrecognition, and social ruptures that are common to the ‘experience’ of migration and other con ditions of in betweenness. Imputing a progressive politics of intervention to the subjects of cultural hybridity, moreover, overlooks the ways in which those ‘on the margins’, themselves can play a role in reproducing both socioeconomic and cultural forms of injustice in the margins. In fact, it can be said that the flows and impacts ap proach in general suffers from too narrow interpretations of culture and geographic scale that ultimately leave unchallenged neoliberal assertions of market triumphal ism at ‘the end of history’. For however much it seeks to deterritorialize culture, the proposition that once im mobile ‘local’ places are now transcended by ‘global’ flow suggests that there are still, as Anna Tsing puts it, some local people stuck inside local situations – and belonging to stagnant ‘local cultures’. The more nuanced inter pretations of flow do of course move beyond popular representations of the local as the stopping point of global circulations, where global flows are unques tioningly consumed and incorporated. But, as Tsing has argued, even the concept of hybridity relies on an understanding of the local as the place where global flows fragment and become something place bound and par ticular. Such invocations of the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ produce an understanding of geographic scale as essen tially fixed and hierarchal domains in which particular processes are consigned to specific levels. As geographer Gillian Hart points out in a series of important essays on development, they also play into disabling discourses of globalization that reinscribe a series of related hegemonic binaries. In addition to active/passive, male/female, col onized/colonizer, production/consumption, public/ private, economy/culture, these include dichotomous understandings of time and space in which time is treated as a primary analytical category while space appears as a passive container. The effect is to naturalize hegemonic forms of economic globalization that currently prevail and are taken for granted as producing outcomes in particular places. Within this epistemological framing, the fundamental analytical move is limited to chronicling the ‘impacts’ of globalization on places and people. In the

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cultures of economies approach, to which we now turn, the case is made instead for a more nuanced interpret ation of agency and causality by deconstructing in par ticular the economy/culture dichotomy.

Cultures-of-Economies Approach Some of the most persuasive and interesting remedies to the limitations of the flow approach to cultural global ization can be found in the subfield of economic geog raphy. Formerly narrow representations of the economic in terms of modes and forces of production (determining the organization and experience of social life) gave way in the 1990s, to an appreciation of the social embeddedness of economic processes. At that conjuncture, geographers were responding not just to post structuralist critiques of reductive economisms within academia (some of which, it must be said, reflect a serious misreading of Marxist political economy, and on the contrary galvanized some persuasive illustrations of historical materialism as a method for cultural interpretation, such as David Har vey’s Condition of Postmodernity). They were also taking their cue from nonacademic sources: from, as geographer Phil Crang has suggested, the shift in popular radical politics away from concerns with socioeconomic re distribution to a focus on representational politics aimed at remedying cultural forms of injustice; and also from the ways in which the capitalist economy began to define itself through culture – seeking, for example, to create the institutional conditions for innovation, learning, knowledge sharing, and so on. The turn to ‘the cultural’ in economic geography thus marked a new interest in discursive constructions and processes of meaning mak ing as constitutive of economic practice. ‘The cultural’ moved from a derivative and secondary category of an alysis to take center stage alongside ‘the economic’ in a more relational approach to understanding economic life. For our purposes of reviewing geographic approaches to cultural globalization, these developments are significant because they brought economic geographers into the business of documenting not only the political–economic conditions of global cultural flows, but also the ways in which culture, construed in this processual sense, con tours global economic processes. One formulation of these relationships seeks in effect to specify the intersection of ‘the cultural’ with ‘the economic’, the two way mutually constitutive inter relations between constructed economic and cultural spheres. Thus, for example, in a seminal study on the Spatial Divisions of Labor, Doreen Massey chronicles the reciprocal relationship between public and private in vestment in South Wales and key cultural characteristics – namely, geographically and historically specific forms of patriarchy, masculinism, Methodism, trade unionism,

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and corporatist community life. Rather than merely chronicle the impact of direct investment on localities, she explores how changes in industrial geography are contoured by embedded social and political struggles. Studies of global commodity chains have similarly fore grounded the significance of consumption for capitalist expansion and for tracing links among spatially dispersed histories. This work has antecedents in anthropology where there is a longer history of documenting the ways in which ‘local’ cultural practices contour particular moments of integration into global economic processes; an exemplary study in this regard is Sidney Mintz’ Sweetness and Power, a historical ethnography of the emergence of a taste for sugar among the working class in Britain and its relationship to the dramatic rise of sugar cane production in the Caribbean colonies. Even the globalizing finance sector, often taken to be a purely ‘economic’ domain, has been subject to this sort of cul tural analysis. Given the significance of personal inter action, discourse and interpretive skills in the conduct of financial intermediation, geographers such as Linda McDowell began in the 1990s to analyze the cultural practices of employees – how they perform gender, class, ethnicity, and so on – as well as the places of doing business and the discursive strategies engaged. Others, most notably David Harvey, have maintained that the intersection between the economic and the cultural is rather more unidirectional. While not denying the significance of culture for the expansion of global capitalism, the argument in The Condition of Postmodernity – arguably one of the most widely influential books published in geography – is that in the last instance, the economic is determining: the postmodern (cultural) condition can be traced to the spatial and temporal dy namics of capitalism. This polemical tract was in fact written in response to Jean Francois Lyotard’s The Post modern Condition (1979), which aimed to dispense with modernist metanarratives of determination and ontology in favor of a populist eclecticism and deconstructivist stance. Harvey argued that the expansionist requirements of capital led in the 1980s to the dismantling of the Fordist economy and introduction of more flexible re gimes of accumulation relying on global tele communication and other means to reduce barriers of space by the speeding up of time. These increasingly polarizing and debilitating forms of capitalism have produced the cultural experiences of hybridity, pastiche, and disorientation so often characterized, and celebrated, in postmodern theory as the ‘cultures of globalization’. Indeed, postmodern epistemology itself can and must be theorized in relation to these economic conditions of possibility – and the injustices of our times can only be confronted through this sort of historical materialism. Within cultural studies these commitments find ex pression in work that takes as its problematic the export

of American consumerism as a mode of daily life, but goes beyond simple homogenization arguments to con sider the politics of cultural globalization. Frederic Jameson has been at the forefront of efforts to trace how the free movement of American culture (construed here as cultural industry, sectors of cultural production within which value depends on symbolic rather than utilitarian attributes – movies, music, fashion, television, and so on) subverts artistic production and spells the commodifi cation of the aesthetic everywhere (including in America). In a contribution to Cultures of Globalization, he suggests that the problem with cultural homogenization theses is that they conflate ‘the economic’ and ‘the cul tural’ as the cultural, and thus overlook the fact that American mass culture is fundamentally an economic enterprise. By way of example Jameson chronicles the concrete provisions worked out in global and regional trade agreements that secure American dominance and hegemony, such as the removal of subsidies to national film as ‘unfair competition’ or the opening of quota barriers on film in countries around the world. An analogous investigation could be made of the political–economic circumstances surrounding the pub lication of this encyclopedia, with an eye to the ways in which academic publishing, too, is controlled by cor porate interests. For the producers and consumers of academic knowledge it is common to view such publi cations as platforms for critical debate – and indeed critique about the polarizing modalities of capitalism. Rarely does one pause to consider the ways in which academic publishing (and thus scholarship) is imbricated in these very processes. The recent activity of a sub sidiary of Reed Elsevier – publisher of this encyclopedia along with several key geography journals – has provided grist for such reflection within the community of critical and political geographers. That subsidiary, Reed Exhi bitions, had included within its portfolio exhibitions of Defence Systems & Equipment International (DSEI), the world’s biggest weapons fair. The stark proximity of critical geographical scholarship to a company with links to the arms trade prompted a heated debate on the Critical Geography listserv and in the pages of Political Geography in the first half of 2007 about the moral perils entailed in the commodification of academic knowledge. Those discussions raised the spectre of the many com plex and contradictory ways that academia, and indeed Geography, is linked to the military and defense indus tries. They also revealed the political force academics can wield when they galvanize public attention. In a June 2007 news release, Elsevier announced its intentions to exit the defence exhibitions sector, in response to the ‘very real concerns’ of ‘growing numbers of important customers and authors’. In the case of the film industry, Jameson argues, this sort of morally ambiguous, if not repugnant, corporate


control has substantively constrained content – drastic ally compromising posibilities for filmic experiments in imagining radically different social alternatives to this one we now live under. Thus, the triumph of Hollywood is not merely an economic triumph, it is also a political one. Unfortunately, Jameson moves too reductively from lamenting the role of American mass culture in quelling political innovation to lamenting its role in breaking up entire cultural systems in other parts of the world with the allure of Hollywood film and the consumerist way of life it represents. Like Harvey, he is certainly on the firmest ground when he focuses on the economic basis of cultural production, and here the work of both Jameson and Harvey offers some clear direction for radical praxis and counter hegemonic strategy. For consumerism and postmodernism are revealed in their work not as free floating abstract values, but as ideologies – views of the world – that are grounded in capitalist relations of pro duction and concretely produced in particular historical and geographical conjunctures. The task then becomes one of identifying, and challenging, the political–eco nomic conditions for their production – the trade agreements, capital market structures, legal systems, barriers to local ownership and innovation, and so on. Once these relationships are established, moreover, key hegemonic formulations can be refuted, such as the im puted causal relationship between free markets and political democracy. If consumerism is really a form of manufactured consent, ‘free choice’ in the market might in fact be shown to repress rather than foster political participation. Of course, the standard critique leveled against ma terialist accounts of cultural globalization such as Jame son’s or Harvey’s is that they posit a too easy chain of determination from capitalist political economy to cul tural forms and experience. Limiting one’s reading of cultural forms to only those aspects that might be eco nomically determined means that other bases of subject and cultural formation, such as ideologies and experi ences of race and gender, may be missed. Another tack within the cultures of economies approach has been to focus instead on the economic rationality of culture (as opposed to its determination). This is a move which forces a productive reconceptualization of culture not as fixed signs and symbols with assigned meanings and values, but in terms of what people do. This interpre tation may be located within the anthropological field of practice theory, which consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a common interest in exploring the ‘pro cesses’ through which cultural systems are produced and reproduced, and how they change. Particularly influential in geography has been the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who in his writing on aesthetics and the ‘economics of prac tice’ is concerned not so much with the colonization of people’s hearts and minds by corporate interests, as with

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engaging economic concepts to explore the role of cul tural practice in reproducing (or transforming) existing social structures. Among those of unequal status, for example, gifting and other modes of reciprocity generate affective bonds that obfuscate – and cement – social hierarchy, and as such they constitute a kind of symbolic capital, if not symbolic violence. Likewise, practices of aesthetic appreciation articulate acts of self expression with processes of social reproduction. Crucially, the ar ticulation of cultural practice with processes of social reproduction extends across transnational and global space. In their formulation of the ‘translocal village’, for example, Selvaraj Velayutham and Amanda Wise con sider how South Indian Tamils residing in Singapore maintain strong social ties with fellow caste members in their village of origin. Through returns, remittances, flows of obligations and the replication of village prac tices in Singapore, a moral economy of obligations is expanded spatially across national borders. This trans national social field is perpetuated through regimes of affect – guilt and shame are mobilized, coercively, to reproduce, in a spatially expanded form, the endogamous caste practices of cross cousin marriage, kin networks, and ritual obligations. Without abandoning a concern with social justice, then, such representations give greater emphasis to questions of agency and subjectivity in global cultural processes than we find in the more structuralist accounts of Jameson and Harvey. Others have sought to move beyond the structural coupling of distinct economic and cultural spheres, to consider how economic activity itself is always culturally constituted and spatially placed. Karl Polanyi is perhaps the seminal thinker in this regard. The key intervention in The Great Transformation was to dispute the premise in liberal economic theory that the self regulating market is some naturally occurring ‘pure’ form of the market that can be achieved by removing all forms of political intervention. Rather, it is the product of historical ex periments in creating markets for land, labor, and money – beginning, Polanyi argues, with the Enclosure Move ment in the 1500s – and an impossible utopian project. If anything can be said to be ‘naturally occurring’, the ar gument continues, it is the countermovements for social protection that spontaneously arise in reaction to the profound havoc visited upon people when these domains of social life are subject to market forces. The empirical task then becomes one of examining how ‘the economic’ is instituted in different times and places, and, specifically within capitalist contexts, how countermovements for social protection are contained through particular con structions of market society. Within comparative political economy, these commitments have found expression in attempts to document the ‘varieties of capitalism’, the continued institutional divergence that can be found among advanced capitalist countries in the face of global

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pressures for economic convergence. The emphasis here is on the ‘institutional field’ within which firms operate, including not only market competition, but also inter actions among firms, institutions, labor, and market rules – a conjunction widely summarized as introducing ‘cul ture’ into political–economic analyses. A corollary ar gument, coming from sociology and in particular the work of Mark Granovetter, considers the extent to which firms are ‘embedded’ in cultural environments that are suitable (or not) for technological and organizational innovation – such as social networks through which tacit knowledge is transferred. Economic geographers have weighed in on this dis cussion by expanding the scalar focus of the analysis and moving beyond an understanding of culture as ‘local environmental milieu’ to recognize the significance of meaning making for constituting economic practice. For example, as Meric Gertler’s work has consistently shown, national scale regulation institutionalizes certain ways of viewing the economy which in turn structure firm practices, what counts as economically rational behavior and even what appear to be cultural traits, like co operativeness or competition. At the scale of the firm, economic geographers have examined how such norms are institutionalized in particular constitutions of eco nomic identity and space, such as through recruitment policies, disciplining discourses of organizational change, or the construction of gendered, raced, and classed time spaces of production. The dynamics of (and obstacles to) change, about which the ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach is largely silent, must then be assessed in relation to the complex interactions among such scaled cultural articulations. Before proceeding in a final section to elaborate the concept of articulation, one other direction economic geographers have taken the notion that economies are culturally constructed must be noted. Under the rubric of the ‘diverse economies’ project, J.K. Gibson Graham has advocated engaging post structuralist epistemologies to deconstruct dominant ‘capitalocentric’ representations of the economy in order to make way for counter hege monic reconstructions. The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) argues that the structuralist epistemologies underlying political economy reinforce capitalist hegemony by taking it for granted. Seeing capitalist hegemony as a dominant discourse rather than a social structure or systemic unity presents possibilities for creating com peting discourses, a language of economic alterity to reflect both capitalist and noncapitalist practices that constitute diverse economies. What is perhaps most re markable about this initiative has been the extent to which it has polarized economic geographers into camps of protagonists and critics. On the one hand, it has spawned conferences, edited volumes, special journal issues, and a diverse, all committed to the cause of

economic alterity. On the other hand, it has provoked a vitriolic and defensive response by those who read Gibson Graham to be naively and arrogantly seeking to bring down capitalism through discursive and theoretical finesse. As her later book, Postcapitalist Politics, makes clear, the desired intervention is more modest and tentative than such critiques would suggest, and centers on an import ant insight about the role of economic subjectivity in political change processes. The point is that economic subjectivity is more complex than conventional class analysis allows; depictions of class as a group of unified economic subjects fail to grasp the multiple class pro cesses in which individual subjects are always engaged – working in a capitalist firm, sure, but also likely doing unpaid housework, maybe participating in a babysitting club, hunting or picking berries to supplement food supply, and so on. Renaming class homogeneity as class heterogeneity makes it possible to take seriously the af fective and emotional stances that attach to different subject positions, to appreciate, for example, how the feelings of despair and vulnerability associated with some forms of labor pose a real obstacle for generating eco nomic activism. The point of documenting economic diversity through participatory means is in large part to change such debilitating modes of subjectivity and build a constituency for social change. Once people recognize the innovation and dynamism that already exist in their everyday economic practices, that is, they can undergo the ‘ethical self transformation’ necessary to participate in collective processes of building ‘intentional economic communities’. Freed in this way from hegemonic ac counts and positionings, they can begin to view the economy not as an autonomous zone that impacts their lives, but as an ‘ethical space for decision’, within which all kinds of possibilities arise for engaging social surplus to replenish and expand the commons and the productive base. The hope that is vested in creating a language of economic diversity, then, has not so much to do with challenging capitalism by discursive fiat, as with in terpellating alternative political subjectivities and en abling new forms of economic activism.

Articulation Approach Approaches discussed in the previous section are all significant for their attempts to view ‘the economic’ in relation to ‘the cultural’, and thus for attempting to challenge the hegemonic binaries so commonly associ ated with discourses of globalization. Yet in practice they often foreground one domain over the other. Political economic analyses contribute crucially to our understanding of the material conditions of cultural flow, but in subsuming ‘the cultural’ to ‘the entertainment


business’ or a universal experience of time space com pression, such formulations evoke ‘culture’ in a secondary role to assist in the explanation of phenomena that are seen as primarily economic. Jameson, for example, ad dresses the production of consumerist ideology, but his analysis is limited to political–economic conditions of possibility and conflates too easily the production of ideology with the everyday practice of culture. This work thus overlooks a whole set of important questions about the way consumerist ideologies articulate social for mations in particular time space contexts. Likewise, ex panded notions of economic subjectivity (a` la Gibson Graham) or the economics of culture (a` la Bourdieu) go a long way toward revealing how power operates through culture, right down to the way people carry their own bodies, all of which certainly has important implications for the possibility of economic activism. But they, too, leave aside that point of intersection between the eco nomics of practice and the politics of economies by es chewing political–economic questions about control over the means of production and the structures that support systemic inequalities. The point in reviewing these omissions is not to suggest that one might somehow add up the two sides of the coin (the economic and the cul tural, the global and the local) in order to see the whole picture. It is rather to suggest that an entirely different epistemological stance is required, one that would seek to view the world more relationally from the outset, or, as geographer Gillian Hart puts it, ‘to clarify diverse and interrelated trajectories of sociospatial change’. As this section elaborates, such epistemological distinctions matter, not just for the sake of theoretical precision, but also for how politics can be imagined and practiced. The articulation approach thus begins, but only be gins, with the premise that thinking about ‘cultural globalization’ requires thinking about how products whose value depends on symbolic attributes (like fashion, film, or music) have been commodified under regimes of flexible accumulation; and that ‘the cultural industry’ is deeply implicated in American imperialism and capitalist expansion today, along with its attendant exclusions, in equalities, and class processes. But that is not to assert a singular and inexorable transnational capitalist force encompassing farther and farther flung corners of the globe into its fold. An articulation approach points rather to more conjunctural questions about how conditions for capital accumulation are actively created and constantly reworked in particular historical and geographical con texts. The notion of conjuncture comes from Antonio Gramsci who sought to develop a method of moving from abstract Marxian laws of economic development to concrete analyses of ‘current relations of force’. As Stuart Hall has so carefully argued in bringing Gramsci’s work to bear on contemporary cultural–political dilemmas, it involves a materialist premise, that the analysis of

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political and economic structures, such as the cultural industry, must be grounded in their material conditions of existence; as well as a historical premise, that the specific forms of these relations cannot be deduced a priori from abstract economic laws, but must rather be made historically and spatially specific. From here we can pick up again Polanyi’s formulation about the social and political constructedness of capitalist ‘free’ markets, to ask how are markets in cultural products constituted in particular space–time conjunctures – for example, through, global trade agreements, as Jameson elaborates; how and who are the winners and losers selected; and how, crucially, are countermovements for social pro tection anticipated, managed, and contained? To understand fully such processes of capitalist market formation, however, requires achieving not only an economic and political unity, but also, as Gramsci argued, a moral and intellectual unity, involving the coordination of the interests of (some) subaltern groups with those of (some) dominant groups. In his reformu lation of Lenin’s idea of hegemony, Gramsci was con cerned largely with the cultural processes by which such alliances among differently positioned social groups are built to form the political constituency for a particular market formation. The death of local film industries around the world cannot be achieved singlehandedly by Hollywood; it has of course required a range of state, multilateral, corporate, and civil society actors heralding from different national political contexts and seeking to promote a particular configuration of film production and exchange; and to understand how it could be sustained politically requires understanding the enormous appeal of Hollywood film and television to viewing audiences occupying widely varying class, ethno cultural and spa tial positions. Their addictions constitute a significant dimension of the sort of American cultural hegemony that concerns Frederic Jameson, and illustrate the role of strategic alliances in forging hegemony. As Hall suggests, the question then becomes, how are such alliances ac tively constructed and positively maintained in historic ally specific (and temporary) ‘moments’ in the life of a society? What sort of cultural work is entailed in winning over the hearts and minds of subordinate groups to particular capitalist formations so that relations of dom ination can be secured by consent, not coercion? Cultural industries lend themselves particularly well to exploring the ways in which processes of meaning making conjoin with capitalist social relations to consti tute the various capitalisms that have gone into the making of globalization. For these sectors make especially clear the connection between the production of symbolic value and the creation of the popular habits and spaces necessary to sustain profitable commodity exchange. Economic geographers have gone a long way in showing through studies of fashion, home furnishings, film, and so

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on, how capital takes seriously and makes explicit the cultural work entailed in commodifying distinction and difference as a basis for economic profit. But this sort of relationality between economic practice and meaning making is not unique to cultural industries. The pro duction and exchange of goods and services is always intimately bound up in the production of ways of doing and thinking. These ways of doing and thinking may contribute to the formation of historically and spatially specific hegemonic alliances insofar as they get taken up as practical common sense within particular social groups in particular space time conjunctures (or they may not). And they will often have economic effects, in terms of patterns of consumer demand or the competitiveness of particular firms, regions, commodities, or services. The limitations of a Gramscian framework lie in the way that the notion of hegemony construes subjectivity, by suggesting that people either consent to the exercise of power or they resist it. An analytic grounded in the work of Michel Foucault shares an interpretation of capitalist relations as a vehicle not just for extraction, but also for imparting ways of doing and thinking. And it too is concerned with how the exercise of power is achieved in the absence of coercion or force. But, as anthropologist Tania Li has argued in a study on the Will to Improve, within the field of power that he termed ‘government’ Foucault understood subjects to be formed by practices of which they may not be aware, and to which their consent is neither given nor withheld. And he highlighted the ways in which power enables as much as it constrains— through, as he succinctly put it, ‘the conduct of conduct’, the rationalities of rule, and assemblages of techniques that cultivate the conditions in which subjects live their lives. Thus it is not only modern markets that are socially constructed, but also modern subjects, and these are re lational processes. One could explore the relationship between television advertisements aired during cartoons, or the practice of contracting soft drink vending ma chines in public venues such as schools or zoos, or even cultural products themselves, with the constitution of the consuming subject. Or how the idea and practice of the living wage was coproduced with the masculinist laboring subject within particular Fordist regimes of ac cumulation. Or the role of microfinance programs in community development programs all over the world in constituting the entrepreneurial subject. The Fou cauldian notion of governmentality thus encompasses but decenters the role of the state in the practice of gov ernment, making room for other sorts of actors such as corporations, nongovernmental organizations, or labor unions to play a role in projects of rule. And it expresses well the temporary and provisional nature of such pro jects, which must be actively created and constantly re worked, and are always subject to critique and resistance by those whose conduct is being conducted.

Thus far we have been focusing on the production of globalization through hegemonic alliances and regimes of rule. And, as Hart has pointed out, it is easier to recog nize the contingency and situatedness of globalization from the standpoint of its production than from the standpoint of its experience or reception. The articu lation approach to cultural globalization also takes up the question of ‘reception’, but rejects top down impact models of change by focusing instead on the inter relations between wide scale macroeconomic and asso ciated ideological processes with cultural practices and social formations (understood themselves as interrelated with state and economy) in particular regions of the world. Here again it may be useful to return to Bour dieu’s understanding of culture as practices of meaning making that are inextricably linked to the material cir cumstances and dynamics of power within which lives are lived. Anthropologist Mark Liechty’s study of consumer culture in Kathmandu offers a good example of how such an interpretation of culture might be engaged to in vestigate the articulation of globally circulating images and commodities with a particular economics of practice. In Suitably Modern, he describes how middle class Kath mandu residents have since the lowering of import bans in Nepal in the 1980s been engaging commodity con sumption as a marker of class distinction by participating in a rapidly expanding commoditized regime of value, in which personal prestige and identity are related to the control and display of possessions. Though many people describe the practices of ‘doing fashion’ or hosting ex tremely costly ‘buffet style’ parties as intensely stressful, they feel they have no choice but to participate for fear of losing their place in a consumption based prestige economy. For others such as low castes the new social currency of consumer goods presents opportunities for transcending low status positions associated with previ ously salient forms of prestige such as caste. Here we see how a global cultural economy of con sumer goods gets harnessed to the imperatives of place based cultural projects (in this case, projects of subject formation through class practice). The global mobility of cultural forms and products may have entailed processes of deterritorialization, the dislocation of culture from centers of cultural production (which, it must be em phasized, are multiple – Asian, European, Latin Ameri can, African, Middle Eastern as much as American). But, as anthropologists Inda and Renato Rosaldo have argued, consumer goods and other cultural forms are always reterritorialized through distinctive time space contexts of consumption. Returning now to a Gramscian analytic, the question is, to what extent do such reterritoriali zations reinscribe existing hegemonic formations or create the conditions for moments of critical conscious ness? In the Kathmandu case noted above, for example, we find a simultaneous deepening of class hierarchies and


loosening of caste based modes of distinction. The feel ings of frustration, even violation, that accompany mid dle class peoples’ embrace of consumer lifestyles provide grist for critical insight into the way their subjectivity as consumers is being constituted. But this critical con sciousness has for the most part not catalyzed individual tactics of subversion or more potent and collective forms of resistance to the new commoditized regime of value. A Gramscian analytic thus demands a focus on how and why particular situated subjects do or do not mobilize to contest their oppression. With respect to these questions, the primary methodological act then becomes learning to read the modes of representation that convey contra dictory consciousness and to identify the social and political forces through which countermovements for social protection are constituted in any particular his torical–spatial conjuncture. The articulation approach thus requires a processual and relational understanding of cultural globalization that explores how multiple forces come together in practice to produce particular dynamics or trajectories. The focus here on interconnections among multiple historical/geographical determinations in fact displaces ‘globalization’ as a suitable metaphor for understanding the historically specific collaborations that create dis tinctive cultural forms of capitalism. The term ‘global ization’ reinscribes local/global dichotomies and remains mired in an interpretation of history as teleological ab straction. In an articulation approach, all regions of the world are seen as both local and global. The emphasis, as Doreen Massy put it in her influential and important book, Space, Power and Gender, is on how places are set in the context of forces and relations that lie both within them and beyond them, and how therefore the particu larity of any place must be recognized precisely through the specificity of the mix of interconnections to that ‘beyond’. In this view, places are imagined not as bounded ‘local’ entities impacted by outside ‘global’ processes, but as open and porous networks of social relations, a large proportion of which are constructed not ‘inside’ that place but on a larger scale. The ‘global’ and the ‘local’ are just names we give to different aspects of these inter secting relations.

Conclusion: The Cultural Politics of Globalization The goal in these concluding remarks does not sum marize the argument presented thus far, but focuses specifically on the political implications of the three approaches to cultural globalization, and in particular on the political implications of the meanings they convey about the nature of globalization and of the cultural. The limiting and ambiguous politics of the flows and impacts

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and cultures of economies approaches will be noted briefly, with the remainder of the conclusion elaborating methodologies and political praxis associated with the articulation approach. Within the flows and impacts approach we have noted that globalization is viewed as a process of flow from centers of economic and cultural production to diverse sites of reception around the world. And ‘the cultural’ is construed in rather essentialist and static terms as cultural signs and symbols, and the meanings and values associated with them; even if new cultural hybrids are produced at the margins and in liminal spaces, we are still talking here about culture as text. This approach lends itself to a range of moral valuations – the celebration of cultural difference, the fear of cultural homogenization, the embrace of opportunities entailed in the expansion of capitalist markets, or the critique of the ways in which globalization forces the periphery to integrate into the capitalist world system. The stance within the cultures of economy approach expresses a more consistent critique of capitalist relations of pro duction and other systems of domination, and some of the work within it introduces an analytically more useful interpretation of culture as processes of meaning making. But it encompasses a range of views on how the eco nomic articulates the cultural – as an intersection, a determination, a mutual embeddedness – with competing interpretations of the ideal sites and strategies for polit ical change. And in its imputed separation of the eco nomic from the cultural this epistemological framing is open to appropriation by more regressive normative agendas that would seek to claim culture as a ‘resource’ for deepening capitalist markets and subjectivities. The articulation approach rests on firmer normative ground. It also takes up an interpretation of culture as processes of meaning making, but consistently seeks to ground such processes in situated material practices and their associated power relations. This commitment in forms an understanding of globalization not as inexorable force, but as webs of interconnection among concrete places in the world, which are themselves constituted through social relations operating at multiple spatial scales. It also demands attention to the constellation of social relations and technologies of government through which dominant cultural productions are secured, as well as to the conditions in which particular situated subjects mobilize to contest their oppression. And it demands research methodologies suited to tracing how the playing out of social relations across scales constitutes, as Hart puts it, diverse and interrelated trajectories of social change, for the explicit purpose of drawing inferences about directions for political praxis. Two recent critical ethnographies of global con nection are worth mentioning in this regard. Cindi Katz’ Growing Up Global (2004) draws a contour line that links

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the fate of children growing up in the Sudan and the United States, as wide scale capitalist processes articulate practices of social reproduction. While attending to the specificities of the two historical geographies, the sug gestion here is that unexpected similarities in experiences as well as consciousness of economic restructuring offer common grounds for political response across scale and space – for, as she puts it, a countertopography of global capitalism. James Ferguson’s Global Shadows (2006) offers a more disjunctive view of Africa’s global inter connectedness: as he puts it, networks of political–eco nomic connectedness span the globe but do not cover it; rather they hop over large (African) territories and populations to land in spatially dispersed centers of capitalist extraction. Such highly selective and nodal forms of global connection leave most Africans with only a tenuous connection to ‘the global economy’. Both books exhibit a relational and conjunctural approach to geog raphy and history. If the trajectories of connection and change they describe are unique to particular political– economic and cultural–political conditions, then alter native trajectories are always possible. But they must, as Hart suggests, be produced on a terrain given by concrete conjunctures of multiple scaled social relations. Several considerations suggest themselves for moving from an analysis of practice to a praxis of politics. First, as Ferguson persuasively argues, is to recognize how cul tural practice always indexes membership in different and unequal social groups. Thus measures to ‘respect difference’ that are the typical focus of a politics of recognition all too often contribute to exacerbating the lines of socioeconomic inequality. At the same time, the contours of inequality in particular space time con junctures are different; they are born out of distinct historical geographies. A second consideration then has to do with the challenge of finding commonalities within the differences, as Hart, Harvey, and others have argued, in order to develop a politics that is collective in its orientation, but that also remains sensitive to such ir reducible distinctions. This involves, as Katz’ notion of countertopography so powerfully evokes, thinking about how struggles in disparate places might unexpectedly link with one another. A final consideration must then attend to how subjectivity, sentiment, and critical con sciousness are constituted under prevailing conditions – how a constituency for such a collective politics might form. As a Gramscian analytic makes clear, while capi talist processes may by definition create winners and losers, it is precisely the role of hegemony to make such arrangements appear natural and inevitable to adequate numbers of losers. The question then becomes, under what circumstances do those who are oppressed in par ticular socio spatial arenas come to recognize the arbi trary foundations of the prevailing system and mobilize

to change their situation? And how might those cir cumstances be facilitated? Such considerations are crucial for the project of imagining and building alternative political economies based on solidarities across inter connected historical geographies. See also: Cultural Economy; Cultural Politics; Cultural Studies and Human Geography; Globalization and Transnational Corporations; Globalization, Economic.

Further Reading Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Crang, P. (1997). Introduction: Cultural turns and the (re)constitution of economic geography. In Lee, R. & Wills, J. (eds.) Geographies of Economies, pp 3 15. London: Arnold. Ferguson, J. (2006). Global Shadows: Africa in the New World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gibson Graham, J. K. (2006). A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Katz, C. (2004). Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hall, S. (1980). Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance. Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, pp 305 345. Paris: UNESCO. Hart, G. (2002). Geography and development: Development/s beyond neoliberalism? Power, culture, political economy. Progress in Human Geography 26, 812 822. (See also Hart’s two other Progress Report contributions in 2001 and 2004.) Harvey, D. (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Inda, J. X. and Rosaldo, R. (2002). The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Jameson, F. and Masao, M. (eds.) (1998). Cultures of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Li, T. M. (2007). The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Liechty, M. (2003). Suitably Modern: Making Middle Class Culture in a New Consumer Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, K. (2003). Cultural geographies of transnationality. In Anderson, K., Domosh, M. & Thrift, N. (eds.) Handbook of Cultural Geography, pp 74 88. London: Sage. Tsing, A. L. (2000). The global situation. Cultural Anthropology 15, 327 360. Velayathum, S. and Wise, A. (2004). Moral economies of a translocal village: Obligation and shame among South Indian transnational migrants. Global Networks 5(1), 27 47.

Relevant Websites http://www.communityeconomies.org Community Economies. http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2007/02/28/stuart hall globalization cartographies of power/ Darkmatter Post colonial Futures. http://www.boell meo.org/en/web/73.htm Heinrich Boll Foundation. http://www.globalization101.org/issue/culture The Levin Institute.

Globalization, Economic H. W.-c. Yeung, National University of Singapore, Singapore & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction ‘‘Geography is still important. Globalization has not di minished the economic significance of location’’ – John Kay, one of Britain’s leading economists, proudly declares in the headline of his fortnightly column in the world’s famous pinkish newspaper, The Financial Times (FT). The fact that business gurus like John Kay write about glob alization is nothing new; indeed, prominent geographers, such as Peter Taylor, Kelvin Cox, and Peter Dicken, have associated the dreaming up of ‘globalization’ as the lexicon in the new century with such business gurus (as well as chief executive officers (CEOs), global financiers, business schools, and international organizations). What is particularly interesting in Kay’s FT column, however, is his unreserved defense for the importance of place and location in today’s globalization. Coming from outside geography as an academic discipline, his views on glob alization provide significant legitimacy for the claim that geographers might have some very useful things to say about globalization. The missing link in Kay’s rather polemical acknow ledgment of the importance of geography in global ization, however, is what constitutes this importance. Does it refer to geography as preexisting spatial con figurations that simply do not wither away in the midst of globalization processes? Or perhaps more significantly, what is the explanatory relationship between geography and globalization? Is geography simply an outcome of globalization that poses itself as the cause? How does geography matter in our explanations of globalization? In their laudable efforts to relate geography to globalization, Taylor et al., in 2001, noted that ‘‘[w]hatever your own opinion may be, any intellectual engagement with social change in the twenty first century has to address this concept [globalization] seriously, and assess its capacity to explain the world we currently inhabit.’’ Attempting to assess the capacity of globalization as a concept and a set of tendencies to explain the geographical world is the primary focus of this article. Economic globalization, by its very nature, demands serious attention from geographers. The processes that have, over the last few decades, led to dramatic increases in the intensity and extensity of international economic interdependence and integration are inherently and un avoidably spatial in character. Any international eco nomic relationship – be it associated with trade, investment, finance, labor, or technology – is a reflection

of, and partly constituted by, spatial difference. Geog raphers have thus coined the metaphor ‘mapping glob alization’ to highlight what we see as a pressing need for globalization studies that analyze the phenomenon from theoretically and empirically rigorous geographical per spectives. As argued passionately by Amin, in 2001, ‘‘the distinctive contribution of this discipline [Geography] within the congested study of globalisation, has lied in the study of the spatiality – social, economic, cultural and political – of what is increasingly being seen as a single and inter dependent world.’’ Indeed, the first step toward undertaking effective mappings of globalization is to be explicit about how the phenomenon is being conceptualized and delineated. In one of the earliest geographical contributions to global ization debates, Dicken et al., in 1997, argued that ‘‘def initions are not mere semantic peccadilloes; they remain crucial not least because they caution against the kind of caricaturing of globalization which has become all too common.’’ The tendency in the media, and certain pol itical and academic circles, to label simply any kind of ‘international’ economic relation as indicative of eco nomic globalization quite simply destroys its usefulness as an analytical category. In other words, we have to be clear about what we mean by economic globalization and how it relates to, and contrasts with, other forms and processes of international economic restructuring. This is, of course, not a new argument – albeit, it is still not made forcefully enough – and there is now a wealth of critical literature that can help in formulating effective and usable definitions of globalizing processes. Rather than formulating a definitive framework on geography and economic globalization, this article seeks to open up spaces for debates among geographers and social scientists interested in studies of global economic change. It contributes to the current efforts in critical geography to move beyond ‘first wave’ analyses of glob alization as a geographical phenomenon. Cognizant of the enormous amount of globalization studies, this article is not intended to be a critical assessment of the glob alization literature that is extremely diverse and, perhaps, chaotic. Instead, this author aims to develop a geo graphical perspective on globalization and argues that globalization is an inherently geographical phenomenon, and therefore, its alleged causality and outcomes might be better understood and accurately assessed from this perspective. Globalization processes are conceived as spatial tendencies contingent on, and accounted for by,

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certain stringent and necessary requirements, some of which are geographical while others are political, eco nomic, and/or technological. Contrary to the efforts of what sociologists Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash called ‘‘the spatialization of social theory,’’ this geographical perspective attempts to destabilize the hegemonic mobilization of globalization as the universal explanation of empirical outcomes. Our analytical concern should not be about explaining how globalization is reshaping our lives – a key observation made by most social/globalization theorists. Rather, geographers should be interested in what geographical preconditions enable globalization to take place in tan dem with this reshaping of social life – a geographical theory of globalization. This geographical perspective views the spatiality of globalization as an outcome of social constructions of space that are mediated through historically specific political, economic, and technologi cal forces. As a description of spatial tendencies, global ization does not have an independent existence outside these forces, and thus cannot be mobilized to explain empirical outcomes in the absence of these forces. This perspective can make a potential contribution to demystifying, or at least qualifying, the alleged explana tory power of globalization and space. Before we proceed further, it is useful to recap geographers’ participation in the study of globalization.

Globalization as Both Material and Discursive Processes Anyone working on globalization these days immediately runs into a seemingly intractable problem of defining globalization. The definitions of globalization in the lit erature unfortunately remain largely elusive, vague, and, in sociologist Bob Jessop’s view, ‘chaotic’. It is now gen erally agreed among human geographers that global ization should be viewed as both a set of material processes of transformation and resistance, and a set of contested ideologies and discourses that operate across a variety of spatial scales. Globalization is certainly not akin to a mega trend ‘out there’ to be grappled object ively by social scientists. We cannot define globalization as concrete processes of socioeconomic and political re structuring on a global scale without underscoring the ideological foundations on the basis of which these pro cesses operate. This definitional problem makes it in cumbent upon us to present a very specific and precise definition of globalization that hopefully avoids the problem of ‘chaotic concepts’. This article focuses more specifically on ‘economic’ globalization, defined as the rapid proliferation of cross border production, trade, and investment activities spearheaded by global corporations and international

financial institutions that facilitate the emergence of an increasingly integrated and interdependent global econ omy. There are three specificities to this definition of economic globalization. First, it includes only material processes of economic transactions and linkages across borders, and excludes other globalization imperatives that may have economic consequences (e.g., migrations and civil society networks). Second, the definition encapsulates an actor oriented approach to understanding globalization by focusing specifically on the transformative role of global corporations and international financial institutions. This specificity avoids the flawed structural view of globalization as some sort of mega trends ‘out there’. It allows us to bring back the Prince of Denmark (social actors) in the discussion of Hamlet (globalization). We need to identify the ‘captors’ and ‘captives’ of globalization. Third, it explicitly refers to the global scale as critical in defining ‘global’ization. Whatever its constituents, contestations, and consequences at different geographical scales, globalization is necessarily an integrating set of tendencies that operate on the global scale and intensify connections and flows across territorial borders and re gions. This narrower definition of globalization avoids the dangerous tendency to use ‘globalization’ as a catchall phrase for describing all kinds of contemporary processes of change. Despite its causal links with the contemporary capitalist imperative, globalization is certainly not just about the latest phase of uneven geographical develop ment, de/reterritorialization, or crisis induced capitalist restructuring. Globalization, indeed, has much deeper historical roots in the founding of the modern nation state during the seventeenth century. Although Global Shift, the now influential text on globalization by an economic geographer Peter Dicken, was published as early as 1986, geographers had not been very evident in the globalization debate until the early 1990s when ‘the end of geography’ thesis became in creasingly popularized in the media, policy circles, and even academic worlds. In its essence, this thesis argues that the juggernaut of globalization, as a planetary force, is capable of penetrating all kinds of national boundaries and eroding any geographical differences therein. The con vergence effects of globalization are so strong that there is no place for geography in the processes of global change. The critique of this strong convergence thesis of global ization has reverberated seriously in the social sciences, and notably, in human geography. Globalization has seemingly led to significant material transformations in the global economy, most appropriately termed ‘global shift’. These global transformations entail the rapid proliferation of cross border trade and investments by global corpor ations and financial institutions, the ruthless penetration of global cultures epitomized by McDonald’s, Hollywood movies, MTV, and the Internet, and the reluctant power shift from nation states to global governance.


These global transformations, nevertheless, are not geographically even and without their resistance at dif ferent spatial scales and in different countries/regions. The global reach of corporate activities has failed to transform the world economy into a singular global production factory. In fact, what appears to be more convincing, according to Allen Scott and Michael Stor per, is the phenomenon of regionalization through which regions have emerged as the major motor of the global economy. Global production activity seems to be taking place in high tech regions such as Silicon Valley (northern California), Third Italy (Emilia Romagna), and Baden Wu¨rttemberg (southern Germany) and low cost regions such as Dongguan (China), Penang (Ma laysia), and Bangalore (India). Global finance remains highly rooted in existing global finance centers such as the City of London, New York, and Tokyo, and new international financial centers as Hong Kong and Singapore. Geographers have, therefore, argued for an examination of specific regions and territorial ensembles in order to appreciate the inherently geographical nature of globalization processes. Other geographical studies have shown that while globalization has been spear headed by the cross border operations of transnational corporations, the spatial transfer of business and indus trial practices is by no means unproblematic. There remain significant place based institutional limits to the globalization of business cultures and economic prac tices. For example, while capital can be transferred al most effortlessly across space, labor remains highly place bound and locally embedded. In other words, globalization encounters most ‘friction’ over space at the local and regional scales. It is clearly unable to erase spatial differentiation even in the realm of economic processes and governance. The arrival of global cultures has further accentuated the awareness of local differences and cultural responses. While the global flows of information, images, and ar tifacts are greatly facilitated by the advancement in telecommunications and transport technologies, the re cipients and consumption of these flows remain highly territorialized and embedded in specific geographical boundaries. Although few people in developed countries do not have access to global cultures in their embodied and commodified forms, a large segment of the popu lation in developing countries is still highly dependent on localized products and cultural services. Most Fili pinos and Brazilians, for example, are still drinking their local beverages instead of Coca Cola and Pepsi. Fur thermore, global cultures are equally resisted in many countries that view these cultural inflows as threatening to their national interests and political legitimacy. There are countermovements to the globalization of cultures through the reassertion of local/national cultures, re ligions, and other forms of social identities. Despite the

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dominance of American movies in the English speaking world, the local movie industry in India and Hong Kong continues to thrive from strength to strength. These countermovements, enmeshed in the global web of cultural flows, have created a world of cultural mosaics and differences. We are certainly still far away from a culturally homogeneous world of a global village. The political economy of globalization does not ne cessarily indicate the demise of nation states as the primary locus of political governance. Some geographers have argued that the world is not becoming more unruly and disorderly in the governance sense. Rather, there is a reconfiguration of political governance and institutional power through which the nation state is joined by supranational institutions and others institutions (e.g., nongovernmental organizations) to govern globalization. Just witness the immensely complex organization behind those antiglobalization protests in Seattle (USA), Melbourne (Australia), and Genoa (Italy), and the rapidly evolving World Social Forum. Nation states, worldwide, are experiencing a relative decline in their capacities to control the whereabouts of global corpor ations, to provide social welfare for their citizens, and to contain the post Cold War world threats. These states, however, are not fixed entities to be overwhelmed by the unruly processes of globalization. Indeed, some nation states are active agents in promoting globalization, for example, through the liberalization of financial markets. Still, other nation states have globalized themselves by building interstate consensus and con tributing to trans state sources of power and authority. It is, therefore, too premature to proclaim the death of nation states. Globalization is also as much a set of material pro cesses as a set of contested ideologies and discourses. The ways through which globalization is represented can have equally significant impact on material processes. While we cannot equate globalization with neoliberalism per se (i.e., defined as a political–economic ideology in favor of market mechanisms in lieu of state intervention), it is true that neoliberal programs of policies have greatly facili tated the advent of globalization. Just think of how lib eralization and market based economic policies have enabled certain giant corporations to emerge and dom inate the global economy. In other words, globalization cannot proceed smoothly without its supporters and champions. As expected, business gurus, media pundits, and policymakers (and even academics) are often the strongest supporters of globalization. In championing for globalization and making it appear a natural force, these people have ‘naturalized’ globalization processes and portrayed them as ‘necessary’, ‘inevitable’, and ‘beyond our control’. Powerless citizens have to choose either wholesale embracing of globalization or economic de cline and social exclusion.

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Toward a Conceptual Remapping of Economic Globalization What geographers have plainly shown in their recent work is that this either/or ideological choice of global ization should be seriously questioned. In fact, localities can reassert their power in the global economy through certain discursive practices and/or constructing alter native globalizations. These practices include the building up of social capital, the experimentation with nonmarket forms of economic exchanges, the reorgan ization of local work practices, and so on. To challenge the ideological supremacy of neoliberalism and its much broader processes of globalization, some localities and communities have actively demystified globalization as a necessary and inevitable phenomenon. The rise of local civil societies in many parts of Western Europe, for example, is a direct answer by localities to regulate the apparently unruly effects of globalization. To sum up this discussion so far, globalization is understood in geography as a set of material processes and discursive practices that operate across different spatial scales. The differences that these spatial scales make are that globalization is about changing relation ships between geographical scales and that these scales are socially constructed through ideologies and dis courses. Geographers’ greatest contribution to the glob alization debate is the recognition of how spatial scales matter in our understanding of the complex operations of globalization processes. Globalization is sometimes highly localized, whereas in other times, it is a region that witnesses most of the effects of globalization. Viewed in this geographical perspective, globalization is ‘not’ ne cessarily an essential global force that homogenizes na tional and local differences. It has as many local and regional dimensions as being a global force. What we discern to be the most effective character ization of globalization can be summarized by the fol lowing set of interrelated assertions. This conceptual mapping of globalization places us unequivocally in David Held’s ‘transformationist’ segment of the literature that sees globalization as an ongoing transformative process, rather than either an unattainable end state of universal interconnection (‘the skeptics’), or an inexorable global force that will inevitably eradicate local differences and put paid to the nation state (‘the hyperglobalists’). Globalization is constituted by a set of processes that • are increasing in extensity and intensity, but are not

•

even approaching any kind of homogenized end state of universal global interconnection. As a concept, it represents a ‘qualitative’ change in the nature of the global system rather than an epochal shift to a global mode of organization. Globalization is best represented as a relative increase in the functional integration of economic activity

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

across national borders (i.e., characterized by complex interdependencies) and is, therefore distinctive from simple internationalization. Transnational corpor ations are playing a relatively more important, but by no means hegemonic, role in these processes that are uneven both across and within economic sectors. Globalization is not spatially homogenizing, but instead depends upon, and contributes to, uneven geographic development at different scales. The spatial economic pattern that results can perhaps be best described as a mosaic of interconnected national and subnational clusters of activities. Different territories are integrated into the global system to greater or lesser extents, and some are currently excluded almost entirely. Globalization is both leading to, and partly consti tuted by, a mutating of the role of the nation state, which is not declining appreciably in importance. However, there has been a degree of ‘hollowing out’ of functions to both supranational and subnational organizations. Globalization is, however, resulting in a reworking of the different scales of economic activity. Two scales, in particular, have seen a relative rise in importance as a result: (1) the global city region is argued by many to be an increasingly important scale for the coordin ation, regulation, and promotion of economic activity; (2) the three triadic regions – North America, Western Europe, and Japan/East Asia – are also becoming clearly visible, although more perhaps as scales of political and corporate integration rather than co hesive trade and investment blocs. Globalization is as much a neoliberal discourse as a set of material processes. The two domains interact in complex but often mutually reinforcing ways. For example, certain neoliberal discourses ‘naturalize’ processes of globalization, thereby constructing no tions of economic space that lead to a deferral of political options to the global scale. Globalization is not some kind of immutable inevit ability, but a set of processes that is socially con structed, and therefore, can be encouraged or resisted by actors/institutions at various scales. Globalization is, therefore, a set of complex and conflicting ten dencies, the outcomes of which often cannot be pre dicted a priori. Globalization is not significantly eroding the import ance of national business systems, understood as dis tinctive configurations of institutionalized economic activities. Rather than being replaced or eroded by globalization tendencies, national business systems are experiencing highly variable processes of reconfigur ation as they are integrated at the international scale in a highly uneven manner. Globalization is constituted and reflected by qualita tive changes in nature of the organization of economic


activity, often associated with a rise in business net working, in particular, through intra firm (exploiting core competencies) and inter firm networks (equity and nonequity arrangements, such as subcontracting, strategic alliances, etc.).

Bringing Geography Back Into the Globalization Agenda What then are the implications of this article for future geographical studies of global economic change? There are important geographical preconditions of globalization worthy of further theorization. Ash Amin has developed a relational concept of place in his theorization of the re lationship between geography and globalization. He argues that ‘‘a relational or global sense of place will interpret the spatiality of globalisation – however defined – rather differently from a territorial perspective.’’ This relational perspective on the spatiality of globalization views locales, such as cities, as ‘‘a meeting place for di verse geographies of linkage’’ that clearly go beyond a territorial and scalar reading of the position and function of urban economies in globalization. Other geographers have recently developed the geographical concepts of global city regions as ‘‘points at which globalization processes crystallize out on the geographic landscape and as active agents in shaping globalization itself ’’ (Scott, 2001: 7) and global cities as relational networks. Whether these concepts herald the sociospatial con struction of new geographical scales is a moot point here. But what is clear in these conceptual interventions is the explanation of globalization tendencies in relation to their various sociospatial formations, not the other way around as so often done in globalization theory where globalization is pretended to explain those very for mations. Space does play an analytical role in explaining globalization tendencies, although this role is not ex clusive to geography, or other social sciences for the same matter. Sociologist Saskia Sassen, in 2007, noted that ‘‘Two disciplines more than any others have contribu ted significantly to the study of the global as it gets constituted subnationally. They are geography and anthropology, specifically, particular branches of each. Economic and political geography have done so espe cially through a critical development of scale and scaling. This work recognizes the historicity of scales and thus resists the reification and naturalization of the national scale as present in most of social science.’’ Another important implication is related to an agency focused approach to globalization research that places more significance on actor transformation and resistance. Much of the existing globalization literature takes on an abstract macro and structural view of the global economy. What is missing in this globalization

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agenda is the attention to social actors who are not only constructing globalization in their various capacities, but also experiencing significant transformations in their own everyday social life. By focusing on these actors in globalization processes, we can make a much better connection between the apparently nonhuman processes of globalization and their manifestations in all sorts of human activities, practices, and struggles. This approach also allows us to study the contested sociospatial pro duction of scales and globalization discourses. In short, we have to pay attention to globalization as a ‘living’ experience, which entails both transformations of social practices and resistance from social actors. The empirical orientation of geography as an intellectual discipline allows us to bridge the still largely unfilled gap between overwhelmingly stylized abstractions in most global ization studies and the contradictory experiences of most people who are living with economic globalization as an everyday fact. Now that we have a better appreciation of the geo graphical specificity of globalization, it is perhaps time to move beyond the simplistic notion of globalization as merely a set of end state or ‘placeless’ phenomena. There are many geographical questions that should inform fu ture research on globalization and four are highlighted here. First, we need more balanced, empirical assess ments of globalization processes. At both research and policy levels, it is really not helpful just to embrace globalization wholeheartedly or to condemn it un reservedly. We understand from previous studies that the Janus face of globalization may simultaneously benefit as well as harm localities. It is imperative for future researchers to continue to evaluate the uneven geo graphical outcomes of globalization processes in order to arrive at better informed development policies. Second, while there is a wealth of ‘top down’ studies of globalization, particularly those measuring the extent of globalization via specific economic indicators, there is clearly room for further ‘bottom up’ studies of global ization that take a more agency oriented approach. We certainly need to continue to understand and critique the strategies of global corporations and international or ganizations. Equally important, however, is the pressing need – both intellectual and social – to appreciate how globalization is contested at various scales by social actors, such as cocoa farmers in West Africa and auto mobile component suppliers in Germany and Detroit, whether at the level of the individual household decision, the workplace, or the international mobilization of labor unions. Third, we need to think creatively about the new kinds of spaces that are being created by globalization. For example, anthropologist Aihwa Ong talks in concrete terms about areas of ‘graduated sovereignty’ – such as export processing zones – where being connected to

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global networks is predicated upon the existence of customized regulatory and disciplinary regimes. At a more abstract level, John Beaverstock, Richard Smith, and Peter Taylor describe the emergence of ‘translo calities’ within major cities, spaces that are relatively more connected into transnational networks than ‘local’ relations within the urban area. Relational, network based views of space will need to be developed to con ceptualize how globalization is carving out new kinds of regulatory and lived spaces. Finally, future researchers need globally coordinated research that is well executed, locally. In other words, globalization research requires the construction of international networks that parallel, overlie, and criss cross the very global networks we are concerned to investigate. Only through such cross national/regional efforts can we improve our chances of coming to terms with globalization as a complex set of phenomena that are increasingly impinging upon everyday lives in most, if not all, parts of the world. See also: Global Commodity Chains; Global Production Networks; Globalization and Transnational Corporations; International Organizations; Neoliberal Economic Strategies.

Further Reading Amin, A. (2001). Globalization: Geographical aspects. In Smelser, N. & Baltes, P. B. (eds.) International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, pp 6271 6277. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. Amin, A. (2002). Spatialities of globalisation. Environment and Planning A 34(3), 385 399. Amin, A. (2004). Regulating economic globalization. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29(2), 217 233. Beaverstock, J. V., Smith, R. G. and Taylor, P. J. (2000). World city network: A new metageography? Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90(1), 123 134. Cameron, A. and Palan, R. (2004). The Imagined Economies of Globalization. London: Sage. Coe, N. M. and Yeung, H. W. c. (2001). Geographical perspectives on mapping globalization. Journal of Economic Geography 1(4), 367 380. Cox, K. R. (2004). Globalization and the politics of local and regional development: The question of convergence. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29(2), 179 194.

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. Dicken, P., Peck, J. and Tickell, A. (1997). Unpacking the global. In Lee, R. & Wills, J. (eds.) Geographies of Economies, pp 158 166. London: Arnold. Economic Geography (2002). Special Issue on Global Economic Change. Economic Geography 78(3), 253 386. Elden, S. (2005). Missing the point: Globalization, deterritorialization and the space of the world. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30(1), 8 19. Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. and Perraton, J. (1999). Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Polity. Kelly, P. F. (1999). The geographies and politics of globalization. Progress in Human Geography 23(3), 379 400. Ong, A. (2007). Neoliberalism as a mobile technology. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32(1), 3 8. Peck, J. and Yeung, H. W. c. (eds.) (2003). Remaking the Global Economy: Economic Geographical Perspectives. London: Sage. Sassen, S. (2007). Introduction: Deciphering the global. In Sassen, S. (ed.) Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects, pp 1 18. New York: Routledge. Scott, A. J. (ed.) (2001). Global City Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, A. J. and Storper, M. (2003). Regions, globalization, development. Regional Studies 37(6/7), 579 593. Smith, N. (2004). The Endgame of Globalization. London: Routledge. Taylor, P. J. (2007). Problematizing city/state relations: Towards a geohistorical understanding of contemporary globalization. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32(2), 133 150. Taylor, P. J., Watts, M. J. and Johnston, R. J. (2001). Geography/ globalization. GaWC Research Bulletin, No.41. Department of Geography, Loughborough University. Walker, R. (1999). Putting capital in its place: Globalization and the prospects for labor. Geoforum 30(3), 263 284. Warwick, M. (2006). Geographies of Globalization. London: Routledge. Yeung, H. W. c. (1998). Capital, state and space: Contesting the borderless world. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23(3), 291 309. Yeung, H. W. c. (2002). The limits to globalization theory: A geographic perspective on global economic change. Economic Geography 78(3), 285 305. Yeung, H. W. c. (2003). Globalization. In Rogers, A. & Viles, H. A. (eds.) The Student’s Companion to Geography (2nd edn.), pp 1103 1107. Oxford: Blackwell.

Relevant Websites http://www.johnkay.com Jonkay.

Golledge, R. G. Rushton, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Analytic Behavioral Geography The investigation of human activities in a time–space framework, focusing on the way that spatial decision making is guided by cognitive processes. Cognitive or Mental Maps The internalized representations of space which guide everyday wayfinding and decision making. Consumer Spatial Behavior The rules by which people select one place over another in which to consume products. Nonmetric Multidimensional Scaling A method for inferring locations of points from independent, ordinal, measures of relationships between them. Positivism A philosophy of science in which individual observations are seen as instances of universal laws which are developed by induction and shown to be related by deductive, usually mathematical, principles. Spatial Cognition The process of acquiring, coding, using, and storing information from the multitude of environments external to mind. Spatial Structures The geometrical relationships between elements in time and space. Wayfinding The process by which an individual processes information about their current location in relation to a second location to which they wish to reach in an economical way.

Born in Dungog, New South Wales, Golledge (Figure 1) received his BA (honors in geography) at the University of New England, Armidale, NSW in 1959 and MA, geography, at the University of New England in 1961. He received his PhD at the University of Iowa in 1966, subsequently becoming a leader in the field of analytic behavioral geography for 40 years, defining its links with the associated disciplines of psychology and, more re cently, computational science. As a result, he received an honorary PhD in psychology at Goteborg University, Sweden, in 2001, and an honorary LLD from Simon Fraser University in Canada in 2001. Golledge was a senior demonstrator in geography at the University of New England in Australia when Harold McCarty of the University of Iowa met him and per suaded him to go to Iowa to pursue a PhD. At Iowa, Golledge studied how human spatial behavior contrib uted to the organization of spatial structures. His early focus was on how spatial choices supported specific

characteristics of urban settlement patterns and intra urban spatial structures. He noted that spatial structures are maintained by the spatial choices people make as well as the locations of facilities selected by businesses, gov ernors, and the public. These structures in turn constrain the spatial choices that people make. As a PhD student at Iowa in the summer of 1964, Reg Golledge and Gerard Rushton, along with W. A. V. Clark (recently graduated from the University of Illinois), worked together on a research project under the super vision of Dr. Ron Boyce, who gave them the flexibility to pursue ideas on how human spatial behavior contributes to urban settlement patterns, based on the idea that people make decisions according to their perception of the world, not its reality. They found considerable em pirical support for the idea that there are reciprocal re lationships between behaviors and spatial structures. This became a lifelong theme that gave theoretical coherence to Golledge’s work. In collaboration with Kevin Cox, he subsequently brought widespread professional recognition to the work of behavioral geographers who worked in the analytic mode by organizing sessions at the Association of

Figure 1 Reginald G. Golledge.

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American Geographers meetings in the late 1960s and producing a widely cited collection Problems in Behavioral Geography that was republished in 1981. In the 1970s, as an associate professor at Ohio State University, his work focused on decision making pro cesses and locational behaviors. He became interested in cognitive images of environments and in developing theories for how these knowledge structures are formed and changed as people gain more experience of their environments. There clearly was a measurement problem with gaining knowledge of cognitive environments and representing this knowledge in ways that were helpful to interpretations of observed spatial behaviors. He intro duced nonmetric, multidimensional scaling, developed in psychometrics, as a method for inferring spatial structures from survey data from people about their knowledge of their local environments. Over time, his interests broadened beyond consumer spatial behaviors to migration and mobility research as he noted that cognitive images appeared to be funda mental to the understanding of many kinds of human spatial behavior. During this time, he became the second editor of the journal, Geographical Analysis, which intro duced much of the new, quantitative, and theoretical research that characterized human geography in the 1970s. By the late 1970s, analytic behavioral geography was under fire from a group of scholars who were critical, to say the least, of positivism and its role in research in human geography. With Helen Couclelis, Golledge de fended analytic human geography as it had evolved, and argued that much of behavioral geography, as practiced by the late 1970s, had transcended its logical positivist roots. While acknowledging that ‘‘with positivism came a model of explanation that subsumed particular phe nomena to universal law, a formula – the scientific method – for obtaining valid knowledge, and a cult of quantification and measurement that changed current perceptions of what empirical reference may mean,’’ Couclelis and Golledge (1983, p. 332) argued that there were important ideas in analytic behavioral geography that had enduring value. These ideas included reliance on logico mathematical structures and an ‘‘insistence upon open, public intersubjective tests of knowledge by continuous reference to experience’’ (Golledge, 1983, p. 334). What is left, they argued, is a mode of discourse, which, when pursued with honesty and humility, gives us fundamental principles from which to study human spatial behavior with the objective of finding valid gen eral statements about human behavior in space. A sum mary of many of Golledge’s ideas in this area came together in his book with Stimson, which takes the reader through the tenets of behavioral approaches to human geography, principles of spatial cognition, theories of learning, daily activity patterns, spatial choice models,

migration in a behavioral context, and residential location decision making. David Simonett, the new chairman of the department of geography at the University of California, Santa Bar bara, decided that he wanted Reg Golledge to head up his quantitative human geography program. After an intense recruitment effort, Simonett succeeded in 1977. Golledge, in collaboration with Larry Hubert, a professor of statistics at University of California, Santa Barbara, produced a series of papers that searched for the prin ciples of measuring order in spatial data. Their classic paper, published in Geographical Analysis in 1981, focused on spatial autocorrelation. They used randomization procedures for producing reference distributions de scribing the relationships that would be expected to be found in data if spatial order were not present. These ideas were seminal in moving the geographic literature from its reliance on distributional assumptions in meas uring statistical significance. Their explanation and il lustration of measuring spatial association and spatial autocorrelation coincided with the availability of in creased computing power in universities, which made the implementation of reference distributions practical. The random relabeling ideas first described in the papers with Hubert have become foundations for spatial analysis methods for understanding many geographical distri butions where events occur with defined likelihoods and outcomes vary stochastically but are consistent with the priors that are consistent with theoretical norms. For these contributions to geography in particular, Golledge received the honors award for scholarship from the Association of American Geographers in 1981. After becoming legally blind in the mid 1980s, Gol ledge turned his interests and knowledge of spatial learning and cognition to problems faced by the visually handicapped. Soon he was writing on ‘wayfinding’ and route selection, and developing haptic soundscapes for blind users to access computer screen imagery. He spoke at international conferences on ‘Navigation without sight’, ‘Navigation aids for the blind’, ‘Analysis of navi gation without sight’, ‘Spatial cognition of the blind and visually impaired’, and ‘Auditory maps as alternatives to tactual maps’. 10 years later he was writing professionally about the problems academics confront when facing blindness. When nominating Golledge for a lifetime career honors award to the Honors Committee in 2006, Professor Grant Thrall noted that ‘‘Reg turned a misfortune of health into a laboratory to improve the quality of life for the visually handicapped.’’ Emeritus Professor Les King said of Golledge: ‘‘He not only learned to live with his blindness but made it a subject of first class research and fount of inspirational instruction and leadership.’’

Golledge, R.

Besides receiving many honors, he was elected fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1990; vice president and president of the Association of American Geographers from 1998 to 2000; and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. In his post presidential address to the Association of American Geographers in 2002, Golledge said, ‘‘Finding an answer to questions of how and why geographers think the way they do has stimulated much of my research over the last 35 years.’’ Indeed, in his estimation the changes of the last century have moved geography from an inventory dominated and descriptive activity (finding ‘what’ and ‘where’) to emphasizing cognitive demands (finding ‘why’ and ‘how’). He also said that perhaps the greatest changes in the nature of geographic knowledge over the last half century have been: 1. Recognition of the difference between the acts of accumulating geographic facts and representing the spatial form embedded in these facts, and under standing the processes involved in understanding and analyzing those facts to produce new information and knowledge that is not directly observed during data gathering. 2. The development of spatially relevant theories about the location, arrangement, and distribution of geo graphic phenomena and the spatial interactions among both physical and human components of those phenomena. ‘‘I believe,’’ he said, ‘‘that geographic knowledge is con cept rich, has a substantial theoretical base, is replete with distinct analytic forms (both qualitative and quan titative), lends itself to graphic, cartographic, and other forms of geo representation, and is imbued with know ledge derived from using place specific reasoning to in tegrate components of its physical and human domains.’’ Golledge has influenced geography through his many professional contacts, graduate students, international and national presentations, and the offices he has held at

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the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he chaired the department of geography for 4 years in the early 1980s during a period of consolidation and growth. See also: Behavioral Geography; Mental Maps; Multidimensional Scaling; Positivism/Positivist Geography; Spatial Autocorrelation.

Further Reading Couclelis, H. and Golledge, R. (1983). Analytic research, positivism, and behavioral geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73, 331 339. Cox, K. R. and Golledge, R. G. (eds.) (1981). Behavioral Problems in Geography Revisited. New York: Methuen. Egenhofer, M. J. and Golledge, R. G. (eds.) (1998). Spatial and Temporal Reasoning in Geographic Information Systems. New York: Oxford University Press. Golledge, R. G. (1979). The development of geographical analysis. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 69, 151 154. Golledge, R. G. (1997). On reassembling one’s life: Overcoming disability in the academic environment. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15, 391 409. Golledge, R. G. (1999). Wayfinding Behavior: Cognitive Mapping and Other Spatial Processes. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Golledge, R. G. and Stimson, R. J. (1987). Analytical Behavioural Geography. London: Croom Helm. Golledge, R. G. and Stimson, R. J. (1997). Spatial Behavior. New York: The Guilford Press. Hubert, L. J., Golledge, R. G. and Costanzo, C. M. (1981). Generalized procedures for evaluating spatial autocorrelation. Geographical Analysis 13, 224 233. Rice, M., Jacobson, R. D., Golledge, R. G. and Jones, D. (2005). Design considerations for haptic and auditory map interfaces. Cartography and Geographic Information Science 32, 381 391.

Relevant Websites http://www.geog.ucsb.edu Golledge take, a lively chronicle 1963 2000, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Gottmann, J. L. Muscara`, Universita` del Molise, Isernia, Campobasso, Italy & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Circulation (Movement) The displacement of people, goods, armies, money, information, ideas, etc. Crossroads A multiscalar concept defining a position in space where flows of circulation meet, mix, and irradiate their orbit to the surrounding space. Geographical Space Space accessible to people and their activities, defined by Gottmann as continuous, limited, expanding, diversified, organized, and partitioned. Hinge The interface function of a city or region between two or more geographical scales. Iconography Set of beliefs and abstract symbols relating a community to its territory at any given scale. Its contents are less important than its action in affecting movement in space. Megalopolis A polynuclear urban region, with a nebula structure, inhabited by at least 25 million people, which functions as a ‘hinge’ between the local, regional, national, and global scales. Originally developed to describe the Northeastern urbanized seaboard of the US, it was then applied to other parts of the world by other scholars (Great Lakes megalopolis, Tokaido megalopolis, Northwestern Europe megalopolis, etc.). It differs from Mumford’s megalopolis. Political Partitioning of Space The process of dividing geographical space into political units. Regional Monograph Classic, analytical tool developed by the French School of Geography.

Jean Gottmann’s (1915–94) contribution to human geography has long been associated with urban geog raphy and, in particular, Megalopolis, his study of the post World War II urbanized Northeastern seaboard of the US. Sometimes controversially, this became a paradigm subsequently applied to different regions of the world by other scholars. The opening of the Fonds Gottmann at the National Library in Paris, coupled with an international and intergenerational effort, has allowed for reassessment of his contribution to urban, regional, economic, histor ical, and political geography, reconciling the profound fragmentation of awareness and recognition of his work, which brought some to observe that: ‘‘each geographer had its own Gottmann.’’ Twice a political refugee, an academic and linguistic nomad, Gottmann was active for six decades, with nu merous appointments and a record of approximately 400

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publications, mostly in English and French (though not respectively translated). A French citizen from 1939 onwards, he is considered the first cosmopolitan geog rapher, who merged the French and Anglo American methodologies. Born in Kharkov to a Jewish family, active in railroad development in the Ukraine, then part of the multi national Czar imperium, Jean Gottmann lost both parents during the Russian revolution and fled, with three sur viving relatives, to Constantinople in 1919. Once in Paris (1921–40), he studied under the French system: Laureát du Concours Geńe´ral des Lyceés et Colle`ges de France in geography (1931), he enrolled at the Sorbonne in the faculties of law, history, and geography (1932). Docteur e`s Lettres in 1934, in his diploma thesis on irrigated agri culture in Palestine, he merged physical, economic, and cultural geography, with a touch of Zionist irredentism injected in him by his stepfather Michael Berchin. As research assistant to Demangeon (1936–40), through the Rockefeller Foundation’s Social Science Program at the University of Paris, he worked on the structure of agriculture in France and its Mediterranean colonies, and on France raw materials supply. His knowledge of the Russian language granted him the opportunity to review, for the Annales de Geógraphie, dif ferent aspects of Soviet economic geography. On theo retical grounds, he criticized Huntington’s environmental determinism in the debate then opposing the French and German schools, and was attracted by Isaiah Bowman’s ‘pioneer fringe’. However, his French career, interrupted by the Nazi invasion, was completed years later. A refugee scholar, he fled to Montpellier and reached New York in December 1941, where he joined De Gaulle’s ‘France Libre’. His Mediterranean knowledge and French regional approach attracted strong interest in the US war effort. Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ (1942–44), he consulted in Washington, DC (1942–43), and taught at Bowman’s Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD (1943–48). In 1945, he served the French ministry of economy in Paris and Washington. Director of studies and research at the UN Secretariat (1946–47), in a seminal methodological essay on human geography (1947), he proposed an an alysis of network flows (‘circulation’) through multiscalar nodes (‘crossroads chains’), and the use of psychology to study the cultural geography of consumption patterns. And yet, despite his close ties with both Oppenheimer and Princeton physicists, he only foresaw the quantitative developments of Anglo American geography. In his

Gottmann, J.

post war unsettlement, he set out on an academic transhumance across the Atlantic and on a cross cultural effort to explain post war Europe to America and vice versa (1949, 1950). While resuming his French academic career at Centre National de la Recherche´ Scientifique (CNRS) (1948–51) to study the Boston–Washington urban corridor – where he had spent most of his time during the war – Gottmann began teaching at the Institute d’Etudes Politiques (1949–55), where he developed a general theory of political geog raphy in several articles, published in America and France, and in a book (1952). He insisted on the ‘hinge’ between the regional and the global, and explained the political partitioning of geographical space as the result of the interaction of network flows (‘circulation’) and territorial identities (‘iconographies’) of communities, through the key role played by nodes (crossroads chains), and their orbits in shaping human regions, beyond the framework of the nation state. Political territoriality was seen as historically contingent and – as he elaborated later (1973) – dependent on the community’s search for opportunities or security. Without a permanent ap pointment, he found support from private foundations to direct a study of Virginia (1952–55) – the first attempt at a regional monograph in the French geographic tradition of a US region – and the research on Megalopolis, re spectively thanks to Flexner and Oppenheimer. Mistakenly understood by many as a regional study, Megalopolis was viewed as the incubating laboratory of major trends in post war urbanization: the polynuclear structure, the then unmatched density of cities, the ‘hinge’ of American economy, serving ‘both as an oceanic façade for relations abroad and as a springboard for the settlement and development of the continent inland’, ‘the symbiosis of rural and urban’ in land use, and the coming dominance of a ‘quaternary’ sector of labor force, due to the advent of an information economy. Recent studies explained how the genesis of Megalopolis stems from his earlier political geography. Between 1961 and 1983, he became Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris; in 1968 he was offered the chair of the school of geography at Oxford University (Hertford College), which he viewed as a synthesis of France and America, the close of his yearly Atlantic transhumance, and a springboard to Japan (Figure 1). Urban geography remained pre dominant in his theoretical and applied work from 1956 to 1994. In his last two decades, he elaborated further on the concepts of territory, centre periphery, the political aspects of urbanization, capital cities, telecommunica tions and settlements, and diasporas. Free from any de terminism, Gottmann’s general contribution to human geography focused on the organization of space, in a historical perspective, and with a particular interest for how psychology shapes the material forms and structures

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Figure 1 Jean Gottmann in the 1970’s.

of cohabitation. He retired from Oxford in 1983 as emeritus fellow, and in 1993 was nominated honorary fellow. He died in Oxford in 1994. In his long career, Gottmann chaired the International Geographical Union (IGU) Commission on the Ameń agement Regional (1949–52), Centre d’Etudes Prospective Committee on French Urbanization in Paris (1962–66), Fondation Europeénne de la Culture Committee on Urban ization (Amsterdam, 1969–72), World Society for Ekistics (Athens, 1971–73), Permanent Research Committee on Political Geography of the International Political Science Association (1976–94). Honorary fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1972); fellow of the British Academy (1977); honorary member of the American, Dutch, Italian, and Lie`ges geographical soci eties; vice president of the Royal Geographical Society; Chevalier de la Le´gion d’Honneur et des Palmes Acade´miques; doctor Honoris Causa at the University of Wisconsin, Southern Illinois, and Liverpool; honorary citizen of Guadalajara (Mexico) and Yokohama ( Japan). See also: City-Region; Core-Periphery Models; Cosmopolitanism; Growth Poles, Growth Centers; Historical Geography; Mega-Cities; Network Regions; Polycentricity; Regionalism; Sovereignty; Territory and Territoriality; World/Global Cities.

Further Reading Agnew, J. (2007). Territoire, souverainete´ et le corps politique. La Geógraphie 1523bis, 91 103. Baigent, E. (2004). Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and Jean Gottmann: Divisions over ‘megalopolis’. Progress in Human Geography 28, 687 700. Beaujeu Gamier, J. (1986). A la remise de la grande medaille d’argent au Professor Jean Gottmann, Oxford, 9 Octobre 1986. Acta Geographica 67, 6. Clout, H. (2006). Review: La strada di Gottmann. Progress in Human Geography 30, 696 698. Corey, K. E. (1995). In memoriam: Jean Gottmann, 1915 1994. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85, 356 365.

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Gottmann, J. (1947). De la me´thode d’analyse en geógraphie humaine. Annales de Geógraphie 56, 1 12. Gottmann, J. (1949). L’Ame´rique. Paris: Hachette. Gottmann, J. (1950). A Geography of Europe. New York: Henry Holt. Gottmann, J. (1952). La politique des Etats et leur geógraphie. Paris: A. Colin. [Reprinted 2007, Paris: CTHS.] Gottmann, J. (1955). Virginia at Mid Century. New York: Henry Holt. Gottmann, J. (1957). Les Marche´s des Matie`res Premie`res. Paris: A. Colin. Gottmann, J. (1959). Etudes sur l’Etat d’Israel et le Moyen Orient. Paris: A. Colin. Gottmann, J. (1961). Megalopolis, the Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. New York: The Twentieth Century Fund. Gottmann, J. (1966). Essais sur l’ameńagement de l’espace habite´. Paris: Laye, Mouton. Gottmann, J. (1973). The Significance of Territory. Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia. Gottmann, J. (ed.) (1980). Centre and Periphery, Spatial Variation in Politics. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Gottmann, J. (1983). La Citta` Invincibile, una Confutazione dell’Urbanistica Negativa. Milan: Angeli. Gottmann, J. (1994). Beyond Megalopolis, towards a World Community? Tokyo: The Community Study Foundation. Gottmann, J. and Harper, R. (eds.) (1990). Since Megalopolis, the Urban Writings of Jean Gottmann. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gottmann, J. Muscara`, C. (eds.) (1991). La citta` prossima ventura, Roma Bari: Laterza.

Hooson, D. (1983). National cultures and academic geography in an urbanizing age. In Patten, J. (ed.) The Expanding City, pp 157 178. London: Academic Press. Hubert, J. P. (2007). L’art de reínventer la re´gion. La Geógraphie 1523bis, 104 115. Johnston, R. (1996). Jean Gottmann: French regional and political geographer extraordinaire. Progress in Human Geography 20, 183 193. Muscara`, C. (2003). In the steps of Jean Gottmann. Ekistics 70, 418 423. Muscara`, L. (2005). La Strada di Gottmann. Rome: Nexta. Muscara`, L. (2005). Territory as a psychosomatic device: Gottmann’s kynetic political geography. Geopolitics 10, 26 49. Muscara`, L. (ed.) (2007). Une Geógraphie dans L’histoire, Actes du Colloque Internationale: L’orbite de la Geógraphie de Jean Gottmann. Paris: Socie´te´ de Geógraphie. Sanguin, A. L. (1996). Jean Gottmann et la geógraphie politique. In Claval, P. & Sanguin, A. L. (eds.) La Geógraphie Française a` L’epoque Classique (1918 1968), pp 229 240. Paris: L’Harmattan. Sanguin, A. L. and Pre´ve´lakis, G. (1996). Jean Gottmann, un pionnier de la geógraphie politique. Annales de Geógraphie 587, 73 78.

Relevant Websites http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ Fonds Gottmann at the Bibliothe`que Nationale de France.

Governance M. Goodwin, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Keynesian Welfare State A political and economic system, which balanced mass production with mass consumption, underpinned by state welfare provision. Metagovernance The coordination and organization of governance structures – sometimes referred to as the governance of governance. Multilevel Governance A political system in which different territorial levels of governance share decisionmaking competencies across a variety of scales, linking local governance to regional, national, and international political networks. Partnership An arrangement which deliberately draws together the resources of specified partners in order to achieve a defined objective.

Introduction The 1990s saw the widespread adoption of the term governance in academic, policy, and practitioner circles alike, and by the end of that decade governance had gained a widespread currency across many of the social sciences. To those interested, for instance, in the geog raphies of public policy, political institutions, organiza tional change, and social networks, the term governance opened up new avenues of enquiry into a wide range of social and political systems. Where we once spoke almost automatically of the government of such systems, we now routinely talk of their governance. This article traces the reasons behind this shift, and examines the usage of the term governance within human geography.

The Turn to Governance It was no accident that by the 1990s the term governance had begun to appear regularly in the geographical lit erature. Indeed, like many other terms used within the social sciences it is date and place specific, and its as cendancy can be linked to a series of social and political changes which swept across the Anglophone world in the 1980s and 1990s and together resulted in a changed meaning to the notion of the government. This changed meaning emerged through three interconnected pro cesses, which individually and collectively served to question the established ways of governing society. First, there had been the fiscal crisis of the post war Keynesian

welfare state, and its associated modes of economic and political coordination. Although the precise nature of the welfare state varied from country to country, by the 1980s governments across Western Europe, North America, and Australasia were reducing their spending and cutting their welfare budgets. Second, in many instances – especially the UK, USA, Australia, and New Zealand – neoliberal governments were swept to power on a wave of new right ideology which provided a politically effective critique of state activity, government bureaucracy, and ‘red tape’. Once in power, however, the ideology turned from a ‘rolling back’ of the state to a search for new forms of intervention and control. These new state forms were constituted by a raft of new agencies and institutions, some based in the civil service, some operating at ‘arms length’ as quangos (quasi autonomous nongovernmental organizations), and others occupying a somewhat in determinate sphere as nondepartmental public bodies. This was reinforced by the third process, whereby pol itical actors at the local level have themselves formed a range of coalitions and partnerships which have also transformed the institutional structure of government. Some of these have been funded and promoted by higher tiers of government, but others are the result of local decisions and arrangements to involve nonstate actors from both the private and voluntary sectors. The end result was a transformation in the insti tutional map of government, and a change in the way society was governed. Where public services had once been the sole province of central and local governments, these changes to the role of the state transformed this system into one which instead involved a wide range of agencies and institutions drawn from the public, private, and voluntary sectors. These still include the institutions of elected government, but also involve a range of nonelected organizations of the state, as well as insti tutional and individual actors from outside the formal political arena, such as voluntary organizations, private businesses, and corporations and supranational insti tutions such as the European Union. Reflecting these changes, the term governance is thus used to refer ‘‘to the development of governing styles in which boundaries between and within public and private sectors have be come blurred’’ (Stoker, 1998: 17). Hence the concept is not simply an academic synonym for government. Its increasing use signifies a concern with a change in both the meaning and content of government. As Rhodes puts it, ‘‘governance signifies a change in the meaning of government, referring to a new process of governing; or a

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changed condition of ordered rule; or the new method by which society is governed’’ (Rhodes, 1996: 652–653). Where government signals a concern with the formal institutions and structures of the state, the concept of governance is broader and draws attention to the ways in which governmental and nongovernmental organizations work together, and to the ways in which political power is distributed, both internal and external to the state. In the words of Jessop, the term governance signals a shift to ‘‘a broad concern with a wide range of governance mech anisms with no presumption that these are anchored primarily in the sovereign state’’ (Jessop, 1995: 310–311). This ‘broad concern’ has been picked up across the social sciences, and the parallel emergence of the term ‘governance’ across economics, international relations, organizational studies, sociology, public administration, and political science owes something to the fact that each was struggling to understand these broad sets of changes in the relationship between elements of the state, market, and civil. In institutional economics the notion of gov ernance led to a growing interest in forms of economic and corporate coordination which bridge the divide be tween state intervention, pure markets, and corporate activity. In international relations, the focus is on the coordination of nation states through international agencies such as the United Nations (UN) and through international agreements such as the Kyoto Treaty on Climate Change. In organizational studies, the focus brought by a concern with governance has again been coordination, this time of interorganizational relation ships, but there has also been a concern with the self organization of institutions, especially through the study of organizational intelligence and learning. In sociology, theorists have drawn on Foulcaultian inspired notions of governmentality and discipline to examine the inter section between the technologies of government and the technologies of the self, introducing an individual and subjective stance into the debates on governance. In all these disciplines, one will see the term governance used slightly differently – although sharing a common root. In human geography, it is perhaps the explicit policy focus of the political science literature that has had most influence, as political geographers have sought to understand the changing ways in which different places and different territories are governed. The concept of governance explicitly focuses attention on the relations between different actors, and on their coordination – and crucially from our perspective draws attention to the complex geographies now involved in the act of gov erning any particular area. The governing of any par ticular space – whether that is a city, a region, or a rural area – is now a complex, differentiated and multiscaled process, involving a range of different actors and agen cies. Indeed, this complexity has been recognized by the development and use of the term ‘multilevel governance’

within both political science and geography. The term signals a concern with the way in which different terri torial levels are linked within a dispersed decision making system, and it has been especially used as the focus of empirical work on governance structures within the European Union. This has meant that governance studies have extended well beyond the Anglophonic world and empirical studies of governance cover a wide range of different countries. We now turn to the ways in which the concept of governance has opened up a set of interlinked research questions.

Governance as a Research Perspective Importantly, the term governance does not just refer to a new set of institutions and actors involved in the process of governing. It also signals a change in the nature of the relationships between governing organizations. Taken together, these uses of the term provide us with a new framework for interrogating and understanding the changing ways in which the society is governed. We can analyze this framework by using five propositions set out by Stoker, and interested readers are referred to his article for further details. The five propositions are given in the following: 1. Governance refers to a set of institutions and actors that are not only drawn from but also beyond government. 2. Governance identifies the blurring of boundaries and responsibilities for tackling social and economic issues. 3. Governance identifies the power dependence involved in the relationships between institutions involved in collective action. 4. Governance is about autonomous self governing net works of actors. 5. Governance recognizes the capacity to get things done, which does not rest on the power of government to command or use its authority. It sees government as able to use new tools and techniques to steer and guide. These should not be seen as statements that can be proved or disproved, but rather as propositions which open up a number of research issues which would not have been investigated under the old systems of gov ernment. As such, each unfolds new avenues of enquiry for human geographers. Institutions Beyond Government The first proposition challenges understandings of sys tems of government that focus heavily on the formal structures of elected government, at both local and central levels. But by drawing our attention to the

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complexities of modern governance, the first proposition also points to the highly differentiated polity within most contemporary nations. It also leads us to ask questions about how this polity is differentiated spatially and functionally. Governing organizations are now linked across local, regional, national, and supranational scales, and they are drawn from the public, private, and volun tary sectors. Figure 1 shows something of this complexity. It is drawn from the work of Winter and shows the governing networks operating around one small re generation project in the County of Devon, in the UK. The connections in the network reach from Hatherleigh, a small market town, to regional and national tiers of government, and they involve a host of partnership or ganizations, which themselves have member organiza tions drawn from different sectors. Although this figure simply refers to one service area in one small town, it shows the nature and range of organizations involved in the new rural governance. Under the old structures of the welfare state, which predated the turn to governance, this diagram would have had only four organizations on it – the Hatherleigh Area Project (HAP) itself, the Borough Council, the County Council and central government. Now, after the shift to governance it has over 25, all with differing relations to each other. The diagram de ploys different arrow thicknesses in order to capture

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these different types of organizational relationship. Thin lines represent relationships of praxis where HAP works with another local institution because of mutual interest or complementarity. Dotted lines mark strategic rela tionships, where HAP is guided in some way by the policy or strategy of a higher level organization. Financial relationships are represented by thick lines, and rela tionships which are both strategic and financial are marked by double lines. The messiness and scope of this complexity raises fur ther questions concerning legitimacy and power. Research has uncovered widespread concerns about the operation of this new structure of governance – many components of which are unelected and unaccountable. This is more than a normative concern about where power should and should not be held. It also raises the very practical problem that to be effective in the long run, holders of power should have legitimacy. Yet it is very difficult to trace lines of ac countability within such a system. Partnerships and the Blurring of Boundaries The second proposition points not just to the complexities of modern governance, but to the ways in which these shift responsibilities away from the institutions of elected structures of government. This shift can be summed up by ongoing concerns about the active citizen and the

Central government

Regional assembly

RDA

DEFRA/GOSW

National agencies: Co, Ag, EN, EA, FC

RDA Rural advisory group Objective 2 Rural task group Market and coastal towns initiative

ERDF Consultative group Taste of West

SF&F strategy delivery group

Devon county council

SW chamber of rural enterprise

NGOs (NFU, RSPB, etc.)

Devon strategic partnership

Devon rural network

Devon towns forum

Devon renaissance

Parish councils, local organisations Local regeneration companies

SW rural affairs forum

Local strategic partnerships West Devon Borough council

‘Embryonic’ devon economic concordat

Misc local initiatives, e.g. culm grassland land management strategy; SW forest; Ruby county, etc.

Hatherleigh Area Project

Figure 1 Rural regeneration: the governance network for Hatherleigh in West Devon. Reproduced from Winter, M. (2006). Rescaling rurality: Multi-level governance of the agro-food sector. Political Geography 27, 748, with permission from Elsevier.

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responsible corporation – now both engaged in the part nerships which deliver public services. Table 1 is taken from the work of Edwards et al. and shows the extent of the agencies involved in the new structures of governance. A number of issues arise from this table. The first is the sheer number of partnerships involved in the new structures of governance. In many ways partnerships are the emblematic form of governance, as they seek to draw together the resources of a number of different partners, and replace the role and functions of single, elected government authorities. These ‘resources’ may be finan cial, practical, material, or symbolic, while the partners may be drawn from different sectors or from the same sector. The rationale for partnership creation is that the blending of resources is necessary in order for a desired outcome to be achieved. These partnerships have grown almost exponentially in recent years, and communities of all sizes now usually boast a plethora of groups focused on community development, civic refurbishment, busi ness development, marketing, sustainability, and service delivery in policy areas such as health, social services, childcare, education, policing, transport, and tourism – all constituted as some form of partnership, bringing together a range of organizations, often from across the public, private, and voluntary sectors. Edwards et al. looked purely at regeneration partner ships, and only examined three rural counties in the UK, but they found over 150 partnerships in operation. Had they examined other service areas, such as health, edu cation, and housing, and other places, then the numbers would have been multiplied accordingly. Aside from the sheer number, the complexity of their structure stands out. Some partnerships had over 50 members, and many had 10–15. The involvement of so many partners leaves considerable scope for blame avoidance and scape goating. There is within the new governance what at times seems like an endless circle of responsibility which can never quite be closed. Each agency or actor blames another, and the public can never quite manage to pin point which of the partners is responsible if things go wrong. Although one of the advantages of partnership working emphasized within policy discourse is the cap acity of partnerships to integrate different sectors, in practice few partnerships meet this tripartite ideal. Re search has consistently confirmed that a minority of partnerships do actually have representation from all three sectors, and for a significant proportion the part nerships exist solely between agencies in the public sector. Research has also found that both the voluntary and private sectors are more strongly represented in partnerships scaled at a local level. This raises questions of access to power, as community and private sector actors are more commonly enrolled into partnerships focused on delivery, than into partnerships focused on strategic discussion and decision making.

Power Dependence and Collective Action The third proposition concerns the power dependence involved when a range of agencies come together to act collectively. Put simply there is a divergence between the wish for effective and swift action and the lack of co ordination which inevitably follows from dependence on others. Governance as an interactive process between a range of organizations draws attention to the difficulties of negotiating shared goals and agendas. Moreover, the contribution of partners drawn from different sectors to partnerships is not equal. Research has shown that public agencies and local authorities are frequently responsible for financing and initiating partnerships, and play the major role in resourcing them on a day to day basis, especially in the provision of office space and personnel. Indeed, the concept of governance as an interactive process between a range of organizations draws attention to the difficulties of negotiating shared goals and agendas, and to the acceptance that many intended actions will not match eventual outcomes. Most studies have found that despite a rhetoric of inclusion and partnership, there is a considerable imbalance of power between those in volved in the new rural governance, and many point to the difficulties of involving both private and community sectors, and have also identified considerable gender imbalances in the new governance structures which tend to be male dominated.

Self-Governing Networks The fourth proposition focuses our attention on self governing networks, and much research has been carried out on urban regimes. A regime is formed when a variety of local interests mesh together to form a relatively stable coalition, and involves a number of groups cooperating behind a certain set of policies to achieve their own ends – which may well vary from group to group. Research pays attention to the more informal arrangements that sur round and support the official workings of government, and indeed such informal coalitions often outlast formally elected administrations. Often regimes are directed at securing competitive advantages for particular urban lo calities, as local actors seek collective arrangements that will promote their locality in an increasingly competitive global economy. Such regimes have been given the label of urban growth coalition. The idea of growth coalitions was first developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s to ac count for the pro growth nature of much urban politics in the USA. Research argued that a key feature of US urban government was the formation of coalitions of local busi ness leaders seeking to promote growth. The key players in such coalitions (also known as growth machines) were local property owners and property developers who stood

3 64 42

17

154 100

13 1

50 14

90 58

14

37 13

26

59 38

4

20 7

28

77 50

10

14 10

43

70 45

8

26 9

27

LA

20 13

1

5 0

14

P

37 24

1

26 0

10

TEC

12 8

0

3 0

9

Prior to 1993

78 51

10

25 8

35

1994– 96

63 41

8

20 6

29

1997– 2000

Initiation of partnership

79 51

7

32 2

38

Ongoing

Duration of partnership

75 49

10

18 12

35

Limited life

Key EU ¼ European Union Q ¼ Quango LA ¼ County or District Council P ¼ Private Sector TEC ¼ Training and Enterprise Council V ¼ Voluntary/Community Source Edwards et al. (2000) Partnership Working in Rural Regeneration Bristol Policy Press 8

Subcounty Place Tota N (%)

47

Q

EU

Facilitative

Delivery

Funding of partnership

Focus of partnership

73

Number of initiatives

The structure of regenerat on partnersh ps n m d Wa es and Shropsh re

Reg ona and above County Subcounty Area

Scale of territory

Table 1

132 86

43

64

Q

71 46

30

25

121 76

19

30

V

40

51

LA

Sector mix of partners

87 56

22

32

36

P

7.39

19 4.35

7.48 7.29

10.38

Aver. nos. of partner

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to gain the most from a rise in property values, due to economic growth which would fuel intensification of land use and demand. They were joined by other pro growth interests – financiers, regional banks, construction com panies, estate agents, retailers, etc. – who wished to mo bilize the powers of local government in order to create a business climate conducive to economic growth. They were acting out of self interest, but the key to success was to present this to local politicians and the local electorate as value free development which was self evidently good for the locality. This model of local politics seeks to ex plain how economic agents in the city realize their vested interests through influencing local politics – the key point here is that the new mechanisms of governance are giving much more scope for this influence to be exercised. Of course, not all regimes are concerned with the pursuit of growth, and much of the work in this area has focused on the ways in which different types of regimes are established in different urban contexts. Many simply wish to protect the status quo, while others are concerned with long term transformative change. It is interesting to note that one of the very first (and still most influential) geographical papers to explicitly use the term govern ance – that by Harvey – focuses on the different strat egies employed by different types of entrepreneurial urban governance.

New Tools of Government The fifth area of research prompted by a governance perspective actually focuses on the institutions of gov ernment, in recognizing that the capacity to get things done does not rest with government alone. In short, it recognizes that government itself is now operating in a changed environment, and consequently is concerned with analyzing different modes of intervention. Indeed, there is a strong sense in the governance literature that government itself has acknowledged this, and is busy reinventing itself in a variety of guises – as an enabler, commissioner, manager, and shaper. The role for gov ernment shifts from direct intervention to one of co ordinating and integrating others, hence the famous remark about governments now being more involved in steering rather than rowing. It is seen more as one of identifying appropriate stakeholders and then developing the relevant opportunities and linkages for them to be brought together. However, even where government does succeed in carving out a new role for itself, there is no guarantee of success. Indeed, all kinds of tensions and difficulties among partners and between different insti tutions may well cause governance failure. Ironically, while many theorists see the emergence of governance as a response to market failure and state failure, we still need to allow for the possibility of governance failure.

Governance is not necessarily a more efficient solution than the state in providing public goods and services.

Beyond the Dichotomy of Government and Governance This final proposition also reminds us that government and governance are not two separate processes, and that there is not simply a linear path from one to the other. Indeed a review of research in this area raises a number of thoughts over how we might conceptualize the rise of the new governance. Initially, when researchers found evidence of the rise of partnerships, quangos and other new governing structures, these were conceptualized in terms of a shift from (local) government to (local) gov ernance. However, recent research has uncovered at tempts to coordinate the profusion of governance structures at local and regional levels. In the UK, for instance, Local Strategic Partnerships and Local Area Agreements have been introduced in an explicit effort to rationalize the ever increasing complexity of governance. This might be better conceptualized not as a continu ation of governance but as a response to the problematics of governance. In succinct terms, what we are seeing is an attempt to govern the structures of governance. Thus governance still operates in the shadow of government, and a critical conceptual task is to understand how the two systems are linked and interrelated. One idea which can be drawn on to investigate the relationship between governance and government is that of metagovernance, a concept which focuses explicitly on the practices and procedures which secure governmental influence, com mand, and control within governance regimes. The picture which emerges from recent empirical work is indeed one where the structures of government, including local government, are attempting to secure ‘influence, command, and control’. For instance, formal institutions of elected government provide the ground rules for the operation and funding of partnerships, they provide much of the resources for their day to day op eration, they deploy information and intelligence on partnership activities and they resolve disputes and shape partnership behavior through an increasingly complex system of guidance, monitoring, assessment, and discip line. When the partnership structures grow too unwieldy, the state steps in to replace them with a more rational ized and refined system. What we are witnessing is the development of new constellations of government and governance. This does not mean that we can replace concepts of governance with those of metagovernance. Indeed, metagovernance is premised on the existence of gov ernance regimes. Rather we should be looking to extend work on governance by connecting it to an understanding

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of changes in government control and authority. In this way we can look to move beyond the increasingly sterile ‘government versus governance’ debates which can des cend into either proving or disproving a shift from one to the other. Metagovernance offers us a way out of this impasse by offering us the opportunity to connect changing governance structures on the ground to chan ging political strategies and changing articulations of state power, in examining new constellations of both government and governance. See also: Entrepreneurship; Governance, Urban; New Urbanism; State; Urban Growth Machine; Urban Policy; Urban Regimes.

Further Reading Edwards, B., Goodwin, M., Pemberton, S. and Woods, M. (2000). Partnership Working in Rural Regeneration. Bristol: Policy Press.

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Goodwin, M. and Painter, J. (1996). Local governance, the crisis of Fordism and the changing geographies of regulation. Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers 21, 635 648. Gualini, E. (ed.) (2006). Governance rescaling in Europe: Analytical and empirical explorations. European Planning Studies 14(7 Special Issue), 881 995. Harvey, D. (1989). From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler 71B, 3 17. Imrie, R. and Raco, M. (1999). How new is the new local government; lessons from the UK. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, 45 63. Jessop, B. (1995). The regulation approach, governance and post Fordism: Alternative perspectives on economic and political change? Economy and Society 24(3), 307 333. Pierre, J. (ed.) (1997). Public Private Partnerships in Europe and the United States. London: Macmillan. Rhodes, R. (1996). The new governance: Governing without government. Political Studies XLIV, 652 667. Stoker, G. (1998). Governance as theory: Five propositions. International Social Science Journal 155, 17 28. Ward, K. (2000). A critique in search of a corpus; re visiting governance and re interpreting urban politics. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 25, 169 185. Winter, M. (2006). Rescaling rurality: Multi level governance of the agro food sector. Political Geography 27, 735 751.

Governance, Corporate D. Wo´jcik, Oxford University Centre for the Environment, Oxford, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Board of Directors A group of people who oversee the affairs of a corporation, usually headed by a chairman. Co-determination Practice whereby employees have a role in management of a company. Corporate Stakeholders People and organizations affected by any action taken by a corporation. Equity In finance referred to as the residual value of a company’s assets after all liabilities have been allowed for. External Capital Capital obtained from sources other than a company’s retained earnings, mainly from equity investors or lenders. Hostile Takeover Occurs when one company (acquirer) attempts to buy out another (target) company whether the management of the target likes it or not. Shares One of a number of equal portions in the capital of a company, which entitles the owner to a proportion of distributed profits (dividends) and a part of residual value if the company goes into liquidation.

Definitions and Origins The distinction between narrow and broad definition of corporate governance is illustrated in Figure 1. In a narrow sense, corporate governance concerns the rela tionships between providers of finance to companies and corporate managers, and focuses on legal prescriptions, business practices, social norms, and other ways in which providers of finance can obtain returns on their invest ment. In principle, investors in companies should be able to count on the willingness of their management to maintain a good reputation and obtain further finance in the future. Such mechanisms alone, however, would be insufficient to maintain investors’ confidence and assure a steady flow of finance to companies. In terms of the narrow definition, the objective of corporate governance is therefore to enhance firms’ access to external capital and facilitate investors’ access to investment opportunities. Among providers of external capital to companies, we can distinguish between owners as providers of equity finance, and lenders as providers of debt finance, espe cially banks. In contrast to lenders, which through debt contracts are entitled to a predetermined flow of

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repayments, owners’ returns on investment consist of dividends, that is, the part of net corporate profits divided among owners, and capital gains, that is, the difference between the price at which owners can sell their own ership titles and the price at which they acquired them. Lenders are interested primarily in the company’s ability to meet the promised repayments, while owners are concerned with its overall profitability and corporate value assessed by potential buyers. Lenders also typically hold collateral in the form of part of a borrower’s assets, which they can sell if the company defaults on its re payments. If a company goes bankrupt and is liquidated, lenders also have priority over owners in sharing the proceeds from liquidation. Because of the character of owners as ultimate or residual risk takers in companies, corporate governance research focuses on owners, and is concerned with the mechanisms with which equity holders can obtain returns on their investment in com panies. Corporate governance may refer to a variety of corporate forms. At one extreme, there are enterprises in which all managers are owners, and all owners are managers. At the other, there are corporations in which thousands of investors, whether individuals or insti tutions, hold shares, which are traded on a daily basis on stock markets. The complexity of corporate governance is obviously higher in the latter cases, and consequently the primary focus of corporate governance research is further narrowed down to relationships between corporate managers and shareholders. Broad definitions of corporate governance extend the subject to other stakeholders of the firm: employees, suppliers, customers, local communities, and the gov ernment. As such, corporate governance concerns rela tionships of each of these groups with corporate managers, and also their relationships with each other, to the extent to which they influence how companies allo cate resources and distribute returns. In terms of broad definition the objective of corporate governance is to contribute to economic growth and its fair distribution. The distinction between the narrow and the broad def inition has a positive and normative aspect. On a positive level, narrowly defined corporate governance can be viewed as a subset of wider corporate governance issues. The subject of corporate governance research can thus be seen as a spectrum, from the relationships be tween shareholders and managers, to those among all possible corporate stakeholders, with a wide range of intermediate forms. These include the frequently studied mutual relationships between owners, managers, and

Governance, Corporate

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Owners Employees

Suppliers

Shareholders

Corporate managers

Customers

Lenders

Other institutions

Government Local community

Figure 1 Broad and narrow definition of corporate governance.

employees. On a normative level, however, many pro ponents of the broad definition claim that narrow defin itions promote the attitude that corporations should be run solely in the interest of owners, thus unfairly justi fying the disempowerment of other stakeholders, in particular employees. This tension is an important source of dynamics in corporate governance research, high lighting its relevance for policy making, as well as for understanding the contemporary world. With the very subject area of corporate governance being contested, corporate governance research is best seen as an interdisciplinary debate, rather than a focused academic discipline. The disciplines with the most direct stakes in corporate governance research are finance, economics, law, accounting, business, and management. With time, however, other social sciences including sociology and human geography should develop a growing stake in the debate. Historically, the roots of corporate governance as a socioeconomic phenomenon can be traced back to the emergence of joint stock companies in the seventeenth century, when numerous cases of managers abusing shareholders on a mass scale highlighted governance problems. The implosion of the Mississippi Company in France and the South Sea Company in Great Britain are two infamous examples. Classical economists, including Adam Smith, highlighted potential problems arising from the separation of ownership from company management. Throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries interest in corporate governance issues grew with the rise of joint stock companies, and theorizing on the nature of the firm. Research addressing corporate governance ex plicitly, however, started in earnest in the US only in late 1970s. By the late 1980s it had spread to other developed economies including Germany, Japan, and the UK. Only in late 1990s did it become worldwide, including appli cations in emerging and developing economies.

The Context of Contemporary Corporate Governance Debate A number of developments contributed to the rise of corporate governance policy, research, and media debate in 1990s and early 2000s. The privatizations of public assets, starting in the UK in 1980s and later unfolding in Western Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the former Soviet block, could be seen as an experiment in corporate governance on a mass scale, opening up questions of who the owners of com panies should be and how they should relate to other stakeholders. In some cases it was seen as desirable to find large strategic investors for the newly privatized com panies. In other cases, the preferred option was to sell shares to thousands of small investors on public stock markets. Both routes encountered problems and failures. Some companies were sold at low prices to strategic investors that turned out to be controlled by former managements, leaving nobody able to undertake the painful process of restructuring the company. In other companies managements were able to exploit the in ability of small investors to act collectively. In addition to highlighting difficulties in establishing appropriate own ership and control structures in companies, privatizations also contributed to the creation of a large class of small shareholders – millions of individuals relying on the corporate sector as a source of investment income. Another event that fuelled the debate was the eco nomic turmoil in East Asia, led by speculation in 1997 against the Thai and Malaysian currencies. For some, this was caused by the flaws of international financial markets, including harmful speculation and the lack of coordination between foreign investors withdrawing their money from East Asia. For others, a major reason behind the crisis was the failure of the East Asian corporate sectors to create shareholder value. A spectacular version of the latter view

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appeared in the Western financial press under the heading ‘‘crony state capitalism’’ – a phrase that invokes the ex istence of strong and often hidden reciprocal relationships among industry leaders, their government patrons, and complicit bankers aimed at circumventing market mech anisms. Later events, however, demonstrated that the US and Western Europe are not immune to severe corporate governance problems. In 2001, one of the largest US companies, Enron, until then considered a model of cor porate governance, admitted to fraudulent activity by concealing gigantic losses and went bankrupt bringing demise also to their fraud assisting auditors Arthur Andersen. In 2003, the Dutch corporation Ahold, the third largest food retailer in the world, also announced huge previously concealed losses and found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy. During the periods preceding fraud detection, in both Enron and Ahold top managers’ and directors’ salaries were spiraling upward. Corporate governance problems around the world have necessitated responses by national governments and international organizations. In the US, the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 has introduced stricter requirements with regard to corporate accounting, internal control systems, directors’ responsibilities, and investor pro tection. At the international level the most influential initiative was the 1999 publication of Principles of Cor porate Governance by the Organization for Economic Co operation and Development (OECD), promoting the protection and equitable treatment of shareholders, responsible boards of directors, timely and accurate disclosure, and recognition of the rights of other stake holders. Both the Sarbanes Oxley Act and the OECD Principles have influenced the development of corporate governance codes and standards in many countries. The interest of national governments and international eco nomic organizations in corporate governance can be seen as a part of a shift from national and international eco nomic coordination by monetary and fiscal policy, to a greater emphasis on institutional development, including the rule of law. By undermining investors’ confidence, corporate governance problems can unsettle the financial systems of whole countries. Another set of interests shaping the development of corporate governance has been institutional portfolio investors, mainly pension funds, mutual funds, and in surance companies, which gained prominence in inter national finance in the 1990s largely as a result of a shift from pay as you go to funded pension systems. This began in high income countries but has spread to the rest of the world. These investors are large, but aim to hold highly diversified portfolios, so that their individual in vestments typically do not exceed several percent of any company’s equity. Institutional portfolio investors are therefore corporate outsiders, but larger and more powerful than individual shareholders. Those skeptical of

the positive influence of institutional portfolio investors argue that, managing other people’s money, they struggle with their own internal governance problems, and may collude with corporate managers at the expense of small shareholders and other stakeholders. On the other hand, they have demonstrated a growing interest in the cor porate governance of companies and even whole coun tries, and have thus sustained private sector corporate governance services. Such services range from legal assistance for share holders trying to influence corporate decision making or intending to sue a company for governance misconduct; through advice to companies on investor relations or on the design of internal control procedures and systems; to corporate governance ratings, whereby individual com panies are rated according to standards of good govern ance. They include law firms, management consulting companies, large accountancy firms, credit rating agen cies, as well as specialized corporate governance service providers. In addition, stock exchanges have responded to the prominence of corporate governance debate by cre ating stock market indices based on the stock prices of companies that satisfy certain standards of corporate governance. This gives qualifying companies additional visibility in the market, and promotes the stock market as a place for trustworthy investment by individual and institutional investors. In summary, there is a growing market for corporate governance services and standards, as corporate governance is seen as an important source of risk by investors, and a significant risk category for managers trying to attract external finance.

Theoretical Underpinnings With the significance of corporate governance subject to interdisciplinary debate it is difficult to identify its the oretical underpinnings clearly. Nevertheless, the theories that have so far had most influence on the debate in corporate the interrelated concepts of agency, contracts, and collective action. At a basic level, relationships between managers and stakeholders in a company can be conceptualized as those between agents and their principals, so that the central question becomes how the former act in the interests of the latter. This raises several problems. First, even if managers work with the best intentions, they have to use their business judgment and make timely decisions in reacting to the market, without procrastinating on how each decision may affect stakeholders. Second, and more serious, in reality we cannot expect all managers to be so devoted to stakeholder interests. By the nature of their positions, managers have superior access to corporate information compared to stakeholders. They may there fore make decisions to enrich themselves at the expense


of stakeholders, for example, by overpaying for transac tions with firms controlled by relatives, or by engaging in projects that bring them social prestige without maxi mizing the interests of the company. One way for principals to make agents act in their interest is by entering into legally enforceable contracts, such as employment contracts, loan contracts, contracts with suppliers, or service and sale contracts with customers. The existence of enforceable contracts is highly significant for the proper functioning of corporate governance, but contracts do not present an ultimate solution to the agency problem. The relationships with managers set in the con tracts may be affected by the relative power of different stakeholders. For example, employees may have employ ment contracts with the company but the conditions offered may still be poor. Contracts may also be in complete, and may not fully protect the principals. So, employees cannot be guaranteed lifetime employment in a particular company, and owners’ contracts do not give ex plicit guarantees of return on their investment. The view that corporations should be run solely in the interest of owners is primarily based on the argument that they put everything they invest at risk, while other stakeholders have contracts which, although never perfect, guarantee some predetermined rewards. Two other generic problems complicate the relation ships between corporate managers and stakeholders. First, different groups of stakeholders have different, often con flicting interests. An obvious example is that corporate profit can be used either to increase salaries, to pay bonuses to managers, or to pay dividends to owners. Managers may be able to take advantage of such conflicting stakeholder interests. For example, spending excessive corporate re sources on local cultural and sporting events may earn them social prestige. Second, there may be many entities or individuals within a group of stakeholders. Despite some commonality of interests this can therefore lead to col lective action problems. Even if it is highly beneficial for shareholders as a group to exert pressure on corporate management, the costs for individual shareholders may exceed their expected benefits. In other words, shareholders may wait for others to take the initiative in the hope of free riding on the potential shared benefits. Collective action and free riding problems also apply to other groups of stakeholders including customers and employees, within consumer protection associations, and trade unions.

Major Mechanisms of Corporate Governance Boards of Directors and Executive Compensation Boards of directors (boards), typically elected and re moved by shareholders, and themselves appointing and

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removing senior managers, are meant to act as inter mediaries by representing the interests of shareholders to managers. In some countries the boards also include representatives of other groups of stakeholders, for ex ample, employees. The main problem with boards acting as representatives of shareholders is that they are often dominated by the management or by large owners at the expense of small shareholders. Their members have limited access to information compared to managers and lack incentives to confront managers. One commonly proposed governance standard for the functioning of boards is their degree of independence from manage ment. Specifically, it is recommended that at least half of the directors have no links with management or large owners, and that the company chief executive officer (CEO) should not be the same person as the chairman of the board. Independent directors are believed to be more likely to defend shareholders’ interests, although research shows no clear cut evidence for the benefits of in dependent boards. One of any board’s tasks is also to determine the level and structure of compensation for top managers. In theory, one way to align the interests of managers with those of shareholders would be to base some part of executive compensation on corporate fi nancial performance and especially stock market prices. Skeptics nevertheless point out that managers may ma nipulate both of these. Concentrated Ownership The existence of large owners is the most common mechanism to counterbalance the power of managers in corporations. The concept of concentrated ownership is relative. It might refer to a majority stake exceeding 50%, or one of only 10% if the company otherwise has diluted ownership. However defined, large owners have more incentives than small owners to monitor management. The main disadvantage of concentrated ownership is that large owners may treat themselves preferentially at the expense of small investors, as well as employees and other stakeholders. Another problem with large shareholders involves the trade off between control and liquidity. Large blocks of shares offer control but the number of potential buyers for them is much smaller than that for small amounts of shares. Thus, the prevalence of companies with concentrated ownership depletes the li quidity of the stock market, and hinders the development of the latter as a source of external finance for companies. Hostile Takeovers In company takeovers the bidder makes an offer to share holders of the target firm to buy all or a fraction of shares at a stated tender price. In hostile takeovers, the objective is to gain majority representation on the board, and to appoint new board members and a new CEO against the

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wishes of the current management. The bidder gains control if it acquires more than 50% of the voting shares. In practice, the threat of a hostile takeover often discip lines management and, even if the threat itself is insufficient, poorly performing management may be re moved after a takeover bid. Most corporate governance codes support the process of hostile takeovers, recom mending restrictions on the use of takeover defenses, such as subjection of share transfers to board approval. The latter may reduce the threat of hostile takeovers, but can also strengthen the bargaining position of the target, often for the benefit of target’s shareholders. To further complicate the picture, there is no conclusive research evidence that hostile takeovers are directed mainly at poorly performing firms, nor that the efficiency of com panies increases after a takeover. Hostile takeovers may also be disruptive for companies, where human capital and the creation of informal relations of trust between management and other stakeholders, including em ployees, is important. If these parties know that current management can be so easily replaced, they may be re luctant to commit themselves to such trust based re lations and developing firm specific human capital. Disclosure Disclosure enhances shareholder and other stakeholders’ access to information about corporate affairs that would otherwise be restricted to management. A distinction needs to be made between disclosure of financial statements and corporate governance disclosure. Financial disclosure con tributes to corporate governance but strictly speaking is a subject of research primarily in accounting, not corporate governance. With regard to corporate governance it is ex pected that companies should disclose and make publicly available information on the rights and duties of share holders, antitakeover protection, and board structure and functioning, including details of board members’ and ex ecutives’ remuneration. Disclosure is stressed by all cor porate governance standards, ratings, and codes, and it is probably the least controversial mechanism of corporate governance. While a corporation may have a sensible ex planation for particular antitakeover protection or for the lack of independent board members, there seems to be no justification to keep these elements of corporate governance secret from the public. To be sure, transparency of cor porate governance does not interfere with sensible com mercial confidentiality protecting sensitive information concerning products, markets, or innovations.

International Corporate Governance Corporate governance mechanisms vary greatly between countries. While dispersed ownership structures pre vail in large US and UK corporations, concentrated

ownership is dominant in the rest of the world. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, for example, have a two board system in which a separate manage ment board is overseen by a supervisory board, with members of the latter barred from performing manage ment functions. In some countries including Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Luxembourg, and France companies satisfying certain criteria, mostly with respect to size, are required to have employee representatives on boards, thus involving what is called co determination. Hostile takeovers are very uncommon outside the US and the UK. The combinations of corporate governance mech anisms in different countries are referred to as national systems or regimes of corporate governance. There are two main typologies suggested by international com parisons of corporate governance regimes. At a global level a distinction is made between countries with more or less effective corporate governance and those where corporate governance is ineffective. The allocation of countries between these groups corresponds roughly with the division between developed and developing countries, with transition and emerging economies on the path to achieve effective corporate governance. De veloping countries are considered to be struggling with basic corporate governance problems including the underdevelopment of independent and efficient courts that could enforce contracts between stakeholders, and low levels of corporate transparency. Within developed economies a further distinction is made between coun tries where corporate governance is based on stock markets, and those where it is centered on large owners, often with a relatively active role played by employees, banks, and the government. A stock market based regime prevails in Anglo American countries, with a pre ponderance of dispersed ownership, institutional port folio investors, stock market based compensation, and relatively frequent takeovers. Continental Europe, Japan, and the developmental states of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are considered main bastions of corporate governance based on concentrated ownership. Such typologies of national corporate governance sys tems tend to be based on very broad generalizations. Corporate governance systems are embedded in the wider socioeconomic systems of respective countries, and are affected by multiple historically and geographically con tingent factors. These include the corporate scandals that have made public opinion suspicious of the operations of stock markets, cosy trust based relations between stake holders, an emphasis on cooperation and solidarity as social priorities, rather than competition and individual ism, as well as the often covert political and ideological orientations of business. Moreover, corporate governance systems can differ within countries, between regions, sectors, and individual companies. Industries relying on


human capital may require different corporate governance from those depending more on financial capital. Com panies with long research, development, and implemen tation periods may require different solutions from those with short project cycles. Different corporate governance arrangements may also suit different regions depending on their inherited socioeconomic structures. Corporate governance systems around the world are not set in stone. During the 1990s and 2000s, stock market based executive compensation, shareholder suits, and hostile takeovers have entered the corporate stage in Continental Europe and Japan. Many companies, from Europe, Latin America, and Asia cross list their shares on Anglo American stock markets, thus subjecting them selves at least partially to Anglo American corporate governance regimes. Institutional portfolio investors, led by pension funds, have established themselves inter nationally. In terms of regulations, the OECD Principles, and the ‘Cadbury Code’ in the UK, have been emulated to varying degrees in many countries. The dynamics of corporate governance trigger the question of whether there is a ‘best’ system of corporate governance, which the world might be moving toward. Some commentators welcome the shift toward the principles of Anglo American corporate governance developed in 1990s and early 2000s, claiming that such convergence is driven by internationalization of product and capital markets. Others argue that diversity of socioeconomic circum stances, systems of value, and traditions will continue to resist the imperatives of global finance, recalling that in the 1980s, before Anglo American corporate governance ‘came into fashion’, Japanese and German corporate governance regimes were highly praised for being con ducive to long term cooperative investment in research and development, and close relationships with suppliers. Given the multifaceted, embedded, as well as histor ically and geographically contingent nature of corporate governance, there are ample opportunities for cross fer tilization between human geography and other disciplines contributing to the debate. On the one hand, familiarity with corporate governance issues can enhance human geographers’ understanding of the firm as a nexus of contracts and often conflicting relationships between multiple constituencies, and also of the influence of owners, including shareholders, on the direction of cor porate change. On the other hand, the analysis of the spatial diversity and appropriate differentiation of cor porate governance is an area where human geography can significantly contribute to the corporate governance de bate. Whatever the direction taken by corporate govern ance across the world, a significant part of change involves growing spatial mobility of managers and employees, as well as the activities of capital owners. It seems rea sonable to expect corporate governance, understood as a complex set of relationships between different groups of

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stakeholders, to become more adaptable to their varying identities across widely differing commercial global environments. If human geography offers an insight into such mobility and adaptability, it may also offer key in sights into the future dynamics of corporate governance. See also: Business Services; Capital and Space; Corporate Responsibilities; Financial Risks and Management; Firms; Globalization and Transnational Corporations; Privatization.

Further Reading Becht, M., Bolton, P. and Roell, A. A. (2003). Corporate governance and control. In Constantinides, G. M., Harris, M. & Stulz, R. (eds.) Handbook of the economics of finance (1 edn.). pp 1 109. Amsterdam: Elsevier/North Holland. Berle, A. A. and Means, G. (1932). The modern corporation and private property. New York: Macmillan. Christopherson, S. (2002). Why do national labor market practices continue to diverge in the global economy? The ‘missing link’ of investment rules. Economic Geography 78, 1 21. Clark, G. L. and Wo´jcik, D. (2007). The geography of finance: Corporate governance in a global marketplace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Denis, D. K. and McConnell, J. J. (2003). International corporate governance. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 38, 1 36. Jensen, M. C. (2000). Theory of the firm: Governance, residual claims, and organizational forms. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. La Porta, R., Lopez de Silanes, F., Shleifer, A. and Vishny, R. (1998). Law and finance. Journal of Political Economy 106, 1113 1155. Mallin, C. A. (2004). Corporate governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Monks, R. A. G. and Minow, N. (2004). Corporate governance. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Morck, R. K. (ed.) (2005). A history of corporate governance around the world: Family business groups to professional managers. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. OECD (1999). Principles of corporate governance. Paris: OECD. Roe, M. J. (2002). Political determinants of corporate governance: Political context, corporate impact. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shleifer, A. and Vishny, R. W. (1997). A survey of corporate governance. Journal of Financial Economics 52, 737 783. Wo´jcik, D. (2003). Change in the German model of corporate governance: Evidence from blockholdings 1997 2001. Environment and Planning A 35, 1431 1458.

Relevant Websites http://www.ecgi.org European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI). http://www.dcgn.de German Corporate Governance Network. http://www.gcgf.org Global Corporate Governance Forum, International Finance Corporation. http://www.icgn.org International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN). http://www.oecd.org Organisation for Economic Co operation and Development (OCED). http://www.ssrn.com Social Science Research Network (SSRN). http://www.thecorporatelibrary.com The Corporate Library. http://www.worldbank.org The World Bank.

Governance, Good G. Williams, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Clientalism The structuring of political power through informal networks of ‘patron–client’ relationships, in which powerful patrons provide their dependent clients with resources in return for their loyalty. (Third World) Debt Crisis The default of many countries in the global South on rapidly increasing debt service payments in the early 1980s, which threatened not only the viability of their own economies, but also sections of the international banking industry (commonly dated to Mexico’s default on its international debt in 1982). HIPC ‘The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries’ initiative was launched by the World Bank and the IMF in 1996. To qualify as heavily indebted, a country must have annual per capita income below the threshold for eligibility for concessional borrowing from both the World Bank and the IMF, and external public debt that exceeds 150% of its annual exports. Liberal Democracy A form of government characterized by periodic elections in which a plurality of political viewpoints vie for a popular mandate, and underpinned by constitutional restrictions on state power and the protection of individual rights. Millennium Challenge Corporation Established in 2004 by President George Bush, the MCC is the body that administers the Millennium Challenge Account, a bilateral development fund directed at ‘wellgoverned’ developing countries; the fund received more than US$ 2bn over the first 2 years of its operation. Neoliberalism A capitalist political philosophy, initially set up in opposition to Keynesian ideas of economic management, that stresses the importance of a ‘freemarket’ approach to economic growth. PRSP Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers are national programs for poverty reduction. PRSPs should present a policy framework and agenda that has been produced by a national government for tackling poverty and has that government’s full commitment. Completing a PRSP – which then must be approved by the Bank and the IMF – is a critical criterion in qualifying for HIPC debt relief. Rent Seeking The extraction of value from others without making any contribution to productivity – particularly used to refer to the use of government power to extract such ‘rents’ by regulations which restrict freemarket competition.

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Introduction: ‘Good’ Governance and Its Evaluation Governance, as noted elsewhere in this encyclopedia, is a concept that encompasses forms of rule and the exercise of power in ways that extend far beyond the institutions and actions of government alone. Definitions of govern ance are often all encompassing as a result (Box 1); but despite this breadth, good governance has come to take on a very specific meaning within international devel opment. While all states and regimes have always used their own norms and values to monitor the quality of their rule to some extent, the explosion of interest in governance among international development agencies since the late 1980s represents something rather different. It has aimed to produce a degree of global consensus over what constitutes ‘good governance’, and to make gov ernance reform a legitimate and central issue within their development agendas. The World Bank’s own definition of good governance (Box 2) is thus intended not only to be an international standard against which all countries can be measured, but delivering good governance has also become a major concern of its own development pro grams, where it is seen as a causal variable in the delivery of economic growth and poverty alleviation. The ability to define norms of good governance is clearly an im portant exercise of power in itself – the attempt to en force them through development interventions, still more

Box 1

Defining governance

UNDP. ‘‘Governance is viewed as the exercise of economic, political and administrative authority to manage a country’s affairs at all levels. It comprises mechanisms, processes and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations and mediate their differences’’. Institute of Governance, Ottawa. ‘‘Governance comprises the institutions, process and conventions in a society which determine how power is exercised, how importance decisions affecting society are made and how various interests are accorded a place in such decisions’’. International Institute of Administrative Sciences. ‘‘Governance refers to the process whereby elements in society wield power and authority, and influence and enact policies and decisions concerning public life, and economic and social development’’. From Weiss, T. G. (2000). Governance, good governance and global governance: Conceptual and actual challenges. Third World Quarterly 21(5), 795 814.

Governance, Good

so. A concern with the quality of governance, an in herently political issue, also represents a new departure for bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who are prohibited in their art icles of agreement from interfering in the internal pol itics of nation states. Underlying the seemingly reasonable measures in Box 2 are a set of values and assumptions that both define good governance in very particular ways – as a feature of liberal, democratic, and capitalist regimes that resemble those in the West – and claim legitimacy in projecting these values on to others. The emergence and spread of the ‘good governance agenda’ thus raises questions that are central to the concerns of political and development geography: about the nature of contemporary inter national power relations, the degree to which the sover eignty of individual developing countries is being challenged, and about the evolving roles of international development agencies in the post Cold War era. To ad dress these questions, it is necessary to first look at how and why development institutions became concerned with governance, to see how the good governance agenda has evolved over time, and finally to briefly review the practical mechanisms through which it has been enforced.

Box 2 The World Bank’s six dimensions of good governance 1. ‘Voice and accountability’, the extent to which a country’s citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and free media. 2. ‘Political stability and absence of violence’, perceptions of the likelihood that the government will be destabilized or overthrown by unconstitutional or violent means, including political violence and terrorism. 3. ‘Government effectiveness’, the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies. 4. ‘Regulatory quality’, the ability of the government to formulate and implement sound policies and regulations that permit and promote private sector development. 5. ‘Rule of law’, the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide by the rules of society, and in particular the quality of contract enforcement, the police, and the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence. 6. ‘Control of corruption’, the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain, including both petty and grand forms of corruption, as well as ‘capture’ of the state by elites and private interests.

From Kaufmann, D., Kraay, A. and Mastruzzi, M. (2006). Governance Matters V: Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators for 1996 2005. Washington: The World Bank.

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The Emergence of ‘Good Governance’ as an Aim of International Development Until the 1980s, international development agencies showed little interest in the quality of governance, or even the nature of the state itself, in the countries to which they provided assistance in the global South. Following the tenets of modernization theory, it was expected that developmental states would need to be proactive and strongly interventionist in transforming ‘traditional’ economies and cultures, and international agencies such as the World Bank and UNDP primarily treated governance issues as an ‘internal’ matter. Where multilateral or bilateral aid relationships did seek to exert pressure on individual Southern countries, this was dir ected more at the international geopolitical concerns of the Cold War and the ending of European colonialism than it was with the nature of rule within countries. This pattern began to change over the 1980s for a number of reasons. First, the World Bank and the IMF had begun to push a more aggressively neoliberal agenda that directly defined ‘bad’ governance in terms of too much state intervention in the economy. The Bank’s 1981 report ‘Accelerated Development in Sub Saharan Africa’ (com monly called ‘the Berg Report’, after its editor Elliot Berg) was a landmark document here, arguing that poor agri cultural performance in the region was a result of poor government policy. State procurement mechanisms pro vided cheap food for urban dwellers, but Berg argued that doing so they undermined farmers’ incentives to raise production. The recommendations of this report (dis mantling state run Marketing Boards, and devaluing local currencies to encourage export led agricultural growth) were indicative of a wider policy change in the Bank that saw opening up of Southern economies to the global market as essential for their development. This new policy direction gained real teeth as the 1980s ‘debt crisis’ spread across the global South; the World Bank and the IMF engineered a series of ‘structural adjustment programs’ (SAPs), bailing countries out of debt, but only on the condition that they accepted significant international oversight of domestic economic policy. SAPs were thus important in extending the ‘legitimate’ intervention of international development agencies into domestic affairs. Second, the clear political illegitimacy of some Southern regimes, from white only rule in Rhodesia and South Africa to the extremes of Pol Pot’s Kampuchea or Jean Claude Duvalier’s Haiti, suggested that domestic governance structures should be a subject of international concern. Indigenous pro democracy movements in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere over the 1980s suggested that there was some popular legitimacy for calls for ‘good governance’ that emphasized the import ance of citizens’ voice and governments’ accountability, expressed through multiparty democratic states.

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Finally, the collapse of Eastern European communist regimes and the USSR itself by the end of the decade cemented these changes. In practical terms, the absence of a global counterweight to the US was important in en abling international financial institutions to play a more interventionist role in the internal affairs of national governments. There was no alternative source of economic support for countries facing SAPs, and far fewer geo political constraints on the financial institutions’ areas of operation, as shown by the setting up in 1991 of the new European Bank for Reconstruction and Development for the former Soviet economies. In theoretical and ideo logical terms, the ‘triumph’ of the West meant that neo liberal economic policies and liberal democratic ideas of the role of the state were to play a major role in the restructuring of the post Cold War world. By the start of the 1990s, the stage was thus set for development agencies to take a greater interest in the nature and quality of governance in countries of the global South. Although the ‘good governance agenda’ was (and still is) shaped by the geopolitical context in which it emerged, there have been a number of important changes within this agenda, and it is these that we turn to now. Good Governance – Key Moments in a Changing Agenda As Adrian Leftwich observed, good governance can be defined at a number of different levels. At a fundamental or systemic level, debates around the term have assumed that good governance will take place in the context of democratic states operating within a global capitalist system. At the level of political structures, Southern nations have been expected to follow a western inspired model of the state. This includes a clear division of powers between the legislature, executive, and judiciary, and a political system in which parties are allowed to openly compete for a democratic mandate. At a more surface and practical level, good governance is also supposed to involve significant administrative and managerial reform of the public sector to produce a state with an efficient, accountable, and professional bureaucracy. Given the World Bank’s articles of agreement, it has been this final and more limited sense of administrative

Table 1

reform which has been the explicit focus of its own good governance agenda, although the other two elements have also been implicit within its approach. The Bank’s 1989 report ‘Sub Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sus tainable Growth’ is credited with popularizing the term ‘good governance’ in this sense, and was itself a response to the criticism of the effects of SAPs unleashed on the continent in the wake of the Berg Report. Whereas Berg had seen ‘bad’ governance as being primarily the result of an oversized state and problematic macroeconomic pol icy, the 1989 report tempered this view slightly. The ‘rolling back’ of the state by widespread privatization of public assets continued, but alongside this was a recom mendation for increased expenditure on human resource development. This recognition of the need for ‘adjust ment with a human face’ did not, however, leave the existing structure of the public sector unchallenged, and instead ushered in widespread administrative reforms. Thus the report advocated reshaping the delivery of basic public services such as primary education, primary health care, and water supply in accordance with market prin ciples, and the use of user charges as a means of (partial) cost recovery. More generally the Bank policy of the early 1990s continued the 1980s theme of governance reform through two major policy directions. The first was restructuring the internal rules of government: key concerns here were improving external transparency (through reform of budgeting and public auditing rules) and strengthening institutional checks and balances on executive power (some of these – such as the call for independent judiciaries and central banks – represented a fundamental reshaping of the overall architecture of the state in line with idealized Western norms). Second, the state was to open its operations up to competitive pres sure; here, alongside the outright privatization of state functions, there was an increased emphasis on principles of new public management to produce internal markets for government services and performance based in centives for government personnel. In ‘World Development Report 1997: the State in a Changing World’, the Bank expanded on the underlying thinking behind the individual reform programs it had advocated over the 1990s. The role of the reformed state (Table 1) was envisaged as providing the supporting conditions by which markets could deliver sustainable

Matching the state’s roles to its capacity: a World Bank view

Functions of the state

Addressing market failure

Improving equity

Minimal functions

Providing pure public goods

Protecting the poor

Intermediate functions

Addressing externalities

Activist functions

Coordinating private activity

Regulate monopoly

Overcoming imperfect information

Providing social insurance Redistribution

From World Bank (1997). World Development Report, 1997: The state in a changing world. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

Governance, Good

growth (in particular, correcting those areas where mar kets were absent or failing) and providing some degree of social justice (improving equity between rich and poor). There was a call in this report for governments to ‘get the basics right first’ – to focus on fulfilling the minimal functions of the state – until they had the capacity to progress to more technically demanding aspects of pro moting growth and equity. Alongside this agenda of mapping the state’s roles to its capacity, the report rec ognized that after almost 2 decades of neoliberalism, a degree of state ‘strengthening’ was also necessary; public sector reform was about processes of institution building and not merely cutting back the state. The Bank’s earlier strategies for achieving reform by changing the internal rules of government and introducing competitive pres sures were now enhanced by a third mechanism: en hancing voice and partnerships. It is here that the good governance agenda really began to move beyond the actions of government alone – with NGO support, public–private partnerships, and community participation all being seen as important parts of governance networks alongside a restructured relationship between the state and the market. From the turn of the millennium, the debates on what constitutes good governance within the Bank moved on still further. Given the wider focusing of international development intervention around the ‘Millennium De velopment Goals’, good governance was presented as integral to poverty alleviation, and ‘World Development Report 2000/1’ contained detailed discussion of how governance reform could be made ‘pro poor’. In part, this was a recasting of its existing governance agenda through the lens of poverty (e.g., the report presented curbing corruption not merely as an end in itself, but as instru mentally necessary in attacking poverty because the costs of corruption are disproportionately borne by the poor). In addition, this report also recognized the social and political barriers marginalizing poorer groups from en gaging with the state, and suggested a number of overtly political strategies to overcome these. Distancing itself still further from its pronouncements on public service delivery in the 1980s, the Bank has also recently ac knowledged that sound management of public services needs to be responsive to a range of local conditions (Figure 1). Since the late 1980s, the World Bank’s good govern ance agenda has thus evolved considerably in both its intentions and its content. From being primarily con cerned with ‘rolling back’ the state, it has moved to in creasingly sophisticated forms of public sector reform conducted in partnership with both the private sector and the civil society. Its ultimate aims have also expanded reflecting a broadened set of mainstream development objectives that have now (re)instated an explicit focus on poverty alleviation and citizen participation alongside the

609

narrower market led growth agenda of the Thatcher– Reagan years. This broadened agenda has brought the Bank into making policy recommendations that are ex plicitly political in their content (such as building alli ances to strengthen the ‘voice’ of poor people within government), a move which sits uneasily next to its re peated attempts to present reform as a technical/ad ministrative exercise designed to implement an allegedly ‘universal’ and ‘neutral’ vision of what constitutes good governance. The evolving agenda has, however, largely left the Bank’s underlying assumptions of this vision untouched. Its aim remains the creation of an efficient, but fairly minimal, state that can support a dynamic, market led economy. The means of reaching this end remains reforms that are primarily ‘internal’ to Southern countries, and operate by ‘getting the incentives right’ such that the self interested action of government em ployees and agencies support the greater common good. There are, of course, conceptions of good governance within the international development community that differ greatly from those of the Bank. The UN based institutions (such as UNICEF and UNDP) have always placed a greater emphasis on the human costs and con sequences of development, and within good governance debates, this has meant that they have stressed questions of human rights and democratic accountability more than administrative efficiency or service delivery. A more overtly political agenda is also present within the grow ing community of international NGOs (such as Human Rights Watch) that have an interest in governance issues. In addition, international intervention in ‘failing’ states – actively promoted by UN Secretaries General Boutros Boutros Ghali and Kofi Annan, over the 1990s – may be uneven in its implementation and effectiveness, but its justification on humanitarian grounds represents a sig nificant development. It places limits on national sover eignty in extreme cases of bad governance and also supports an alternative conceptualization of good gov ernance that places at its center, states as responsible political actors rather than mere facilitators of economic growth. A focus on the activities of the World Bank is, how ever, justified because it remains such an important international development institution, and has em phasized good governance so strongly within its own lending. According to Nanda, there has been a prolifer ation of activity from the Bank – between 1998 and 2000, it ran over 600 governance related programs in 95 countries and it initiated significant governance reform in the public sector in at least fifty countries. To really understand how the good governance agenda is reshaping the relationships between states and their citizens in the South, it is therefore necessary to look at the concrete mechanisms through which this wave of reform has been implemented.

610

Governance, Good

1 Yes

Central government financing with contracting

Easy to monitor? No

2 Central government provision

Yes

Homogeneous? 3 No Yes

Local government financing with contracting

Easy to monitor?

Yes

No

4 Local government provision

Pro-poor? 5

Client power − exeperiment with contracts

6

Client power − exeperiment with self-monitoring providers

7

Client power − exeperiment with community control, vouchers

Yes Easy to monitor?

No

No Yes

Homogeneous?

No Yes Easy to monitor? No

8

Client power − imitate market

Figure 1 Eight sizes fit all? Rethinking public service delivery in World Development Report 2004. In its recent thinking, the Bank has tried to recognize the range of political and other conditions that might affect the delivery of public services. Different models of delivery (numbers 1 8) are recommended depending on whether the overall political regime is pro-poor (or clientalist), whether or not the population the service aims to reach is relatively homogeneous, and whether or not the quality of the service delivered is easily monitored. Importantly, market competition at the point of delivery is now seen as only one of a range of possible institutional arrangements. From Devarajan, S. and Shah, S. (2004). Making services work for India’s poor. Economic and Political Weekly 36, p. 916.

Aid Conditionality and the Implementation of ‘Good Governance’ As with the earlier generation of SAPs, the conditions placed on development finance have been a major mechanism through which countries of the South have been required to commit to a good governance agenda. For some, this has meant involvement in multiple rounds of new aid programs aimed at improving governance

structures and building state capacity (Table 2). For those already facing high levels of international debt, the achievement of debt relief, through the recent ‘heavily indebted poor countries’ (HIPC) initiatives, has also meant meeting a series of governance related conditions. In both, similar techniques have been used to ‘discipline’ government, such as improving information management systems to make public sector spending more transpar ent, and enforcing centralized budgetary management

Governance, Good

Table 2

Governance reform initiatives in Tanzania and Uganda

Year

Uganda

Tanzania

1989

Public Service Review and Reorganisation Commission

Public sector reform as part of economic and social adjustment program

611

1990 1991

Creation of capacity building Secretariat

1992

Civil Service Reform Programme

1993

Economic and Financial Management Project I

1994

Workshop on Ethics and Transparency [Economic Development Institute; now World Bank Institute] a

1995

Institutional Capacity Building Project

1996

Parastatal and Public Sector Reform Project (PPSRP) Financial and Legal Reform Project

Service Delivery Survey [Economic Development Institute; now World Bank Institute] a End of first phase of PPSRP Tanzanian Revenue Authority created

1997 1998 1999

Second phase of PPSRP Public Sector Management Project Economic and Financial Management Project II

2000

Launch of PSRP (2000 2011) Privatisation and Private Sector Reform Project

2001

Privatisation and Utility Sector Reform Public Expenditure Review

2002

Capacity Building/Civil Service Reform Capacity Building II

2003

Capacity and Performance Enhancement Program Local Government Development Project II

Accountability, transparency, and Integrity Project Public Expenditure Review

a Note: Italics denote World Bank support for research attached to reform initiatives. From Harrison, G. (2005). The World Bank, governance and theories of political action in Africa. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 7(2), 240 270.

within which there is donor oversight. With regard to the latter, countries required to sign up to a ‘medium term expenditure framework’ effectively fix budget allocations in conjunction with the Bank’s advice, enforcing both overall financial restraint and tying individual ministries’ spending to their performance. This extensive external intervention in countries’ internal affairs is justified in two ways. First, there is intended to be explicit national ‘ownership’ of the reform packages, whether through identifying internal ‘champions’ or ‘change agents’ who will drive forward civil service reform, or through the government’s own drafting of the ‘poverty reduction strategy papers’ (PRSPs) which are central to HIPC based debt relief. Second, and as part of the wider move from ‘government to governance’ from the 1990s, part nership and civil society involvement in governance re form has also been stressed. Thus the production of PRSPs is explicitly intended to involve the participation of the population at large, both through local assessments

of poverty itself, and through civil society input to the policy making process. The net result of these mechanisms in delivering ‘good’ governance is open to debate. Certainly, they are making formal government decisions (especially those over budget allocation) more visible and predictable for donor agencies. To this extent, they are ensuring a greater degree of government accountability, and pos sibly limiting some aspects of corruption. But questions have to be asked about the wider impacts of donor driven accountability: if governments are repeatedly to look ‘upward’ to donors for approval of their actions, their sense of responsibility ‘downward’ toward their own citizens may actually be eroded. There certainly seems to be evidence for this in the states featured in Table 2, despite the fact that both are considered as success stories by the Bank: in Tanzania, ‘civil society’ engagement in the PRSP has been largely orchestrated through a select group of international NGOs, and in Uganda it has

612

Governance, Good

undercut earlier reforms aimed at improving local gov ernment’s financial autonomy and responsiveness to local conditions and ‘voice’. To reinforce its own claims to objectivity, transpar ency, and accountability, the World Bank has been in volved in an ongoing program of research to find reliable statistical measures for each of the six aspects of good governance highlighted in Box 2. Its series of ‘Govern ance Matters’ reports, dating back to 1997, have outlined the evolving methodology by which several hundred individual perception measures – that draw data from a range of sources such as global opinion polls, the country analysts of major multilateral development agencies, NGOs such as Amnesty International, and commercial risk rating agencies – have been amalgamated to produce their ‘worldwide governance indicators’. These allow the investigation of trends in the quality of governance over time, and inter country comparisons are used to offer statistical evidence to support the Bank’s claims that improving governance will foster economic growth and alleviate poverty (Figure 2). Given the Bank’s cham pioning of ‘transparency’, it is somewhat ironic that vir tually the only elements of the data set that make up the indicators that have not been made publicly available are its own Country Policy and Institutional Assessment data. It is almost impossible for any aggregate measure to capture what will inevitably be very diverse experiences

of governance, but these indicators have become powerful pieces of information in themselves regard less of whether they tell us anything significant about the ground realities within individual countries. As the international donor community seeks to maximize the impact of a limited aid budget, governance indicators are playing a new role in aid conditionality. Rather than commitments to ‘future improvements’ in governance being the condition of lending or debt relief, within USAID and the USA’s Millennium Challenge Corpor ation (MCC) a state’s ‘established track record’ of good governance is becoming a qualifying condition for future lending. The MCC uses the Bank’s world governance indicators within a set of sixteen measures of good gov ernance, and to qualify for its support a country must score better than the median in at least half these measures, and surpass the median on controlling cor ruption. This explicit decision to focus the USA’s bi lateral development aid on those who are already ‘good performers’ is a new and worrying trend; if the Bank’s understanding of the importance of governance reform as a driver of economic growth and poverty alleviation is correct, this amounts to writing off precisely those countries that are most in need of im provements in government capacity, and consigning their citizens to a future of poor economic and state performance.

Figure 2 Mapping good governance. The World Bank’s governance and anti-corruption web pages allow access to the ‘world governance indicators’ dataset. The website allows users to make a number of geographical, historical, and indicator-specific comparisons of the quality of governance using this data, such as this map showing the relative rankings of different countries in terms of ‘voice and accountability’ one of the Bank’s six dimensions of good governance. In maps such as these, the complex (and contested) methodologies that link a myriad of data sources to the Bank’s own definitions of good governance largely recede into the background, and a powerful and deceptively simple image of a world divided into ‘strong performers’ and ‘problem areas’ remains. Key: 90th 100th percentile (dark green); 75th 90th percentile (light green); 50th 75th percentile (yellow); 25th 50th percentile (orange); 25th 50th percentile (pink); 10th 25th percentile (red). Source: http://info.worldbank.org/governance/kkz2005/ worldmap.asp#map.

Governance, Good

Questioning the Good Governance Agenda ‘Good governance’ is thus very far from being a neutral term, and its implementation raises important questions about the exercise of power by international development agencies, and as such it has been subject to a range of criticisms from those opposed both to dominant con ceptualizations of the problem of ‘bad governance’ and to the actual practices of ‘reform’. One fairly limited form of critique is to accept that the good governance agenda may be desirable in theory, but, to argue that, in practice it is ‘setting the bar too high’ for developing countries. The list of areas in which governments ‘could’ improve their practice, and therefore reform is to be applied, has lengthened considerably over the last decade. As a result, Merilee Grindle has asked whether searching for ‘good enough governance’ – analyzing where and why examples of relatively good performance emerge within a country specific context, and from this looking to spread their effects to other areas of state activity – is therefore a more appropriate policy response than insisting that all countries respond simultaneously to all areas of an ever growing global agenda. More broadly, historical analysis shows that democratic and publicly accountable insti tutions took centuries to evolve in the West (and were often the result of economic development, rather than one of its pre conditions); for the international donor community to suggest that Southern countries should effect similar changes within a decade or so of intentional reforms is thus somewhat hypocritical according to Chang. A more radical critique, informed by debates in crit ical development geography and political geography, would question the theoretical underpinnings of the good governance agenda. From a geographical perspective, its neoliberal conceptualization of the reform process can be seen offering an analysis of power that is spatially de ficient in three important respects. First, the Bank’s thinking on political agency and change cause it to ignore the specificity of the places in which reform plays out. Viewing governance reform through the lens of rational choice offers a hopeful prognosis; once externally mo tivated ‘change agents’ and ‘champions’ have freed bur eaucracies from the shackles of perverse incentive structures (such as rent seeking or of clientalist politics), individual self interested behavior will generate its own momentum for reform in any and all contexts. This is, however, an analysis that ignores the historical and geo graphical conditions which produced ‘bad governance’ in the first place. Both Marxist and post colonial theories of the African state offer their own explanations of why political and economic power are frequently conflated in Africa, and why a neoliberal vision of the mutually supporting roles of states and markets is often untenable

613

there. As Graham Harrison has argued, by ignoring a contextual understanding of how political elites operate, the Bank risks both mistaking the ‘performance’ of reform for significant change, and overlooking how aid given in the name of ‘good governance’ may be reproducing their power. Second, implicit within the Bank’s approach is the idea that the conditions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ governance are primarily located ‘within’ Southern countries them selves. By framing questions of governance through a national lens, this mode of analysis crucially underplays the power of donor agencies and other international players as part of the ‘problem’ as well as the solution. For many Southern countries, earlier rounds of SAPs played a direct role in eroding and undermining state capacity and the World Bank’s failure to recognize this history is at best a highly convenient piece of institutional amnesia. Other donor agencies offer a more realistic analysis: the DFID 2006 White Paper, ‘Making Governance Work for the Poor’, contains welcome recognition of the fact that it is often the actions of powerful agents in a globalized economy such as transnational corporations and ‘first world’ states that create the conditions under which bad governance is reproduced in the South. This analysis is taken to its logical conclusion, and the White Paper ar gues that any credible good governance agenda must address current failures in ‘global’ governance (by actions as varied as tackling international money laundering to enforcing transparency on international public and pri vate sector transactions) instead of merely pointing the finger at ‘inefficient’ public bureaucracies within the South. Finally, there needs to be more critical consideration of the global geopolitical conditions under which a good governance agenda has developed. Debates around the nature of good governance have taken place in an international context that has itself undergone dramatic changes: the world at the end of the first decade of the twenty first century looks far different from the late Cold War period in which governance debates initially emerged. It is difficult to see how arguments for ‘good governance’ could have expanded so rapidly over the 1990s, and been so closely related to liberal democratic ideas of the role of the state, if an ideological and geo political counterweight to the West had existed during this period. But if a Western derived conceptualization of good governance has enjoyed a free reign since the col lapse of the USSR, it may not do so in future. As emergent nations in the global South, and China in particular, begin to flex their economic and political muscles internationally, the World Bank, the IMF, and individual donor agencies such as USAID or DFID may well find that they have a declining ability to enforce any notion of good governance through aid conditionality. Foreign investment conditional on a string of measures to

614

Governance, Good

ensure transparency, accountability, or public sector re form may seem like an irrelevant affront to national sovereignty for those governments lucky enough to have natural resources valuable to the new economic power houses of the twenty first century. Where countries are resource rich but governance poor, the challenges of molding governance structures in the image of the West may well be set to escalate rather than diminish, despite the growing sophistication of aid agencies’ agendas. See also: Aid; Civil Society; Debt; Governance; Modernization Theory; Neoliberalism; Neoliberalism and Development; Nongovernmental Organizations; Participation; Poverty; State; Structural Adjustment.

Further Reading Chang, H. J. (2002). Kicking Away the Ladder: Policies and Institutions for Economic Development in Historical Perspective. London: Anthem Press. Craig, D. and Porter, D. (2003). Poverty reduction strategy papers: A new convergence. World Development 31(1), 53 69. Devarajan, S. and Shah, S. (2004). Making services work for India’s poor. Economic and Political Weekly 36, 907 919. DFID (2006). Eliminating World Poverty: Making Governance Work for the Poor A White Paper on International Development. London: HMSO. Grindle, M. S. (2004). Good enough governance: Poverty reduction and reform in developing countries. Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration and Institutions 17(4), 525 548.

Harrison, G. (2005). The World Bank, governance and theories of political action in Africa. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 7(2), 240 270. Jenkins, R. (2001). Mistaking governance for politics: Foreign aid, democracy and the construction of civil society. In Kaviraj, S. & Khilnani, S. (eds.) Civil Society: Histories and Possibilities, pp 250 268. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaufmann, D., Kraay, A. and Mastruzzi, M. (2006). Governance Matters V: Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators for 1996 2005. Washington: The World Bank. Leftwich, A. (1993). Governance, democracy, and development in the Third World. Third World Quarterly 14(3), 605 624. Mercer, C. (2003). Performing partnership: Civil society and the illusion of good governance in Tanzania. Political Geography 22, 741 763. Nanda, V. (2006). The ‘good governance’ concept revisited. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 603, 269 283. Weiss, T. G. (2000). Governance, good governance and global governance: Conceptual and actual challenges. Third World Quarterly 21(5), 795 814. World Bank (2003). World Development Report, 2004: Making services work for poor people. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

Relevant Websites http://www.dfid.gov.uk The Department for International Development (UK Government). http://www.mcc.gov The Millennium Challenge Corporation (USA). http://www.worldbank.org The World Bank.

Governance, Transport I. Docherty, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK J. Shaw, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Accessibility The degree to which goods and services can be reached. Although transport is clearly of importance here, it is not the only factor which determines accessibility: Internet access, proximity of services to markets, and structural factors such as age, gender, poverty, and so on need also to be taken into account. Filling In The introduction of new and/or different state functions to replace old ones being discontinued. An example is the rolling out of a system of contract-based management to govern the private sector provision of public services, to replace a command-and-control approach when the service provider was in government ownership. Governance A more inclusive notion than that of traditional government, acknowledging that public policy is delivered by a range of organizations, from the state through to the private and voluntary sectors. The term also refers to the nature of the relationships between these organizations. Government The formal institutions of the state such as ministries, departments, municipalities, and so on. Hollowing Out The ceding by a government of its powers to other organizations. These might be ‘above’ the administration in question – such as a sovereign government transferring powers over an area(s) of its jurisdiction to a supranational body such as the European Union – or ‘below’ – such as to a regional assembly or a private sector contractor. Mobility The ability of individuals or groups to move around. Natural Monopoly The situation where a good or service is most efficiently provided by one supplier. Examples are those industries involving a highly capitalintensive network such as water and electricity and, in the transport sector, roads and railway infrastructure.

Introduction Transport has long been recognized as fundamental to the functioning of societies and economies, but the extent to which governments attempt to influence transport activities varies considerably. It will also depend upon a range of factors from the practical, such as the availability

of finance, to the more abstract, such as changing political philosophies and theories of governance. The nature and scope of state intervention can also produce different outcomes affecting the geography of not only transport but also economic, environmental, and social activities. This article explores the rationale for state involvement in transport, and in so doing explains how trends in the governance and ownership of transport systems and op erations have changed over time. Governments all over the world are involved in transport by providing, or regulating the provision of, infrastructure and services. Particular interventions in a transport market will be determined by the policies de veloped and adopted to suit prevailing circumstances. One definition of transport policy is ‘‘the position that some level of government takes on a particular transport issue,’’ and Rod Tolley and Brian Turton refer to ‘‘the process of regulating and controlling the provision of transport.’’ Although transport policy is both a public and a private sector endeavor – private companies will themselves have policies to govern their operations – governments are frequently the most involved in making and administering policies because many components of the transport system are owned or managed by the state. Policies for transport are derived not just in relation to particular modes, but will also relate to different spatial scales. Some, such as European Union (EU) regulations, will apply supranationally; others will be national or regional in scope. Local authorities will generally be concerned with policies relating to a neighborhood, town, or city. The originating body/bodies and relevant spatial scale of a policy will depend on the arrangements for government in existence in the territory to which the policy applies. In the USA, for example, policies might flow from federal, state, county, and city governments, in addition to some multijurisdictional districts in metro politan areas. We note later in the article that the recent shift in many countries from a traditional type of ‘gov ernment’ toward a more complex system of ‘governance’ can result in more joint working between layers of gov ernment and other stakeholders. It is not surprising that changes in transport policy can have significant impacts upon the transport geography of the area to which it applies. It might, for example, alter a rail network by providing for the construction of new high speed lines bringing places very much closer together in terms of travel time (such as the TGV net work in France – Figure 1) or the closure of a relatively

615

616


London

To Amsterdam Düsseldorf

Ostend Calais

ENG LA ND

Antwerp

Brussels

Cologne

Lille

Boulogne

GERMANY

BELGIUM Namur

English Channel Amiens

LUX Le Havre

Rouen

Reims Metz

Caen Nancy

PARIS

Brest

Strasbourg Rennes

Quimper

Orléans

Le Mans Angers

Tours

Besançon

To Zurich

Dijon

Nantes

Bern

FRANCE Bay of Biscay

Poitiers La Rochelle

TGV / Thalys / Eurostar highspeed line TGV / Thalys / Eurostar service operating on regular line

Geneva ClermontFerrand

Limogas

100

Toulouse

Nîmes Montpellier

km

150

Grenoble

Avignon

ITALY

Nice

Beziers Marseille Toulon Perpignan

0

To Milan

Valence

Bordeaux

Tarbes miles

Lyon

St-Étienne

Bayonne

0

Brig

Mediterranean Sea

SPAIN

Figure 1 TGV network in France.

little used passenger route (such as the infamous ‘Beeching cuts’ of the 1960s in Great Britain). Shifts in transport policy will not just alter the geography of transport activities: depending upon the type of change involved, the economic, social, and/or environmental geographies of an area will also be affected. For example, the TGV reduces greenhouse emissions by abstracting passengers from the airlines (an environmental impact at the global scale), and by reducing journey times influ ences the (re)location of businesses and residential de velopments (economic and social impacts on a local scale, and potential environmental benefits at the local and global scales if car usage is reduced as a result of more walking and public transport usage). Likewise, broader policies such as a rise in interest rates or the general level of taxation might impact upon the geography of transport

activity within a given area by, say, cutting the demand for rail or air services and prompting a reduction in the levels of service provided to certain destinations.

Why Is the State Involved in the Transport Sector? Transport is often described as a universal good, since most human activities depend on it to some extent. Markets depend on raw materials and finished products being transported from producers to consumers, and the myriad social and economic interactions we undertake in our daily lives – from visiting friends, to traveling to school, work, business meetings, and the shops – require movement between places. Managing this complex


pattern of mobility and the infrastructure and services that it requires has long been at the heart of why gov ernments seek to involve themselves in transport. A better understanding has also been gained of the need to manage transport’s ‘negative externalities’ or, in the words of Bill Black, the ‘‘events [such as car pollution] that result in significant disbenefits for persons who had little or no role in the decision making that led to those events.’’ A further factor, and one which has recently increased in prominence following terrorist activity in Western countries, is the influence of military and na tional security considerations. In addition to bespoke facilities supporting, for example, air force and army bases, large scale ostensibly civilian networks such as the Interstate system in the USA have been developed with national security in mind. Equally, decommissioned military installations, especially airports, are often re classified for use as civilian transport hubs. At the most basic level, the state is involved in the regulation and management of transport activities be cause the conditions rarely exist for a genuinely free market to function. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the narrative of transport governance was dom inated by economic and social imperatives. On the one hand there was the need to address natural monopoly (i.e., where a good is most efficiently supplied in mon opoly conditions) and market failure within transport systems, and on the other there was a desire to promote social equity in the transport opportunities available to individuals. These economic and social imperatives are, of course, interlinked. Monopoly in Infrastructure Provision The street is a good example of how certain aspects of transport activity tend toward natural monopoly. Streets do not just provide for mobility, they are also spaces that enable the exchange and sharing of goods and knowledge on which civic, economic, and cultural life depends. It makes no sense to have competing sets of streets; as a public good, the benefit of the street is maximized when it is part of a single, coherent geography to which access is open to all. Conceiving of the street in this way brings the role of governance squarely into focus because access to streets needs to be managed if the levels of security, social welfare, environmental protection, and economic inter action demanded by liberal societies are to be realized. Economic theory emphasizes the potential of carefully targeted state intervention to maximize a range of benefits to society unlikely to be expressed through pri vate profit in the market. In transport terms, this means that public provision of key infrastructure and services can be more efficient and equitable than the market al ternative. Indeed, it is often essential, since the cost and risks involved mean private companies are frequently

617

reluctant to provide them without some form of gov ernment underwriting. State intervention can also avoid wasteful competition and/or duplication of assets, such as separately owned, parallel streets and railway lines; this can also ensure that good value is obtained from the limited capital resources available within an economy if the planning and implementation of transport investment is carefully managed. The power of this argument is reflected in the fact that it became orthodoxy for governments of all political persuasions for much of the twentieth century. Moving away from the model of competing private sector railway companies (many of whom had gone bankrupt or were forced to merge) and eliminating private toll highways had obvious, immediate appeal to the political Left. Interestingly, though, it was also attractive to many on the Right. Innovations such as expressways and passenger aviation provided the opportunity for the state to seek a step change in the efficiency of the market economy by transforming the level of mobility available to individuals and firms so that trade would increase substantially and competition would spread. Social Equity The second key goal of transport governance has been to intervene in the provision of transport infrastructure and services so that a range of social policy goals can be achieved. Controls and systems of subsidy disbursement built up from the nineteenth century in order to promote customer, employee, and vehicle safety and to pre vent the emergence of significant social and financial disparities between areas and groups. Examples of regu latory interventions are those designed to: ensure afford able rather than monopoly fares; guarantee concessionary fares for the young, old, and disabled; promote a high quality of service provision; and stipulate the quantity of services provided to ensure (so far as was reasonable) a comprehensive transport network, especially in thinly populated areas. Social democratic and socialist govern ments alike nationalized various land transport modes, and air transport was publicly owned from an early stage in many countries. A significant element in the notion of transport equity is the development and support of public transport to (among other things) allow for trips to be made by dis advantaged individuals. Overall social equity can be maximized through the provision of a transport system which enhances the accessibility of a wide range of ser vices to as many people as possible. Indeed, the promo tion of transport equity is often thought of as a key aspiration within a comprehensive statement of policy objectives for the enhancement of quality of life. More over, widening access to life opportunities for disadvan taged groups can also serve to promote broader economic

618


benefits by, for example, increasing the mobility of a potentially neglected part of the labor force. It is also important to note that the capital cost of providing any new transport initiative should preferably be at the lowest social cost. This social cost will include the cost of the negative externalities associated with the transport development. These externalities were until relatively recently thought of as being primarily at the local scale, such as land take for new infrastructure de velopments and adverse impacts on air quality. In add ition, the building of a piece of transport infrastructure between two places reduces the available resources to do the same elsewhere. Investing in roads reduces the po tential to enhance the railway network; subsidizing public transport fares reduces the capacity to improve infra structure; and so on; it can be difficult to get the decision between infrastructure projects ‘right’, and there are many who would argue that the state is generally a poor judge.

The Neoliberal Age Compelling as it was for decades, wide ranging public sector involvement in the transport sector was in the end undermined as an approach to transport governance. Stagnating economies and a sharp increase in oil prices in the 1970s prompted governments to find ways of cutting spending across the public sector. At the same time, a new generation of national leaders including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan also saw political and philosophical merit in reducing state expenditure and the size of the public sector more generally. Administrations in countries such as the UK, the USA, and New Zealand started to adopt policies informed by neoliberal thinkers such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, William Niskanen, and Charles Tiebout. As a political and economic philosophy, neoliberalism countered the prevailing assumptions underpinning the ‘welfarist’ economies of much of the developed world by stressing the need to reduce state intervention in the economy and promote market forces which encourage competition, enterprise, and individual self reliance. Neoliberal ideas developed and spread through a range of institutions and political networks throughout the globe, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and were adopted by governments across Central and Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Adam Tickell and Jamie Peck suggest that neoliberalism has provided ‘‘a kind of operating framework or ‘ideological software’ for competitive globalisation, inspiring and imposing far reaching pro grammes of state restructuring and rescaling across a wide range of national and local contexts.’’ The transport sector has been affected significantly by this shift in political philosophy. Notwithstanding its

peculiarities, from the neoliberal perspective transport is the same as any other good, subject to market forces and the rigors of competition. The private car became seen as a symbol of freedom and progress – occupants can within reason go anywhere at any time – and governments deemed sustained increases in personal mobility facili tated by the car essential for economic growth. Large road building programs were often implemented to facilitate increased traffic volumes as a result. In respect of those modes in competition with the car, successive governments championed a range of reforms including the removal of competition restrictions – the process of deregulation – in an attempt to open up a market for services previously provided only by the public sector, and the downsizing, administrative fragmentation and in many cases outright privatization of state owned trans port undertakings. These measures were deemed neces sary to reduce the perceived oversupply of transport services, improve transport providers’ responsiveness to changing customer demand (often a function of rapidly increasing car ownership and use), and limit the need for public sector ownership, management, and subsidy. The procurement and financing of infrastructure also became more dependent on the private sector as governments looked to reduce their spending and debt liabilities. In continental European states, the ‘welfare’ economic model generally retained more influence, and the re structuring and liberalization of the transport sector only really gathered pace in the 1990s. Compared to what is (inaccurately) regarded as the ‘Anglo Saxon’ world, pol itical discourse was far less influenced by faith in de regulation as the means to economic efficiency. Instead, reform proceeded at a slower pace, with the objective being to deliver a true European common market for major transport services such as road haulage, aviation, and the railways dominating policy shifts. In some coun tries, this process was accompanied by the privatization of state owned companies in an effort to strengthen their competitiveness as well as to limit public subsidy. There is little doubt that some of these market re forms succeeded in realizing their intended cost savings, improvements in process efficiency, and reductions in bureaucracy. Equally, others did not bring about most of the positive effects forecast in terms of improving the scope and quality of transport services. In many in stances, reform was sufficient to significantly alter the pattern and nature of service provision. This brought clear advantages, but there were also adverse effects such as service contraction, reductions in public transport patronage, and increasing traffic congestion.

Redefining the Role of the State Just as the welfarist model of wide ranging state pro vision of transport services was superseded by neoliberal


ideas, so policies in the first decades of the twenty first century seem likely to have a different emphasis to those in the 1980s and 1990s. In many countries, something of a retreat from – or at least a redefinition of – neoliberalism is evident, as politicians seek to reengage the state with many areas of public policy. Governments have begun to adopt a more interventionist stance toward transport infrastructure and service provision. In those countries where the pace of the neoliberal project was greatest, politicians are reflecting more on the experiences of other countries where reform proceeded more slowly, and where the desire to achieve economic efficiency never attained preeminent status. Hollowing Out and Filling In In one sense, the bold rhetoric of neoliberalism reducing the role of the state was always misleading. It is true that a ‘hollowing out’ of the state’s existing functions was taking place, as privatization and deregulation signifi cantly curtailed the public provision of services. Yet, as Clive Charlton and Richard Gibb point out, despite the ‘‘undeniable prominence of liberalised transport systems,’’ there was ‘‘an apparent contradiction between the broad policy support for deregulation and privatisa tion and the continued, and even enhanced, regulatory environment affecting many transport systems.’’ This observation refers to the fact that, in reality, it was never possible to privatize or deregulate many transport mar kets to the point where the state could simply withdraw from them. This is not least for the reasons discussed earlier in this article – monopolies could not be broken up, consumers had to be protected, and social policy goals could not be ignored – and progress toward neo liberal goals had to be tempered by a degree of realpolitik. In other words, the process of ‘filling in’ was always in evidence. In the transport sector (as elsewhere), this has often been expressed by the introduction of contractual agreements – as a substitute for the command and con trol management style possible under direct ownership – to ensure that a range of outcomes specified by the state is actually delivered by the private sector. The British government’s decision to protect unprofitable rural bus services following deregulation is one example (the same industry might soon become subject to tighter regulation in order to address some of the ongoing shortcomings in service provision). Rail privatization in Great Britain has involved the tight regulation of a monopoly infrastructure owner and a plethora of contractual stipulations to which the pas senger train operators have to adhere. In large part, this was to guard against the significant network contraction – effectively a complete recasting of Britain’s railway geography – that would have ensued if private sector operators had sought to maximize revenue by closing

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unprofitable routes. The near collapse of the privatized rail industry in 2000–01 following a fatal crash at Hat field, near London, saw ministers rescue the bankrupt infrastructure company and provided a stark illustration of the state’s continuing role as guarantor of the last re sort in many areas of transport endeavor, even in a sup posedly privatized system of provision. Governments are facing the reality that while market based transport policies work well in some sectors, they function less effectively in others and in some cases tend not to function at all. The same applies in terms of the geographical implications of such policies: at the simplest level, the market will provide services in areas where they are profitable, but without appropriate regulation will precipitate their withdrawal or downscaling where money cannot be made. All of this means that privat ization and deregulation should not be interpreted as a simple reduction of state intervention and control. Rather, they are part of a broader process of state restructuring which incorporates elements of both de regulation and reregulation as established modes of or ganization are dismantled and new ones established. Public and Private Interdependence At the same time, as this process of ‘filling in’ of the state’s functions is becoming better understood, parallel developments generating increased interaction between the state and private transport interests are coming in creasingly to the fore. At least three important trends are apparent here: the ‘crisis of mobility’ brought about by worsening congestion; the recognition of the need to pursue environmental policy goals through intervention in transport markets; and the general shift to a more complex system of governance. The enormous growth in car (and air) traffic levels in recent decades has left a legacy of severe congestion in much of the developed world. Despite significant road construction programs, governments (or private sector holders of building concessions) are unable to build themselves out of congestion. Partly this is because the financial, political, and practical limitations on building new infrastructure are real – roads are expensive, attract a lot of opposition, and fill up very quickly after they are built (the phenomenon of ‘induced traffic’) – but it also dawned on politicians from the Right that continuing to accommodate such vast increases in mobility was in creasingly paradoxical as it implies very high levels of government spending. The resulting crisis of mobility has been an important driver of the state’s re engagement in the regulation of the transport sector. Essentially, some form of demand management needs to be put in place once the level of congestion reaches a certain threshold, otherwise the costs of this congestion jeopardize economic efficiency by

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creating delay and uncertainty in the transport system. The London congestion charge is a good working ex ample of demand management – congestion has fallen by 26–30% following the introduction of a daily charge – and the Dutch government is introducing a nationwide charging scheme early in the next decade. The second significant factor is the scale of transport’s contribution to global environmental damage. A critical introductory passage from the Brundtland Report noted the need for concerted government action because of ‘‘a growing realizationy that it is impossible to sepa rate economic development issues from environment issuesy and environmental degradation can undermine economic development.’’ Not only has an extensive lit erature developed in the field of environmental eco nomics that attempts to formalize and quantify some of these relationships, but also the case for government intervention in the transport market is much stronger since the international scale of transport related pol lution and emissions has become apparent. States and other government bodies are widely seen as the only institutions with the power to make any meaningful impact on such strategic processes, even if ultimately they rely on market mechanisms such as road user charging – derived from the work of environmental economists among others – to ascribe the costs of transport more appropriately to users. The more explicit recognition by many recent gov ernments of the importance of environmental as well as economic and social policy aspirations underscores the contemporary ‘three legged stool’ conception of sustainability as applied to transport policy, which seeks to balance these often competing demands. It is also interesting to note that the emergence of congestion and pollution as significant multiscalar issues repositions the state firmly in the role of arbitrator between public and private interests, as envisaged by those economists who identified nearly 100 years ago the potential for carefully targeted state intervention to benefit society. In order to address congestion and pollution, it is becoming neces sary for the state to take a leading role in restricting individual mobility. The third factor to consider is changes to the structures of governance witnessed in many countries as state insti tutions have sought to adapt to changing socioeconomic contexts. The emergence of supranational institutions (such as the EU) and other international treaties and organiza tions has challenged existing states from ‘above’, and in some countries there have also been challenges from ‘below’ in the form of (re)emerging nationalist movements and/or more vocal desires for increased regional autonomy and discretion in policymaking. The establishment of de volved governments within the UK in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland illustrates this well. Such ‘spatial’ hol lowing out – powers transferring up or down to institutions

with different jurisdictional territories – combines with the processes of functional hollowing out and filling in to produce complex, multi layered systems of governance often involving stakeholders from the voluntary and private sectors. Understanding how this impacts upon transport regulation and control – as for other areas of public policy – can be complicated and requires an analysis of the changing ways the state seeks to achieve its goals. Bob Jessop’s work on the processes underlying the changing character of state reorganization is useful in explaining how the regulation of transport might begin to look in a ‘post’ neoliberal world. The first such process, de nationalization, encapsulates the apparent spatial hollowing out of transport regulation. From ‘above’ comes, for example, the EU’s drive for the harmonization of transport markets between states in areas such as air traffic control and open access to rail markets. From below, subnational governments take on responsibility for the specification and franchising of transport activities such as local rail services in France, Germany, and Sweden. The second process, de statisation, reflects the increasing role played by nonstate actors in regulation and service management, such as the control of some regional airports in Europe by Chambers of Commerce or wide ranging public–private partnership consortia. Finally, the third process, the interstate transfer of policy, is clearly evident across the transport sector, be it the lessons learned from the privatization of British Rail (generally regarded as an overly complex and highly costly experiment), or the influence of the German Ver kehrsverbund tariff management concept in the franchise models of bus provision in many major metropolitan areas across the globe. In making sense of these developments, states are increasingly seeking to follow what Anthony Giddens characterizes as a ‘third way’, between neoliberal and welfarist thinking, by combining elements of market discipline in transport procurement and delivery with stronger state regulation for economic, social, and en vironmental reasons. Governments are both reacting to new threats such as widespread congestion and the en vironmental crisis, and addressing less immediate but equally important trends, such as aging demographic profiles that place new demands on systems of mobility and connectivity. They also attempt to replicate the old consistency of state provision of services with complex regulatory systems based on contractual relationships. And in doing all of this they routinely – or at least fre quently – share or cede/delegate responsibility to a far greater range of public, private, and voluntary sector stakeholders than has historically been the case. Although the neoliberal experiment was designed to facilitate a shift to the market provision of transport services, the need for state intervention in the system, albeit in a different form, has very clearly reasserted itself.


Conclusion This article has explored transport governance and ownership from a geographical perspective. It is im portant to understand the role of the state in transport because territorial governments are heavily involved in the management and ownership of transport activi ties; the strategies and policies they adopt over time will shape the development of transport infrastructure and services in a variety of ways at a variety of spatial scales. In addition to military and national security consider ations, taken as a whole, state interventions in the transport sector seek to promote economic development and efficiency while pursuing social objectives such as widespread mobility and accessibility, and addressing environmental imperatives like global warming and local air quality. The level and scope of state intervention in transport activity will depend upon a range of factors. The finances available to politicians at any given time are clearly im portant, but more abstract factors such as political ideologies must also be taken into account. A major re focusing of state involvement in the transport sector was attempted in response to the rising influence of neo liberal ideology, although in reality the extent to which states were able to withdraw from the transport sector is debatable; in many territories direct ownership and op eration of components within the transport market was replaced with management through contract and other regulatory apparatus. Most recently, transport systems around the world have witnessed something of a resur gence in state intervention arising from what might be described as a ‘crisis of mobility’, heightened concern about the global environmental impacts of transport, and the increasing complexity of the state sector. Looking to the future, it is inevitable that the relationship between

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transport and the state will continue to evolve in re sponse to broader social processes. See also: Transport and Deregulation; Transport and Sustainability.

Further Reading Black, W. (2003). Transportation: A Geographical Analysis. New York: The Guildford Press. Charlton, C. and Gibb, R. (1998). Transport deregulation and privatisation. Journal of Transport Geography 6(2), 85. Docherty, I. and Shaw, J. (2008). Traffic Jam: 10 Years of ‘Sustainable’ Transport in the UK. Bristol: The Policy Press. Giddens, A. (2000). The Third Way and Its Critics. London: Polity Press. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: University of Oxford Press. Jessop, B. (2004). Hollowing out the ‘nation state’ and multi level governance. In Kennett, P. (ed.) A Handbook of Comparative Social Policy, pp 11 25. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Knowles, R., Shaw, J. and Docherty, I. (2008). Transport Geographies: Mobilities, Flows and Spaces. Oxford: Blackwell. Marsden, G. and May, A. (2006). Do institutional arrangements make a difference to transport policy and implementation? Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 24(5), 771 789. Niskanen, W. (1973). Bureaucracy: Servant or Master? London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Rodrigue, J. P., Comtois, C. and Slack, B. (2006). The Geography of Transport Systems. London: Routledge. Tolley, R. and Turton, B. (eds.) (2001). Global Transport Issues. London: I.B. Tauris.

Relevant Websites http://www.internationaltransportforum.org/ International Transport Forum; Passenger Transport Executive Group. http://www.stif.info/IMG/pdf/plaquette anglais.pdf Introducing the STIF (Paris region transport authority). http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about tfl/2881.aspx Transport for London legislative framework.

Governance, Urban M. Raco, King’s College London, London, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

What Is Urban Governance? Urban governance is primarily concerned with the pro cesses through which government is organized and de livered in towns and cities and the relationships between state agencies and civil society (a term that is used to include citizens, communities, private sector actors, and voluntary organizations). Governance has multiple meanings. For some, it represents a concept and an ana lytical approach that opens up new ways of thinking about processes of government, urban politics, accountability, and democracy. For others, governance is a more de scriptive term that focuses attention on concrete insti tutions and their financing, roles, and responsibilities. Key questions for the analysis of urban governance include:

simply a matter of technical and/or bureaucratic pro cedures but consists of a set of processes and structures that shape and constitute broader relations of power, domination, and authority. Urban governance is principally concerned with the following topics: Urban politics: Urban politics relates to the complex • relationships between different groups of people and

Who is it that makes decisions about the organization • and implementation of policy in urban areas? How these decisions made? • Who are controls agendas and how? • What policy making processes exist? • Which institutions/interests • have the power and re • sources to shape policy agendas? What control do local people and individual citizens • have over the way their cities are governed? A focus on governance, therefore, draws attention to those interests that have the ‘power’ to make decisions about policy in cities and how processes of decision making operate. Effective policy development and im plementation depends on how systems of governance are organized, shaped, and structured. These processes are particularly important in urban areas, for it is in cities that the full effects of economic restructuring and de industrialization have been most keenly felt. Cities suffer from high levels of unemploy ment, crime, and social problems, and often possess de prived districts alongside areas of relative affluence. It is also in cities that, arguably, some of the most difficult contexts for governing can be found. Modern urban areas often possess a greater diversity of social groups than nonurban areas and have a greater concentration of problems to be tackled. Populations are also increasingly urbanized and what happens in towns and cities has broader social, political, and economic impacts beyond the urban scale. Indeed, it could be argued that urban governance is at the heart of broader changes to the or ganization of the state and political debates over its ap propriate roles and functions. In short governance is not

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interests in society, especially, those relationships involving the acquisition of power and authority. It is closely related to broader conceptualizations of identity and representation and the decision making processes through which representations and decisions are made. Urban politics is both formal and informal in character. The former consists of elections, political parties, representative systems, and the like whereas the latter relates to the softer social relationships and networks that exist between different groups, actors, and interests. Changing modes of democratic representation: Gov ernance is also about the structure of political systems and broader concerns with questions of political rep resentation, democratic legitimacy, and accountability. Well functioning systems of governance both help to create, and are the consequence of, healthy dem ocracies. When systems of governance function poorly, the legitimacy and relevance of democracy to citizens and communities is reduced, and this leads to a spiral of declining participation and legitimacy. The move ment towards urban governance has also been elided with broader shifts in the nature of democratic rep resentation. Old fashioned systems of government were built upon ‘representative’ modes of account ability through regular elections, and the principle that elected representatives carry a democratic man date to represent those who have elected them. The new urban governance, by contrast, is presented as a system in which individual citizens, and the com munities of which they are a part, engage in direct, ‘participative’ modes of governance. Citizenship: This shift to participative governance has significant implications for citizenship and the rela tionships between citizens and the institutions that govern them. It involves the establishment of a new balance of rights and responsibilities and the re drawing of boundaries of state action and regulation. Participative governance requires a greater focus on

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•

•

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what has been termed ‘active’ citizenship. In simple terms, active citizens are characterized as being pol itically, socially, and economically independent. This independence enables them to take on more responsibility for their own welfare so that they do not have to rely on state bureaucracies and/or welfare services. Passive citizens, on the other hand, are often portrayed as ‘dependent citizens’. Their passivity is increasingly seen, by (neo liberal) governments, as a problem to be cured through government programs and actions. In many countries governments have, therefore, introduced measures to foster new types of citizenship to underpin wider policy initiatives and governance reforms. Economic competitiveness: In recent decades, there has also been growing interest in the relationships between governance and economic development. With the growth of the so called ‘new economy’, economic activity is increasingly dependent on the networks established between firms and the support structures that exist with institutions of government and civil society. Much of the rhetoric that accom panies the emergence of the new urban governance is directly linked to the imagined role that decision making structures can play in creating entrepreneurial and attractive environments for competitive busi nesses and individual entrepreneurs. Decision making and governance, it is argued, needs to be flexible and able to respond to new challenges and opportunities in the global economy. The governance of economic development has become an increasingly important issue in urban politics as industrial cities across the Western world have sought to manage the negative consequences of economic decline. Urban sustainability: Governance is one of the key pillars of the sustainability agendas promoted by agencies such as the World Bank, national govern ments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It is argued that economic development projects will only promote new forms of equity if decision making systems and structures are broken open and made responsive and accountable to a broad section of civil society. There has, therefore, been a renewed interest in the mechanisms through which decisions are made, particularly at the urban scale where, the impacts of development projects on different social groups have been particularly marked. Urban politics, it is argued, can only become truly sustainable if new modes of participative governance are introduced alongside economic and environmental policy programmes. The ‘hollowing out of the state’: For many writers, particularly those writing from a regulationist per spective, the emergence of the new local governance reflects and reproduces the broader transfer of powers away from the nation state to other actors, working at

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a variety of scales. This process of ‘hollowing out’ represents a reaction to the expansion of government, local and national, in the post war era. In ideological terms, this represents part of a wider trend towards the creation of what neoliberal writers, such as Osborne and Gaebler, have termed ‘leaner and fitter’ govern ment. Battles over the form and character of govern ance are at the heart of contemporary political debates over the organization of the state and its capacities and priorities. Social control: Governance is also bound up with broader questions of social control. Historically, the ruling classes have seen cities as disordered places that require careful management, regulation, and control. Establishing effective forms of governance is one of the best mechanisms for the quelling of urban unrest whilst enabling certain powerful groups to ensure that their visions, needs, and priorities are articulated in policy programs.

The Rolling-Out of the Governance Agenda The term governance is clearly not a ‘neutral’ or apolitical term. In large part, it represents a way of thinking about how politics at a variety of levels should be organized and managed. During the 1990s and 2000s, global institutions, such as the World Bank and United Nations, have taken it up with relish and national governments are increasingly required to reform existing new modes of government in return for assistance. Considerable efforts have been made to define ‘good governance’, with the United Nations Development Program, for example, claiming that: good governance is among other things participatory, transparent and accountable. It is also effective and equitable and it promotes the rule of law. Good gov ernance assures that political, social and economic pri orities are based on broad consensus in society and that the voices of the poorest and the most vulnerable are heard in decision making over the allocation of resources.

Similarly, the self appointed Commission on Global Governance are keen to stress that, there is no alternative to working together and using collective power to create a better world. Governance is the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and co operative action may be taken. It includes formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal

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arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed or perceive to be in their interest.

Bad governance is, conversely, elided with post war welfare states and ‘inflexible’ bureaucratic procedures and power structures. Indices of good and bad govern ance, such as those produced by the World Bank’s ‘anticorruption’ unit, are increasingly used to compile comparative ‘league tables’ of different government sys tems and the extent to which they can be characterised as ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Institutions at other scales have been pursuing similar agendas. For the European Union, effective and efficient systems of governance provide the mechanisms in and through which the twin objectives of development policy – economic competitiveness and social cohesion – can be delivered. Its spatial development framework, Agenda 2000, specifically calls for new modes of governance to be introduced as a prerequisite for other elements of devel opment policy. Urban policy programs, in particular, have made governance reform a core objective. National gov ernments have also been rolling out governance reforms. For those of a less interventionist, more liberal persuasion, the new agendas reflect and reproduce a new set of phil osophies about what the state should be doing to support its citizens and, more importantly, what those citizens should be doing to support themselves. The UK has led the way in Europe, but similar models of reform are being adopted by governments across the EU and beyond.

Conceptualizing Urban Governance Academic work has focused on both the conceptual and empirical dimensions of urban governance. As with any disciplinary area, very different approaches have been applied. Much of the writing on urban governance has been developed in the United States where there has been a long tradition of strong territorial and urban politics. In the 1950s and 1960s, writers such as Robert Dahl argued that urban politics was, essentially, charac terized by open and accountable systems of democracy. Power was dispersed between a plurality of interests and state agencies, particularly urban governments, acted as neutral arbiters, weighing up the competing claims of different interests and making just and inclusive decisions in the name of a ‘common good’. This pluralist urban democracy was the embodiment of the American democratic system. Other groups of writers, however, developed much more critical approaches. C. Wright Mills famously wrote of urban ‘elites’ or groups in whom power was concentrated. Far from representing a plural and open system, urban governance, it was argued, was often dominated by a small number of groups whose power and decision making practices were ‘hidden’ and

systemic rather than open, transparent, and accountable. Elites include economic groups, political cliques, social organizations, private sector actors, and technical–bur eaucratic agents. Debates became focused on the extent to which urban politics represented an ‘open’ or ‘closed’ democratic system and the relationships between insti tutions of government and the citizens and communities that they (ostensibly) served. Following on from these classic accounts, a range of different theories have been put forward that seek to explain how urban politics and governance works. In the 1980s and 1990s, a group of American writers, including Clarence Stone, developed a set of ideas that became known as ‘regime theory’. Using examples such as At lanta, regime writers set out to show that urban gov ernance was dominated by identifiable coalitions of interests working to tightly focused agendas. In different cities, different groups came to dominate these coalitions or regimes. Other writers, however, have argued that such definitions of urban politics are too narrow. In order to capture the processes and practices of governance and decision making at the urban level, authors such as Rod Rhodes suggest that the focus should be on fluid and changeable ‘policy networks’ that coalesce around par ticular problems of government such as ‘community safety’ or ‘town center management’. The two approaches do, however, have similarities in focusing on the hori zontal relationships of power at the urban level and giving less attention to the vertical or structural rela tionships of power in which regimes or networks are operating. Other writers have approached urban politics and governance in a more structured way. Mike Davis, John Logan, and Harvey Molotch, for example, have identified what they term ‘urban growth machines’ as dominant players in the development of many US cities. Drawing on cases such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas, they argue that urban politics has become a vehicle for powerful coalitions of developers, locally dependent companies, and leading politicians to take control of profit making urban development programs. Developers are structur ally privileged actors in these new, relatively closed ar rangements. Neo Marxist authors, such as David Harvey, go further and argue that urban governance, primarily, serves to reproduce the needs of capitalists at the expense of other interests. Place competition has encouraged new processes of ‘urban entrepreneurialism’ to emerge in which towns and cities act like private sector businesses, speculating in order to accumulate. For Harvey, urban politics has become trapped in a zero sum game in which places compete vigorously for increasingly mobile forms of investment and what Richard Florida terms a ‘creative class’ of entrepreneurial workers. Whilst such approaches have significant explanatory power they have also been criticized for being reductionist and for failing to

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acknowledge the complexities of governance relation ships that emerge in different places. Other groups of writers have approached urban governance from a rather different direction. Neo Foucaudian authors, such as Nikolas Rose and Barbra Cruickshank, argue that governance is explicitly con cerned with the control of populations and the shaping of what Foucault termed ‘governmentalities’. Such work emphasizes the ways in which structures of governance become infused with relations of power and control so that, actors’ ways of thinking and approaching politics and political questions are shaped by those in power. Giving individuals and communities new powers and responsibilities, it is argued, represents a form of aban donment in which the legitimacy and political support given to collective welfare provision is eroded. Citizens have to ‘go it alone’ with a minimum of support. The ultimately pessimistic and all encompassing nature of such accounts is both their intellectual strength and their greatest weakness. Urban governance is also closely related to geo graphical questions. In many urban political systems the democratic legitimacy of institutions is articulated on a geographical basis. Elected representatives, often, repre sent particular localities and it is assumed that all those present in a particular place will have shared interests and needs that can be represented politically. However, there are clearly problems with this type of approach. Critics such as Geoff Mulgan, for example, argue that governance should be organized at the ‘community’ level, rather than at the traditional urban or local government level – as communities represent the key scale of human interactions and imaginations. Peter Taylor has tried to capture these dynamics by focusing on what he terms ‘place–space tensions’ in the organization of governance. Individuals and communities often associate themselves with particular places, or life worlds. Where a high de gree of congruence exists between these imaginations and the spatial boundaries of governance institutions, the more representative, legitimate, and effective organiza tions will be. Conversely, where there is a mismatch in place–space relationships, tensions are enhanced and systems of governance are weakened and undermined. Within some strands of geography and political sci ence, many writers now talk of ‘multilevel governance’ and focus on the ways in which urban governance has to be conceptualized as part of a nested hierarchy of scales, as clearly bounded administrative and political spaces that play an important role in the wider political system. This nesting is most effective where place–space tensions are reduced, and least effective where they are enhanced. However, a number of critical geographers, such as Ash Amin and Doreen Massey, have recently argued that urban politics should be seen in more ‘relational’ terms. Rather than the conceptualizing of urban governance as a

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spatially bounded and defined process that relates to particular places, relationalists argue that the focus should, instead, be on the interconnections between places and people. This focus on interconnections makes the category of ‘urban governance’ problematic in that, what happens in towns and cities is always relationally bound up with external with what takes place elsewhere. Overall, then there have been competing and con trasting conceptualizations of urban governance. The term’s growing political significance has ensured that it remains a key area of debate across the social sciences.

From Government to Governance – The Practices of Governance The changing nature of urban governance has had sig nificant practical implications for the ways in which urban areas are governed and managed. Since the early 1980s, the rationalities, structures, and mechanisms of urban governance in many countries have undergone major reform. In the post war period, the role and powers of local governments expanded with the growth of Keynesian welfare state systems. Local government played a key role in the delivery of welfare services such as education, housing, planning, and healthcare. In most cases, they were (and still are) run by elected councillors and their decisions had a significant impact on the everyday lives of local residents and businesses. However, during the 1970s and 1980s, with the rise of neoliberalism the values and rationalities of local gov ernment and the wider welfare state came under attack. In many countries, local governments’ powers and re sponsibilities were transferred to a range of other actors drawn from the private and voluntary sectors. Non elected quango agencies (quasi autonomous nongovern mental organizations) also took on many of the activities formally carried out by local government. For example, in the UK in 2006, there were 883 government quangos responsible for spending a total of d128 billion. As un elected agencies, they were managed and run by ap pointees (there were approximately 21 000 appointees in 2006) and their agendas were set through a combination of central government targets and internal management processes. Such organizations raise important questions over accountability and democracy as their formal rela tionships to local civil society are not founded on democratic elections. In addition, this fragmentation of responsibilities has forced governments to try to develop new forms of institutional cooperation at the urban level. There has been a new emphasis on ‘joined up working’ between organizations, and ‘partnerships’ have become commonplace. However, there are also serious deficiencies in the new model. The growing fragmentation of institutional

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responsibilities for different aspects of governance has made the job of governing an increasingly complex and opaque process. In a context where partnerships have become an increasingly dominant vehicle of decision making, identifying who it is that is responsible and ac countable for urban governance has become more and more difficult. The new agendas are also built on a cri tique of local government that, for political reasons, both exaggerates the ‘bureaucratic’ nature of earlier periods of governance and underplays the central role that local government continues to have in organizing and man aging these new partnerships. One further irony of the ‘new’ urban governance is that it has gone hand in hand with the extension of central state power through the introduction of new forms of top down ‘public manage ment’. Local governments and other agencies that are in receipt of government funds now have to meet centrally directed targets, milestones, and other ‘value for money’ criteria. In countries such as the UK, such pro cesses are well advanced, and this has an enormous im pact on the ability of local actors to act independently and flexibly in response to local circumstances and pol itical pressure.

Future Directions and Trends The political, social, and economic forces that have underpinned the ‘new’ urban governance are likely to become more powerful in the coming years. The neo liberal clarion call for fitter, leaner, and less inter ventionist forms of government is being taken up by governments and agencies operating in very different contexts. The new discourses preach that it is not up to governments alone to govern. Instead, it is up to indi viduals and communities to take more responsibility for their own lives and to tackle the problems that they face; it is up to city leaders to identify and mobilize those who live and work in their cities and develop political mechanisms of inclusion; it should be the responsibility of business leaders to play a greater role in the devel opment and delivery of welfare services; and it is es sential that new forms of government are flexible and light touch and do not interfere with the operation of market systems and business entrepreneurialism. In addition, these new forms of governance are becoming increasingly elided with visions of sustainability and the cross national sustainable city building agenda. There seems little prospect of a reemergence of well funded local ‘government’ state agencies playing the same sig nificant role that they played in the post war decades. Advocates of the new urban governance present it as a vehicle of empowerment for communities and citizens. Old vertical hierarchies are broken down, with power and responsibility transferred to a range of new actors. A

virtuous democratic circle emerges in which active citi zenship generates new forms of engagement and influence which in turn generates a greater desire for more par ticipation, activation, and inclusion. The power of estab lished professional and bureaucratic elites is undermined and the process of governance becomes geared up to the needs of citizens as consumers, who are able to exercise their ‘choice’ over services and participate directly in their own decision making and governance. However, critics argue that at the same time as these discourses of choice based governance have become more widespread, socioeconomic inequalities between and within countries have grown inexorably. The em phasis on active citizenship has effectively shifted the responsibility for socioeconomic problems onto those who are often least able to challenge relations of in equality and influence agendas. At the same time, the new focus on partnership has a tendency to cloud or obscure relations of power. The term partnership is often used as a vehicle for ‘including’ a range of political stakeholders, whilst nullifying opposition and protest. Systems of local governance are, in many ways, becoming ‘less flexible’ as powers and responsibilities are taken away from elected local authorities and handed to private companies and other quangos. In key policy areas such as transport and healthcare, there is much less scope for changing policy agendas now then there was during the post war decades when utilities and service providers were under the control of elected local government. Overall, the study of urban governance has taken on a new significance not only within urban geography but also across the social sciences. Its popularity as a term has grown inexorably during the 1990s and 2000s, and it is now commonly used as a frame of reference by state actors and those in the voluntary, private, and social sectors. There remain significant disagreements over the term’s meaning and its practical implications for urban politics and government. It is also becoming an overused and increasingly politicized term, making it all the more important that its core concerns with political power, democracy, representation, and accountability remain at the forefront of critical social research. See also: Entrepreneurship; Neoliberalism, Urban; Social Justice, Urban; Sustainability, Urban; Urban Growth Machine.

Further Reading Buck, N., Gordon, I., Harding, A. and Turok, I. (eds.) (2005). Changing cities Rethinking urban competitiveness, cohesion and governance. London: Palgrave. Harvey, D. (1989). From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler B 71, 3 17.

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Healey, P. (2006). Collaborative planning: Shaping places in fragmented societies. New York: Palgrave. Imrie, R. and Raco, M. (1999). How new is the new local governance? Lessons from the UK. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, 45 63. Judge, D., Stoker, G. and Wolman, H. (eds.) (1995). Theories of urban politics. London: Sage. Kearns, A. and Paddison, R. (2000). New challenges for urban governance: Introduction to the review issue. Urban Studies 38, 845 850. Kooiman, J. (2003). Government as governance. London: Sage. Osbourne, D. and Gaebler, T. (1992) Reinventing Government. London: Penguin.

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Rhodes, R. (1998). Understanding governance: Policy networks, governance, reflexivity and accountability. Buckinghamshire: Open University Press.

Relevant Websites http://www.nlgn.org.uk/public/ The New Local Government Network webpage. http://www.gdrc.org/u gov/ugov define.html The U Gov website on ‘urban governance’. http://www.unhabitat.org/categories.asp?catid=25 The UN HABITAT webpage.

Governmentality J. Ha¨kli, University of Tampere, Finland & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Biopolitics A term coined by Michel Foucault, meaning the style of government that regulates entire populations by fostering life in all its aspects, including its biological basis, health, reproductive practices, habits, customs, and well-being. Geopolitics Analysis of the strategic relationship between spatial context and politics at various scales ranging from individual body, home, street, city, region, state to international. Neoliberalism Political rationality that espouses liberty as a means of promoting social, economic, and political development. Historically refers to socialscientific and political sentiments that manifest themselves in policies supporting market as a form of regulation. Subjectification Process through which individuals become subjects in the dual sense of forming identity through conscience and self-knowledge, and being subject to dependence of and control by others. Territorial Sovereignty Principle of international law according to which a government has the exclusive right to political authority within its territory.

Introduction The term governmentality was first used by the French historian of ideas and philosopher Michel Foucault in the context of his studies on governmental rationality in the late 1970s. The idea of governmentality reached the English speaking world largely through an English translation of Foucault’s lecture on governmentality given at the Colle`ge de France in February 1978. Published first in 1979 in journal Ideology and Consciousness, and again in 1991 in an edited volume The Foucault Effect, the lecture gradually introduced governmentality to a widening audience of scholars in a range of social and cultural studies disciplines. The concept of governmentality is key to several important aspects of Michel Foucault’s thought. Foucault coined the term in the later years of his career, which ended prematurely to his death in 1984. Since the late 1970s, Foucault had been working on issues related to individualization, subjectification, rationality, and gov ernment in attempting to clarify the regimes of power that work through the expansion of governmental ra tionality in modern societies. In particular, he wanted to

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reveal the ways in which social power is constituted by the regulation and self regulation of embodied action. He insisted that what best characterizes the contemporary mode of government is not the state’s encroachment on the liberties of society, but rather the governmentaliza tion of the state. The latter refers to a mode of scientific state government that takes the welfare of the population as its end as well as its means. While Foucault mainly discusses state government, the concept of governmentality does not point merely at the reality of the state, or even the population as a whole. Of equal importance are the subjectivities that govern mental rationality impinges on individuals. Foucault insisted that the modern individual is not a given, but constituted as a domain of initiatives and self government that together operate the dispersed social power typical of modern Western societies. Instead of direct forms of repression and constraint, social control is achieved by means of subtler strategies of normalization, which pro duce self regulating individuals. This power is operative not only on the individual level but in the context of the state government of population that Foucault calls bio politics. Above all, Foucault claims that modern regimes of power operate to produce subjects who are both the objects and vehicles of power. Thus, the modern indi vidual is not the opposite of power but rather one of its prime effects. Hence, in analyzing governmentality, Foucault does not see the state as a singular all powerful apparatus that exists in opposition to the civil society. On the contrary, he is critical of state theory that approaches society as external to the state, or seeks to reduce the state to one of its functions, such as the provision of security or the reproduction of relations of production. By illuminating how the modern state and the modern society are co constructed, the concept of governmentality works to bridge the gap between macro and micro levels of analysis of power.

‘Gouvernementalite´’ – The Birth of a Concept In the early 1970s, Foucault was preoccupied with the task of understanding forms of disciplinary power based on the disciplining of individual bodies. This mode of power was epitomized by the military rationality he analyzed in Dis cipline and Punish. He gradually extended his analysis of power from disciplinary to biopolitical regimes and the phenomenon of governmentality in two annual courses of

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lectures at the Colle`ge de France titled Security, Territory and Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. The term gov ernmentality (in French, gouvernementalite´ ) appeared first in the concluding part of a lecture given in February 1978. Foucault summed up what he had described as historical movement in the art of government that brought about population as target of knowledge and governmental intervention. In this context, governmentality refers to three things: (1) the institutional ensemble that allows the exercise of a mode of governmental power that is not re ducible to sovereignty or discipline; (2) the long term trend toward the preeminence of this type of power over the other modes (sovereignty and discipline) resulting in the formation of specific governmental apparatuses and re spective rationalities throughout the West; and (3) the process of the governmentalization of the modern state. The term governmentality consists of two parts (gou verner and mentalite´ ), which underlines a semantic link between the acts of governing and modes of thought underpinning them. Understanding this link requires a wider conception of government not restricted to state’s politics alone. Foucault shows that before the nineteenth century, the question of government was discussed not only in relation to state government, but also in a broad array of contexts ranging from philosophical to religious, medical, and pedagogic texts. The art of government thus refers to the general reflection of conduct, or the conduct of conduct, seeking guidance in various aspects of life ranging from individual self control or the management of family all the way to the government of population. In revealing that self government of individuals (technolo gies of self) and the government of population (tech nologies of domination) are two sides of the same coin, the concept of governmentality offers novel insight into the nature of social power. The originality of the term lies in its capacity to move beyond the dichotomy of freedom and constraint, or consensus and coercion, as two opposite forms of power. Governmentality points to a power that operates not simply by forcing people to obey the will of the governor, but rather by balancing between techniques that assure coercion and those processes through which individuals themselves modify or construct self. In governmentality, the direction of the conduct of individuals and a popu lation is based on forms of power that are exercised over subjects who are free. With the history of govern mentality, Foucault purports to show that instead of being opposites, the modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual are historically co con structed, reflecting the expansion of governmental ra tionality throughout the West. Hence, what Foucault calls the governmentalization of the state refers to a devel opment by which state power gradually came to rest not merely on sovereignty and discipline but also on gov ernment, that is, the link between the autonomous

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individual’s capacity for self government and rational political objectives. Mentality is key in the formation of this link in so far as it is through the internalization of particular political rationalities that individuals come to govern themselves in ways that serve politically convenient ends. For ex ample, a person’s concern for her or his health and all actions to improve it may first seem choices made by an autonomous individual. However, at the same time matters pertaining to personal health are part of the state’s interest in governing public health. This attempt to manage health on the level of the whole population produces a wealth of knowledge providing guidance for individuals on how to lead a healthy life: how to care for oneself, how to eat, exercise, work, engage in sexual conduct, and so on. In Foucault’s thought this notion is captured in the concept of biopolitics, which refers to state actions to govern population and the underlying rationality that links, for instance, individual’s care of self with the state’s care for the public health.

The Rise of Governmentality From the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century political theory was predominantly concerned with the relationship between the ruler and the sovereign territory, seen in juridical terms. For Foucault the emergence of doctrines concerning the purpose of state in sixteenth century Europe designates the starting point of modern govern mental rationality. At that time the notion of state is dis tinguished from and set above religious considerations, and the new secularized state is given immanent autono mous principles that it should necessarily follow. To know how to govern would then require knowledge of the state and its interests, neither of which are self evident. Hence, governmental rationality starts to build on specific forms of knowledge that observe both the praxis of government and the nature of what is governed. The first body of knowledge that fully articulates the purpose of the state as the science of government is the eighteenth century Germanic Polizeiwissenshaft, or science of policing (i.e., policy). This corpus of theory aspired to maximize the strength of the state by nurturing the real basis of this strength, the population, and life in general. This objective resulted in endless lists of matters per taining to people’s happiness and prosperity that the state should be concerned with, ranging from policing health, foods, and highways to policies dealing with commerce, poverty, religion, etc. While the science of policing now seems too indefinite and chaotic to really serve governmental policy making, it nevertheless paved the way for the increasingly de tailed state intervention into various fields of social life. The multitude of foci that still characterize the science of

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policing in the seventeenth century were gradually re placed by a more coherent system of thought centered on political economy by the middle of the eighteenth cen tury. Foucault distinguishes a turning point in the breakup of the conceptual link between family and economy, whereby the latter no longer means the man agement of family property. The new concept of political economy pertains to a totally different, much larger plane, that of the population as a whole. According to Foucault, it was the science of political economy that enabled the identification of problems that are specific to a state’s population, and thereby fostered reflection on the problem of government outside the juridical frame work of sovereignty. This gave rise to a new and progressively more in timate relationship between the state and society. In contrast to premodern government confined mainly to aspects of territorial sovereignty, modern government had the general welfare of the population as its purpose, which grew into an ever extending field of state inter ventions. These governmental policies not only targeted the population but also used techniques immanent to the population as their means, including the stimulation of birth rates, the prevention of diseases, the promotion of healthy diet, the direction of the population into certain occupations and industries, and so on. This productive governmental rationality Foucault calls biopolitics, that is, the attempt to secure growth by means of designing interventions in the field of economy and population. Summing up this development, Michel Foucault states that the modern state became fully governmentalized roughly by the end of the eighteenth century. While the term governmentality is not restricted to any one his torical period or power regime, it is often used by Fou cault, as well as many of his followers, in referring to advanced Western liberal democracies. Hence, the notion of governmentality applies particularly to neoliberal so cieties characterized by dispersed power structures and emphasis on the freedom of choice based on the pre dominance of market mechanisms. In the context of neoliberalism, individuals have an active role in deter mining the course of their lives and the state appears as the provider of social welfare services and various pos sibilities for the fulfillment of each individual’s full po tential. Neoliberal governmentality nourishes the population by influencing the practices and rationalities of autonomous individuals’ self regulation.

Studies in Governmentality In the English speaking world, interest in the concept of governmentality arose after the publication of an English translation of Foucault’s lecture on governmentality in the early 1990s. Since then, governmentality studies have

expanded across the whole spectrum of humanities and social sciences, ranging from anthropology to critical criminology; from nursing science to social psychology; and from sociology to political science. Arguably, gov ernmentality is one of the major legacies of Foucauldian thought in contemporary critical social science research. However, as is the case with Foucault’s corpus throughout, there exists no single common way of ap propriating his conceptual tool box. The interdisciplinary field of inquiry into modern governmental rationality has brought about a number of different approaches to gov ernmentality. Some of these weigh on the analysis of knowledge production in relation to the rationalities of rule (how regimes of truth constitute the social world as governable and administrable), while some emphasize more on the technologies and practices of government (the operationalization of governmental rationalities in material processes and acts). In the former approach at tention is focused on the mentalities and rationalities that underlie rule – the ways in which problems are defined, expertise recognized and enacted, information construed and codified, participants identified and organized, and codes of conduct arranged and circulated. The second approach focuses more on how techniques of the self interact with structures of domination. Attention is paid to government seen as an ensemble of institutions, pro cedures, analyses, and reflections that facilitate the ex ercise of this complex form of social power through the activities of actually existing governments. While there is no single one paradigm, some major themes can be distinguished in the governmentality ap proach. First, scholars in this area have charted the changes in the state/civil society relationship brought about by the reshaping of government under neoliberal ism. This work has shown that political power is exercised today through a multitude of agencies and techniques, many of which are not associated with the formal organs of state. Hence, what in neoliberalism is frequently seen as the withdrawal of the state from its regulatory function vis a` vis the civil society, can actually be understood as a new technique of government based on reorganization and transferring the state’s regulatory task to responsible individuals. Seen as a specific form of governmentality, neoliberalism is revealed as a rationality that encourages individuals to demand an increasing scope for self de termination and autonomy – that is, self regulation – in areas which had hitherto been the domain of state agencies specifically responsible for regulation. Yet, insofar as the state continues to have an interest in the outcomes of this market like regulation (e.g., its citizens’ health, education, socioeconomic well being, productivity, innovativeness, etc.), the neoliberal development marks not the end but a transformation in societal regulation and a fundamental change in the relation between state and civil society actors.

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Second, studies in governmentality have worked to show that neoliberal political economy operates on multiple political scales, demanding responsiveness not only from the individual body but also from various collective bodies and institutions (e.g., universities, cor porations, non governmental organizations, and public institutions). All these bodies may be called upon to be in shape, flexible, productive, and self organizing by a ra tionality that conceals its multiscalar power geometries. Critical of the idea of scale as a fixed arena of politics, the governmentality approach facilitates the analysis of micro level and macro level politics as implicated in each other through the internalization of a particular mentality of rule (such as neoliberalism) by individuals and collectives alike. The construction of new domains of action in society, including codes of conduct and new roles and identities, often cuts across various scales of action. For instance, new forms of regulation in health care may pass directly from the national medical regu lation into the practices of clinical work. A central avenue for the emerging interlinkages be tween different scales of bodily self regulation is the apprehension of particular knowledge as true. Studies in governmentality purport to reveal the politics of truth that underlie neoliberal rationalities, such as the need to be attractive in order to succeed in competition, be it over a good job or foreign direct investments in a city. Moreover, the concept of governmentality has the cap acity of highlighting the intimate relationship between representations and agency, thought and action, both in the governmental and nongovernmental realms of social life. This enables a sharper analysis of the effects of neoliberal government not simply in terms of the re production of existing social asymmetries, but also through the invention of new social mechanisms of domination on the basis of emerging political rational ities and forms of society. Third, the analysis of governmentality has dis tinguished subjectification as a technology that tends to conceal the power of self regulation from the autono mous individuals themselves. Rather than government simply dominating individuals, in neoliberal govern mentality subjects actively participate in their own sub jectification. This is primarily because the technologies of self – that subjects, as autonomous members of liberal democratic societies, are called upon to practice – are imbued with governmental aspirations to shape indi viduals’ conduct so as to produce desired effects. Hence, there is a double bind between subjection (the relations of governmental power) and subjectification (the con struction of the individual subject), a bind that operates through the naturalization of certain forms of identity and agency, such as the consumer, manager, investor, customer, or entrepreneur, as a fulfillment of inherent qualities of the human nature and society.

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Foucault addressed this duality inherent in the con struction of subjects using the French term assujettissement (translated in English variously as subjectification, sub jection, or subjugation). In liberal democratic societies individual and collective subjectivity is expanded, in corporated, and organized as an integral part of govern ment, so that subjection and subjectification are layered upon each other in complex ways. The institution and proliferation of self reflexive subjects with the capacity to act channels autonomous human agency into a resource for, rather than an obstacle to, governing. In a neoliberal society the reflexive subject emerges as a strategy in the promotion of freedom, understood in terms of the capability of an autonomous individual to establish an identity. Freedom is seen as the capacity to realize one’s desires, to fulfill one’s potential, and to shape a mean ingful everyday life through acts of choice. This entails becoming a subject whose freedom is a condition of subjection, and at the same time subjection, a condition of freedom. Hence, subjectification and subjection inter twine and condition each other. In a sense this intimate relationship culminates in the discourses and practices of personal self assessment. As an awareness of how to evaluate and act upon ourselves to remedy various per sonal and social problems, self esteem is a technology of self par excellence.

Governmentality in Human Geography Interest in the concept of governmentality within human geography research has grown steadily since the mid 1990s. The concept started to gain ground first in the context of political geography, where it was used within wider debates about the role of knowledge production in the constitution of the geopolitical world. While critical of the conventional understanding of the state as the single most important locus and scale of politics, much of this research took the state government as its starting point. The critical analysis of geopolitics has shown that the practices of statecraft depend on and produce particular depictions, categorizations, analyses, and hierarchies, portraying the sociospatial world as a patchwork of naturalized and mutually exclusive terri torial entities: states. The knowledge thus produced in forms practices of statecraft and foreign policymaking, which have been subjected to much critical scrutiny by workers in the area. The concept of governmentality has figured into this work in at least two important senses. First, it has shifted the emphasis from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’ in the analysis of states’ geopolitical practices. Consequently, there is a growing understanding of the ways in which the states not only represent and intervene in domains they seek to govern, but also constitute the geopolitical reality as

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governable, thus fashioning the conditions for any pos sibility of knowing the world more generally as well. Despite the emphasis on state practices, attention has also been paid to the production of geopolitical world de scriptions by media and other nonstate actors, examining their role in the constitution of popular geopolitics. This analysis has helped in rethinking the scales of geopolitics, and how the mentalities of geopolitical rule are consti tuted, disseminated, and internalized through popular cultural products such as movies, newspapers, cartoons, and internet websites. Second, the concept of governmentality has helped political geography analysis to broaden its conception of the organization and politics of space. Foucault inspired studies have brought into focus new forms or aspects of spatiality, such as mobility, fluidity, distance shrinking networks, and the circulatory spaces of security. By analyzing processes such as the geography of statistic production or the ordering of space through cartographic techniques or urban house numbering, this work has shown that governmentality is a technology of power that is used to govern contingency and chance inherent in the complex relationships between population and territory. Political geography’s traditional concern with territori ality has not been pushed aside by the emphasis on governmentality; the research rather has purported to show that only by means of a detailed and consistent knowledge of the territory and everything in it has the state been able to develop systems of government that can be characterized by the term governmentality. Se curity, in this context, means enabling normalization and requires that the state is capable of opening up and lib erating the use of space in the name of the circulation of goods, people, and wealth, rather than restricting and enclosing territory. Although circulation and passage require some regulation, in liberal society this should be minimal and largely dependent on self regulation on the level of autonomous individuals and bodies. Besides political geography, the concept of govern mentality has surfaced in human geographic research in areas such as the regulation of biological risks and dis orders in biological life through biotechnology, and the social production of nature through the intersection of scientific, governmental, and capitalist production. New areas of research also include urban government and planning practices. Specific attention has been paid to issues such as the role of the institutional spaces of statistics and strategic interdependencies in the con struction of relations between local and national government. Growing interest has also been directed to the spati alities involved in managing large scale sociospatial processes (e.g., traffic systems or the public health). This work has shown that practices of governmentality may change in pace with the introduction of new information

technologies. For example, governmentality based on information capture integrates data gathering mech anisms with systems that they seek to monitor and regulate, and thus actively influence the experience of practitioners involved. Automated management has the capacity to produce sociospatial processes and formations that stretch across various scales from the micro setting of components on to operative environments, broader technological infrastructure, systemic assemblage, and so on. This research has also charted the ways in which expertise inextricably linked to governmentality gets in stitutionalized, produced and embodied, and moreover, what spatial configurations the processes involve. Atten tion has been paid especially to the spaces in and through which health is problematized either in terms of know ledge production, education, therapy, or treatment. The governmentality framework has led to consider, for ex ample, of how therapeutic sites shape individuals’ health related conduct by turning them into governable subjects.

Critiques The growing interest in governmentality studies shows that the analytical potential of the concept has not been exhausted. However, arising from heterogeneous works by Michel Foucault and subsequent scholarship, the relevance of the concept of governmentality has been challenged in the social sciences and human geography. Among the key issues of debate is the historical sequence by which governmentality emerged as part of the democratic liberalization of Western societies. While Foucault contends that governmentality is a contingent phenomenon that belongs to Western modernity, authors such as Giorgio Agamben see it rather as an ontological grounding of modernity, which, thus, is much more deeply implicated in every aspect of the origin and de velopment of Western political rationality as such. A related issue of contention is the balance in Fou cault’s thought between territory and population as the nexus of modern governmental rationality. While some authors accept that population rather than territory is the driving force in the governmentalization of the state, others argue that this represents a misleading ontological distinction between territory and population. Yet another question that has provoked criticism is the difficulty that studies of governmentality have in accounting for resistance to the norms and rules of neoliberalism. It is claimed that an emphasis on tech nologies of self leads to the early dismissal of a proactive role that socio cultural change may play in shaping for mal practices of politics, policy, and administration. Yet freedom to govern and control may also afford subjects possibilities to resist and modify those norms and rules that are generated by governmental technologies of

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power. Critique notwithstanding, it seems that the val idity of the concept of governmentality for understanding power relations in contemporary neoliberal societies has gained broad acceptance. See also: Biopolitics; Body, The; Care/Caregiving; Citizenship and Governmentality, Rural; Critical Geography; Critical Geopolitics; Foucauldianism; Identity Politics; Neoliberalism; Regulation; State Theory.

Further Reading Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Foucault, M. (1979). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. An Introduction. London: Allen Lane.

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Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In Burchell, G., Gordon, C. & Miller, P. (eds.) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp 87 104. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory, Population. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hakli, J. (1998). Discourse in the production of political space: Decolonizing the symbolism of provinces in Finland. Political Geography 18, 331 363. Hannah, M. (2000). Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth Century America. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jessop, B. (2007). From micro powers to governmentality: Foucault’s work on statehood, state formation, statecraft and state power. Political Geography 26, 34 40. Lemke, T. (2001). The birth of bio politics. Michel Foucault’s lecture at the Colle`ge de France on neo liberal governmentality. Economy and Society 30, 190 207. O´ Tuathail, G. (1996). Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. London: Routledge. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sinnerbrink, R. (2005). From Machenschaft to biopolitics: A genealogical critique of biopower. Critical Horizons 6, 239 265.

Green Revolution J. Briggs, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary CGIAR Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. This influential group consists of 15 member research centers spread across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. CIMMYT Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo (the International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat) in Mexico, where the pioneering work by Nobel Prize winner, Norman Borlaug, was undertaken on developing high-yielding, dwarf varieties of wheat. Genetically Modified Crops GM crops are currently being developed mainly by large corporations using various biotechnology methods. Whereas traditional cross-breeding methods involve different varieties within the same crop species, GM crops can involve genetic engineering between entirely different and unrelated species. An example of this is the use of fish genes in breeding new strains of tomatoes. Green Revolution The name given to the dramatic increases in crop yields, especially of wheat and rice, that occurred in the 1960s, based on the work led by Norman Borlaug at the Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo in Mexico. High-Yielding Varieties (HYVs) The HYVs of wheat and rice formed the basis of the Green Revolution. These were essentially dwarf varieties which were very receptive to the application of both a regulated water supply, usually by irrigation, and fertilizers, especially nitrogen. Malthusian Specter Thomas Malthus, writing in 1798, suggested that whereas population numbers tended to grow geometrically, agricultural output grew only arithmetically. Hence, there comes a point when agricultural production can no longer supply the population with enough food, and starvation and famine follow. This is the Malthusian specter.

Introduction The Green Revolution is the term applied to the major advances in crop breeding genetics made in the 1960s which significantly raised the yields of some grain crops. Although crop experimentation is something that takes place continually, and has done so since the earliest settled agriculture about 8000 years ago, there are nonetheless step like advances made from time to time in

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producing new seed varieties, and the Green Revolution can be seen as one of these. However, rather than the full range of crops experiencing rises in yields per hectare, it was only really wheat in particular, and rice to a lesser extent, which experienced the dramatic yield rises characterizing the Green Revolution (Tables 1 and 2). Between 1961 and 1971, the advances of the Green Revolution can be clearly seen, as, in that decade, yields per hectare of wheat increased by about two thirds, and those of rice by about one third. In all the selected re gions shown in Tables 1 and 2, it can be seen that yields of both wheat and rice have continued to rise in each subsequent decade, including in Africa, such that be tween 1961, before the benefits of the Green Revolution, and 2005, the last year for which figures were available at the time of writing, wheat yields per hectare have in creased by over 200% in Asia, Africa, and India, although the overall increase in rice yields over the same time period has been rather more modest. It can be argued that the term ‘Green Revolution’ was very much a product of its time. Although the term can be seen as referring to the greenness of crops, it can also be interpreted as being a Green Revolution as op posed to a Red Revolution. During the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, socialism envisaged progress being made by changing the relations of production primarily through the communal or state ownership of the means of production. Capitalism, as championed by the United States, saw progress as being achieved through the transfer of science and technology. In this case, traditional agriculture would be transformed by the adoption of a new, imported technology, forming the basis of the Green Revolution. The political con sequences of the Green Revolution were seen, particu larly by the United States, to be very important as a solution to food shortages and famine in Asia in par ticular, and therefore a bulwark to the spread of social ism in that continent at the height of the Cold War. The research and development of the new high yielding varieties (HYVs) of wheat were undertaken at Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo – the International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat (CIMMYT) in Mexico, and that of rice HYVs at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, the latter using plant materials originally from Taiwan and Japan. Both these centers were mem bers of the Consultative Group for International Agri cultural Research (CGIAR), a network of 15 research centers across the world, each with its own major

Green Revolution

Table 1

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Yields of wheat by selected regions (tonnes per hectare)

1961 1971 1981 1991 2001 2005 Growth 1961 2005

India

Asia

Africa

EU

N. America

World

0.85 1.31 1.63 2.28 2.71 2.74 222%

0.74 1.25 1.77 2.44 2.65 2.82 281%

0.69 0.98 1.13 1.90 2.03 2.11 206%

1.96 3.02 3.80 5.41 5.52 5.74 193%

1.33 2.15 2.23 2.29 2.44 2.75 107%

1.09 1.64 1.89 2.47 2.78 2.94 170%

Source: FAO (http://economics.cimmyt.org)

Table 2

Yields of rice by selected regions (tonnes per hectare)

1961 1971 1981 1991 2001 2005 Growth 1961 2005

India

Asia

Africa

EU

N. America

World

1.54 1.71 1.96 2.63 3.12 3.00 95%

1.86 2.38 2.88 3.61 4.00 4.12 122%

1.48 1.79 1.69 2.07 2.19 2.04 38%

5.34 4.98 5.47 5.93 6.40 6.44 21%

3.82 5.29 5.40 6.42 7.28 7.40 94%

1.87 2.36 2.82 3.54 3.94 4.02 115%


research responsibilities and priorities in the field of agricultural development. The pioneering work on wheat was undertaken by Norman Borlaug who subsequently received a Nobel Prize in 1970 for this work. The basis of the work was to raise agricultural productivity through technical progress, but without any meaningful economic and/or social reform of the agricultural sector. The challenge of development, therefore, was seen as one of technology, and Western technology at that, and not one of socioeconomic reform. The assumption was made that the new technology would be scale neutral, that is, the new varieties would be just as viable on small farms as on large ones. Through a process of hybridization and development, the so called ‘miracle’ seed, IR8, was developed. This was a dwarf variety of wheat which was especially responsive to a combination of a carefully controlled water supply and fertilizer application, par ticularly of nitrogen. The dwarf varieties had some clear advantages over traditional varieties. There was a greater proportion of grain head to stalk; there was greater strength in the shorter stalk so that there was less bending or snapping of the stalk caused by a heavy grain head; and the growing season was shorter which created the possibility of growing two crops per year, this double cropping therefore raising cropping intensity. This, of course, reinforced the need for irrigation to underpin the adoption of Green Revolution HYVs.

Impacts in India Through the 1950s and 1960s, India had been increasingly facing food shortages, and even the Malthusian specter of

Table 3 Total wheat and rice production in India, 1961 2005 (000 tonnes)

1961 1971 1981 1991 2001 2005 Growth 1961 2005

Wheat

Rice

10 997 23 833 36 313 55 135 69 681 72 000 555%

53 495 64 602 79 883 112 042 139 900 129 000 141%


famine. That the Indian Government should embrace the new technologies of the Green Revolution, and should promote the new ‘miracle’ seeds, was therefore of little surprise. Indeed, the government promoted its own re search stations to continue the improvement and devel opment of grain crop yields, but with a greater sensitivity to local conditions. Table 3 shows that the total production of wheat in India, as a consequence of the Green Revolution, was much more dramatic than that of rice. Since 1961, the total production of wheat has grown by 555% and that of rice by a more modest 141%. Nonetheless, the Green Revolution dealt with the food shortage threats of the 1950s and 1960s in gross terms. However, the geographic impacts of the Green Revolution have been far from even. Three states in particular – Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh in northern India – have benefited considerably due to the relatively ready availability of irrigation, especially from tube wells, and, arguably, the more positive attitudes of farmers in these states in dealing with risk and

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uncertainty in agriculture. Wheat HYVs now account for about 50% of all the production in these three northern states and nearly all of the government’s grain purchases. The gains in the rice growing river and delta areas of India have been far less impressive. This not only reflects the fact that the improved yields of the new rice seed varieties were significantly lower than those for wheat in the first place, but also that there were greater water management problems and more serious pest problems affecting the new seed varieties of rice in these areas. Ironically, since the mid 1970s, rice has become an im portant second crop in the three big wheat area states of Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh. Perhaps even more ironically, the rice from these areas is produced primarily as a commercial crop for the market, with about 90% of production being sold, compared to only about 30–40% from the traditional rice growing areas of India. There is also evidence to suggest that, with the increased total production levels of both wheat and rice through the use of HYVs, there has been a reduced rate of growth of grain prices for consumers.

An Evaluation of the Green Revolution There has been a considerable amount of debate over the success or otherwise of the Green Revolution. Whereas it cannot be denied that the adoption of HYVs staved off the threat of famine in India, and that the continued rise of yields per hectare through until the present day has reduced (but not always eliminated) food insecurity in many other parts of the world, there have been a number of environmental, economic, and social consequences of the Green Revolution, some of which have been less than positive. The greater use of irrigation water has fre quently resulted in the general lowering of the water table in many areas, while, ironically, leading to greater salinization in those areas where water tables have risen locally or where excess water has not been successfully drained off the land. Some studies have shown that this has disproportionately affected poorer people because of their greater reliance on shallow surface wells, whereas richer farmers generally have the capital to construct deeper tube wells which offer some insurance against these problems. The new HYV seeds respond very well to the combination of controlled water and fertilizer use. However, if there are any problems with water appli cation, the use of inorganic fertilizer, especially nitrogen, can have a deleterious effect on the soil as it can result in ‘burning’ of the soil. Traditionally, farmers used a range of seed varieties and often intercropped grain crops with other crops. However, the use of the new HYV seed varieties has resulted in a loss of biodiversity in many of the rural areas, as monocropping of the same HYV var iety has become the norm. This, in turn, has impacted on

pest control, as these traditional rotations and inter cropping helped to control pest infestation, which has now subsequently increased in many areas. Consequently, farmers have had to purchase greater amounts of pesti cides and fungicides to guard against crop losses. This has meant not only an increase in input costs for farmers, but has also resulted in an increase in toxic pesticides being left behind as a residual in the environment. The reduction in intercropping has had other con sequences. For example, there has been an impact on household diets. In many areas, it was common in the past to intercrop grain with pulses. With pure stands of HYVs, this now rarely happens, and hence there has been an increased dietary imbalance for many rural people. Intercropping was also used as an insurance policy against the failure of one (or more) crops as a result of drought, flooding, or waterlogging, but with HYVs this insurance has disappeared. Significantly, if irrigation water (or rain for that matter) is well timed, dwarf wheat does well. However, yields are very sensitive to both drought and waterlogging; without regular water application, dimin ishing returns of HYVs can set in quite quickly, such as has happened in parts of Tamil Nadu. Ironically, the import ant advantage of HYV dwarf varieties having a larger grain head in relation to stalk length has had an unfortunate consequence for those farmers who also keep livestock. Stalks have long been used as a source of animal feed and the amount of animal feed material from the dwarf HYVs is much less than from traditional wheat varieties. To make up this shortfall, many farmers now have to buy in more feed for livestock than they did previously, so adding costs to the household budget. A contested area of debate has revolved around the economic and social consequences of the Green Revo lution. Although there is evidence to suggest that neither farm size nor tenure arrangements have had a significant impact in constraining the adoption of HYVs in the first place – that is, HYVs do indeed appear to be scale neutral – there is strong evidence to support the view that the subsequent gains from cultivating HYVs are much greater for those larger, more capital intensive farmers with larger farm units. In other words, there has developed a disparity in income distribution related to farm size and con sequently the Green Revolution has increased rural in equalities. This is hardly surprising, as larger farmers, with easier access to capital resources, are in a stronger position to invest in better irrigation facilities, more reliable sup plies of fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides, to invest in machinery to displace labor, and generally to benefit from economies of scale in production. Indeed, it would seem that many of the larger, more capital intensive farmers in the 1960s and 1970s took advantage of subsidized credit and the overvalued exchange rate in India at that time to import machinery from overseas. Interestingly, it has been suggested that many of the investments in machinery have

Green Revolution

an important gender dimension, as much of the invest ment in labor saving/displacing machinery has been in male labor areas such as land preparation and harvesting. Rather less has been invested in traditional areas of women’s labor input such as weeding. As there was a link between farm size and likely monetary gains and increased margins, it was clearly in the interests of landowners to take over cultivation of the land themselves and employ labor as needed. Hence, a con sequence of the Green Revolution has been that many share croppers and tenant farmers have lost their access to land, with a subsequent increase in landlessness and un employment. For some other farmers, who owned their own land, but had only small farms of less than a hectare in many cases, it proved to be very difficult to achieve the full production gains of the Green Revolution, and, for these, the sale of their land to bigger farmers proved to be irresistible. However, this only led to further increases in landlessness. Between 1971 and 1981 in the Punjab, the number of smallholdings below 2 hectares fell and land concentration increased. There is, however, some evidence to suggest that, despite the increases in landlessness and poverty levels, as parts of the countryside, especially in the Punjab, grew wealthier as a consequence of the Green Revolution, rural employment opportunities also grew, particularly outside the agricultural sector.

The Green Revolution and Africa Although the Green Revolution has clearly been effective in changing the food production fortunes of India and elsewhere, it has had only a limited impact on Africa. Indeed, since 1990, the number of malnourished people in Africa has increased by 20% and food production per capita since 1981 has either been stagnant, or has even declined in the cases of some African countries. Most of the productive agricultural land is already being farmed and so Africa cannot rely on converting new land to agriculture as a solution. Hence, it is argued by many that an agricultural transformation, involving the development and adoption of new seed varieties, is urgently needed. The reasons for Africa so far missing out on the gains of the Green Revolution are clear. First, the main staple crops in Africa are not those which have seen the greatest yield gains from the Green Revolution, that is, wheat and rice. Table 4 shows that, although wheat and rice are grown in Africa, they are relatively minor crops, in terms of area, in comparison to maize, sorghum, and millet, and, to a lesser extent, cassava. Whereas Africa grows less than 5% of the world’s wheat and 6% of the world’s rice by area, it grows well over half the world’s sorghum, millet, and cassava, and a good proportion of the world’s maize. However, the yield gains made by these four African staples since 1961 have been relatively modest

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Table 4 Areas harvested of selected grain crops in 2005 (000 hectares)

Wheat Rice Maize Sorghum Millet Cassava

Africa

World

Africa as % of world

9645 9130 27 890 26 013 20 490 12 345

211 862 153 546 146 741 44 261 35 687 18 689

4.6 6.0 19.0 58.8 57.4 66.1


(Table 5), and, for three out of the four crops, the yield growth in Africa has been below that for the world as a whole. Hence, not only have African staples not shared the yield improvements of wheat and rice, where yield improvements have been made, they have generally been very modest. A significant part of the problem is that African agriculture is overwhelmingly rain fed, rather than irrigated, and so it is very dependent on the vagaries of the annual climate. In addition, one of the key drivers in the success of the dwarf wheat and rice varieties is the controlled application of irrigation water, a factor largely absent from African agriculture as a whole. Indeed, this issue of an inadequate infrastructure relates to more than just access to irrigation, important as this is. The sheer physical size of Africa, the inadequacy and unreliability of the transport system, poor but improving information channels, inadequate credit facilities, and problems of seed and fertilizer development, manufacture, and dis tribution all currently militate against a potentially suc cessful Green Revolution in that continent.

Genetically Modified Crops As we have seen, although genetic advances in seed breeding and development frequently occur in step like progressions, there is also generally a steady rise of yields over time between these steps (see Tables 1 and 2). Al though CGIAR was the dominant force in crop genetics in the 1960s and 1970s, and CGIAR very much drove the Green Revolution, its relative influence over the last couple of decades has declined, to be replaced by large, and in some cases very large, corporations such as Mon santo. The attraction for these corporations is the poten tially large margins and profits that can be made. New crop breeding programs are being promoted, some using well established methods of cross breeding different var ieties within species, but others using new biotechnologies and genetic engineering which introduce genes across species barriers. This latter has become a major concern more widely, as the long term consequences of such interspecies cross breeding are unknown. However, arguments are made that contemporary bio technologies can nonetheless be very beneficial. A common

638 Table 5

Green Revolution

Yields of African staples (tonnes per hectare) Maize

1961 1971 1981 1991 2001 2005 Growth 1961 2005

Cassava

Sorghum

Millet

Africa

World

Africa

World

Africa

World

Africa

World

1.05 1.35 1.86 1.48 1.59 1.70 62%

1.95 2.66 3.50 3.70 4.43 4.73 143%

5.66 6.00 7.06 8.08 9.00 8.88 57%

7.40 8.36 9.26 9.84 10.75 10.88 47%

0.82 0.79 1.00 0.82 0.87 0.86 5%

0.89 1.24 1.61 1.31 1.37 1.32 48%

0.58 0.57 0.73 0.66 0.65 0.69 19%

0.59 0.68 0.72 0.68 0.79 0.77 31%


example quoted relates to the development of a cyanide free cassava which would eliminate the need for its careful, time consuming preparation before cooking. As this task is usually undertaken by women, this would reduce this part of women’s work burdens, as well as using less precious water, further reducing women’s burdens, as water col lection in most parts of Africa is also women’s work. However, it has to be recognized that the corporations’ targets are generally not small scale farmers in low income countries, but rather capital intensive farmers in the West, where significant profits are more likely to be made.

Conclusions There is little doubt that the Green Revolution had a profound effect on the production of wheat and rice during the 1960s and 1970s, and especially so in India. It was, however, a very technocratic solution to the issue of agricultural transformation, and it left unaddressed issues related to the economic and social conditions of pro duction. As such, the Green Revolution was very much a product of its time, when it was thought that the problems of the so called Third World could be addressed by the transfer of science and technology, usually quite uncritic ally, from the West. Today, the question of development in the low income countries of the South is seen as a much more nuanced and complex set of related issues, of which Western science and technology make up simply one part of the jigsaw, rather than being the full jigsaw itself. There is also an irony that we can see today in the use of the term ‘green’ that was not apparent in the 1960s and 1970s. In the early part of the twenty first century, the use of the term ‘green’ implied sustainability, a strong environmental empathy, and the use of sympathetic and locally appropriate technologies. In this sense, the Green Revolution appears to be anything but ‘green’ in the sense of the word today, given that it is highly techno logical and depends for its success on expensive inputs, including inorganic fertilizers and pesticides. Because of this, some have called it a ‘high external input agri culture’, and thus not one which would easily meet the requirements of the green movement today.

See also: Agriculture, Sustainable; Development I; Famine; Modernization Theory; Socialism; Third World.

Further Reading Bayliss Smith, T. and Wanmali, S. (eds.) (1984). Understanding green revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conway, G. R. and Barbier, E. B. (1990). After the green revolution: Sustainable agriculture for development. London: Earthscan. Ghatak, S. (2003). An introduction to development economics (2nd edn.), ch. 9. London: Routledge. Glaeser, B. (ed.) (1987). The green revolution revisited: Critique and alternatives. London: Allen and Unwin. International Food Policy Research Institute. http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/ ib/ib11.pdf. (accessed on 25 August 2007). Hazell, P. and Ramasamy, C. (eds.) (1991). The green revolution reconsidered. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. Jirstrom, M. (1996). In the wake of the green revolution. Lund: Lund University Press. Lipton, M. and Longhurst, R. (1989). New seeds and poor people. London: Unwin Hyman. Perkins, J. (1997). Geopolitics and the green revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rigg, B. (1989). The green revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scoones, I. (2002). Agricultural biotechnology and food security: Exploring the debate. Working Paper 145. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Seshia, S. and Scoones, I. (2003). Tracing policy connections: The politics of knowledge in the Green Revolution and biotechnology eras in India. Working Paper 188. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.

Relevant Websites http://www.actionbioscience.org A very useful source of statistical information relating to agricultural production data. http://impact.cgiar.org CGIAR Impact, Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. http://www.cgiar.org Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. http://www.fao.org Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. http://www.foodfirst.org Food First, Institute for Food and Development Policy. http://www.monsanto.com Monsanto is an Agricultural Company. http://www.actionbioscience.org Promoting Bioscience Literacy.

Greenfield Development P. Breathnach, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Republic of Ireland & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Agglomeration Economies Savings made jointly by firms through clustering together in particular localities. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Investment in operations abroad by firms which confers a degree of direct control over the foreign operations in question by the investing firms. Greenfield Development A business investment by a firm which involves setting up an operation in a new location. Industrial District/Cluster A localized concentration of industrial activities characterized by a high level of interaction between the firms carrying out these activities. Multiplier Effects The stimulation of additional economic activity in a region arising from the establishment of a new business in that region. Polarized Growth Tendency for economic growth to be spatially concentrated in growth poles/centers. Spatial Division of Labor (Intrafirm) Location of different segments of a firm’s production chain in different places/regions. Technology Transfer The transfer of technological and/or organizational know-how between regions/ countries.

involve a net addition to the firm’s productive capacity, or simply a relocation of an existing activity from another site, or sometimes a rationalization of a number of existing activities at different sites. These different pos sibilities carry with them very different implications in terms of their local, regional, and national economic development impacts. Analysis of patterns of greenfield development bring together two important areas of concern in economic geography – industrial location and regional develop ment. Geographers have long been interested in ana lyzing patterns of industrial location – including the establishment of new industrial plants on greenfield sites – and the factors which influence how these patterns are shaped. Interregional variations in forms and levels of economic development and the processes producing these variations have also been a major focus of geo graphical enquiry. The stimulation of greenfield invest ments in manufacturing (and, increasingly, services) activities in less developed regions has been an important feature of public policy in most advanced economies, and geographers have made an important contribution in terms of examining the nature, location, and economic impact of such investments.

Factors Influencing Greenfield Investment Introduction: Defining Greenfield Development The term greenfield development originally referred to economic activities (usually manufacturing plants) which were established on sites which had not previously been developed (except for agricultural purposes). Such sites contrasted with so called brownfield sites which were, or had been, previously developed for industrial purposes, particularly involving old generation industrial activities, such as coal mining, heavy industry, and dockland ac tivities. As the term itself suggests, greenfield develop ment in this context generally referred to establishing economic activities either in rural areas or, more typi cally, on the outskirts of towns and cities. Over time, the use of the term was broadened to encompass any business investment by a firm which in volves setting up an operation in a new location (whether urban or rural) rather than, for example, expanding or acquiring existing operations. This new activity may

Firms take a range of considerations into account in deciding whether to remain in and/or expand existing industrial plants or set up new plants in greenfield lo cations. Factors which may favor expanding production at existing locations include the prospects of obtaining economies of scale; the fact that it is usually cheaper to add capacity to an existing plant rather than build a new one from scratch; and the simpler management structures involved in keeping production under one roof. The factors favoring establishment of new plants comprise a combination of the push and pull factors normally associated with migration behavior, the former prompting firms to move from existing sites and the latter attracting firms to new sites. Firms may be stimulated to relocate existing production where existing plants are characterized by high costs, labor relations problems, and obsolescent technology. Alternatively, firms may choose to install additional production capacity at new sites where existing plants are constrained by lack of space, or where plant enlargement may create production control difficulties, or problems in maintaining effective

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communications with an enlarged workforce. Firms may also be attracted to new locations in order to exploit local market opportunities, to reduce operating costs, or to avail of favorable financial incentives, although set against these will be the costs of identifying appropriate locations for new investments and of operating in unfamiliar environ ments. The establishment of new branch plants in green field locations, accordingly, tends to be mainly confined to larger firms with appropriate resources and experience, especially where the new plants are outside the home region of the parent firms.

Greenfield Development and Regional Policy Much of the early impetus behind greenfield develop ment emanated from the desire of industrial firms to move out of the inner city locations where most manu facturing industry established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been concentrated. Such re location became increasingly common from the 1950s onward and was prompted by a variety of mutually supporting considerations: the growth of automobile transport meant that city • centers were becoming increasingly congested and polluted;

space for expansion was at a premium, especially in • the light of changing technologies which favored

• • •

single story over more traditional multistory industrial buildings; much of the traditional workforce had been removed from inner city areas to new suburban housing projects; alternatively, new technologies created a desire to access new sources of labor; and substantial capital gains could be realized by selling off valuable central city sites and moving elsewhere.

Much of this relocation simply involved a move to nearby suburban areas where adequate supplies of land and labor were available and which were much more accessible to the motorized transport which was increasingly being used by industrial firms for deliveries of both inputs and out puts. However, in many advanced economies, these re locations involved interregional movements, particularly to declining industrial regions or peripheral rural regions where cheap labor and financial and other incentives were available. In Britain, by 1966, 10% of the manufacturing workforce were employed in plants which had moved from one region to another, or in entirely new plants owned by firms headquartered outside the regions in which the plants were located. In France, between 1954 and 1982, industrial employment grew by 368 000 in the under developed west and southwest regions, while falling by

275 000 in the Paris region. These forms of industrial movement were one element of the new spatial divisions of labor which were being created within large manu facturing firms, whereby different segments of these firms’ production chains came to be located in different places (depending on such factors as access to resources and level of production complexity), with administrative and re search and development functions being located at dif ferent places again. Relocations of existing manufacturing activities were particularly common in the clothing industry which, fa cing increasing competitive pressures from new technol ogies (e.g., synthetic fibers) and new production locations overseas, sought to cut costs by moving production to cheap labor sources. Thus, there was a spectacular movement of the US clothing industry from its original base in New England to the southern states; while in the UK, there was also a significant movement of the cotton and woollen textile industries from their original bases in Lancashire and West Yorkshire to peripheral rural areas. This interregional movement of branch plants was not confined to declining traditional sectors. Many of the new consumer industries of the twentieth century (such as electrical and electronic products) also from an early stage began to set up production plants – mainly in final assembly – in areas where cheap (and mainly female) labor was available, particularly where this was accom panied by government location incentives, such as fi nancial grants, tax concessions, labor subsidies, and the availability of serviced sites. Indeed, the attraction of branch plants through such incentives became the standard formula for the new regional development policies which were commonly introduced in advanced economies during the recessionary 1930s and then ex tended in the decades after World War II. Thus, in Ireland, substantial grants were introduced in 1952 to encourage the establishment of manufacturing plants in the underdeveloped western part of the country; while in Italy, substantial funding was made available in the 1960s to encourage industrial firms based in the prosperous northwest to set up branch plants in the very poor southern part of the country. Virtually from the beginning, therefore, regional de velopment policies in advanced economies became strongly associated with the attraction of inward branch plant investment to greenfield sites within lagging re gions. The logic involved in these policies was simple (if not, indeed, simplistic): manufacturing industry was seen as the essential driver of economic development in ad vanced industrial economies; in regions where traditional industries were in decline, the formula was to replace these industries with modern industries which were emerging elsewhere. In peripheral rural regions which had no previous experience of industrialization, this was seen as evidence of a lack of indigenous natural or


entrepreneurial resources, in which case the introduction of manufacturing employment from outside the region was seen as the most direct route to raising average living standards to the levels prevailing elsewhere.

Transnational Corporations and Greenfield Development Up to the 1960s, regional development policy was largely focused on inducing interregional industrial movement within national economies. With the rapid growth in foreign direct investment (FDI) by transnational cor porations (TNCs) from that decade on, regional policy became increasingly focused on attracting the branch plants being set up by these corporations in various parts of the world. Such investments are attractive for a number of reasons. Driven by the forces of globalization, the absolute volume of mobile FDI has expanded enor mously over the last 30 years. Being inherently footloose, such investment is amenable to being attracted to lo cations which can provide an appropriate package of attractions. TNCs tend to be to the forefront of tech nological innovation, so their production plants are in little danger of suffering obsolescence and might, indeed, function as sources of technology transfer to local businesses. Also, some TNC branch plants are very substantial operations which can bring substantial em ployment benefits to host locations. In addition, new production and communications technologies and new organizational structures have enhanced the ability of TNC branch plants to perform effectively in noncore locations, and have widened the range of possible func tions which can be moved to such locations. An important consequence of the latter point is the growing tendency on the part of TNCs to include service activities in the portfolio of projects potentially available for location in lagging regions. These include data pro cessing, telephone call centers, and back office adminis trative functions. In the aftermath of the creation of the Single European Market in 1993, many TNCs have been restructuring their European operations, one of the re sults of which is the rationalization of back office func tions into fewer ‘pan European’ centers which, thanks to the proliferation of new information and communications technologies, have in many cases been set up in per ipheral regions where cheap labor and investment in centives are available.

Locational Patterns of Greenfield Investments The locational patterns associated with greenfield invest ments in lagging regions have been quite diverse. When regional policy first became a major issue in the advanced

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economies in the 1960s, it was strongly influenced by theories of polarized growth which were prevalent at that time, and which argued for the concentration of new de velopments in what was hoped would become self sustaining growth poles or centers. However, political problems quickly fell in the way of attempts to implement such policies. The main problem was related to the idea that, in order to achieve sustainability, growth centers would have to reach a certain minimum size in order to generate substantial agglomeration economies. This in turn implied that the number of centers selected would have to be small. This predictably generated a negative reaction from the majority of urban centers in lagging regions which were not designated as growth centers under this policy. Thus, in southern Italy, a growth center policy introduced in the 1960s became increasingly dilu ted under local political pressure until eventually so many towns had been designated for development that the policy became meaningless. In Ireland, by contrast, a proposed growth center policy was rejected by the government in the late 1960s (again, mainly in response to political protest) and, in stead, a very ambitious program of industrial dispersal was introduced in the 1970s. Ireland’s accession to the Euro pean Economic Community in 1973 was accompanied by a major acceleration of inward investment, and the gov ernment set out to distribute this investment as widely as possible throughout the country. The main methods used to achieve this objective were an extensive program of advance (ready built) factory construction combined with spatially variable grants to guide industrial projects to particular locations. This policy worked quite well for a while, and by 1980, virtually every town in Ireland of any size had acquired at least one significant industrial project, most of them foreign owned. However, the policy ran into difficulties in the recessionary 1980s when industrial contractions and closures became quite common without an adequate flow of replacement projects. It is possible that widespread dispersal could have materialized even without the government’s advance factory and variable grant measures. There was growing evidence in the 1970s of corporate branch plants actively seeking out locations in previously unindustrialized areas rather than in established urban centers. Apart from lower site and service costs, a key factor in this locational avoidance was the desire to access labor with no previous industrial experience and, in particular, no contact with trade unions. This had been made possible by the de skilling of manufacturing work (especially through the development of assembly line technology), which meant it could be performed effectively with minimal training. Subsequently, a desire to avoid competition for workers became another important reason for firms to set up greenfield operations in small rural towns. This has been a key feature of the clusters of component suppliers

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which have developed around the set of Japanese auto mobile assembly plants which were established in the American Midwest in the 1980s and 1990s. These sup pliers are mainly located within 4 h driving time from their focal assembly plants, and in most cases are also located individually in small towns about 100 km apart so they do not form overlapping commuting zones. In declining urban industrial regions with high population densities, spatial concentration of new in dustrial plants was the norm more or less from the be ginning of regional industrial policy. In former coal mining and heavy industrial areas, with their derelict and blighted landscapes, the typical approach was to provide serviced sites on industrial estates or parks located in previously undeveloped green areas, frequently adjacent to main road routes. In Britain, this was frequently done in conjunction with the many new towns built after World War II to resettle people who had been living close to the now closed or greatly reduced mines and smelters. The idea was that these towns would be self contained units, with adequate employment provided in adjacent industrial estates, so that inhabitants would not have to commute long distances to find work.

Economic Impact of Greenfield Development In general it can be said that the economic development impacts of greenfield investments in lagging regions have been disappointing. Frequently, the benefits of such in vestments are of the static variety (involving a once off increase in output, employment, and wage payments) with few long term dynamic effects, such as technology and know how transfer, creation of local linkages, and spawning of spin off firms. There has been limited creation of local linkages as branch plants have typically sourced their in puts from outside the region, frequently from affiliate units of the same corporation. Technology transfer has been constrained by the low skill levels in branch plants, the fact that, typically, they involve only a single stage of the overall production chain, and their low use of local suppliers. Surpluses generated have been mostly transferred out of the region rather than being reinvested locally. Even consumer multiplier effects have been constrained by the low pay levels in many branch plants, which in turn is linked to the high levels of female employment in these plants. Policies which were designed to attract replacement jobs for those lost by the menfolk in the coal mines, the steel mills, and the shipyards instead had the effect of at tracting jobs in such areas as clothing and electrical as sembly targetted at women workers whose inferior social position meant they could be paid much lower wages. Greenfield developments which have little economic interaction with the wider regional economy in which

they are located are termed enclave developments. Even where branch plants do develop linkages with local firms or institutions (which becomes more likely the longer the branch plant is located in the region), sometimes the firms or institutions (e.g., training agencies) in question can become heavily dependent on the branch plant, due to the absence of alternative clients in the region. This may lead to the creation of an extended enclave em bracing the initial branch plant and the local suppliers who are largely or entirely dependent on that branch plant. Ultimately, the entire region may become dan gerously dependent for its welfare on a single major branch plant whose long term stability will always be in doubt (a situation referred to as regional capture).

Regional Implications of New Trends in Transnational Investment Recent changes in the nature and organization of transna tional investment carry with them varying implications for the prospects of TNC branch plants developing increasing linkages with the regional economies in which they are located. There has been a growing trend for many TNCs to confer greater functional autonomy on subsidiaries, in order to enhance their flexibility and learning capabilities. In theory, this should allow subsidiaries to make greater use of local suppliers and other local resources such as research institutions. However, the fact is that many peripheral re gions lack the technological capability to support the so phisticated supplier or research base which TNC subsidiaries require, and the general view is that this type of subsidiary development is only likely to occur where sub sidiaries are located in already advanced regions. Indeed, it has been suggested that low tech subsidiaries may be closed down altogether (especially in the light of increasing out sourcing by TNCs of routine forms of production) or re located to central regions for the precise reason of enhancing their learning capabilities. A second major recent trend as regards transnational investment has particularly serious implications for those regions which seen, in inward greenfield investment, their route to a prosperous future. This refers to the fact that the great acceleration in global FDI, which has occurred since the early 1990s, has mainly involved mergers and acquisitions (M&As) rather than establishment of new activities in greenfield locations. M&As rarely entail a net addition to production and employment and, in fact, are more likely to lead to job losses as they normally involve some degree of rationalization of the operations which have been merged or acquired. Furthermore, M&As are more likely to involve activities which are already located or headquartered in central regions. Even when the focus is confined to new investments in productive facilities (as opposed to mergers and


takeovers of existing facilities), recent trends do not favor greenfield investments in new locations. This is because a growing proportion of such investments (up to one half in some West European countries at the end of the 1990s) consists of repeat investments in existing facilities. This reflects the fact that, after up to 50 years of transnational investment inflows, the stock of foreign subsidiaries has both built up and matured in many regions, such as Ireland, Central Scotland, and South Wales. As a result, a growing proportion of new FDI is being devoted to the replacement of equipment in established branch plants, the expansion of existing lines of production at these plants, and/or additions to their product lines or range of functions. Of particular importance in this respect is an increasing tendency toward co location of process/ product development with manufacturing production in order to facilitate quicker and more hands on feedback (previously these two functions tended to be spatially separated, with process/product development carried out in specialized research units). This trend could spell danger for less sophisticated production activities in low tech countries/regions as production may be moved to where development staff are available.

Alternative Scenarios Despite these trends, which, for the most part, tend to favor investment in subsidiaries located in more advanced regions, international competition for inward investment continues to grow as more and more regions come forward seeking to attract mobile FDI as a means of achieving economic development. China has achieved particular success in this respect, due to both the large and rapidly growing size of the domestic market and the availability of very cheap labor for export oriented branch plants. In Central and Eastern Europe (the so called CEE coun tries), various states, as part of their transition to private enterprise following the collapse of central planning in the late 1980s, have been seeking to maximize inflows of capital from abroad. Initially, the main focus was on at tracting investment to take over existing brownfield plants (mainly inefficient state owned enterprises undergoing privatization), but in the late 1990s the emphasis switched to the attraction of new greenfield plants. The increasing intensity of competition for inward investment has meant a growing tendency for regions to outbid each other in making concessions and offers to potential investors. This has created fears of a race to the bottom as localities sacrifice tax revenues, proper planning, environmental concerns, workers’ rights, and working standards to entice desperately needed projects, but at the cost of an erosion of local living standards or life quality. The low operating costs which are the main attraction for potential inward investors offered by China and

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Eastern Europe are considerably offset by lower prod uctivity levels and, in any case, provide a poor founda tion for sustainable long term investment. The type of branch plant industrialization stimulated by low costs and financial incentives rarely generates the kinds of interfirm synergies upon which self sustaining growth is based. The economic success of prosperous central re gions tends to be built around complexes of inter dependent firms in particular sectors, with some of these firms involved in export markets while drawing on inputs of equipment, materials, and services from specialized local suppliers. The broad base of such industrial clusters and the inherent dynamics arising from interaction be tween exporting firms and their suppliers can provide a much more secure foundation for sustainability than the narrow base normally associated with branch plant in dustrialization, which typically involves the creation of few linkages with the remainder of the regional economy. See also: Agglomeration; Economies, Branch Plant; Embeddedness; Foreign Direct Investment; Industrial Districts; Industrial Location; Industrial Restructuring; Regional Development Models; Spatial Division of Labor.

Further Reading Breathnach, P. (1982). The demise of growth centre policy: The case of the Republic of Ireland. In Hudson, R. & Lewis, J. (eds.) Regional Planning in Europe, pp 35 56. London: Pion Ltd. Brown, A. and Burrows, E. (1977). Regional Economic Problems. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Dicken, P. (2003). Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the 21st Century. London: Sage Publications. Dunford, M. and Perrons, D. (1986). The restructuring of the post war British space economy. In Martin, R. & Rowthorn, B. (eds.) The Geography of De Industrialisation, pp 53 105. London: Macmillan. Hayter, R. (1997). The Dynamics of Industrial Location. Chichester: Wiley. Helsinka Hughes, E. and Hughes, M. (2003). Joining the competition: Central and Eastern European challenge to established FDI destinations? In Phelps, N. & Raines, P. (eds.) The New Competition for Inward Investment: Companies, Institutions and Territorial Development, pp 155 172. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Keeble, D. (1977). Industrial Movement. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Mair, A., Florida, R. and Kenney, M. (1988). The new geography of automobile production: Japanese transplants in North America. Economic Geography 64, 352 373. Massey, D. (1984). Spatial Divisions of Labour. London: Macmillan. Parr, J. B. (1999). Growth pole strategies in regional economic planning: A retrospective view. Part 1: Origins and advocacy. Urban Studies 36, 1195 1215. Parr, J. B. (1999). Growth pole strategies in regional economic planning: A retrospective view. Part 2: Implementation and outcome. Urban Studies 36, 1247 1268. Phelps, N. and Fuller, C. (2000). Multinationals, intracorporate competition and regional development. Economic Geography 76, 224 243. Porter, M. E. (1990). The Competitive Advantage of Nations. London: Macmillan. Raines, P. (2003). Flows and territories: The new geography of competition for mobile investment in Europe. In Phelps, N. & Raines, P. (eds.) The New Competition for Inward Investment: Companies, Institutions and Territorial Development, pp 119 135. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Gregory, D. B. Warf, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Theoretician One who engages in the production of new forms of theory, particularly social theory.

Gregory, Derek (1951) Derek Gregory is one of contemporary human geo graphy’s leading theoreticians (Figure 1). Born in Kent, England in 1951, he became a Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1969. He earned his BA, MA, and PhD (1981) at Cambridge and subsequently became university lecturer there. In 1989, he moved to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where he became professor of geography. He is the re cipient of University of British Columbia, Killam Re search Prize and the Killam Teaching Prize, 2005, and has received the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geo graphical Society. For Gregory, language occupies a central position in the interpretation and representation of people and places. His works have been widely noted for their ele gant rhetorical style, intriguing metaphors, and seductive phrasing, helping to legitimate a broader shift in aca demic prose from sterile, cut and dried style long char acteristic of most social sciences to a self consciously poetic model evocative of the richly symbolic worlds inhabited by real human beings. Gregory’s numerous works have been very influential. In 1978, his MA thesis, Ideology, Science, and Human

Figure 1 D. Gregory.

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Geography, was an elegant critique of emerging post positivist lines of thought. He offered a contextual summary of the rise of positivism in Recollections of a Revolution, which portrayed that paradigm as the product of scholars laboring to refashion the discipline in the face of intense political opposition rather than the un stoppable triumph of rational logic over empiricism. Gregory also wrote devastating critiques of location theory, systems theory, diffusion theory, and humanistic geography. Simultaneously, his works introduced geographers to Anthony Giddens’ highly influential theory of struc turation, which effectively overcame the long standing divide between views that emphasized social structures at the expense of individual consciousness on the one hand and ahistorical idealist views such as phenomenology that celebrated individual behavior but ignored social contexts. Structuration theory sought to recover the thoughts, desires, and meanings of actors but simul taneously avoided collapsing notions of social structure into those same motivations, with sociospatial relations always escaping the intentions of their creators. The construction of geographies is thus described by Gregory as a ‘‘sensuous swirl of contingency and determination.’’ Gregory’s works helped to integrate structuration theory with existing lines of thought such as time geography and humanistic approaches. This view became increas ingly accepted throughout the discipline in the 1980s and 1990s, with the volume Social Relations and Spatial Struc tures, a particularly important milestone in this process. Gregory’s works injected social theory into historical geography, which had long been characterized by a straightforward empiricism. For example, he wrote about the uneven spatiality of class struggle in England during the Industrial Revolution with his doctoral dissertation applying structuration theory to the Yorkshire woolen industry. He also examined information circulation in light of the massive time–space compression generated by modernity. These excavations of the origins of modernity enticed geographers and others to unveil its historically specific nature, demonstrating that En lightenment claims of the universal applicability of rationality (e.g., in Marxism and positivism) representing a particular configuration of power/knowledge. By the late 1980s, Gregory had begun to explore the vast implications of postmodernism, including its general distrust of broad, overarching theoretical paradigms and the manner in which it opened the door for a renewed regionalism. In ‘Solid geometry’, he lambasted

Gregory, D.

structuralists who attempted to theorize space, time, and society independently of one another. Geographies and landscapes, he insisted, are not simply passive reflections of some aspatial social structure; rather, space is inevit ably an active participant in the formation of social re lations and their changes over time. Thus, Gregory’s view advocated a much more aggressive role for space without retreating to the frozen spatial geometries of positivism. The book Geographical Imaginations marked the initi ation of a new phase in Gregory’s career. Drawing upon a wide array of philosophers and intellectual historians, he elaborated upon the ways in which seemingly different theoretical approaches reflected historically specific ‘scopic regimes’ – ways of seeing and knowing the world that appear consistent and complete within their own frames of reference. Since the Renaissance and particu larly the Enlightenment, Western social science, in cluding geography, has subscribed to the notion of a Cartesian observer, who is detached, all knowing, and objective. Because this observer in this model of know ledge has no social context, it is sometimes called the ‘view from nowhere’, what Gregory calls the ‘‘world as exhibition.’’ This notion underlies many seemingly disparate perspectives, including Marxism and positivist conceptions, and confers the power to know and define the world – both social and natural – on a rational, and presumably male, all knowing ego. Drawing upon the seminal work of Martin Jay, Gregory’s world as exhibition is a form of ‘ocularcentrism’, one that arose within the contours of modernity and facilitated the historical process of commodifying social life and space. Within geography, it was reflected in the triumph of abstract space over lived experience, a position made possible only if representations of the world are held to be detached from the world they reflect. The rise of postmodernism and post structuralism, which legitim ated relativist points of view, increasingly rendered this position indefensible. In contrast to the world as exhibition, Gregory argues that every theoretical position is necessarily incomplete and situated, linked to a power interest, and reflective of its utility in social life. Putting aside this scopic regime opens up numerous epistemological standpoints that take power and social context seriously, and in particular give voice to marginalized subject positions, including femi nism and subalternity. Avoiding a purely idealist history of social and spatial thought, Gregory links this shift to the massive waves of restructuring and time–space compression characteristic of global capitalism in the late twentieth century. Gregory’s work thus paved the way for much post structuralist theorizing within geography, and, unsurprisingly, generated considerable debate.Gregory has also co edited multiple editions of The Dictionary of Human Geography, which provide concise summaries of the discipline’s terminology and concepts, making clear the

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meanings and implications of terminology often lost in the jargon of obfuscationist rhetoric. More recently, drawing upon the concept of Orien talism initiated by Edward Said, Gregory has focused on European colonial representations of non Western spaces. As a power/knowledge relation, the active ‘geo graphing’ of various parts of the globe was an integral part of Western administrative control of colonized re gions. Not simply a list of use values, geography was also central to the ideological legitimation of colonial power relations. The colonial world as exhibition was thus closely linked to the naturalization of Western domi nance and ideologies of non Western inferiority. The colonial geographical imagination demarcated space and brought alien territories into Western frames of under standing in a manner that drew critical boundaries be tween identities, self and other, and whites and non whites. Colonialism was hence every bit as much a cul tural and ideological project as an economic and political one. Empirically, Gregory’s postcolonial work has focused largely on the Middle East, particularly European and American representations of Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, as Egyptology became fashionable, Egypt occupied a central ideological position in the evolving self con ception of the West as both proximate and distant, foreign and yet familiar, ancient yet stagnant, and in dire need of being rendered sensible through the ‘empire of the gaze’. Reworking discourses of colonial travelers and adminis trators, Gregory reveals how Western imaginative geog raphies were laced with patriarchical, sexualized, and often racist imagery that effectively ‘Othered’ Arabs in their own lands as Egypt was thoroughly ‘geo graphed’ by a panoptic foreign authority. Gregory’s postcolonial turn also led him to a creative encounter between Orientalism and recent conceptions concerning the social construction of nature. During the colonial era, for ex ample, Europeans often depicted tropical environments as either fecund Gardens of Eden inhabited by childlike innocents in need of conquest or as disease ridden swamps populated by dark savages. Finally, in The Colonial Present, he extended postcolonialism into a lucid critique of the ‘war on terror’ in Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan, revealing it to be a war of terror against people rende red invisible by Western discourses that marginalize Muslims. Gregory’s contributions to geography are both con ceptual and methodological. For close to 30 years he has repeatedly and emphatically stressed the importance of historical context in academic work, a move that thwarted the aspirations of Enlightenment modernists to construct universal interpretations independent of time and space. He has remained steadfast in his insistence that geographies are peopled, that time and space are

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made by ordinary folk, and that the outcomes are always contingent and never predetermined, even if, ‘contra’ overly structuralist interpretations, they are likewise never random or chaotic. His works have decisively demonstrated the need to understand capitalism in dis cursive terms, and he has been an acute observer of the roles played by language in the process of representation. In so doing, he has helped geographers to problematize the question of intellectual inquiry, wrenching it from its perch as a passive exercise in interpretation and recasting it as an active, often muddy, process of constructing meaning. He has remained sensitive to the politics of representation, the ways in which all forms of under standing are inescapably entwined with temporally and spatially varying regimes of power–knowledge: dis courses simultaneously reflect and constitute the re lations they depict and that give rise to them. Finally, his turn to postcolonialism has helped to awaken the dis cipline to the profound but often invisible ways in which geography as discourse was complicit in the systematic Othering of non European peoples. See also: Historical Geography; Human Geography; Industrialization; Orientalism; Postcolonialism/ Postcolonial Geographies; Postmodernism/Postmodern Geography; Structuralism/Structuralist Geography; Structuration Theory; Structurationist Geography; Time Geography.

Further Reading Duncan, J. and Gregory, D. (eds.) (1999). Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing. London: Routledge. Gregory, D. (1976). Rethinking historical geography. Area 8, 295 299. Gregory, D. (1978). The discourse of the past: Phenomenology, structuralism and historical geography. Journal of Historical Geography 4, 161 173. Gregory, D. (1978). Ideology, Science and Human Geography. London: Hutchinson.

Gregory, D. (1980). The ideology of control: Systems theory and geography. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geographie 71, 327 342. Gregory, D. (1981). Human agency and human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 6, 1 18. Gregory, D. (1984). Contours of crisis? Sketches for a geography of class struggle in the early Industrial Revolution in England. In Baker, A. & Gregory, D. (eds.) Explorations in Historical Geography. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Gregory, D. (1985). Suspended animation: The stasis of diffusion theory. In Gregory, D. & Urry, J. (eds.) Social Relations and Spatial Structures. New York: St. Martin’s. Gregory, D. (1987). Postmodernism and the politics of social theory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 5, 245 248. Gregory, D. (1988). Solid geometry: Notes on the recovery of spatial structure. In Golledge, R., Couclelis, H. & Gould, P. (eds.) A Ground for Common Search. Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Geographical Press. Gregory, D. (1989). Areal differentiation and post modern human geography. In Gregory, D. & Alford, R. (eds.) Horizons in Human Geography. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble. Gregory, D. (1994). Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Gregory, D. (1995). Between the book and the lamp: Imaginative geographies of Egypt, 1849 50. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20, 29 57. Gregory, D. (1995). Imaginative geographies. Progress in Human Geography 19, 447 485. Gregory, D. (2001). (Post)colonialism and the production of nature. In Castree, N. & Braun, B. (eds.) Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics. Oxford: Blackwell. Gregory, D. (2002). Orientalism and the cultural politics of nature. In Wynn, G. & Gregory, D. (eds.) Nature, Culture, Colonialism. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Gregory, D. (2004). The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. Gregory, D. and Urry, J. (eds.) (1985). Social Relations and Spatial Structures. New York: St. Martin’s.

Relevant Websites http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/derek gregory the cultural turn in late modern war and the rush to the intimate/ http://web.mac.com/derekgregory/iWeb/Site/Welcome.html

Grounded Theory M. Cope, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary 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. Constant Comparison A central characteristic of grounded theory; a process in which researchers use multiple forms of comparison to evaluate and reevaluate their data, codes, themes, and theories. Recursive Analysis The process of going back cyclically in multiple iterations to reevaluate data and previous analysis in light of new insights. Social Construction of Knowledge The perspective that knowledge is produced iteratively and recursively through active processes in the social world, including through the research process. Theory Building In grounded theory, the process of developing themes, concepts, and theories inductively from repeated, iterative data collection, analysis, and identification of core themes.

Introduction It could be said that geographers rarely ‘call’ their ana lytical practices ‘grounded theory’, but they do often practice the strategies, use the tools, and produce grounded theories without invoking the term. Other disciplines have been much more transparent in their dealings with this set of inductive guidelines for ana lyzing data, including sociology (where grounded theory was born), anthropology, and nursing. However, with the ‘cultural turn’ and the revival of qualitative research of the past 15 years, geographers have increasingly sought out methods for conducting rigorous research and grounded theory has much to offer in this regard. Grounded theory has a relatively short history, being only about 40 years old, but it is one full of changing

collaborations, rivalries, disavowals, new developments, divergent trajectories, and colorful personalities. The details of this history are thoroughly covered elsewhere so this article focuses primarily on the form and practice of grounded theory, as well as some of the ways that geographic perspectives can both benefit from grounded theory and contribute to its future. There are many streams of practice of grounded theory, as well as many subtleties in their strategies and methods, but the general coverage offered here is based on those principles closest to current practice in critical human geography. To this end, this article focuses primarily on ‘constructivist’ grounded theory, that is, the stream taking the view that social realities and meanings are perpetually socially constructed, lived within and against, and reconstructed, and also that research itself is another such dialectical process whereby data are not ‘collected’ but, rather, ‘created’ in the course of research interactions. Con structivist grounded theory also fits well with much of postmodern and post structuralist geography because it allows and even encourages the production of knowledge through the recognition of a multiplicity of truths and takes seriously the question of the context and posi tionality of both the researcher and the participants.

What Is It? Grounded theory involves, at its heart, a set of strategies, tools, and central principles that aid researchers in doing inductive, reflexive, and rigorous analysis of data. The goal in adopting grounded theory is to produce new insights that are thoroughly ‘grounded’ in the empirical findings, but also which have strong conceptual threads tying them together. Grounded theory is typically con sidered an analysis technique, but it actually informs (even shapes) all areas of research – identification of the research questions, data collection, analysis, theory building, writing, and sharing of results. Indeed, one of the central tenets of grounded theory is that these areas of research are not discrete and sequential but instead are iterative and recursive. Data can be collected – or, more accurately, ‘created’ – at any point during the project and indeed, researchers are expected to go back and forth between multiple data sources, through various analytical techniques and perhaps even writing, frequently re turning to do more data collection as new themes emerge, new questions arise, and new concepts need clarification or validation. Thus, in grounded theory much of the linear formula of ‘the’ research process

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(hyper legitimated by its roots in the ‘scientific method’) many of us are trained in is turned inside out and scrambled around, but with the purpose of more rigorous and defensible results. Of course, despite the linear way scholarly articles present research, in reality most social research does not really follow a rigid step by step pro cess of data collection analysis writing up, but already involves the back and forth steps intrinsic to grounded theory. Therefore, grounded theory offers us a chance to formalize and treat more systematically the inherent piecemeal practice of social research.

Strategies and Tools Grounded theory involves several specific strategies for analysis, though they are not all necessarily essential or foundational to the approach. One of the most central tools of grounded theory is the use of coding. Coding can be practiced in different ways, but the central goal is to or ganize, categorize, and draw insights from data by identi fying core themes that emerge inductively. For example, a geographer might notice that participants mention playing up – or hiding – certain aspects of their identity (age, gender, race, sexuality, etc.) over others depending on which local setting they are in, but they may do so in many different ways. Codes could be used to organize these data so that important meanings, constructions of social space, power, and forms of local knowledge can be pulled out. Coding would allow the researcher to preserve important differences between participants, but also to pull out commonalities in, for instance, people’s strategies to avoid confrontations on the street. Coding is in part a process of categorizing, and therefore is a data reduction technique, but it is also an important step in analysis and concept building. So in this example, while there might be a code for the street behavior ‘walking tall’, there is also a set of concepts that go with this code based on power, fear and other emotions, construction of social space, and identity that needs to be developed. This is where diagramming and ‘memoing’ become useful. Diagramming involves mapping the networked relationships between research elements (including codes, themes, quotes or sections of dialog, photos, etc.) in order to see new ways that they condition each other, are contingent upon or consequences of each other, or are otherwise connected. Creating memos is also an im portant tool of grounded theory because memos about data, about analytical operations, about the meaning or origin of codes, or about emerging ideas of the researcher are an ongoing reflexive type of metadata for the re search, which is a rich source of knowledge production. Memos also help to keep track of decisions that are made or concepts that are in their infancy, which in turn boost the rigor of the research by allowing the scholar to be

more consistent in coding and to document analytical developments. Modern computer aided qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS – a generic term for a host of soft ware programs) are generally well integrated with grounded theory, and thus typically have excellent cap acity for constructing, refining, displaying, and analyzing the codes, code families, diagrams, memos, networks, hierarchies, conditional relationships, and metadata that are intrinsic to qualitative research projects. While these programs are very powerful for organizing, storing, and analyzing data, having an understanding of the grounded theory helps researchers both to use the programs more effectively and to maximize their return on investing in the time to learn and use them. Of course, the programs will not ‘do’ the analysis but they can greatly enhance a project with their functions. Another important element of grounded theory in volves the process of ‘constant comparison’. This means that data, codes, and emerging conceptual themes are continuously held up for scrutiny, for reevaluation in light of new understandings, and for examination of their validity. Comparison allows researchers to be more confident in confirming the trends or concepts they have identified in the data, but it also forces researchers to dig deeper to understand mismatches and divergences in the data. To continue with the above example, one study found that elderly white women in an urban neighbor hood sometimes used ‘walking tall’ as a strategy on the street to avoid confrontations or getting mugged, but sometimes some of the participants used the opposite strategy – stopping to look carefully at a street sign in pretend confusion while a group of young people walked by – to avoid attention in public space. These kinds of empirical inconsistencies can actually provoke new in quiries and stimulate new conceptual insights so the goal of ‘constant comparison’ is not merely to confirm, but also to complicate. Comparison is also important between multiple sources of data (e.g., semistructured interviews as well as travel diaries kept by the elderly women) and helps to tease out subtleties and emerging themes. At the more abstract level of conceptual development, comparison of codes and emerging themes enables re searchers to refine their concepts, reach a point of ‘sat uration’ (wherein further analysis of the data stops revealing new themes), and ultimately to build theory that is thoroughly grounded in data. All of these practices serve several purposes. First, they encourage rigorous and reflexive research through their demands for the careful, critical attention of the scholar. This in turn serves an important legitimating function, which has been especially important for quali tative work. Finally, grounded theory done well produces theory that has been actively and mindfully ‘built’ that remains sensitive to context, positionality, the social

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production of knowledge, and the contingencies of the social world. The resulting theory will be both durable – it holds up because it incorporates variations – and flexible – it accommodates researchers’ future refine ments as more comparison is completed.

Geography’s Contributions The discipline of nursing has used grounded theory ex tensively and made contributions to it by breaking down barriers between the clinical side of medical practice and the more holistic side of patient care and advocacy. Sociologists have sought to envision ‘constructivist’ grounded theory that fosters understanding of multiple realities and multiple viewpoints, along with the under standing that the research process constructs ‘data’ and renders participants’ stories in dialogic ways. How might geography or taking a spatial perspective contribute to grounded theory? Issues of context, multiple/intersecting processes and identities, and the social construction of knowledge are familiar terrain for contemporary critical human geographers so it should not be a stretch to envision some potential areas of contribution that the discipline and practice of geography could make to grounded theory. The three points in the following represent a beginning in this process. Settings and Stories Geographers are finely attuned to the contextual factors that influence and are influenced by human social action. In some cases location information will include objective site based measures such as addresses and Global Pos itioning System (GPS) points (and these have their uses – see below), but there are also many other characteristics of the settings of the social world that have relevance for grounded theory researchers. Political processes of both formal and informal power relations; economic processes of trade, investment, exchange, and labor; cultural pro cesses shaped by language, history, religion, and change; and social relations of identity, social regulation, social reproduction, and institutions are constitutive of the situations of human agents, who in turn act upon these processes in complicated ways. Geographers are skilled in identifying and analyzing these multiple forces in an integrated way by, for instance, examining the con struction of ‘place’ as both a product and the medium of everyday life. A place based approach not only benefits from the analytical rigor of grounded theory, but the integrative, comparative, and recursive strategies used in critical geography could also serve to push toward new practices of grounded theory. Discrete boundaries be tween quantitative and qualitative research, between so cial/economic/political processes, between the physical and social world, and between ‘researcher’ and ‘subject’

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have all been challenged and reshuffled in geography, with varying effects. While much of the work done in other disciplines using grounded theory takes a ‘slice of time’ approach, place based perspectives offer some fresh opportunities for grounded theory practice. For example, among grounded theorists there is burgeoning concern for subjectivities and how to avoid overemphasizing the individual, which could benefit from geography’s con siderations of how people construct place through rou tine performance, actions and verbalizations, expressions of identity and power(lessness), bodily comportment, etc., and simultaneously how people react to place, live in place, resist place, experience place, and ‘be’ place(d). Geography’s focus on context, multiple and intersecting processes, and inherent comparative facilities could help in this reworking of grounded theory, and the mutual benefits would be invigorating. Qualitative Data Analysis and Geographic Information Systems (GISs) An area of significant potential contribution from geog raphy to grounded theory is through the integration (or at least communication) of the digital tools we use for data handling, storage, analysis, and representation. Some initial steps along the lines of constructing a ‘qualitative geographic information system (QualGIS)’ have used ‘Atlas.ti’ (a CAQDAS that uses nonhierarchical net working of codes and data) and ArcGIS. Because Atlas was developed as a tool for grounded theory analysis, its central characteristics and principles are embedded in the system in various ways. Using the ‘codes’ that emerge from grounded theory analysis in Atlas as a bridge a connection is then made to a database in the GIS, allowing social and spatial data to blend. An example of this is one researcher’s ability to analyze the concept of ‘community identity’ based on children’s artwork and child led neighborhood tours in part by embedding their representations within a map of the city that also shows quantitative data, such as race and poverty distributions, and qualitative data, such as photographs of the location. Another example of the integration of social and spatial data, ‘mash ups’ (e.g., using Google Maps), cur rently have no particular relationship to grounded theory but there is the potential to make good use of them. Mash ups are the products of laypeople who incorporate various sorts of qualitative data into existing web based mapping applications. While some of these are purely for fun (e.g., tracking foul smells people encounter at various New York City subway stations), others represent the cutting edge of real time, useful public information, such as mapping and reporting the spatial extent of wildfires in California along with evacuation orders and sites for safe refuge. Mash ups could be especially useful for re searchers needing a spatial element of their ‘constant

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comparison’, and would also be very useful for the metadata functions of ‘memos’ because they are quick and easy to do but can convey a lot of information about spatially referenced data in a simple visual form. Both qualitative GIS and mash ups are techniques in their infancy, but their future is open to creative new approaches. There is no reason grounded theorists could not employ such integrative methods in all areas of re search: data production, analysis, and representation. Grounded Visualization Extending from ‘qualitative GIS’ and the tool based discussion above, a final realm for productive exchange between geographers and grounded theorists is in the area of grounded visualization. Geographers, particularly those using GIS and ‘exploratory data analysis’ (EDA), are quite familiar with visualization, which involves looking at spatially referenced data in different ways in order to discern new patterns, trends, clusters, absences, or co occurrences. For example, to take one of the sim plest techniques, zooming in or out changes the scale of the map, which may reveal visual patterns that were not noticeable at the original scale of analysis. In this process, the researcher is exploring the data visually by changing the resolution, filtering out or highlighting certain data, or incorporating statistical techniques to identify clusters or other important patterns. This process is inductive, iterative, and reflexive, just as grounded theory is. These commonalities were identified and built upon by a re search team of two geographers who were interested in the complexities of how community gardens played a role in the community identity of a marginalized social group. They developed the practice of grounded visualization, which fosters rigorous grounded theory analysis using qualitative and quantitative data, spatially and non spatially referenced data, and a set of recursive, reflexive processes for understanding intricate social worlds. In this example, the potential impact of geography on grounded theory is particularly apt as it represents the symbiosis between two methods of analysis that had many common roots but had never been combined.

existed an independent reality ‘out there’ that awaited discovery. More recent developments have reflected the postmodern turn of much of social science (and other disciplines, such as nursing) in which there is acknow ledgement that stories told through grounded theory may indeed be rigorously researched but they still represent the mutual and contingent actions, thoughts, and inter pretations of the researcher and the participants at a given moment and in a given place. This reflects a growing understanding that the social world itself is conditioned by multiple processes, informed by multiple ‘truths’, saturated with power relations, and always contextually situated. Geographers are well poised con ceptually, analytically, and technologically to contribute to the future of grounded theory. See also: Ethnography; Qualitative Geographic Information Systems; Transcripts (Coding and Analysis); Visualization, Feminist.

Further Reading Bringer, J., Johnston, L. and Brackenridge, C. (2006). Using computer aided qualitative data analysis software to develop a grounded theory project. Field Methods 18(3), 245 266. Charmaz, K. (2000). Grounded theory: Objectivist and constructivist methods. In Denzin, N. & Lincoln, Y. (eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd edn.), pp 509 535. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 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. Jung, J. K. (in press). Computer aided qualitative GIS (CAQ GIS): A software level integration of qualitative research and GIS. In Cope, M. & Elwood, S. (eds.) Qualitative GIS: Mixed Methods in Practice and Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Knigge, L. and Cope, M. (2006). Grounded visualization: Integrating the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data through grounded theory and visualization. Environment and Planning A 38(11), 2021 2037. Miller, C. (2006). A beast in the field: The Google maps mashups as GIS/2. Cartographica 41(3), 187 199. Mills, J., Bonner, A. and Francis, K. (2006). The development of constructivist grounded theory. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 5(1), 1 10. Strauss, A. and Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory (2nd edn.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Concluding Thoughts Grounded theory has stood the test of time in part through its composition of strategies and characteristics that are flexible enough to adapt to changing epis temologies and ontologies. Early grounded theory (and indeed, much work still done today) was decidedly objectivist and based on the positivist’s belief that there

Relevant Websites http://www.qualitative research.net/index.php/fqs Forum of Qualitative Research, a peer reviewed, multi lingual journal. http://www.qualitativeresearch.uga.edu/QualPage/index.htm Qual Page, lots of links to helpful resources & reviews. http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/web.html The Qualitative Report, journal and links.

Growth Poles, Growth Centers U. Rossi, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction It can be argued that the theory of what came to be known as ‘growth poles’ (poˆles de croissance) – a ‘magic label’ or a ‘mythic catchword’ as some commentators put it at the time – symbolized in the 1950s and the 1960s what industrial districts theory and discourse represented in the 1980s and the 1990s: a pathbreaking strand of re search and theoretical elaboration, intimately linked to the leading approaches of industrial policy being adopted at the local level, particularly in the disadvantaged re gions of both developed and developing countries. It is thereby interesting to look back again to the theory of growth poles and centers and to its translation into a concrete strategy of regional policy, also because it tes tifies to the ways in which theories and concepts of re gional development cyclically appear and disappear within this field of inquiry and its related policy sphere. This circulation of ideas sheds light on the highly his toricized and contingent character of regional economic development policies and theories. Regional policies witness the spirit of the times in which they appear and take form and all of them are, in a way or in another, subjected to cycles of rise, consolidation, decline, and then more or less rapid dismissal. While the place where growth pole theories and strategies appeared and gained their academic reputation was France, for industrial districts theory and some other more recent regional development theories and policy recipes this role has been played by Italy and most no tably by the Third Italy. In both cases, these theories and the related policy instruments have acquired an influence transcending their respective contexts of origin and have been applied in a growing number of regions in both the developed and developing countries. Variants of growth poles and centers policies have been implemented all over the world, as this article documents in more detail by referring to cases in Southern Europe, Latin America, and Northern America. The variety of policy applications shows how growth pole theory has become a truly ‘cross national’ instrument and conceptual framework of re gional policy during the post war decades. This is a demonstration of the high level of homogenization at a world scale level experienced by regional policies during the Fordist–Keynesian era. A difference between Fordist and post Fordist re gional concepts and related models of economic and spatial policy lies in the fact that the former, such as

growth pole theory, have been adopted most frequently within the context of lagging behind regions, while the latter, such as industrial districts theory and other more recent conceptual tools in the field, have been primarily formulated with reference to more prosperous regions of Western Europe (Third Italy, Baden Wu¨rttemberg, Catalonia, etc.). This shift testifies to the changing per spective that has gained ground in regional development studies and policies in recent years as compared to the situation in the post war decades, with attention being diverted from the structural conditions of less favored regions and a greater emphasis being placed on the conditions of economic success rather than on the re covery from economic backwardness. In light of this shift in regional development literature and policy action, this article presents and discusses the scholarly literature dealing with growth pole theory and strategies. The article is organized as follows: first, it reconsiders the conceptual value of growth pole theory; second, it analyzes the implementation of growth pole strategies in a number of regional contexts at an inter national level; finally, some conclusions are drawn reflecting on the intellectual legacy of this regional development theory and policy experience.

The Theories of Growth Poles and Centers: Potentials and Pitfalls As originally presented in the mid 1950s and onward by French economist François Perroux, growth pole theory was a largely abstract conceptualization. The theory implied the idea of a complex of industries mu tually linked by functional relations and dominated by a propulsive industry (the so called industrie motrice), the latter being the engine of the development dynamic, thanks to its intrinsic capacity to innovate and stimulate economic growth as well as to nurture the formation of other economic activities and industries (the so called industries mues, or ‘mute industries’). Conceptually, Perroux premised his theory upon a neo Schumpeterian understanding of the mechanics of development within capitalist economies. Development proceeds, in Schumpeter’s view, by the direct and the indirect effects of innovations which are able to take an economy away from a stationary equilibrium (both sec toral and spatial). This means that the newer and more efficient industries in which innovations take place grow

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at a faster pace compared to the older and more static industries. Regional economic development, therefore, implies cumulative sectoral and spatial differentiation in impact and thus deviates from a stationary conception of equilibrium growth. Building on this conceptual argumentation, which had many points of convergence with subsequent theories of unbalanced and cumulative growth (notably those of leading economists and planners such as Albert Hirschmann, Gunnar Myrdal, and John Friedmann), Perroux thought that in order to act as a pole the propulsive industry should satisfy the three criteria of: (1) large size, (2) a potential of economic leadership, and (3) a rate of growth faster than that of the local and regional economy in which it becomes em bedded. The existence of these conditions allowed the deployment of a mechanic of polarization, which in Perroux’s view could take place in two specific respects: first, the leading firm can make anticipation of demand, both correct and incorrect, affecting smaller firms; sec ond, the effects of the leading firm is able to change the balance of factor inputs in other firms. In formulating the growth pole theory, critics have noted that Perroux referred to a conventionally abstract, topological space of Euclidean kind. It was only at a subsequent stage of the debate on growth poles that some scholars, especially in France, sought to apply Perrouxian theory to a geographic dimension of enquiry and theo retical reflection. Francophone human geographers were in the forefront of this attempt. At that time, human geographers and most notably economic geographers had become persuaded about the necessity to rethink con ventional categories and visions of regional growth and change, particularly those inherited from the tradition of regional geography established by Vidal de la Blache and his followers in the first half of the twentieth century. This emergent body of geographic thinking and research ad vocated the embracement of a more proactive approach to regional enquiry, which was presented under the banner of geógraphie active. In doing so, these geographers asserted the aim of going beyond the objective and prefixed identity and status of regional economic spaces while paying greater emphasis on the role of the state and other plan ning entities in giving form and shape to regional econ omies and societies. While the homogenous region was the favorite regional form of Vidalian geographers, during post war decades and most notably during the 1960s the success of polarization theories led to the fore debates about the so called ‘polarized region’. According to those proposing this concept such as Jacques Boudeville, a po larized region exists only as a product of a regional eco nomic planning and policy initiative. Somehow consistently with the aim of spatializing growth pole theory, other authors – most notably urban scholars – referred to a location, usually a city region, having a polarizing effect and potential in terms of

‘growth center’. This latter field of enquiry offered an expanded interpretation of the Perrouxian theory of growth poles, trying to show how the role played by growth centers in regional development is a particular case of the general process of innovation diffusion. In doing so, these scholars drew on functional urban theory: in particular, Brian Berry’s conceptualization of urban systems theorizing a system of cities arranged in a hier archy according to the functions performed by each. Discussions about the critical size of the city for being a ‘growth center’ were central to this line of enquiry, with the 250 000 population figure being the conventional threshold. Theorizers of growth centers related the dif ferential of demographic growth displayed by cities and metropolitan areas to the local economic structure and particularly to the sectoral division of labor at the urban level. In advanced countries – these authors argued – the greater the earnings derived from primary activities, the lower the growth. As earnings from manufacturing in crease, the growth rate tends to stabilize around the na tional average. The greater the share of earnings from the tertiary sector, involving innovative activities such as research and development and education, the greater the population growth rate. But even in those contributions that retained a closer linkage to Perrouxian theory, while attempting to offer a spatialization of the theory itself, the conceptual mis match was evident. In general terms, the translation of the Perrouxian theory of the growth pole into a theory of the ‘growth center’ (or growth areas, development nuclei, core areas, according to the varying definitions) entailed a translation of an economic concept into a geographic concept. This act of translation from the realm of eco nomic space to that of geographic space has been among the most controversial and critiqued aspects in this lit erature. While Perrouxian theory itself did not remain untouched by critiques stressing its incompleteness and vagueness, an even much stronger and more severe criticism has been directed against the geographic ap plications and reformulations of his theory. Geographic translations of the Perrouxian theory have been widely criticized for absence of theoretical rigor and sophisti cation, for lack of a satisfactory empirical evidence and at the same time for a tendency toward empiricism. Ac cording to critics, the concept of ‘growth center’ has exceeded the original conceptualization of the Perroux ian notion of ‘growth pole’, but at the same time has also developed an ambiguous relationship with it. In par ticular, three weaknesses have been identified within those theoretical efforts attempting to spatialize growth pole theory and to apply it to specific geographic and policy contexts. First, critics have questioned the basic assumption that the growth pole in geographic space (the ‘growth center’) was simply a specific variant of the growth pole in economic space, producing the semantic


confusion of attributing to a location the growth char acteristics of the pole (industry); second, critics expressed skepticism about the main assumption underlying the geographic translation of growth pole theory, that is, the idea that the ‘natural’ growth pole existing in geographic space could be automatically replicated in the form of a planned growth pole; third, they lamented the loss of the original neo Schumpeterian attention toward economic innovation and signaled, on the contrary, a prevailing emphasis being laid on firm size with its multiplier po tentials as a distinguishing feature of growth centers and poles. However, despite this conceptual looseness as regards the relationship to the Perrouxian formulation, the geo graphic understanding of growth pole theory provided a bridge with another and older set of theories investigating the organization of human activity in geographic space: most notably, August Losch’s economics of industrial lo cation and Walter Christaller’s central place theory. Albeit these theories and the geographic reformulations of growth pole theory differ in their way of reasoning, the former embracing a distinctively deductive method and the latter an inductive method of analysis, it can be nonetheless argued that they are complementary in their contribution to regional science. In fact, while Jacques Boudeville’s theory provides an explanation of the de velopmental impact of localized poles of growth in geo graphic space, it is not by itself a theory of location explaining where the functional growth poles are or where they will be localized in the future. To clarify this, some authors have argued that the growth pole theory should rely on theories of location, such as those of Losch and Christaller. In fact, central place and industrial location theories, despite their obsession with spatial regularities and their blindness toward the understanding of the dy namics of economic growth, are to be regarded as useful points of departure for analyzing the impact of develop ment in a given center on the other centers and, in doing so, appear to well supplement theories of growth poles and centers, which on their part concentrate their analytical efforts on the functioning of the economic process. The translation of the growth pole conceptualization into a geographic theory of regional development has proved to be problematic not only at a theoretical level but also at a practical level. The experiments of regional policy that have been undertaken in different regions of the world are illustrative of the potential as well as the limitations of this controversial theory and policy tool.

Using Growth Pole Theory as a Regional Development Policy The formulation of growth pole theory and the related application to concrete regional contexts arose in the

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wake of the search for policy and planning tools to solve problems of imbalance among regions in both indus trialized and so called ‘underdeveloped’ countries during the post war decades. Despite its conceptual vagueness and elusiveness, as highlighted in the previous section, growth pole theory proved to be a highly popular tool of regional policy in a number of different geographic and economic contexts. Its popularity largely lies in the fact that it was viewed by planners and policymakers as a sort of ‘complete theory’ of economic growth, capable of in tegrating all interrelated aspects of development in a large variety of geographic settings. In Southern Europe growth pole policies have been pursued in Italy and Spain in the 1950s and the 1960s. At the time these countries strongly differed in their polit ical, economic, and geographic situations. Italy was an emerging capitalist country, experiencing an intense process of industrialization in the years between 1958 and 1963, albeit its economic geography was strongly char acterized by a deep North–South divide. On the other hand, Spain was politically isolated, the economy strongly nationalized and heavily regulated from the center, while the dominant features of its economic geography were not those of dualism as in Italy but of fragmentation and dispersal: Spain’s main centers of ac tivity were far apart from each other and were linked by an imperfectly developed transportation system. In Italy, a growth pole strategy was devised in the southern re gions of the country. The growth pole strategy took the form of an industrialization plan which was organized by concentrating public investments in a relatively large number of industrial poles, in which the mechanic of growth was to be generated by the settling of a propulsive industry specializing in a capital intensive and relatively technologically advanced sector of the economy. A law approved by the Italian Parliament in 1957 established about 100 industrial poles, even though those that proved to be effective were much fewer and – even more im portantly – the propulsive effect of many of them proved to be weaker than that envisaged by Perrouxian theo retical framework. Several poles of industrial growth demonstrated to have been created with goals of con sensus building, consistently with the functioning of the Italian system of political clientelism. In the end, only a limited number of regions had benefited from the growth pole strategy: the Campania region with some large in dustrial complexes established in the broader metro politan area of Naples; the Puglia region with a large chemical industrial settlement in Brindisi and a big steel plant in Taranto; and then Sicily with the industrial sites of Gela and Syracuse specializing in chemicals and petrochemicals. Geographically the policy strategy was therefore implemented mainly in the coastal regions, while the inland areas became only marginally involved in the industrialization plan.

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In Spain, the growth pole policy was much more se lective than the one implemented in Italy: in 1964, seven poles were established (Saragoza, Sevilla, Valladolid, La Corunã, Vigo, Burgos, and Huelva) and, in 1969, five more poles were created by the national government. One of the most interesting facts in the establishment of these poles was that they were not concentrated in the most backward regions. Thus, in the Spanish experience the growth pole strategy was not used as an instrument for developing the poorest regions, but was approached as a way to find suitable centers for expansion along the major (present or intended) transport and development axes. This means that considerations of regional equity were not central to the pursuit of the policy strategy. In general, the strategy suffered from a lack of interinstitutional coordination between the national and the regional levels of govern ment, and its effects were limited by the scant attention that was devoted to crucial issues in regional economic development such as the enlargement of the firm size (Spanish industry was dominated by very small firms at the time) and the linkage with environmental and social issues such as the provision of social housing. One of the best known growth pole strategies has been the one pursued in the Appalachian Region in the United States. This was an unusual example of lagging region, as it was located between two of the most highly industrialized and urbanized regions of the world, the Atlantic meg alopolis and the industrial Midwest. The Appalachian Regional Commission viewed the lack of urban centers capable of providing producer services, trained labor, and other external economies as the factors lying behind the backwardness of this region. It is in light of this context that the Appalachian Regional Development Act which was approved in 1965 has to be understood. In contrast to the scattering of public investments that characterized earlier attempts to aid depressed areas, the Act concen trated the public investments in areas where there was the greatest potential for future growth. The Commission identified 30 ‘growth areas’ as principal recipients of the public investments. Each area was organized around a ‘growth center’, which was defined as ‘‘a complex con sisting of one or more communities or places, which, taken together, should provide, or were likely to provide, a range of cultural, social, employment, trade and service func tions for itself and its associated rural hinterland.’’ A re cent assessment of this policy experiment has pointed to some critical issues that resemble those raised with ref erence to the Italian and the Spanish experiences (espe cially the former): an inconsistency between theory and implementation; the low level of place selectivity and the identification of too many areas, many of which could not reasonably qualify as growth centers; the policy’s inherent exposure to political pressures. Especially the latter has proven to be a decisive factor in growth pole strategies’ failures or only partial success: the identifications of only a

few growth centers amid political demands and pressures to designate many have been the main contradiction in the implementation of this policy. In Latin America growth pole strategies were devised in almost all countries, even though concrete results were poor. In Chile in the late 1960s a growth pole strategy was established in each of 11 regions (typically the provincial capital), a few of which were selected as functional poles: for example, Arica for automobiles and electronics, San tiago for electronics, Concepcioń for steel and petro chemicals, and Punta Arena for petrochemicals. However, despite some promising signs of regional resurgence, polarization strategy was adopted too passively on the regional level and was abandoned by the national gov ernment too early to be effective. In Peru the 1971–75 plan attempted to alleviate the economic dominance of Lima–Callao through a decentralization policy which identified two novel axes of national growth where sec ondary cities were located. However, the industrial aspects of the pole growth strategy were overlooked and the political will behind the strategy itself proved to be weak. The Venezuelan case has been relatively well known, particularly for the Ciudad Guayana project which, on the one hand, transformed a frontier region into an integral part of the national economy but on the other hand was not exempt of enclave effects. In Colombia the 1969–72 Development Plan aimed to counteract Bogota´’s domin ance by developing the next three largest cities (Medellıń, Cali, and Barranquilla) as equilibrium metropolises. However, the strategy never got off the ground as the Borrero administration that came into power in 1970s subjugated polarization to sectoral priorities. In Bolivia, the 1971–91 Plan published in 1970 included a growth pole strategy with Cochabamba designated as a service pole, Santa Cruz and Oruro as industrial poles, and the much smaller centers of Sucre and Tarija as agro indus trial poles, but was never implemented and remained a ‘paper plan’. In Argentina the 1970–75 Plan identified several regional growth poles, but the spatial choices were poor and orientated by political motives rather than by a policy rationality: for instance, three of the poles were in Patagonia, which has only 2% of the population, while the high density areas of the North were relatively neglected. In Brazil the most successful attempts at polarization strategy have been the promotion of small metropolitan poles within the Saõ Paolo state and the transfer of the administrative capital to Brasilia, but overall the regional policies and programs in this country have been too dif fuse to be described as a coherent growth pole approach. Generally speaking, Latin American experiments of growth pole policies have suffered from similar limitations that have been detected with reference to other geo graphic contexts: politicization of localization choices, lack of integration with wider national development strategies, and neglect of institutional factors. Moreover, these


experiments have encountered a number of regionally specific problems: most notably, the weakness of demo cratic political structures and the prevailing of authori tarian political regimes; the importance of monopolistic industrial structures and associated autarchic economic policies in these countries; the relative absence of middle class elites, managerial talent and associationist leaders, particularly in secondary cities; and the lack of an inter dependent inter urban network and the weak economic and functional base of most Latin American cities, except for coastal cities and capital cities.

Conclusion Growth centers and poles strategies have been imple mented in a tremendous variety of geographic settings and socioeconomic contexts: not only in those illustrated of the Italian Mezzogiorno, of Spain, Latin America, and the Appalachian Region in the United States, but also in other Western countries (Canada and the UK) as well as in developing countries such as India and Tanzania. While these development strategies have occasionally achieved success, on the whole final verdict is un questionably negative: growth poles have not met original expectations within academia, policymakers and the wider public alike. Policy’s advocates lament the sus picious volte face that has led scholars of regional eco nomic development first to celebrate the virtues and potentials of growth pole theories and policy recipes then to quickly dismiss them as something passe´ or even as a sort of relics of post war top down planning approach. However, as a matter of fact, the theory originally pro posed by François Perroux and subsequently amended by other scholars of regional economic planning has sub stantially failed to generate self sustaining regional de velopment processes and then has disappeared along with the general decline of Keynesian policies and of related state centered modes of local economic governance. Even so, the intellectual legacy and influence of growth pole theory are still remarkable. In particular, some of the fundamental tenets and concepts in this literature survive within contemporary strands of re search commonly labeled as ‘new geographical eco nomics’ (the work, among others, of Krugman, Glaeser, and Porter) and ‘endogenous growth theory’ (led by economists such as Lucas and Romer), which are highly influential in today’s mainstream regional and urban economics. Most notably, ideas about agglomeration and localization economies and a number of neighboring concepts and catchwords such as ‘industrial clusters’, ‘cities and regions as engines of growth’, ‘learning re gions’, ‘industrial districts’, and the like are reviving the classical, post war tradition of regional development studies of which growth pole theory has been an

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important part. Some overly simplistic versions of growth pole theories have become clearly obsolete, particularly those associating economic and spatial externalities with the size of a city (or a region). Other aspects of growth pole theory are certainly outdated (the main are probably the rigidly top down approach to economic spatial planning, and the neglect of the sociocultural factors in regional development processes), but of course it would be ungenerous to expect from a theory that was formu lated in the 1950s to express views and conceptual sensibilities that at the time had not appeared yet. What has to be emphasized is the geographic focus of the theory itself and its significance in the light of the current scenario of economic development and related regional development studies. In the ‘Introduction’ to this article it has been noted how growth pole theory re flected the spirit of the times in which it appeared in the ways in which it gave prominence to the intervention in the regions lagging behind both in developed and in developing economies. Today, on the contrary, impera tives imposed by neoliberal ideologies are shifting at tention from policy strategies tackling the structural conditions of economic backwardness to those aiming at enhancing the competitiveness of urban and regional economies in an increasingly globalized economic and societal realm. While the main body of economic theory is shared by both contemporary and past strands of re search, at least within mainstream urban and regional economics, it is this shifting attention from the less favored to the prosperous regions and cities as subjects and objects of theorization and intervention that makes the difference between the past and the current state of affairs within this field of enquiry. See also: Agglomeration; Cassa per il Mezzogiorno; Central Place Theory; City-Region; Corridor and Axis Development; Firms; Fordism; Fordism, Post-Fordism and Flexible Specialization; Functionalism (Including Structural Functionalism); Industrial City; Industrial Districts; Industrial Location; Industrialization; Latin American Structuralist School; Local Economic Development; Me´tropole d’e´quilibre; Neoliberal Economic Strategies; Neoliberalism and Development; Region; Regional Development Theory; Regional Inequalities; Regional Planning and Development Theories; Regional Science; Transport and Accessibility; Uneven Development.

Further Reading Berry, B. J. L. (1972). Hierarchical diffusion: The basis of developmental filtering and spread in a system of growth centers. In Hansen, N. M. (ed.) Growth Centers in Regional Economic Development. New York: The Free Press.

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Boudeville, J. R. (ed.) (1968). L’espace et les poˆles de croissance. Recherches et textes fondamentaux. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Darwent, D. F. (1969). Growth poles and growth centers in regional planning a review. Environment and Planning 1, 5 32. George, P., Guglielmo, R. and Kayser, B. (1964). La geógraphie active. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Hall, P. and Hay, D. (eds.) (1980). Growth Centres in the European Urban System. London: Heineman. Hansen, N. M. (ed.) (1972). Growth Centers in Regional Economic Development. New York: The Free Press. Hermansen, T. (1972). Development poles and development centres in national and regional development. In Kuklinsky, A. (ed.) Growth Poles and Growth Centres in Regional Planning. Paris: Mouton. Lasuen, J. R. (1969). On growth poles. Urban Studies 6(2), 137 161. Muscara`, C. (1967). La geografia dello sviluppo. Sviluppo industriale e politica geografica nell’Italia del secondo dopoguerra. Turin: Edizioni di Comunita`.

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